Composer and performance artist Nick Collins is currently at the Art Institute of Chicago. George Lewis trombonist, computer music composer and critical theorist is Professor at the University of California, San Diego and recipient this year of the MacArthur Prize.
Also on the panel will be Amsterdam based pianist, instrument inventor and electronic improviser Cor Fuhler, composer and electronic musician Marko Ciciliani and Robert van Heumen, composer, sound designer and laptop artist.
The culture of electronic music has matured since the 70's and 80's when those who took performance as essential to the art were regarded as an eccentric minority, the opposite is now the case. The current generation of musicians invited to STEIM, for example, as well as graduates attending the Institute of Sonology, are overwhelmingly instrumentalists and take the issue of performance as a given. The number of tape music composers has not in fact declined, on the contrary, but the distinctiveness of electronic music can no longer be based on a working method which by now is common to every genre of music.
However the question of what is electronic music has not become any easier to answer. Is it the cultivation of new sources of sound? An attempt to replace the written language of music or, as at STEIM, the invention of new instruments and thus new ways of playing which will in itself constitute a new music?
The territory has been opened even wider in the last few years with the arrival of new players from the visual arts tradition for whom a wholly different set of formal criteria are operating. This and other associated and unresolved issues such as the role for improvisation in a land of musical automata, will be the ground we hope for a fertile discussion.
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