To help recreate the artistically and politically charged atmosphere of Ann Arbor around the time of the original ONCE festival, UMS will create a downloadable self-guided tour of the city as it might have been experienced in the 1960s. Although the civil rights and youth counterculture movements did not reach their zenith until the late ’60s, the preceding years in Ann Arbor served as a foundation for much of what was to follow—including John F. Kennedy’s proposal for the Peace Corps on the steps of the Michigan Union, Lyndon Johnson’s speech outlining his “Great Society” program, and almost weekly student protests. The first major meetings of the national left-wing campus group Students for a Democratic Society took place in Ann Arbor in 1960; by 1965, the city was home to the first US teach-in against the Vietnam War. The tour features of some of the legendary buildings and sites that played a central role in shaping a community and a time.

Original programs, manuscripts, and photographs document the influential avant-garde ONCE Festival held annually in the early- to mid-1960s in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A now-and-then exhibition, it reprises the phenomenon of the event, the brazen energy of the new-music scene from the era, and honors the talents of the ONCE founding composers Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda.

Lecture on the Weather, a multimedia installation created by John Cage and based on the texts of Henry David Thoreau, brings together speech, music, film, lighting, and a weather soundscape, to form a softly political piece as relevant today as the year it was written. John Cage was a guest and friend of the ONCE Festival, performing and conducting alongside local artists.

"Specious Present" is an interactive algorithmic sound and video installation created specifically for the ONCE. MORE. Festival. The piece celebrates the anniversaries of the ONCE Festival and the U-M Performing Arts Technology program with an exploration of the concept of the passage of time from both aesthetic and historical perspectives. The piece manipulates and distorts timing and duration with its structure and content. Informed by the original ONCE composers, "Specious Present" takes a historical look at the techniques and attitudes of these innovative electronic composers. Simultaneously, the piece takes advantage of new technology, using interactive digital systems to influence sound and image in real-time.

The Digital Music Ensemble celebrates the 12th year of Gypsy Pond Music, based on a story about Stephen Rush. While visiting Hungary and longing to hear Gypsy music, Mr. Rush went to cafés and roamed the streets only to be disappointed. After two weeks of searching, he decided to take the train. There, at the train station, he heard a two-hour impromptu concert of authentic Gypsy music. As John Cage noted, "Music is (indeed!) all around us, if only we had ears to hear." Each fall, students create a site-specific work on "The Pond" that is inspired by their deep and personal encounter with these stories and traditions.

Since the 1970s, scholarship on the historical avant-gardes has extended well beyond painting to encompass the illustrated book and other forms of print media. Yet modernist studies still pay little attention to the collaborative books of the Russian Futurists—poets Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov and artists Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, and Kazimir Malevich. It is Nancy Perloff's contention that these pocket-sized, hand-lithographed books, with their transrational language of zaum or "beyonsense" and their neo-primitive, Cubo-Futurist, and Rayist imagery, are crucial to our understanding not only of the Russian avant-garde, but of modernism more broadly. Zaum was both archaic incantation and Futurist neologism and marked the beginning of sound poetry. Poets and artists juxtaposed sound with word and image, and used humor and parody to explore tensions between past and future, sacred and secular, rural and urban. This analysis will place these tensions and the role of the avant-garde book as a vessel of sound within the context of the crisis enveloping Russia between the 1905 Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover of 1917.

This day-long symposium hosted by the U-M Institute for the Humanities provides a unique opportunity to explore Ann Arbor's progressive role in the development of the America avant-garde. Featured speakers include Daniel Herwitz, Director, U-M Institute for the Humanities; Leta Miller, Professor of Music, University of California, Santa Cruz; Nancy Perloff, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute; Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor Emerita, University of Southern California; and Richard Crawford, Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan.

The day-long ONCE. MORE. symposium culminates in a conversation with some of the original founding composers: Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda. Michael Daugherty, Professor of Composition, U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and Daniel Herwitz, Director, U-M Institute for the Humanities, facilitate the discussion.

Writer, director, performer, and John Cage collaborator, Laura Kuhn is Director and co-founder of the John Cage Trust and the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College. She will perform Cage's Indeterminacy, a work of anecdotes, each, regardless of length, read precisely in one minute, accompanied by an "improvised" electronic score involving certain of Cage's works manipulated by a DJ/turntable-ist. This performance features DJ Tadd Mullinix, Ghostly International recording artist. Sponsored by the U-M School of Art &Design.

Writer, director, performer, and John Cage collaborator, Laura Kuhn is Director and co-founder of the John Cage Trust and the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College. She will perform Cage's Indeterminacy, a work of anecdotes, each, regardless of length, read precisely in one minute, accompanied by an "improvised" electronic score involving certain of Cage's works manipulated by a DJ/turntable-ist. This performance features DJ Tadd Mullinix, Ghostly International recording artist. Sponsored by the U-M School of Art &Design.

