TENOR 2018 : Workshop I Georg Hajdu – Working with Maxscore

A-607, Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke Street West

May 24, 2018

8:00AM - 11:00 AM

This workshop is limited to 12 people. Please apply at matralab@concordia.ca

$20 registration fee for the workshop – http://matralab.hexagram.ca/tenor2018/register

Participants are strongly urged to bring their own computers with Max installed; an Ableton Live installation would be an additional boon. MaxScore will be installed at the beginning of the workshop; all participants will also receive a temporary JMSL license, required to run MaxScore. If you have an iPad, please bring it to demo Maxscore’s network capabilities.

Maxscore is a notation package for Max based on the JAVA music specification language (JMSL). It consists of a “core” mxj object capable of rendering to a variety of contexts and a growing number of peripheral modules allowing MaxScore to interface with third-party technologies such Ableton Live, Mira/MiraWeb, the bach package of Max objects and the conTimbre sound library. The separation of data handling and rendering facilitates the creation of graphical scores where symbols encode actions associated with a particular musical event. Furthermore, a strong focus on networking capabilities allows its use as multi-user score editor or as a notation engine in networked music/multimedia performance environments. This workshop will give an overview of MaxScore’s functionality with hands-on experience. Each workshop participant is encouraged to bring his/her own computer and, possibly, a hand-held device such as a tablet, iPad or smartphone.

Georg Hajdu was born in 1960 to Hungarian parents and grew up in Cologne where he obtained diplomas in molecular biology and musical composition from the University of Cologne and the Cologne Musikhochschule. A stipend by the German Academic Exchange Service enabled him to enter the graduate program in composition at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990, working closely with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and eventually obtaining a Ph.D. in 1994. His teachers include Clarence Barlow and David Wessel. He also took classes with György Ligeti in Hamburg. In 1996, following residencies at IRCAM and the ZKM, Karlsruhe, he cofounded the ensemble WireWorks, a group specializing in the performance of electro-acoustic music. In 1999, he produced his full-length opera Der Sprung – Beschreibung einer Oper for which renowned author and filmmaker Thomas Brasch wrote the libretto. In May 2002, his Internet performance environment Quintet.net was employed in a Munich Biennale opera production and in the same year Georg Hajdu became professor of multimedia composition at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama (HfMT). There, in 2004, he established Germany’s first master’s program in multimedia composition and, in 2012, the center for microtonal music and multimedia (ZM4). In 2005, he co-founded the European Bridges Ensemble—an ensemble dedicated to local and wide-area network performance. In 2010, he was artist in residence with the Goethe Institute in Boston as well as visiting professor at Northeastern University, and masterminded the first conference entirely devoted to the Bohlen-Pierce scale. He was also involved in a number of large international projects such as CO-ME-DI-A—a European Culture 2007 project focussing on networked music performance and contributed to the installation of the Hochschule’s-wave-field synthesis system in 2011. In 2016, Georg Hajdu was the chair of the 13th Sound and Music Computing conference. In 2017, together with his colleague and former student Jacob Sello, he successfully applied for the highly competitive “”Innovative Hochschule”” grant which will fund a number of innovative projects at the HfMT until 2022.