Parametric modeling in Frank O. Lunaire # 10: Raub

Paul Steenhuisen (University of Alberta, Canada)

While resident in Los Angeles, Austrian expat Arnold Schoenberg infamously never met Igor Stravinsky. Another person he never met was Canadian-born architect Frank O. Gehry, who moved to the city at the age of seventeen, four years before Schoenberg’s death. One of the radical structures designed by Gehry and Associates is the Walt Disney Concert Hall - also in Los Angeles, and home of the L.A. Philharmonic.  Since composers dating from Schoenberg’s time onwards are seldom heard in such halls, I have chosen to force the music in – not through the front doors, but through the materials of the building itself.  To get the music in, it meant penetrating the brilliant metal exterior that now monumentally dominates Grand Avenue, and pushing the sound into the wooden acoustic space. To achieve this, I employed physical modeling software and sent Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire #10: Raub (Theft) virtually into the materials, stimulating simulated tuned metal and wood. The resistance and resonance of the models to the soundfile that traverses the interior of its shapes and curves provided the essential collection of sonic materials for the work.  Forcing the music through the materials and into the hall may be seen as an act of civil disobedience, partially reconciling the current discrepancy between the design of the space and the music played within it.

Since 2003, Paul Steenhuisen teaches composition and electroacoustic music at the University of Alberta.  Prior to that, he worked freelance as a composer in Toronto, and held the position of Composer in Residence at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.  He studied with Keith Hamel (UBC, Doctor of Musical Arts, 1998), Michael Finnissy (private consultations), Tristan Murail (IRCAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), and Louis Andriessen (Royal Conservatory of Music, The Hague).  Several orchestras and the majority of new music ensembles in Canada have commissioned him, and his work has been performed and broadcast worldwide.  In the past, he received more than a dozen national and international composition awards, including seven from the SOCAN Young Composer Competition, and four from the currently dormant CBC Young Composers Competition.  He received the Governor General of Canada Gold Medal as the outstanding graduate student at the University of British Columbia, and his piece “Wonder” was selected third overall in the world at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers.  Steenhuisen is also a defenseman on the Morningstars Hockey Club in Toronto.