Leary recital to feature electronic music, guests, inventions

SUNY Oswego faculty member Paul Leary, who specializes in music technology, composition and flute, will offer a recital at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 31, in Tyler Hall's Room 11, featuring two students, his wife, one or more of his electronic music inventions, and a mix video from the recent premiere of Leary's original multimedia work, "Larger Than Us."

The Focus on Faculty concert will feature a variety of electronic music pieces, most of them composed by Leary working solo.

"'Oscillations' combines the pendulum with my more recent endeavor in shakuhachi flute playing," Leary said. "The shakuhachi is a traditional Japanese flute made of bamboo."

A 9-toot-tall pendulum that O'Leary built uses an accelerometer and a magnetometer to send data back to a computer, electronically changing the pitches and tempos of traditionally produced music. Leary said he is not yet sure whether his bicycle wheels, another homegrown instrument with Hall effect sensors installed, will make an appearance.

"Hyperthesis," an electronics piece for three performers, was co-composed and will be performed by Leary and two of his students, Nicholas Radford and Zahra Bellucci. The three performed it at the Root/Signals Festival in Statesboro, Georgia, on Feb. 22.

Leary and his wife Lowell Hutcheson, arts programming coordinator for the college's Artswego, co-wrote "Paper Thin." Hutcheson will perform vocals, while Leary plays piano and electronics.

Besides another, untitled electronics piece, Leary also intends to give an Oswego audience access to his piece in homage of the Apollo 8 mission to lunar orbit, a precursor to the manned lunar landing nearly 50 years ago. "Larger Than Us" premiered March 16 at the Museum of Science and Technology's Bristol IMAX Omnitheatre in Syracuse.

The piece, commissioned by the Society for New Music, provides an otherworldly display. Adobe's After Effects software enabled Leary to animate sequential NASA photos -- taken during the Hubble space telescope mission, among others -- causing celestial objects to move in the video at a visible rate of rotation and the stars to twinkle precisely in time with the music. A seven-piece chamber orchestra and Heather Buchman, education outreach conductor for Symphoria, fronted the piece, which O'Leary plans to mix down from recordings.

Tickets for Leary's recital are $8 ($5 for SUNY Oswego students) and will be available at the door. For more information, call 315-312-2130.

Parking is included in the price of a ticket and is available for the concert in the employee lot in front of Culkin Hall and the employee and commuter lots behind Hart and Funnelle residence halls.