Kuivila,Ronald J. (b. Boston, MA, 19 Dec 1955) Composer/sound-artist.
While his interest in music began with piano lessons at
the age of six, his first introduction to experimental
and electronic music (the record Indeterminacy) was in an
eighth grade music appreciation class. This interest developed
through attending concerts at SUNY at Albany organized by
Joel Chadabe. Kuivila attended Wesleyan University (BA 1977,
magna cum laude, music and mathematics) where he studied
composition with Alvin Lucier and Richard Winslow, piano
with Peter Armstrong and Jon Barlow, and shakuhachi with
Yoshikazu Iwamoto. He also attended classes given by John
Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and
Lejaren Hiller at "June in Buffalo" in 1975. His interest
in live electronics developed during this time through those
studies and interaction with fellow students Nicolas Collins
and Marc Grafe. Subsequently, he attended Mills College
(MFA, 1979) where he studied with Robert Ashley, David Behrman,
Paul DeMarinis, Ron Nagle, and "Blue" Gene Tyranny and was
classmates with Rich Gold, Frankie Mann, and Joel Ryan.
Kuivila"s sensibility as a composer has been shaped by the dual influences of Cage"s antipathy to recording as "artifical music" and Walter Benjamin"s belief that the processes of technical reproduction have the potential to shape perception in a liberatory way. Recognizing his own relation to music as having been fundamentally shaped by recording, he set out to compose pieces that derive their structure from technical processes or that use technical processes to directly shape the sounding music. His first acknowledged composition, "The essential conservatism of feedback" (1974), for chorus, sought to create an audible self-correcting process or "servo mechanism".
During an artist in residency at ZBS Media in 1976, the assistance of Bob Bielecki enabled him to begin working with motion-sensing fields (based on ultrasonic burglar alarms). This led him to compose pieces that can be presented both as concert works and as "sound installations". A cycle of concert/installation works based on ultrasound were composed from 1978 to 1984 including "Comparing Habits", "Flame", "Sailing Ship/Flying Machine", and "Untitled". An invitation from David Tudor provided the first professional presentation of this work in two Studio events with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in January 1978.
Throughout the 80"s, Kuivila composed performance pieces based on high voltage phenomena (Paralel Lines, Radial Arcs, Spark Harp), speech synthesis (The Linear Predictive Zoo), and compositional algorithms (Loose Canons). Kuivila"s recorded works from this period seem for the most part to be records of extremely complex improvisations utilizing a complex musical rhetoric. His work is syncretic both in terms of stylistic vocalbulary and instrumentation, and impressive in its utilization of complex technology. Yet Kuivila"s is generally accessible, his structures and syntax so idiosyncratic also be immediately recognizable.
Much of his work in the 1990s has taken the form of site-specific interactive multi-media installations. For Il Giardino de Babele (1990), a video camera was suspended over a set of separated tiles. Walking over each tile would trigger a musical note. A "virtual performer" was designed to accompany visitors" actions, reacting according to the number of visitors as well as to what it judged to be the "musicality" of their interaction. In ShadowPlay (1996), participants used their shadows to interact with musical processes. Four light sources illuminated blank panels. When the light sources were interrupted, throwing shadows on the panels, a voice in an ongoing algorithmic composition was changed.
He has also pursued the use of digital signal processing to duplicate and recall the processes of analog "live electronics". For example, fugue states (for David Tudor) is a 50 minute work based on a fixed set of 32 tunings for a processing structure designed by Gordon Mumma. Performance of the composition involves freely "morphing" between these tunings using a specially designed interface consisting of a graphics tablet and keyboard.