Babybot by Andrea Mazzariello

Performed by Lagan Percussion
Ricky Bracamontes, Taylor Davis, James Ferris, and Stephen Seymour

ABOUT THE PIECE:
Among my favorite experiences listening to music is a sense of mishearing a groove and discovering it retroactively: one hears the beat and relates to it in a particular way, then some future event serves to recontextualize that relationship, ratcheting the listener out of comfortable space and forcing a readjustment. For a long time I wanted to write music that did this obsessively. This series is the realization of that ambition. Bot collects all four pieces in the series (Octobot, Polybot, Babybot, and Electrobot), composed between 2008 and 2011.

Babybot doesn't look like a drum kit quartet, but is actually very much conceived of as one; I substitute a different material (wood, metal, glass, etc.) for each position on the kit and then lay the instruments down on a tabletop.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Andrea Mazzariello is a composer, performer, writer, and teacher. His music thinks through the physiology of performance in terms of instrumental technique, often extended through technological intervention, and pays special attention to the treatment and setting of his own original text, spoken and sung.

He’s active as a solo performer of his own work, for a novel and evolving instrumental setup, and has presented in such diverse venues as the Knitting Factory, Cakeshop, the Queens New Music Festival, and the Wassaic Festival. Sō Percussion, Mobius Percussion, NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, the Berkshire Symphony, and many others have performed his concert music. Recordings of his work appear on New Amsterdam Records and SEAMUS.
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In 2011, he completed his Ph.D. in music composition at Princeton University, writing on the vinyl resurgence and its connection to our ideas of physicality and abstraction in music analysis. He holds an M.M. from the University of Michigan and graduated magna cum laude from Williams College with degrees in music and english.

Andrea joined the faculty of the Princeton Writing Program in 2010, where he taught several first-year writing seminars, including "Music and Power" and "Found Sound," through spring 2015. As adjunct professor in the production program at Ramapo College of New Jersey's School of Contemporary Arts, he taught beginning and intermediate electronic and computer music. He currently teaches composition, music technology, and music fundamentals as visiting assistant professor of music at Carleton College, and directs the composition program at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute. His first book, One More Revolution, will be published by The Operating System in 2017.