The electroacoustic music of New Zealand composers will feature in France and Canada in six events in early June presented by Lissa Meridan Composer and Director of the Lilburn Electroacoustic Studio at the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University, Wellington . Lissa Meridan will present a seminar and three concerts of New Zealand works on June 5 and 6 at the Festival Synthese 2006 in Bourges, France, regarded as the world's most prestigious festival of electroacoustic music. The electroacoustic music of New Zealand composers will feature in France and Canada in six events in early June presented by Lissa Meridan Composer and Director of the Lilburn Electroacoustic Studio at the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University, Wellington . Lissa Meridan will present a seminar and three concerts of New Zealand works on June 5 and 6 at the Festival Synthese 2006 in Bourges, France, regarded as the world's most prestigious festival of electroacoustic music.As she returns she will attend the premiere of her own work at the International Viola Congress in Montreal and share the presentation of student works at the Architecture Music Acoustics Conference being held in Toronto.

Lissa Meridan has been invited to present a seminar on the life and electroacoustic works of Douglas Lilburn at Bourges.

"Douglas Lilburn set up the studio at Victoria forty years ago and forged an international reputation in this genre of music through innovative ideas and techniques," Lissa comments. "I will follow the seminar with a concert featuring his electroacoustic music including Summer Voices, Poem in Time of War and Soundscape with Lake and River.
"A second concert will feature electroacoustic works by other New Zealand composers: John Rimmer, Chris Cree Brown, Stacey Pilcher, Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns, as well as the premiere a new work by Jack Body called Intimate History n °1 : Yono."
The third 'concert' will be a presentation of intermedia works for video and electroacoustic music curated by Jack Body and hosted by Meridan at the Festival Synthese. Featured works are City Respirations by Matthew Lambourn, Now by Philip Dadson, Say by John Cousins, and both Noise and the award winning Generation by David Downes."

Lissa attended the IMEB Festival Synthese in June 2005 and forged collaborative links between the Bourges studios, the CCMix Studio in France and the Lilburn Studio in Wellington. The agreement sees composers and students from each country sharing ideas, forming creative partnerships and participating in international concerts and competitions of electroacoustic works.

Lissa's own work Tunnel Vision will have its premiere at the International Viola Congress in Montreal on June 9. "Professor Donald Maurice, Head of String Studies at the New Zealand School of Music, Wellington, commissioned the work for the Viola Congress," she says. "The piece involves live viola accompanied by an electroacoustic track which uses sounds sampled from my journeys on the Wairarapa-Wellington line. Historic film of the construction of the Rimutaka Tunnel - courtesy of the New Zealand Film Archive and video artist Emil McAvoy - will be projected behind Donald as he performs the piece "

Film is also part of the second event in Canada. Lissa will join Mike Donn from the Victoria University School of Architecture and Design to give a presentation on June 10 at the Architecture Music Acoustics Conference at Ryerson University, Toronto. She explains: "Over the last six years students from the School of Architecture and Design and electroacoustic composition students from the Music Department have collaborated on short films featuring animation and music, in which the architecture is the central 'character'. Our presentation will be based on the results of these collaborations."

For more information about any of these composers or works, contact SOUNZ, the Centre for New Zealand Music.