Maybe this seems obvious: Electronic music is any music that uses or requires electricity to perform.
But it goes deeper than that. Think video game soundtracks, EDM (electronic dance music) and noise (yes, that’s the name of the subgenre).
Electrowave: Rocky Mountain Electronic Music Festival will offer three days of performances, lectures, demonstrations and a synthesizer petting zoo, where attendees can play around with all sorts of music-making devices, mostly synthesizers, but also other tools and toys. Free sound walks require headphones and a phone so you can go outside and be immersed in a landscape of different sounds as you approach bushes, trees and other landmarks.
The festival also focuses largely on academic electronic music, which is a bit more experimental but more musical than the noise genre. Academic electronic music is performed live on laptops and isn’t music you’d necessarily dance to, like EDM. It might look like someone playing a tuba in front of a mic and feeding that sound through different effects, like guitar pedals. It’s taking something acoustic and electrifying it.
The second annual event is open to all ages Friday through Sunday at Ent Center for the Arts. Tickets are free, but you need to register. Go online to electrowavemusicfestival.org.
For Jon Forshee, co-founder and artistic director of the festival, electronic music has expanded the possibilities of what he can do as a composer.
“My training is classical. My education took place in music conservatories on the East Coast,” said Forshee, who’s also a professor of music technology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
“Electronic music has opened up my ears to new sound possibilities I could never have imagined on my own. As a composer it’s like having an entire orchestra at your disposal, plus a choir, plus a rock band, plus everything. That excites the imagination.”
Many of his students and people participating in the festival come to electronic music from the video gaming soundtrack world.
“To them that is music,” he said Forshee. “When I was 11, I decided to become a composer after falling in love with Mozart. Nowadays many students tell me they wanted to become a composer because of a certain video game they play.”
Nationally known electronic artists will perform concerts each night, including Miller Puckette, who created Pure Data, a popular computer music-making program. He’ll perform Saturday night with Kerry Hagan in their duo The Higgs Whatever.
“They have an interesting set list of works,” Forshee said. “Some kind of humorous, taking familiar sounds and transforming them into strange or surprising sounds. There’s video with their work. Many of our artists include video as part of their work.”
Violinist Christopher Otto, one of the founding members of JACK Quartet, the most famous modern string quartet in the U.S., also will perform Saturday night.
“They’re a bit like the Leonard Bernstein of quartets,” Forshee said. “Composers all know the JACK Quartet. Chris will do a piece we’ll present in a surround sound environment. The audience will be immersed in sounds flying over them and around them.”
Festivalgoers also can investigate what exactly noise is during a Sunday afternoon session.
“A lot of this music could be characterized as oppressive, loud, very grating,” Forshee said. “You might have had that experience of switching between radio stations and you get a lot of static. A noise artist sticks between stations. They love that sound of all the frequencies and sounds and distortions and electronic sound. It’s as nonmusical for most people as we get.”
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