School of Sound 2000

MICHAEL CHANAN is a writer, teacher and documentary film-maker based in London. He is author, editor and translator of writings on film history in Britain and Latin America, the social history of music, the recording industry, and aspects of the media. He has just published ‘From Handel to Hendrix, The Composer in the Public Sphere’, and will be visiting professor at Duke University, NC, later this year.

MICHEL CHION was born in 1947. He has been a composer of musique concrète since 1971 (Best Record Prize in 1978 for his Requiem), a director of films (Jean Vigo Short Prize for Eponine in 1985), of videos since 1975 and art video since 1990 (City of Locarno First Prize for La Messe de terre in 1996) and a writer of books about music, sound and cinema since 1978 (Best Cinema Book Prize for La Musique au cinéma in 1995). He has been a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the Service de la Recherches set up by Pierre Schaeffer (who acknowledged him as his leading heir) and a critic for Les Cahiers du Cinéma. His books have been translated into some fifteen languages. As a theorist and teacher of sound in general and the relationship between sound and vision in particular (a field for which he laid clown the theory), he teaches in many schools and universities including Paris III (where he is an Associate Professor), the Esec and the Davi at Lausanne Cantonal Art School. He also leads seminars and gives lectures in numerous countries in Europe and North and South America.

Chion’s latest writings, Le Son and a monograph on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, were recently published. His last musical composition was The Ringing Island (after Rabelais and Melville). Available in English are his books Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, David Lynch and The Films of Jacques Tati.

CHRIS DARKE writes on film and the arts for The Independent newspaper, Sight and Sound and Mute magazine. Light Readings, a collection of writings on film and other media will be published by Wallflower Press in October 2000. He also writes screenplays and is currently working with critic Jonathan Romney on Mood Music, a feature film script which is being developed by Tall Staries Films.

MANFRED EICHER (born 1953) studied double bass and composition at the Academy of Music in Berlin. In 1969 he founded the Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM) for which he is record producer, publisher, and editor of the ECM New Series.

Hundreds of records made under his artistic direction include those of Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal, Egberto Gismonti, David Darling, Pat Metheny, Dino Saluzzi and Bruno Ganz (Holderlin). For the ECM New Series he has prodûced recordings by composers Gyorgy Kurtog, Arvo Part, Heinz Holliger, Giya Kancheli, Alfred Schnittke, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Meredith Monk, Gavin Bryars, Werner Pirchner, Steve Reich and John Adams, as well às albums with works by Bach, Perotin, Tallis, Gesualdo, Hindemith, Shostakovich, and Schubert.

Eicher is responsible for the music production and/or conception for films by Jean-Luc Godard (Forever Mozart, JLG, Hélas Pour Moi, Allemagne Neuf Zéro, Nouvelle Vague, L’Histoire(s) du Cinéma), Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses’ Gaze, The Suspended Step of the Stark), Xavier Kolier’s Oscar-winning]ourney To Hope, and more. Two of his most inspired releases of the last few years are the complete soundtracks to Godard’s Nouvelle Vague and L’Histoire(s) du Cinéma.

In 1986, Manfred Eicher received the honorary “Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik”. Awards for outstanding productions include the Grand Prix du Disque (France), the Edison Award (Holland), Grammy Award (USA), Academy Award (Japan) and the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis.

MIKE GRIGSBY has worked as a film director since his first commission Deckie Learner was nominated for a British Film Academy Award. While at Granada in the 1960s and 1970s, he made several seminal documentaries including Deep South, I Was a Soldier and A Life Apart. In 1979, he made Before the Monsoon, the provocative trilogy about India’s State of Emergency under Indira Ghandi. Living On the Edge and Thoi Noi, Carlton’s first documentary feature, was followed by The Time of Our Lives, which was nominated for the 1996 Grierson Award.

