Mari Kimura
Mari Kimura
For the first time in Texas, audiences at the Round Top Festival Institute on May 12th, 2012 will have the opportunity to witness the amazing virtuosity and imagination of one of the world’s most innovative violinists. Japanese-born, New York based composer and violinist-extraordinaire, Mari Kimura will employ the latest of the latest, cutting edge technologies for augmented violin to create what she feels is a more natural, organic playing that support and extend human expression.
As a performer, composer, and researcher, she has opened up new sonic universes for the violin. Notably, she has mastered the production of pitches that sound up to an octave below the violin’s lowest string without retuning.
At the Plutopia FutureMusic Summit 2012, in addition to pieces by John Adams, Mari will perform her own compositions such as Eigenspace for Augmented Violin, Interactive Graphics and Clone Barcarolle to demonstrate hitherto unattained worlds for the violin and her unique approach to classical music and composition.
Always ahead of the curve, for these pieces, Mari will work with an electronic 3-D bowing-motion sensor that consists of a half-finger glove equipped with electrodes that monitor the angle and speed of her bowing arm, allowing her to synchronize real-time acoustic performance with recorded material, creating expressive collaboration between human and machine. The outputs are quite remarkable.
Mari will also perform pieces from her latest CD, The World Below G and Beyond (Fall 2010 on Mutable Music), which focuses on works using Subharmonics, a field she has pioneered and involve special acoustic techniques that redefine the relationship between music and technology. Her dedication to the development of subharmonics was inspired by Ravel’s “Tzigane,” a Gypsy-inspired rhapsody, which opens with a moody two-minute solo on the G string. She has been exploring unsuspected subterranean sounds as much as an octave deeper.
Mari has also played her violin in conjunction with an interactive computer, and the GuitarBot, a computer-controlled mechanical stringed instrument created by the League of Electronic Music Urban Robots (LEMUR).
Since 1998, Mari has been teaching a graduate course in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard.
Read about Mari’s symposium, “Revolutionizing Musical Expression” here.
