jwilzewske: Faster than Sound: Acoustic-Electronic Compositions and Combined Visual-Music Performance at Aldeburgh

M usical sound is too limited in its quantitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument… This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered. ”
— Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1913.

T he ‘Faster Than Sound’ program was held at Snape Maltings in the Britten Studio last Friday (12 November), one of Aldeburgh Music’s events. The performance was preceded by a 10-day composing workshop led by composers Milton Mermikedes (Univ Surrey and Royal College of Music, London), Martin Suckling (Somerville College, Oxford), and Ted Machover (MIT and Royal College of Music, London).

T he compositions each involved either one or two performers and utilized a combination of conventional acoustic (‘analog’) and signal processing software (‘digital’) idioms.

Adrian Gierakowski – Unitas Multiplex (eDrum tablets and software DSP)
David Ibbett – Impulse Imagined (miked and processed cello and software)
Charlie Williams – e to one million pieces (miked and processed piano and video)
Gregor Riddell – Skyfish (miked and processed cello and software)
Enrico Bertelli – Drumactica (eDrum tablets and software DSP)
Tod Machover – Michael’s Dream (K-bow processed cello and software with lights)
Tod Machover – Spheres and Splinters (K-bow processed cello and software with lights)

A pre-performance talk was given at 6 p.m. in the Jerwood Kiln Studio at Snape. Among the 5 panelists, Ash Nehru (Software Director) from United Visual Artists (UVA) explained the multiple ways in which the 25-pole LED tower array is engineered to respond to inputs from the various sensors on the K-bow and on the cellist’s body. Ben Bloomberg (MIT student) explained some aspects of the Max/DSP and related software that controls the array of 16 loudspeakers positioned around the performance hall. The pre-performance talk was attended by an SRO crowd of about 70 people on this damp, dreary Friday evening in November. The performance itself was attended by about 150. Aldeburgh is famous, but such a turn-out is pretty remarkable given the considerable distance from Cambridge or London in darkest Suffolk on a Friday night. Fantastic to see!

T he gist of Tod Machover’s preconcert remarks was that electronic and multimedia technology can lead ‘classical’ music into new, financially viable markets and young audiences who are not now disposed to spend money consuming classical music. For my part, I strongly doubt this will happen. I have attended concerts of electronic chamber music for years and occasionally write about them in this blog, but see no evidence of market ‘traction’ or audience growth, certainly not among the youth segments Machover was referring to. The affinities, such as they are, are among those who already are devoted to serious music, new or otherwise. That and things like Classical Spectacular, which is about as far from ‘chamber music’ as one can get.

A nd, honestly, the capital expense for acquiring all the gear required—and the expense to ship it and set it up and tear it down for each performance, and the technical complexity of managing it—are out-of-reach for all but a very few classical musicians. The ‘Faster Than Sound’ faculty do not acknowledge this.

T he financial growth opportunities are considerable, though, for combined electronic-acoustic and multimedia compositions in film or recorded on-demand HD downloadable media that are not ‘live’ performances. Home theatres with synths and lights?

T he Ibbett and Riddell e-cello compositions were the ones that I found most accessible and compelling. Gregor Riddell’s cello performances were passionate and elegant, and the use of electronic DSP software effects was tasteful. The textures and timbres provided by the DSP contributed meaningfully to the compositions’ narrative arc and lent extra emotional tension and complexity to the pieces.

I n other pieces on the program the DSP effects proliferated. Sometimes ‘less’ really is more?

O ne begins with a mark, another mark, a third mark, a splash, a smudge, a drip—until the whole work energetically completes itself and the artists can then see [hear] what has been achieved [if anything]. It is not something in which all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand with ‘the execution a perfunctory affair’! How could Pollocks’ ‘Autumn Light’ have been planned? Or de Kooning’s ‘Woman I’? In Abstract Expressionism, hand and eye were everything, and for those who can remember that era, the intellect could hardly have been more suspect. The painter’s studio and the philosophy seminar room were at one in repudiating the ‘ghost in the machine.’ ”
— Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders, p. 98.