In 1998, he collaborated with composer Paul Englishby on The Score, a short musical about football for the BEC/Arts Council ‘Sound on Film’ series. That same year, Lockerbie – A Night Remembered, was nominated by the RTS and BAFTA for Best Sound and received the 1999 BAFTA for Best Editing. Of it The Guardian wrote, “Cornes as close as television can to achieving the quality of silent prayer.”

Grigsby is currently co-writing a cinema screenplay based on the award-winning Vietnamese nove!, The Sorrow of War, a love story set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.

HEIDI GRUNDMANN has worked as cultural reporter, art and theatre critic, editor and program producer at the ORF (Austrian National Radio/TV) for over 25 years. In 1987 she created the radio program KUNSTRADIO-RADIOKUNST (original artworks for radio) which she still curates.

KUNSTRADIO is a 55 minute program broadcast weekly on Ôl, the cultural channel of the ORF. Since the beginning of 1995 KUNSTRADIO has its own homepage: http://thing.at/orfkunstradio, which is the site of many art projects and live webcasts.

Grundmann was involved in many telematic art projects including “REALTIME” (1993), a live interactive work for radio and television, “ZEITGLEICH” (Hall-in-Tiro!, June-Sept. 1994), a symposium, seminar and exhibition (organised and curated by H.G.), “HORIZONTAL RADIO”, a live 24 hour multi-media radio project (1995), and its successor RIVERS & BRIDGES (1996).

In 1997, Grundmann curated “RECYCLING THE FUTURE”, an exploration of on air- on line – on site art-production and its theoretical implications (Hybrid Workspace, DX, Kassel; Ars Electronica, Linz; international symposium, Vienna.) In 1998 she curated “IMMERSIVE SOUND”, a 6 week long on site-on line-installation (Kunst in der Stadt II, Bregenz, Austria). In 1999, together with Colin Fallows, she acted as the curator of “SOUND DRIFTING”, a 9 day long interdependent system of international sub-projects using a wide range of methods and approaches to the generation and processing of sounds and images to form a continuous on line – on site – on air installation on the occasion of the Ars Electronica 99.

In addition to her work in radio, Heidi Grundmann lectures and writes on art and new media and has organized and curated symposia and exhibitions related to art practice in the electronic media – especially radio, TV and the internet. She was a member of the Berlin DAAD jury for music and the Austrian federal jury for visual arts and acted as a coordinator of “Ars Acustica”, the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) working group on radio art.

MANI KAUL is a filrnmaker, musician and painter who, since making his first feature film in 1970, A Day’s Bread, has produced a very persona! and innovative body of work fed by the two sources of eastern classical music and of art and aesthetics. These themes are particularly evident in the films Dhrupad and Siddeshwari and in films on art such as Mind of Clay. But, just as importantly, his approach has been enriched by a completely modern sensibility. Kaul has drawn from haïku poetry, the nouveau roman, Matisse, Bresson and Ozu. His later films – The Gaze and The Idiot- are from Dostoevsky.

In addition to his work in India, Kaul has made films internationally, including Desert of a Thousand Lines (ZDF); The Cloud Door (Erotikon), part of a German series of films by twelve filmmakers including Bob Rafelson, Susan Seideln:i.an and Paul Cox; and, along with twenty other directors, he will take part in the Danish series, Danish Girls Show Everything. His latest production is the short film, Bojh (The Burden). He is âiso completing his contribution to Nightwatch, six short films to be filmed at the Boijmans-Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

At the end of 1997 he worked at the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands, where he held an exhibition of his ceramics. Kaul has taught film and video at Duke University, North Carolina.

SARAH KOZLOFF is Associate Professor in the Department of Drama and Film at Vassar College. She has written two major works on film dialogue, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film and Overhearing Film Dialogue. In addition to having taught a variety of courses on Arnerican cinema, she has lectured on dialogue, film narrative and sound in cinema at numerous international conferences and within the film industry.

