News #59 May/June 2018 includes a book of 120 scores published by Les Presses
du Réel and Al Dante, exhibitions at Musée Le Carroi, Chinon and MAC,
Pérouges plus a presentation at the Tate Modern and a concert at Iklectik in London.
with permission from the artist Frédéric Acquaviva
"Suzanne began her life with music at the
age of seven when her mother brought home a collection of classical albums from
a neighborhood fire sale. As the third of six children in a busy suburban
household near Boston, Suzanne found her own space by teaching herself to play
the piano and to read music.
As an undergraduate at Wellseley College, Suzanne began
dividing her time between performance and composition. She also began her
fascination with technology when one of her classes took a field trip to nearby
M.I.T., where a professor demonstrated his early attempts to make a computer
produce the sound of a violin. Upon graduation, she went to the University of
California at Berkeley to continue her studies in composition. She received her
Masters Degree in composition there, but more importantly, at nearby Stanford
University and Mills College, she met three of the founders of electronic
music: John Chowning, Max Matthews and Don Buchla.
Suzanne became entranced with the ability to produce music
with a machine, and she became a devotee of synthesizers for the next two
decades. She has often joked that for at least ten years she was essentially
married to her Buchla synth, and in fact she did leave the massive machine
running for months at a time, programming it to compose and play endless
compositions.
Suzanne believes that the synthesizer should follow its own
course as an instrument, but her position ultimately lost out to those who
wanted simple machines that duplicated the sounds of other instruments and had
preset voices. As this change in the world of electronic music and instruments
came about, Suzanne found herself returning to classical instrumentation in
support of her melodies, culminating in her Grammy-nominated album for piano
and orchestra, "Dream Suite." This same sensibility is evident in
"Pianissimo II" and "Turning" as well." - Discogs
