The project aims to give students in Tbilisi diverse and relevant perspectives and skills in creating and performing electroacoustic music, and give them an arena to showcase their work.
During the 2019/2020 academic year, NMH students and electroacoustic composers Mariam Gviniashvili, Giuseppe Pisano, and Mike McCormick travelled to Georgia as part of the Making Waves project, to teach Bachelor- and Master's student at the Music Technology Department at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire. Whilst the facilities at the conservatoire is adequate the current scope of instruction is limited, and the focus has been on giving the students' entry points to the musical tradition, such as software solutions, recording techniques and various ways of composing and playing using technology.
The projects will end with a festival, the MAKE WAVES festival, which will be Tbilisi's first electroacoustic music festival where students from the project will perform alongside the three involved composers/instructors and a renowned guest artist from Norway.
Due to the Covid-19, the last part of the project and the festival has been postponed to October 2020.
The Making Waves project came as a result of a one-week teaching visit to Tbilisi in February 2019 as part of the project Modernising higher education at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire" and had very ambitious goals.
The students would develop the necessary skills to create and perform electroacoustic music and the Make WAVES festival would give the students the opportunity to test and try out their new skills and present their work in a professional setting with established artists. This would contribute to the strengthening of the audience and a community around the musical tradition in Tbilisi and later in Georgia.
