Festival on the Hill

In February 2010, Mark Katz, associate professor in the UNC department of music, is organizing Festival on the Hill, a public event held biennially and sponsored by UNC’s music department. The music department has partnered with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and the CHAT festival to put on a two-day event, February 18-19, on The Art and Culture of the DJ. It will consist of performances, scholarly presentations and discussions, and a DJ/VJ Dance Party geared toward students.

Festival on the Hill events will include:

• An Electro-Acoustic Concert - The electro-acoustic concert will kick off the CHAT festival on Tuesday, February 16, in Memorial Hall. A foundational performance of the concert is an innovative, collaborative composition organized by Stephen Anderson that addresses the topic of war. Tinapple will develop a custom interactive environment to generate, trigger and alter sounds as well as drive a visual display of war imagery. Anderson will then compose a piece of music that will provide a flexible musical framework and incorporate UNC faculty performers who will interact in real-time with the images, each other and the interactive environment. The sounds and visuals will be part of a larger system including sensors such as visible and audible analysis of the audience.
• Premiere: Homage to Maurice - A key performance at the electro-acoustic concert is a world premiere of a musical composition: pianist Thomas Otten of the UNC department of music has commissioned Frances White to compose a piece of music for piano and voice based upon Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit  with a text drawn from E.M. Forster’s novel, Maurice. Known as a leading composer of computer music, White will combine computer-generated sonority with the live acoustic performance in her composition. Otten will perform both the vocal and piano parts of White’s composition.
• Turntable Concert with Open Rehearsal - Katz has commissioned a work for turntables and ensemble, to be composed by Raúl Yañez and performed by DJ Radar and the Charanga Carolina, UNC’s Latin music ensemble, under the direction of David Garcia of the UNC music department. In partnership with UNC’s Process Series, Charanga Carolina will hold an open rehearsal of the Turntable Concert the day before the performance. Musicians will explain their work and field questions from the audience.
• Panel Discussion: The Art and Culture of the DJ - Friday afternoon will feature several scholarly presentations on the art and culture of the DJ as well as a roundtable discussion with DJs and scholars about the impact of digital technologies on the field. The all-star participants include: Oliver Wang (California State University, Long Beach), Mark Butler (University of Pennsylvania), Rayvon Fouche (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Larisa Mann (a.k.a. DJ Ripley, University of California, Berkeley), 9th Wonder (hip hop producer, North Carolina), DJ Radar (DJ, Phoenix), Raúl Yañez (composer, Arizona)
• DJ/Veejay Dance Party - This community oriented event, held the Thursday evening of the CHAT festival, will feature a variety of local and national DJs in collaboration with student and faculty veejays, or video jockeys, who will digitally manipulate images projected onto a large screen while the music plays. We have partnered with WXYC, UNC’s student-run radio station, on this event. WXYC has a history of digital innovation: In 1994, the radio station became the first in the world to stream its on-air signal live over the Internet. Several of the DJ/VJ performers for the dance party are UNC students who also work as DJs at the radio station.