CLAUDE LETESSIER began his sound career running his own Paris sound production company producing ads and shorts. He won the Arts Directors Club of Paris award five rimes in the 90s. A mid-life crisis drove him to contact his old collaborator, Hans Zimmer, now working in Hollywood. He moved his family to

L.A. and re-started his career as an “apprentice” on Prince of Egypt. A meeting with director Terence Malick led to Letessier working as sound designer on The Thin Red Line and Endurance, a feature-documentary about the Ethiopian long­ distance runner, Haile Gebrselassie.

Letessier has developed a theory of Sound Architecture which integrates his experience of producing sound and music for image with concepts of psychoacoustics and the thinking of Goethe, Nietzsche and Lacan. Following his work in Los Angeles and teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Letessier has returned to Paris.

KIRSTY MALCOLM has over sixteen years experience in television and films, combining producing with research. She has worked extensively in documentaries and drama, specialising in co-productions. Her credits include the feature film Darkness Covers the Earth (Antenne 2/NDR/RTP); Round IX, coverage

of the Documenta art event (Illuminations for Channel 4); The World of Geo (Bertelsmann for BBC/Discovery; for four years she chaired sessions for the European Association of Animation Film (CARTOON). Recently she co-produced The Score, a documentary directed by Michael Grigsby for BBC 2 and the Arts Council of England’s ‘Sound on Film’ series. This is her third year overseeing the School of Sound event.

MIGUEL MERA read music at York University (composition with Trevor Wishart and Roger Marsh, film composition with David Kershaw), attended the film composition course at the Dartington International Summer School, and has a postgraduate degree in Music Design for Film and Television from Bournemouth University. He is currently the Pathway Leader for the MMus in Composition for Screen course at the Royal College of Music.

His research interests include humour in film music, the relationship between sound-design and music in screen soundscapes, and spatiotemporal representation in screen music. Recent publications include: ‘An Interview with Julian Nort’, Music From the Movies (No. 20, Summer 1998), ‘Read My Lips: Re-evaluating Subtitling and Dubbing in Europe’, Links and Letters (Issue 6: Word and Screen, 1999) and ‘Towards a Better Soundscape’, Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions (No. 3, Spring 1999).

Miguel is actively involved in Screen Music education outside the RCM and has been employed as a visiting lecturer at the Southampton Institute, the British Film Institute, Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art. He has also carried out numerous film composing workshops on behalf of the British Film Institute’s Education Department.

He also composes music for film, television and theatre. Recent works include: Fugee Girl (Channel 4, 1999), the anirnated short Last Best Friend (Steve Smith, RCA, 1999), Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood (dir. John Rhys Thomas/Dylan Thomas Society of Great Britain, 1998), John O’Keefe’s The Son-in-Law (dir. David Hunt, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998), and Francis Marion Crawford’s The Screaming Skull (dir. Peter Harris, Regent’s Park Theatre, 1997). Forthcoming projects include the feature film, Three Days (Austin-Hill Productions).

ANTHONY MOORE is a composer and sound artist. Having studied Indian classical music with Viram Jasani in 1969, he composed his first movie soundtrack for David Larcher’s “Mare’s Tale”. Since then he has written a number of scores for european independent movies, many of which have won international awards. In 1970 he moved to Hamburg, Germany, where several albums of his work were recorded by Polygram.

In 1972 he formed the band Slapp Happy with Dagmar Krause and Peter Blegvad. From 1973 on he worked in different•· european locations as a freelance composer, writing songs, filmscores and experimenting with sound. He collaborated with Pink Floyd on two of their albums and worked as a record producer in studios both in America and the U.K. In 1991 he composed a one hour television opera, ‘Camera’, commissioned and broadcast by Channel 4.

In September 1996 he became professor of ‘Auditive Gestaltung in den Medien’ at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where he is working with the various technologies of digital recording, signal processing and sequencing with computers.

Besicles teaching he continues making music, sound compositions and installations.

