Due largely to the collective vision of Director James Paul Sain, Associate Director Javier Alejandro Garavaglia from ICEM in Essen, Germany, and composer-in-residence Larry Austin, this year's festival was a huge success. Austin's inclusive musical language brings together elements from past and present, classical and jazz, folk and technology, while Garavaglia's contributions mark FEMF's first year of international cooperation. Altogether, an eclectic mix of musical offerings and ideas invigorated the festival.

Establishing community among composers of divergent geographic and aesthetic locations has been one of the motivating concepts behind the festival from its inception in 1992. Two factors make this goal feasible: attendance at the festivals is required of all selected composers, and the festivals remain purposefully small, encouraging an easy interchange of ideas amongst participants. This year's three-day festival featured eight concerts of music with a wide range of musical intentions, and two additional events each day, featuring presentations by composers and software demonstrations.

Concert I featured works by Michael Thompson, Ron Herrema, Douglas Maxwell, Randall L. Muck, Mike Frengel, Ron Parks, Akihisa Ohashi, and Robert Frank. Michael Thompson's Machinewerks opened the festival with a bang. Consisting of carefully sculpted heavy machinery sounds, this work arrived at two loud climaxes with enough gusto to stand your hair on end. A stunning finale to the concert, Robert Frank's Zymurgy, constructed from sounds of water and grains shaking in a jar (not granular synthesis, but actual grains!), seduced the ear with continuously escalating watery textures interspersed by tentative grooves. Effective use of frequency distribution, coherency of gestures and textures, and a fair amount of playfulness gave this work an immediate musical appeal.

With pieces by Howard Frederics, Robin Julian Heifetz, Michael Angell, Robert Scott Thompson, Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Elsa Justel, Mara Helmuth, Marc Ainger, Paul Rudy, and James Dashow, Concert II was perhaps the most musically diverse concert on the festival. An unforgettable moment was created by the intrusive entry of Marc Ainger's Shatter!, an intensely aggressive and explosive piece ("Hey listen to this!, Smash!"), following the serene resonance of nature and humanity heard in Mara Helmuthıs Abandoned Lake in Maine. Both pieces, intensely effective on their own, forged a bizarre relationship at this concert. Mara Helmuth commented later, "It was a most effective moment, my piece asks a question of the listener, 'can we bring about change?'" Shatter! answered this question with a explicit "NO!"

Adding to the drama of Concert II, Orlando Jacinto Garcia's controversial piece #2 from Three Pieces, for contrabass and tape invites the listener to experience time in a radically different way. The unwilling listener who resists this invitation will invariably struggle through the seemingly static landscapes Garcia creates with quiet, miniature, repeating gestures and long notes in the bass part. The refusal of the bass to correspond with the tape comes to a powerful ending, where the temporal worlds created by the tape part and a repeating series of double stops in the bass overlap but never coincide. On the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, James Dashow's First Tangent on the Given Curve, for piano and tape consists of highly coordinated and explicitly choreographed gestures between piano and tape, which focus too heavily on pitch to the detriment of timbre and form. Also of note on this concert, Elsa Justel's Alba Sud, an homage to musique concrète, consists of beautifully crafted sound objects, which sounded strangely disjunct in this concert - a result of spastic octatonic diffusion (composer was not present).

Concert III featured works by Neil Flory, David Durrant, Beatriz Ferryera, Doug Michael, Bonnie Miksch, Graham Hadfield, Natash Lee Barrett, and Mikel Kuehn. Many of the pieces on this concert had strong extra-musical motivations or vivid images behind the music. Natash Lee Barrett's elegant work Microclimate II: Red Snow does not attempt to disguise its source - her feelings of isolation and heightened sensitivity toward nature's severity, which she experienced during her first winter in Norway. Not unrelated perhaps, Graham Hadfieldıs piece Europa was inspired by a geographical description of Jupiterıs moon, Europa. Social issues served as the impetus for David Durrant's Renewal of Central Foundry: Part I and Bonnie Mikschısequality. Durrant's piece, which uses found objects as source sounds, such as an old drainpipe and a childıs accordion, stirs up nostalgia and hope for a small town in Alabama polluted over the years by a foundry. Equality, inspired by a Maya Angelou poem of the same name, consists entirely of manipulated voices of students in a Cincinnati inner-city high school. Ellage by Neil Flory and Music Through Prisms by Mikel Kuehn share in conception the use of finished pieces as source sounds. In Ellage, Flory creates a collage using excerpts from Ella Fitzgerald songs. The result is a brightly colored musical quilt, with a clever and abrupt ending with the excerpt "you can't take that away from me." Music Through Prisms, which uses four previously composed pieces by the composer, takes a very different approach to its source material. Kuehn uses techniques of digital processing as prisms which split and change the spectra of the original sounds, thereby rendering these four pieces unrecognizable.