Program

Roger Reynolds	MOSAIC (1962) for flute and piano
Robert Ashley	in memoriam…CRAZY HORSE (symphony) (1963) for 32 instrumentalists
Gordon Mumma	LARGE SIZE MOGRAPH 1962 for solo piano
Donald Scavarda	GROUPS FOR PIANO (1959)
Ashley	in memoriam…ESTEBAN GÓMEZ (quartet) (1963)
Scavarda	FilmSCORE for Two Pianists (1962)
Scavarda	GREYS, a FilmSCORE (1963) performed silently
Scavarda/Mumma	GREYS, a FilmSCORE (1963) performed with stereo electronic music
George Cacioppo	CASSIOPEIA (1962)
Mumma	SINFONIA (1958-60) 12 instruments and magnetic tape
Scavarda	MATRIX FOR CLARINETIST (1962)
Reynolds	A PORTRAIT OF VANZETTI (1962-63) for narrator, instruments, and stereophonic electro-acoustic sound

Program

Robert Ashley	VAN CAO'S MEDITATION (1991) for piano
Gordon Mumma	THAN PARTICLE (1985) for live percussion with synthesized percussion
Donald Scavarda	CINEMATRIX, a FilmSCORE performed silently (2002)
Scavarda	CINEMATRIX, a FilmSCORE performed with multiple instrumentalists (2002)
Mumma	GAMBRELED TAPESTRY (2007) for solo piano with internal electro-acoustics
Scavarda	SOUNDS For seven (2010) for chamber ensemble
Rodger Reynolds	ARIADNE'S THREAD (1994) string quartet, computer-synthesized and spatialized sound

Featuring Michael Coletti, percussion; Dane Crozier, percussion; Katri Ervamaa, cello; Michael Gould, drums; Arthur Greene, piano; Andy Kirshner, video projections and sound design; Stephen Rush, piano; and Solomia Soroka, violin

Program

Andy Kirshner	Connect the Dots
Jennifer Furr	peacock blue for loudspeakers
Erik Santos	KATA-KATA for Percussion Duo and Recorded Sound
Mary Simoni	Piano Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello with Electronics
Stephen Rush	BukMix for Computer and Piano

Imagine a room overwhelmed with sound + vision—snatches of music, throbs + echoes, and sights unseen until this night that somehow seem familiar. Haunted by fever dreams of the avant-garde past, Outlier combines the heavy influence of 20th-century composition with contemporary approaches to experimental music and performance art in a space filled with psychedelic majesty. Is it real? How will you explain it to others? How will you explain it to yourself? Ann Arbor producer HOTT LAVA brings a stellar cast of musicians, composers, performance artists, and filmmakers including Laurel Halo, Todd Osbourn, Sean Patrick, Tom Buckholz, and Ted Kennedy to create a dynamic installation work that will delight, provoke, and overload the senses.

A collaboration with Hott Lava, UMS, U-M Institute for Humanities, U-M School of Music, Theatre, & Dance, Ghostly International, and First Martin & Co.

The U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Center for Performing Arts Technology with a day of workshops and performances.

11:00am–12 noon
Mobile Phones for Musical Performance
Design Lab #1, Duderstadt Center

This workshop explores how current mobile smart phones such as Apple Computer's iPhone can be used as musical instruments. We will investigate urMus, a platform that allows us to define what kinds of musical instruments we want to use and how they should sound. Along the way, we will explore what music-making with mobile devices means and think about playing in a mobile ensemble. Far beyond playing ring tones and mp3 songs, this workshop will focus on how to create new ways to play, perform, and enjoy music. Led by Georg Essl.

1:00–1:55 pm
Timbral Sensitivity: Developing Aural Skills for Electronic Music Composition and Sound Recording
Audio Studio, Duderstadt Center

Timbre can be described as the tone quality or texture of sound. Since timbre is used as a means for artistic expression in the fields of electronic music composition and sound recording, a heightened sensitivity to timbre and the sonic effects of audio equipment are required for composers and engineers. This workshop will explore some of the aural skills that are addressed through technical ear training. Led by Jason Corey.

2:00–2:55 pm
Integrating Emerging Technologies and Music Performance
Teleconference Room, Duderstadt Center

This workshop will investigate new technologies being used by composers and performers and explores how these tools have influenced modern music. The session will include live performance, demonstrations, as well as a brief historical look at technology's role in music performance. Led by Jeremy Edwards and Tim Flood.

3:00–3:55 pm
the questions that tempt the sleeper
A play by Shannon Dowd and Mary Simoni
featuring the
Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble
Georg Essl, director
Mary Simoni and PAT students, music and sound design
Video Studio, Duderstadt Center

the questions that tempt the sleeper is composed of three interwoven monologues, each centered on different methods of enquiry in the moments between sleep and wakefulness. Each monologue employs a set of musical and literary devices that reference the history of the art while suggesting a unique interaction of the literary and performing arts. The mobile phone ensemble becomes a modern-day chorus, while contemporary dance and theater inform motifs drawn from literary modernism and surrealism. Ultimately, however, the piece seeks to draw insight from the moments in which we are made aware of ourselves and others, of searching and loss, as inspired by Virginia Woolf, from whose novel To the Lighthouse the title is derived.

The Digital Music Ensemble celebrates the 12th year of Gypsy Pond Music, based on a story about Stephen Rush. While visiting Hungary and longing to hear Gypsy music, Mr. Rush went to cafés and roamed the streets only to be disappointed. After two weeks of searching, he decided to take the train. There, at the train station, he heard a two-hour impromptu concert of authentic Gypsy music. As John Cage noted, "Music is (indeed!) all around us, if only we had ears to hear." Each fall, students create a site-specific work on "The Pond" that is inspired by their deep and personal encounter with these stories and traditions.

Featuring Michael Coletti, percussion; Dane Crozier, percussion; Katri Ervamaa, cello; Arthur Greene, piano; Andy Kirshner, video projections and sound design; Stephen Rush, piano; and Solomia Soroka, violin

Program

Andy Kirshner	Connect the Dots
Jennifer Furr	peacock blue for loudspeakers
Erik Santos	KATA-KATA for Percussion Duo and Recorded Sound
Mary Simoni	Piano Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello with Electronics
Stephen Rush	BukMix for Computer and Piano

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