Trevor Bača
Wednesday, April 6, 5-7pm
Davison Room
Music Department
Harvard University
ABSTRACT: Abjad is open-source software designed to help composers build up complex pieces of music notation in an iterative and incremental way. You can use Abjad to create a symbolic representation of all the notes, rests, staves, nested rhythms, beams, slurs and other notational elements in any score. Abjad is a command-line utility implemented in the Python programming language. In this talk composer and Abjad systems architect Trevor Bača will introduce the system and show Abjad at work in score preparation.
BIO: Trevor Bača was born outside Los Angeles in 1975. His concerns as a composer include lost and secret texts; broken and dismembered systems; sorcery, divination and magic; and the effects, action and beauty of light. Bača’s music has been played in the US, Europe and Japan, with recent performances in New York, Berlin, Tokyo and elsewhere. Bača’s music has been anthologized as part of Notations 21, edited by Theresa Sauer, and Bača’s scores have been exhibited as art at the Chelsea Gallery in New York City and at the Hutchins Gallery on Long Island. Recent lecture engagements at the University of California at San Diego; University College Cork in Ireland; the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) in Paris; and the Stuttgart Musikhochschule. See www.trevorbaca.com for more information.