With Martin Fumarola as curator, Concert IV presented works by the following composers residing in Latin America: Alejandro Iglesias-Rossi, Ricardo Dal Farra, Martin Fumarola, Daniel Schacter, Rodrigo Sigal, Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Juan Reyes, Carlos Vazquez, Jacky Schreiber, and Lucio Edilberto Cuellar. Babel by Rodrigo Sigal and Mascarada by Carlos Vazquez include live flute and soprano respectively. In Babel, a lyrical flute part provides a cohesive guide through the varied terrains of the tape part, which is derived from recordings made in many different environments and countries. Mascarada, which begins with some interesting vocal techniques, including splicing the text into strangely articulated pieces, becomes significantly less interesting as the piece continues, relegating the singer to a more traditional operatic style and the tape part to a mechanistic accompaniment. There were many beautiful pieces on this concert, including Alejandro Iglesias-Rossi's Ascension, a religiously inspired work combining polyphonic music from the 11th through 16th centuries and indigenous musics of South America. Another stunning work was Manual Rocha Iturbideıs Moin Mor, a granular deconstruction and reconstruction of voices and recorded sounds from Ireland. Ending the program on a futuristic note was Lucio Edilberto Cueller's Android, which generated memorable grooves through random algorithmic procedures.

Concert V presented works from ICEM in Essen, Germany featuring composers Friedhelm Hartmann, Anna Ikramova, Achim Bornhoeft, Mathias Hettmer, Dirk Reith, Gerald Eckert, and Javier Alejandro Garavaglia. With the exception of Garavaglia, the associate director of the festival and curator of the concert, these composers were unable to attend the festival. As a result, pieces were not diffused by the composers, and spastic diffusion prevailed, leaving many listeners dizzy and disoriented. Unlike Concert IV which presented works created in studios throughout Latin America, Concert V featured works created in a single studio, and it was interesting to hear similar musical intentions surfacing in many of these pieces. Perhaps bearing resemblance to the sonic ideals of elektronische musik, sound materials were generally elemental and abstract, bearing more resemblance to classic synthesis than to real world sounds. Contrary to this trend, Javier Alejandro Garavaglia's Poppekstive!, a wildly impetuous piece created using short samples of over 40 musicians from the 60's, 70's, and 80's, was a fun end to the concert. Unlike Flory's Ellage from Concert III, Poppekstive! uses a variety of signal processing techniques to modify samples. Nevertheless, many short clips from Miles Davis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and many other musicians surface unaltered. Also in contrast to the rest of the concert, the disjunct and child-like nature of the piece lent itself well to zealous diffusion.

Concert VI presented music from FEMS with pieces by the following student composers: Marc Shahboz, Robert Andersohn, Isaac P. Bichachi, Linda Ann Brown, Kristen King, Edward Martin, Paul Still, Paul Burkhead, The Experimental Audio Initiative, John Edward Watts IV, Jimi Hiley, Tom Nelly, Tohm Judson, John McElroy, David Collins, and Hogan Zinn. A scheduling nightmare, this three-hour marathon presented itself as a true work in progress. Some pieces included video, live voices, and choreography, but the experimental aspirations of the concert did not compensate for poorly prepared tapes, excessive noise, and technical problems during the concert. Many were thankful, however, for Edward Martin's dem darn ducks, which was brief, clean, and light-hearted, complete with (you guessed it) duck sounds rendered on tape by a human voice!