T he quality of some of this was a bit like Abstract Expressionistic painting, with cascades of disparate effects—ones that are responsive to telemetered measurements of the performers or their instruments, yes, but not ones that are intentional or deliberated, anymore than Pollock’s dribbles were deliberated in detail. There is an aleatoric, ambient ‘found’ quality to such music, though, and that ain’t a bad thing...

O rson Welles once said, that a movie studio was ‘the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.’ I think [McMillen’s] TrioMetrik® [software] just may be the modern composer’s ‘electric train set.’ ”
— Jay Cloidt, Composer.

B y far the most inspiring aspect of the performance, in my opinion, was the United Visual Artists light installation that accompanied the Machover ‘Spheres and Splinters’ composition. The equipment consisted of 25 poles about 3 meters tall equipped with high-intensity LED lamps from top to bottom. The poles were arrayed in two concentric rings (6-meter and 10-meter diameter) about cellist Peter Gregson who was seated on the darkened stage in the middle of this forest of light-poles. The signals from his K-bow and instrumentation that measured his muscle tension, arm gestures, and other physiological variables were processed by software that then controlled the dynamic geometrical 3-D patterns and changing colors on the light-poles.

H ow much ‘control’ or ‘reproducibility’ there may be to this spectacle from performance to performance is anybody’s guess. But there is no doubt that the combination of light and sound can be emotionally engaging and genuinely moving.

I n the pre-performance Q&A session, one professional cellist inquired as to what, if any, of the DSP and lighting is amenable to ‘notation’ in the conventional sense of musical scores and orchestration. ‘How much of what comes out is a surprise to the performer? How much of it is, shall we say, improvisational and how much of it is explicitly notated?’

T he responses of the panelists were, frankly, unconvincing. If graphical scoring methods à la Stockhausen and Xenakis and others are used, they did not say so. Instead they insisted that everything is exquisitely ‘controlled’ by the performers.

N otwithstanding the fact that the patches and loops and software init parameters and so forth constitute a network of procedural and declarative code, it should be confessed that these bricoleurs’ constructions of dozens of disparate elements and subsystems must be documented, in a manner that can not only be replicated and performed by others (not just by the original composer and collaborators) but can be performed by others in decades yet to come, on future equipment and software that can emulate the equipment and software used today. The equipment and software you are performing on will be obsolete in 2 years! In 15 years you won’t be able to boot one of those things you are performing on today or find replacement parts for it when it fails—they will be inoperable ‘antiques’ by then! You must have a notation and waveform specs and filter specs and patch specs, or your ‘composition’ will be like so much disappearing ink!

A rchival characterizations of current system and DSP object-classes and instances? [Crickets chirping] MusicXML representations, with extensions to MusicML? [More crickets]

T he cellist and I were disappointed with the ‘Faster Than Sound’ faculty members’ answers. But we (and, I think, the rest of the audience, based on their enthusiastic applause) were delighted with the performances, regardless whether they prove to be one-of-a-kind, ambient, impossible-to-replicate, incompletely-documented ‘improvisations’ or installation-art ‘happenings’. These were wonderful new works (works-in-progress), composed, engineered, and produced under the duress of a 10-day-long workshop. Bravo to one and all!

C ombining the visual and classical is not as blasphemous as many would think. More than a century ago Alexander Scriabin notated his 1909 symphonic poem ‘Prometheus, the Poem of Fire’ for the Luxe, a custom designed light projector built by Russian physicist Alexander Moser. In the mid-20th century, as a biography explains, conductor Leopold Stokowski often had lights set up for concerts to cast huge shadows of him on the walls of the concert hall. In the 21st century we maintain the visual convention of dimming the auditorium lights to provide engagement betwen audience and musicians. Light installations such as the one that accompanied Spheres and Splinters at Snape yesterday simply strengthen this engagement... Combining visual and classical could press the important hot button for funders, and a little bird tells me UVA may have some speculative work waiting to be picked up by someone quick off the mark in the classical field. Bring on music and movement.”
— On an Overgrown Path blog, 13-NOV-2010.

jwilzewske

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Faster than Sound: Acoustic-Electronic Compositions and Combined Visual-Music Performance at Aldeburgh

No comments:

Post a Comment