“Am I listening?”
Elainie Lillios, featured composer at the 33rd annual Ussachevsky Memorial Festival of Electroacoustic Music, finds herself asking this question constantly, whether it be while improvising with her colleagues, creating her newest composition or even at the dentist.
Although she doesn’t recommend asking oneself this question in such an uncomfortable setting, it’s one that Lillios suggests anybody who wants to “move toward a more meaningful engagement with the sound world that surrounds us” ask themselves, too.
The Ussachevsky Festival, named after celebrated electronic musician and composer Vladimir Ussachevsky PO ’35 and hosted by the Pomona College Department of Music, took place on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1. The event was attended by students, faculty and Claremont community members.
Throughout the weekend, guests attended a lecture by Lillios, who is an electronic music composer and a professor at Bowling Green State University, and two performances of the site-specific piece “Night Sky” at the James Turrell Skyspace. The final event of the festival was a concert called “Breathing Rooms,” featuring renowned performers Rachel Rudich, Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Yuri Inoo and Igor Santos, a visiting assistant professor of music at Pomona.
Lillios kicked off the festival with a lecture about her compositional process and goals, including her sources of inspiration. One tenet she returned to throughout the talk was the idea of imagining all sound as musical sound — a thread evident throughout the works she presented at the festival.
Uma Kaler PO ’25, who is studying music composition with Santos, attended Lillios’ lecture and was inspired by “the manipulation of everyday sounds, like foley sounds, and how you can change a sound so much and morph it so that it sounds like music.”
To do this, Lillios uses everyday objects in unconventional ways — rubbing a credit card on a cookie sheet to create a scraping noise, for example — as well as standard instruments like pianos and flutes. By also using electronic manipulation methods, she produces interesting, avant-garde compositions.
She traced her interest in unique forms of music back to playing the organ and owning a transistor radio as a child, both of which heavily rely on physicality and space to produce sound.
Lillios’ unconventional influences can clearly be seen in “Night Sky,” the sound and light performance that she composed specifically for the James Turrell Skyspace at Rice University and presented at Skyspace. “Night Sky” is inspired by Don Bogen’s poem of the same name and was created in collaboration with Bogen.
“She traced her interest in unique forms of music back to playing the organ and owning a transistor radio as a child, both of which heavily rely on physicality and space to produce sound. “
The piece played at sunset, allowing the audience to watch the sun lower through the open ceiling of Skyspace, while the surrounding lights slowly transitioned from a bright pink to a calming blue. At the same time, each of the four speakers positioned around Skyspace played a different track, combining to create what Santos called a “spatialized piece.”
Attendees were invited to move around the space while listening to the auditory collage, which included several lines from Bogen’s poem “Night Sky,” various musical phrases and electronically edited and produced sounds.
The poem is an elegiac piece for Bogen’s late wife, exploring grief and loss among other themes; Lillios wanted to ensure that she maintained the vulnerability inherent in the poem when adapting it.
“It takes a lot of bravery to write that kind of poetry … and to make yourself vulnerable in that way,” Lillios said. “The fact that [Bogen] trusted me, somebody he didn’t know at all, with this very special, personal piece of his, that means a lot to me. I tried very hard, in my own musical realization of his poem, to hold that space, and respect and acknowledge that space, in the world of sound.”
Besides “Night Sky,” other performances at the Ussachevsky Festival also experimented with unconventional forms of music. The “Breathing Rooms” concert at Thatcher Music Hall, which included six pieces from various composers including Santos and Lillios, elevated “compositions that explore the human voice — through speech, breath and storytelling — and its connection to music and sound,” wrote Santos in the concert catalog.
Of the six pieces, many were multimedia performances, including aspects of video or speech that accompanied traditional instruments such as vibraphone, piano and flute in often unexpected ways.
“Voices and Piano,” a series by Peter Ablinger, combined speeches from well-known figures such as Angela Davis and Mother Teresa with a piano that followed the pitch of their speech. Ablinger described what followed as a “song-cycle, though nobody is singing in it.”
Speaking of her goal as the festival’s featured composer, Lillios said, “I hope that audience members feel that my music takes them on a journey … and that at the end of the day, they simply feel that it was time well spent.”