Concert VII presented music from the University of Texas, Austin and included pieces by David Hainsworth, Bryan Clark, Tom Lopez, Rachel McInturff, Rick Peterson, Larisa Montanaro, Rodolfo Coelho de Souza, and Russell Pinkston. Inspired by John Cage's prepared piano, David Hainsworthıs Shady Origins takes the idea of timbral extension of the piano one step further. A beautiful exploration of granular synthesis, this piece avoids using any recognizably pianistic sounds, thereby disguising its "origins." Bryan Clark's Ellipses Dreaming and Rodolfo Coelho de Souza's What Happens Beneath the Bed While Janis Sleeps, both collages with pop music clips, reinforce a musical trend of this festival. Ellipses Dreaming, however, takes a new slant on an old theme, exploring the white noise between radio stations in between the pop references. Rachel McInturff's By Heart leads the listener through an angry confrontation between lovers followed by an Aztec poem, which seems to function as a healing meditation to counteract the previous ugliness. Perhaps this piece represents an important psychological process, but its musical intentions remain fuzzy.

With music by Brian Belet, Palle Dahlstedt, Scott L. Miller, Samuel J. Hamm, Jr., Allen Strange, Rodney Washka, Hubert S. Howe, Jr., James Paul Sain, Javier Alejandro Garavaglia, and Larry Austin, Concert VIII proved to be the highlight of the festival. Brian Beletıs [MUTEation], for Computer, which according to the composer "will never be finished," was performed on a laptop Mac with a Kyma digital synthesis system and featured real time algorithmic processes and performer-controlled parameters. The performance was breathtaking and quiet, and the audience could sense the immediacy and elasticity of the delicate musical gestures. Another memorable piece, Palle Dahlstedt's I Lend You My Ear, offers the listener the perspective of an ear in a box on itıs way through a noisy postal distribution in search of silence, encouraging a heightened awareness for everyday, unprocessed sounds. James Paul Sain's Tåg till..., also inspired by real-life sounds, uses recordings made on a Swedish train. Allen Strange's Velocity Studies IV: Flutter, for Alto Saxophone and Digital Media, an ecstatic tribute to Charlie Parker's music, explores famous quotes and characteristic improvisatory phrases with some material left open to the performer's spontaneity. The performer, William Trimble, turned the piece on its head, riveting the audience with endless energy and licks so virtuosic, one wondered at times if he were possessed by the Bird himself! Esther Lamneck, another captivating performer, seized all ears present in an awe-inspiring performance of Larry Austin's Taragato! (1998), for taragota and octatonic computer music. This was one of the few pieces on the festival designed specifically for an array of eight speakers, and the breathtaking localization and whirling motion of the tape part coupled with the strangely human cry of the strident taragato (both live and mixed into the tape), rendered the audience incapable of anything but total surrender! Taragato! is a piece of unquestionable and divine power.

Although the concerts remained the primary focus of the three-day festival, the lectures and demonstrations were welcome islands in a sea of over seventy performed pieces. Mara Helmuth and Brian Belet gave practical demonstrations of software. Mara Helmuth demonstrated her own application Stochgran, a stochastic granular synthesis program based on the Cmix instrument, sgran. This program allows the user to draw envelopes to control various parameters, such as grain rate and duration, allowing sounds to transform over time. Brian Belet demonstrated the Kyma software and sound synthesis system, whose creation can largely be attributed to composer Carla Scarletti. Extremely flexible and open-ended, Kyma contains over 130 basic modules, which can be connected in signal flow networks of any design and then saved as new modules. Visiting composers Martin Fumerola and Daniel Schacter introduced Travels of the Spider, a new CD released by Pogus Records. Larry Austin's presentation covered concepts and musical ideas behind many of his most significant works including La Barbara: The Name/The Sounds/The Music, Variations...beyond Pierrot, Sinfonia Concertante: A Mozartean Episode, and Targato!. Although time permitted only an introduction to these works, this presentation showcased the breadth and eclecticism of his style. Javier Alejandro Garavaglia discussed T.A.T. (A Man's Life), for Viola, Bass-clarinet, quadraphonic tape, and live electronics, which premiered on Concert VIII. An extremely personal work, this piece was based on the life of his viola teacher, Tomas Alejandro Tichauer, and uses numerological relationships based on his name and birthday.

Thanks to the Herculean efforts of James Paul Sain, FEMF '99 proved that smaller festivals can program the same high level and stylistically diverse music that we expect to find at ICMC. I look forward in eager anticipation to future FEMFs.