THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents the
Electroacoustic Concert featuring works by Arrell • Callender • Dirks • Suhr • Tovar-Henao • Wolfe
Saturday, January 31, 2026 1:00 p.m. | Opperman Music Hall
Self-Censorship (2024)
Arches and Strings (2024)
I. Cadenza
III. Bisbigliando
IV. Ballade
Ghosts of Altamira (2023)
Cecilia Suhr, violin
fixed and interactive audio and video
Cecilia Suhr
Living With My Donkeys (2022)
Compassion (2001)
salsa al vapor (2024)
Noël Wan, harp
Elizabeth Milan, violin live electronics and video
Eric On, horn fixed media
Seunghye Park, piano
Qing Jiang, piano fixed media
Clifton Callender
Chris Arrell
Jewel Dirks
Julia Wolfe
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.
Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.
Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.
Self-Censorship is a multimedia performance representing disenfranchised and oppressed voices. It combines a loosely improvised violin performance with live processing and fixed media featuring a bamboo flute. The live violin music interacts with the visual elements in real-time. This piece depicts the push to silence minorities, women, and other marginalized groups. While there is a strong desire to speak up, one pulls back due to fear, force, and the possibility of retribution and negative consequences. Overall, this piece depicts the tyranny and frustration that stem from having to exercise self-censorship while empowering underrepresented and powerless groups to speak up.
Cecilia Suhr is an award-winning intermedia artist, multimedia composer, researcher, multi-instrumentalist (violin, cello, voice, piano, bamboo flute), and painter. Her honors include receiving the Pauline Oliveros Award (IAWM), a MacArthur Foundation DML Grant, an Honorable Mention from the American Prize, and medals from the Cambridge Music Competition and Global Music Awards, Best of Competition Winner Award from BEA, etc. Her music has been featured at ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, Mise-En Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou, Performing Media Art Festival, Hot Air Music Festival, Splice Festival, Mantis Festival, TENOR, EMM, SCI, BEAST Feast, and MoXsonic, and many more. She is the author of Social Media and Music (Peter Lang, 2012) and Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities (MIT Press, 2014). She currently serves as a full professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Arts at Miami University Regionals.
Callender: Arches and Strings
Arches and Strings was written for my colleague and friend, the extraordinary harpist Noël Wan. I’ve long been fascinated by the harp, with its astounding expressive range, timbral resources, extremely rapid figurations and virtuosic potential, and a complex yet fertile harmonic palette mediated by 2,187 different pedal configurations. But I’m also drawn to the instrument for its profound historical resonances, with evidence of its first forms, the arched harp, dating from over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and likely evolving much earlier from the hunting bow. For all the differences in its construction, playing techniques, and variety of associated musics, the instrument connects us to our distant musical forebears’ ingenuity, invention, and creativity—to those who, driven by a deeply human impulse, reimagined a practical tool as a powerful means of expression.
Clifton Callender is Professor of Composition at Florida State University, teaching composition, orchestration, and music programming and computation, and has studied at the University of Chicago, Peabody Conservatory, Tulane University, and King’s College, London. His works, which often draw on mathematics, are recorded on the Capstone, New Ariel, and Navona labels. Recent commissions include Chain Reactions, for the 75th commemoration of Chicago Pile 1 (the first nuclear reactor), Canonic Offerings and Hungarian Jazz, for the Bridges Conference on the Arts and Mathematics, gegenschein, for Piotr Szewczyk’s Violin Futura project, and Reasons to Learne to Sing, for the 50th Anniversary of the College Music Society. A recent composer in residence at Copland House, his music has been recognized by and performed at MACRO Composition Contest, Third Practice, the Spark Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, SEAMUS, Forecast Music, Composers Inc., Studio 300, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, the International Festival of Electroacoustic Music “Primavera en La Habana,” NACUSA Young Composers Competition, the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conferences, the World Harp Congress in Copenhagen and the ppIANISSIMO festival in Bulgaria. Recent works include a focus on
the climate crisis, including a setting of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem for the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit, Dear Matafele Peinam, and a work for solo piano, Meditations on a Warming Planet. Also active in music theory, he has published in Science, Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and Intégral and currently serves as co-editor of Perspectives of New Music.
Arrell: Ghosts of Altamira
Ghosts of Altamira is a companion to an earlier composition of mine titled Altamira. Both works imagine a tour through the Cave of Altamira by flickering torchlight. Located in northern Spain, the Cave of Altamira is a vast network of interconnected passages and cavities rich with Upper Paleolithic cave paintings of animals, abstract shapes, and the human hand. Shadow and light dance across ceilings to reveal immense herds grazing on sweeping plains. Nimble deer, sturdy boars, sure-footed goats, and noble horses animate across the walls. A bold red bison, muscles literally bulging by the artist’s incorporation of natural contours in the cave’s surfaces, stands head lowered, steadfast and resolute. Accompanying the animals are static, immobile imprints of the human hand. A stamp, a signature, or perhaps an acknowledgment of human and wildlife symbiosis, the artist is both participant and observer, living within and without the natural world.
Chris Arrell is a composer and associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross. His compositions, praised for their unconventional beauty by New Music Box, The Boston Music Intelligencer, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others, have received commissions from organizations such as the Alte Schmiede (Austria), Boston Musica Viva, MATA (New York), and the Fromm Foundation (Harvard University). Arrell’s invitations include a portrait concert at the Alte Schmiede and selection as a featured guest composer for the Pellegrini Festival of New Music (Ball State), the University of Nevada—Las Vegas, the AURA New Music Ensemble (University of Texas—Houston), and Collide-O-Scope Music (New York). A winner of the Bent Frequency’s 2023-24 Underscore Call-for-Scores, Arrell holds additional prizes from the Ettelson Composer Award, Ossia Music, ISCM, the Salvatore Martirano Competition, the MacDowell and ACA colonies, and the Fulbright Hays Foundation. chrisarrell(dot)com
Living With My Donkeys is a set of nine short pieces for solo horn with electronic sounds, reflecting the enchantment of sharing a home with two mini-burros. All electronic sounds are created from a single long bray I recorded from one of my donkeys happily calling for peanuts. I used sound design programs (HALion6, Equator2, Iris2 and Padshop2) to isolate various wave forms and grains within that original bray. I then processed those through effect programs (Eventide, SoundToys, iZotope, Infected Mushroom among others). Using Cubase, I was able to manipulate all sounds with my Physis K4(88) and Roli Seaboard Rise 49 keyboards, and the Hornberg Hb1 breath controller.
Jewel Dirks: Although educated in music, I’ve spent most of my life in psychology as a counselor for the seriously mentally ill and teaching brain anatomy and neurology. I am surrounded by Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation, and am retired, old and arthritic. My consuming passions in life remain roaming the wilderness areas with my packgoats and composing music from natural sounds around me, e.g. coyotes, birds, trees. I explore different ways a sound can be heard through various sampling tools and effects, which I like to refer to as Electric Earth Music. I’m finding once I do that, I tend to return to the original animal or object with a completely new understanding of its nature.