Tonight I performed the Fokker Microtonal Organ in the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. The Fokker Organ is a rather remarkable instrument, tuned in 31-tone equal temperament, built by Adriaan Fokker in Amsterdam in 1950. (More info: www.huygens-fokker.org/instruments/fokkerorgan.html) I did this from my desk in Daylesford. Here's a picture of me performing, taken by Catherine. In the small Skype window on the big computer is Ere Lievonen, who was performing with me, on the organ keyboard in Amsterdam.
Here's a photo, taken by the Huygens-Fokker Foundation, who commissioned the pieces and organized the event. Ere Lievonen is at the organ console, and I'm on the video screen to the right of the organ.
And here is a video, also taken by the Huygens-Fokker Foundation, of the performance of most of the 3rd movement of "Three Movements for Fokker Organ (2011)" by me. The 3rd movement is called "Being Generous with Those Genera," which refers to particular chords available in the 31-note scale. More info on that in the program notes below. In this video, Ere sits at the organ console to change registration, and I play the organ via computer (using ArtWonk) from Daylesford.
UPDATE 5 December 2011:
We also performed Wim De Ruiter's duet "Together" for Max patch and live 31 tone organ. Ere played the live part on the keyboard, and I sent midi to the organ from Daylesford. We heard each other with a 1 second delay, however, since we were triggering gestures, and not matching specific note rhythms, that wasn't a problem. "Together" is a fun piece where the two players trigger or play a restricted set of gestures, assembling a structure from the pre-composed materials in real time. It's a lot of fun to play - and I'd like to do more of this.
Here's the program of the concert from the www.huygens-fokker.org website. This was a very exciting, if a bit hair-raising, way to perform. There were a number of hours-long rehearsals where all we did was sort out technical problems, which, of course, manifested themselves right up until the last minute. Not to mention the difficulties of performing with someone half a world away over a tiny video window. However, now that we've ironed out the difficulties, I'm hoping to do a lot more of this.
