The first-ever Los Angles CSound user's group meeting took place tonight.
In attendance were myself, Jason Thomas, Bill Alves, and Erik Spjut.

A hearty thanks to Bill and Erik for arranging for us to use a room at
Harvey Mudd.

The evening for me began when I realized it was further to Claremont from
Pasadena than I thought, and I was going to have to hope for VERY good
traffic. In the end, I was only five minutes late, and the rest of the
guys waited for me.

We were entertained tonight by a presentation by Bill Alves, showing and
telling about three of his compositions.

Actually even before that, we were entertained by chewy and chocolatey
cookies, thanks also to Bill Alves.

Bill told us first about In-yo for shakuhachi and tape, a piece that uses
just intonation. We listened a bit to it. It had beautiful, sustained
chords and timbres, and had an interesting formal shape.. the second half
used a different scale than the first, one associated in Japanese music
with lighter or folk music. I experienced this shift as one with emotional
or story-meaning, a release of tension and a shift toward light.

Then he moved on to Aleph, an audio-visual piece with a CSound soundtrack
and a POVRAY video track. I must say, I have never seen computer music
together with an abstract video track, and I was really impressed. I
thought that the video really expressed the music in a visual form (much
better than, say Fantasia :).

Finally, we heard Mass Destruction, a CSound piece made by manipulating
recorded words of George W. Very humorous.

Afterwards Jason and I drove in a random direction until we encountered a
Starbucks (we didn't have to drive far, of course) and chatted some more
about music.

Before the meeting was over, we talked a bit about when we want to have
these meetings in the future. Probably again in October, after the school
year is underway, and then 2 or 3 times per school semester. Perhaps some
of Bill's students can participate.

It was a good experience and I hope new people can come next time!

Mike

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