Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

Circular Song, Solitary Journeys of the Mind, and Windows
Joan La Barbara

Musician and composer Joan La Barbara will perform Circular Song (1974), Solitary Journeys of the Mind (2009) and Windows (2013). Circular Song is one of La Barbara’s earliest works, focussing on “circular singing” (ingressive/egressive vocalising). It is clearly a process piece as well as one influenced by conceptual art. Solitary Journeys of the Mind explores real-time composition, while Windows is part of an opera in progress, inspired by the works and dream fragments of sculptor Joseph Cornell, as well as the flow of Virginia Woolf’s writings and the curvilinear architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Antoni Gaudì.

JOAN LA BARBARA
Composer/performer Joan La Barbara is renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques (her “signature sounds” include multiphonics, circular singing, ululation, and glottal clicks), which have influenced generations of composers and singers. Awards and prizes include Premio Internazionale “Demetrio Stratos”; Civitella Ranieri, Guggenheim and 7 NEA Fellowships; numerous commissions for chamber ensembles, theatre, orchestra, chorus, interactive technology and soundscores for dance, video and film including an electronic/vocal score for Sesame Street. La Barbara teaches music composition at NYU and is currently composing a new opera. joanlabarbara.com