TOM PAULIN was born in Leeds in 1949 but grew up in Belfast and as a result, although born in England, he considers hirnself as Northern Irish and as one of the ‘school of Ulster poets’. He was educated at the universities of Hull and Oxford and has lectured in English at Nottingham University since 1972. He has taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. After a spell as Professor of Poetry at Nottingham University, he is now the G.M Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.

He is a regular guest on BBC TV’s The Late Show. His play Ali the Way to the Empire Room about the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 1994. Faber published Paulin’s SELECTED POEMS 1972-1990 in 1993. His new volume of poetry WALKING A LINE was published in 1994. Tom Paulin gave the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at University of Kent in 1996. Fa ber published a collection of his critical essays, WRITING TO THE MOMENT, in 1996, and THE DAY-STAR OF LIBERTY: WILLIAM HAZLITT’S RADICAL STYLE in June 1998. His latest collection of poetry, lHE  WIND DOG, was published by Faber in November 1999.

PIERS PLOWRIGHT was born in London in 1937 and spent a lot of his childhood listening to the radio and going to the near­ by Everyman Cinema, where he saw the classics of European, American and Asian cinema. After a rime teaching in Borneo, Iran, and the Sudan, he joined the BBC in 1968, working first for the overseas service and then moving to the Radio Drama Department where he discovered the power of the radio documentary and feature. Since 1977 he has been making radio programmes about real people and events but which often make use of the techniques and structure of drama. He has also been much influenced by film and its use of sound.

Piers has won two Italia Prizes and a RAI prize for his radio documentaries and, most recently, a Gold Award for documentaries in the 1997 Sony Awards and ditto in 1998 for ‘Services to Radio’.

LARRY SIDER is the Director and co-founder of the School of Sound. He studied Radio-TV-Film at Northwestern University (Chicago) before coming to London in 1976 to work with Peter Wellen and Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx, a relationship that continued through many of their features and documentaries. Since then he has worked extensively with Keith Griffiths and Koninck Studios, editing and sound designing with the Brothers Quay (Street of Crocodiles, The Comb, Institute Benjamenta), Patrick Keiller (London, Robinson in Space, Dwelling Spaces) and Simon Pummell (Secret Joy, Rose Red, Butchers Hook). His work crosses between documentary, drama and animation as evidenced in projects that include The Brother With Perfect Timing, about the jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (directed by Chris Austen); the prize-winning animated short Death and The Mother (directed by Ruth Lingford) and My Marna Done Told Me, a documentary about romance and torch songs (directed by Elizabeth Taylor-Mead).

He is a regular lecturer at the Royal College of Art, the Surrey Institute of Art and Design and the National Film and Television School, teaches seminars on post-production and has contributed to the periodicals PIX, Framework, Vertigo and Filmwaves.

DAVID TOOP Born near London in 1949, David Toop is a musician, composer, writer and sound curator. He has published three books: Rap Attack (third edition – Rap Attack 3 published in 2000), Ocean of Sound, and Exotica. He has also released five solo albums – Screen Ceremonies, Pink Noir, Spirit World, Museum of Fruit (inspired by the Yamanashi Fruit Museum designed by architect ltsuko Hasegawa), and Hot Pants !dol, a spoken word and music CD of extracts from Exotica by Bill Laswell, Jon Hassell, Scanner, Talvin Singh and others, released on Barooni. His next CD release will be Needle ln the Groove, a music and spoken word collaboration with author Jeff Noon.

He has curated five CD compilations for Virgin Records – Ocean of Sound, Crooning On Venus, Sugar & Poison, Booming On Pluto and Guitars On Mars.

ln 1998 he composed the soundtrack for Acqua Matrix, the outdoor spectacular that closed every night of Lisbon Expo ’98. He has recorded shamanistic ceremonies in Amazonas, written interactive database material on shamanism and trance for The Shamen and worked with musicians including Brian Erio, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell, Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Evan Parker, Max Eastley, Scanner, lvor Cutler and Witchrnan. As a critic he has written for The Wire, The Face, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer, Arena, Vogue, Spin, GQ, Bookforum, Pulse, Urb and The Village Voice. ln January 2000 he exhibited a sound installation and performed at ICC in Tokyo, as well as completing the soundtrack for Mondophrenetic, a CD-ROM installation to be shown in Brussels in summer, 2000. He is currently curating a major exhibition of sound art – Sonic Boom – that will open at the Hayward Gallery in April 2000.

