When composer Kevin Ernste opened Cornell’s Electroacoustic Center last fall, he spoke to the Ithaca Times about his desire to build an accessible community around which to orient the new research center’s activities. Nearly a year later, Ernste seems to have achieved his goal, and much more: the Center’s ever-widening circle of friends, musicians, and innovators extends through Cornell, Ithaca College, and the town of Ithaca, to Google’s New York City offices, Silicon Valley, and some of the finest musical institutions in the world.
To speak to Ernste and to spend time at the Center is to see why this was able to occur so quickly: Ernste doesn’t just talk about generosity and openness, he practices them patiently in all aspects of his professional life. “In a way, I perceive openness as a method in itself,” Ernste told us recently — referring both to his management of the Center and to his own compositional approach — when we sat down to talk with him about the Center’s first year.
For Ernste, two key factors in the success of the Center have been its ability to serve students with varied musical interests, as well as its capacity for showing students that technological solutions to creative problems can mirror and model methods of discovery used in the learning process itself.
On March 22, 2007, Ernste spoke to a group of Silicon Valley experts about the role of technology in mediating approaches to art and education. Cornell’s President David Skorton (a musician himself) was in attendance and found that Ernste’s ideas resonated with his own.
Not long after, the two were addressing William Safire’s Dana Foundation about the role of creativity in education, and now these concepts are finding their way into many avenues of learning at Cornell: A new interdisciplinary program entitled Computing in the Arts, as well as ongoing research devoted to music and cognitive psychology, are currently underway at the university.
“I would like to help others see technology as a facilitator for creative solutions in all aspects of life, not simply as a place where we type papers,” says Ernste.
In practice, this means, among other things, that Ernste not only works with aspiring composers but spends a good deal of time teaching students whose interests are in popular music, including music production, performance, recording technology, DJ culture, and similar topics.
But for Ernste the role of the Center does not end at Cornell — quite to the contrary. Cornell’s Music Department has long enjoyed a tradition of cooperation with Ithaca College, whether that be the sharing of concert space or enthusiastic collaborations between performers and composers from both institutions.
As one example, Ernste is currently writing a piece for Ithaca College clarinetist Richard Faria, which will include electronic techniques, some of which were developed at the Center. For a special collaborative “Leap Day” performance on Feb. 29, Ernste has asked musicians from both Cornell and Ithaca College to perform.
Ernste is also looking forward to utilizing the Center’s facilities for participation in this year’s Light in Winter festival, to be held in Ithaca. One of Ernste’s stated goals is “to participate within the local Ithaca community as much as we can.” In this connection, he mentions his work running sound at last year’s State Theatre performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, featuring actor John Cleese, as one particularly memorable event.
Ernste’s openness extends to individual members of the community as well. When a non-Cornell student recently came to him with the wish to take classes and to become involved in the Center, Ernste agreed. “When you adopt the mentality of wanting to develop a community, which was my stated purpose for the Center to begin with, it leads you to a place where, if someone comes to the Center and makes an enquiry, my first impulse is to do what I can to bring that request to life, or at least to give that person the right tools for getting started,” says Ernste.
Yet another example of Ernste’s spirit of collaboration and openness was last year’s performance by Cornell Electroacoustic Center students at the Google offices in New York City. Ernste invited not only composers and electronic artists from his Center, but a jazz ensemble led by Paul Merrill as well as local Ithaca electronic duo D.A.M.A.G.E.
Ernste is quick to point out that while this was the second performance by musicians from Cornell and Ithaca, the first, given by Ernste and his students the year before, was the first-ever performance of a musical event of any kind at Google.
In today’s world, where media saturation and the proliferation of digital technology have become a part of daily life, probably no one needs to be told that electronic music and the technologies used to make it now play a central role in the contemporary world. What some may not know is that many of the breakthroughs in audio synthesis and sound processing that led to today’s state of affairs came from collaborations involving classical composers.
One of the foremost pioneers in this area was Jean-Claude Risset, a brilliant French composer who came to Bell Labs in 1965 to collaborate with computing pioneer Max Matthews and to study sound synthesis in its connection with psychoacoustic perception. It is no surprise that Ernste chose Risset as a guest at last year’s opening ceremonies at the Center.
As an example of his own commitment to openness and community, Risset, now in his seventies, lectured, shared a performance of his work, met with students, and even addressed a group of researchers in cognitive psychology.
“Risset is not only one of the foremost experts in the field but someone who was personally responsible for the development of the field as we know it,” Ernste says. “He is also one of the nicest people in the world, an extraordinarily warm and
generous person. It was an honor for us to have him participate.”
Ernste likes to think that Risset’s beneficent presence at the Center’s opening ceremonies will bode well for the Center’s future, and he seems to be doing everything in his power to make that happen.