STEINA VASULKA, born in Iceland in 1940, is an artist who has explored the generation and manipulation of electronic images and sounds since 1970. Co-founder of the Kitchen in New York, she started playing violin for Icelandic Symphony orchestra, and now she plays images using a MIDI violin. She is also the author of multi-monitor video installations. She teaches, lectures and performs ail over the world.

THANOS VOYOUS Born in Greece in 1958, he studied Social Anthropology, Drama and Film Theory at the University of Stockholm. He went on to study at the Dramatic Institute, the state college for theatre/film/television studies in Sweden, where he specialised in mask/costume design. In 1995, he presented his research on the form and function of the mask in the Greek tragedy with special attention to the acoustic aspects of the mask.

For the past 15 years, Vovolis has been working primarily in theatre production as a mask/costume and stage designer at many leacling theatres in Sweden and Greece as well as the Research Center of Ancient Drama in Athens and many fringe theatre groups. Exhibitions of his masks have been held at the Stockholm Puppet Museum, the Cultural Centre of Athens, the Foundation for Hellenic Culture in London and in many other European cities.

GREGORY WHITEHEAD Writer, audio artist, voice performer, radiomaker. Since 1984, Whitehead has produced over eighty features, documentaries and earplays for broadcast in the U.S. and abroad, together with an extensive list of credits in emedia, theatre, film and installations. Most recently, he performed as The Voice in Valère Novarina’s theatre manifesto Theatre of the Ears, at the center for New Theatre in Los Angeles.

Drawing on his background in experimental theater and improvised music, Whitehead has developed a radiophonie style distinguished by its playfully provocative blend of text, concept, voice, music and pure sound. He is the recipient of many major electronic arts fellowships and awards, including the Prix Italia, the Prix Futura/BBC Award for New Hërspiel, as well as a Special Commendation at the 1995 Prix Futura. In addition to his broadcasts, Whitehead’s audiography includes numerous releases on CD.

The author of critical essays and fictive texts on subjects relating to language, technology and the public sphere, Whitehead co­ edited Wireless Imagination: sound, radio and the avant-garde (MIT Press). He is also the president of Atlantic Public Media, a not-for-profit production company, and chairman of Shortfest.com, a site for the production and distribution of independently produced emedia.

PETER WOLLEN is an internationally known film scholar, film teacher and film-maker. In the 1960s and 1970s, he helped refocus the discipline of film studies through his pioneering book, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, now in a third, expanded edition, and his work for Screen magazine. He has taught film at many leading universities in the United States, including Brown, Columbia, NYU, Northwestern and Vassar, where he was Distinguished Luce Professor. He is now a professor at UCLA. His feature films, for the most part co­ directed with Laura Mulvey, have been shown in a number of Film Festivals, including Berlin, Cairo, Cannes, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Sydney, Sundance, Toronto and Venice. He co­ wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger and his most recent feature was a science-fiction film, Friendship’s Death. He has made several television documentaries and exhibited both video and digital art. He has also curated international art exhibitions, for the Centre Pompidou, the Hayward Gallery and many other museums, and has published widely and frequently, with work translated into numerous languages. He is a contributor to both Sight and Sound and The London Review of Books.

SIEGFRIED ZIELINSKI studied theatre, philology, philosophy, linguistics and political science in Marburg and Berlin. He has written numerous books on the history, theory and practice of cinema, television and video, including: “Audiovisions – Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History”, Amsterdam University Press 1999. He is Professor of Communications and Media Studies, focusing on the archaeology of the media, and Founding Principal of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Zielinski is a Member of the European Film Academy (EFA) and the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain.