jwilzewske: ambient

Showing posts with label ambient. Show all posts

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Terry Riley’s Aleph (א): Music to Code By

A leph in Jewish mysticism represents the oneness of the Divine. The letter can been seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffible aspects of God while the lower yud represents God’s revelation and presence in the world. The vav connects the two realms.”
— Wikipedia.

T he 1-hour 53-min recording of Terry Riley’s solo synth performance of his composition, ‘א’, is beautiful—and precisely the sort of experience you would expect from Riley.

B ut, apart from whatever else it may be and apart from its merits as a composition and as a performance, I have found it to be especially conducive to my own productivity when working on complex math problems and coding software to solve them. For me, silence works only up to a point, after which I need minimalist music.

B ut not just any minimalist music. For example, Michael Nyman’s music interferes with concentration. La Monte Young’s music contains, for me, too many distractions. I do find Ellen Fullman’s recent work conducive, though, in the same way that Terry Riley’s ‘Aleph’ is conducive.

T he timbre of the Korg Triton Studio 88 Synth is bright like a Chinese single-reed or double-reed, but with a lot of spectral flux like a car horn... or a choir of Chinese tenor and bass suonas. Spectral flux and spectral irregularity are distinguishing features in car horns (see Lemaitre 2003, link below).

T he two-hour performance is filled with dense, organic, continually-changing textures—nimble car horns, if car horns can ever be nimble, and these are supernaturally nimble. The automaticity of preschool kids’ trying out their fingers on a keyboard, enjoying the raw pleasure of making notes and reproducing patterns and sequences... reflexive movements of their fingers and arms, yielding arpeggiation that involves just those notes that are within easy reach without stretching.

T he effect, some minutes into listening to it, evokes a freedom from intention and planning that is unknown to sober adults, and this is what facilitates my problem-solving and coding mind. The uncertain continuation of woodwind-like fingering patterns without aim, as long as they last, until superceded by some new motif... the stochastic, aleatoric innovations... Riley discounts the creative value of mind and deliberation and discounts it again, and again... the dollar-store of intellect... until the passion of meat is all that’s left, and animal instinct is restored...

O nly connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”
— E.M. Forster, ‘Howard’s End’, Ch. 22, 1910.

H ere’s a short MP3 clip.

T here is a ceremonial, magisterial, quasi-liturgical quality of ‘Aleph’ that reminds me of requiem forms. Or of chant, which can be heard as both archaic and contemporary. It is a mystical piece that unfolds at an implacable, glacial pace. The tone is largely meditative and serene, which provides space for contemplation and veneration. There are dozens-of-voices atmospheric Ligeti-like sound-fogs... fields of dissonance that convey an inhuman, infinite, primeval power—this surely is part of the Hebrew significance of Aleph; as is true also of the meaning of ‘א’ in mathematics—fitting as well in the context of requiem-writing.

I t has been said that my ‘Requiem’ does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its over-inclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my ‘Requiem’, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper...”
— Gabriel Fauré, 1902.

T hroughout, the piece is prodigiously inventive, with prolific layers upon layers of rhythmic and harmonic complexity, yet all presented with what appears on the surface to be minimalistic... it embodies the best of what minimalism can be: full of latent variety that captures and nourishes the listener’s awareness. (Which is why I find it helpful to listen to when I am tackling a hard problem, and why I am writing this blogpost you are reading. If you are interested in reading more about quantitative evidence concerning music listening and work productivity, have a look at the links below, esp. the book by Vikram Kiran.)

T he seamless, cluster-like blends fan out like a spilled liquid on a flat surface—part of the organic quality of just intonation, providing a support structure for the synth suona-like parts, a Toop-style “rawness” of intonation that sustains the emotional intensity of the piece.

M ost a cappella ensembles naturally gravitate to just intonation because its ‘stability’ or ‘target-pitch predictability’ is comfortable. In that regard, maybe the spectral flux and on-again-off-again frisson of this Terry Riley recording will be of special interest to people of a vocal bent, both amateur and professional singers alike.

T his sound of synth suonas keening, synth voices keening, choir of synth car horns keening... bears some resemblance to the György Ligeti piece in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, ‘Lux aeterna’... A friend who was overhearing my repeated playing of the 2 Riley ‘Aleph’ CDs wondered aloud “How can you stand that!? It’s driving me nuts!” So, to be truthful I should say that this is an acquired taste, or reveals a patience borne of equanimity. It is like being transported by William Kraft’s music in the walkway between terminals underneath Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It is like listening to a choir of chainsaws in the forest at a great and comfortable distance. Or like the persistent-but-beautiful bleating and tintinnabulation of sheep in a high alpine meadow in the Swiss alps, below the Jung Frau Joch in the late mornings of mid-summer. In other words, the bleating and tintinnabulation signify tolerant, salutary, and humane qualities that are implicit in our planet’s troubled story. Children of the Universe, you (every living creature) are here, hurray. Have a good life.

I n short, these are qualities which make humans, the sum of which could be seen in love (esp. agape, which in turn can be seen as an embodiment of the ‘idea of One’). The musical gaze cast from this sphere upon the story world is distanced, more or less withdrawn, non-judgemental, calm, quiet, and slightly melancholic, yet non-sentimental. As film music, tintinnabuli music often qualifies as an ‘against all odds’ score capable of making the complicated plot-level matters more poignant.”
— Kaire Maimets-Volt, p. 172.

I f you were in a foreign country and experiencing the local people performing on their native instruments, a long raga, for example—you would exhibit a tolerance toward such bleatings and tintinnabulations. But if instead, like my friend, you regard it as a choir of annoying car horns—multiple car alarms being set off repeatedly by marauding kids on a street a couple of blocks away—you just want it to stop.

I n summary, playing these 2 CDs consecutively without a break induces an awareness that can facilitate productive concentration at work and lift you into a realm beyond human understanding or hearing. The music requires an audience who must be willing to accept the spirit of the work and suspend their disbelief in order to receive its many rewards.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Frogs: Invasive Chamber Music

T heories pass. The frog remains.”
— Jean Rostand (French biologist/philosopher, 1894-1977) ‘Ce que nous apprennent les crapauds et les grenouilles’, 1953.

I ’m awakened by owls’ hoots outside our bedroom window, third night in a row. I listen for awhile, then all is quiet again. I get up, don my bathrobe and headphones, and put on ambient music of amphibians.

F roggy recordings by The Weather Station [Tamara Lindeman, pictured above in a woodsy Canadian landscape], Thom Brennan, Anne LeBaron.

H armonic soundscapes like these invite our taking rhythmic journeys. Invite our acceptance of deafening silence as well as deafening sound; accept uncountable, anonymous plurality as well as self-obsessed namable individuality.

W e are reminded of the karmic virtue that attaches to our accepting life’s uncertain beginnings, uncertain middles, and uncertain and sometimes sudden/catastrophic endings.

T he politics of this music are what I decide to call ‘interspecies anarchist’. The psychology of it: ‘agoraphilic’. Agoraphilia admixed with coexisting/concomitant agoraphobia. After all, predators are seeking prey, suitors seeking mates. Situatedness with no hope of escape, in the long run.

T hese recordings are ‘specimens’ illustrating the paradoxes of solitude in a crowd, evidence of unfoldings that don’t yet realize what end-state toward which they are unfolding. Burden and necessity and automaticity of living. Heart that beats and beats, from one beat to the next, not needing a reason.

T his is not ‘droning’ or ‘cacophony’ as its detractors allege, only a [human-ambitions-agnostic] diversity of natural purposes that are opaque to human reason.

T his [the sounds; the animal originators of the sounds] can be experienced but not owned. This can be embraced but not held.

E very sound/song on these recordings challenges or refutes the property rights we as individuals imagine that we have, unmasking our self-delusion of human mastery or control.

T he naturescapes of Lamont Young and Terry Riley will be on my list if awakened tomorrow. Or the sound sculptures of Morton Subotnik. Early Brian Eno, possibly.

D ialectics of sonic invasiveness/intrusiveness/pervasiveness... every living being has a right to be here. But not every living being has a right to sleep.

S ome people might not like this principle. Instead of headphones, I could maybe amplify it through the loudspeakers on our patio...

Friday, November 25, 2011

Claudia Bosse: Antiphonal Speech, Musicality of Eavesdropping

O ne can call this incestuous interplay of times a cacophony... Even, in analogy to the competition of generations, a competition among the texts emerges: i.e., the powerful ancient texts make - like unrestrained show-stoppers - the contemporary daily-life reports look pale. But this also means, that the frontal view distances the spectator, so he can feel comfortable. It is striking, that Bosse’s collage does not involve an immediate contemporary text; of all things, it is the present, that creates a blank spot on the "map of the present"- and of course it is exactly this blank spot that the audience has to occupy, to conquer, the eye of the needle for the audience to filter in. The frontality however blocks or contracts this hole in the overall picture, so that access is hindered or even refused. But, you can reopen this hole, precisely when the spatiality of the theatre is not concealed, when the force of the machinery producing its images is contantly interrupted as in Bosse's theatrical practices. This does not mean a return to cosmic salvation.”
— Sebastian Kirsch, 2011, review of Bosse’s ‘Vampires of the 21st Century’

F ascinating sound-art installation by Claudia Bosse, currently in the Egon Schiele exhibit at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The installation consists of a series of plate-glass kiosks that are just large enough to stand or sit in, dispersed in a nearly anechoic gallery room that has had foam applied to its walls.

M ost of the glass compartments are large enough to hold only one person at a time (WxDxH: 50 cm x 80 cm x 200 cm). One that is labeled ‘LOVERS’ has two chairs in inside, with enough room for two people to sit facing each other.

S ome compartments have one miniature loudspeaker. Others have two or three of them, positioned at various spots high or low with respect to the vertical axis of the compartment. Some are positioned close to where your ears are located when you are inside the enclosure; others are far above, below, in-front-of-but-to-one-side, or behind your head. These speakers are 10 €, German-made Visaton® 36 mm diameter, 6 mm thick, 1 watt speakers—of the sort that might more usually be found in a laptop computer.

E ach speaker is fed by a pre-recorded, edited, pre-equalized track that is being played-back from a Alesis 24-track hard-disk recorder HD24

T he amplified outputs of the Alesis HD24 are fed via heavy twisted-pair shielded cables that are routed to each glass compartment and snaked up the plate glass walls. The naked black Mylar-cone speakers dangle from these wires—each cable end has been taped to the glass at the right height; the jacket and the wires’ insulation have been stripped; and the speaker has been soldered on, right there.

T he frequency response of these speakers is perfect for the frequency spectrum of the human voice, falling off rapidly below 300 Hz. The recorded tracks are entirely of women’s and men’s voices—either in conversation or in soliloquy. Some of the tracks seem to be spontaneous—‘found’ sounds, ambient bits of incidental speech that Ms. Bosse captured in public spaces. Other of the tracks have the measured phrasing of an actor reciting from a written script or poem or other text.

T he perfectly acoustically reflective plate glass surfaces of the booth interiors produce a listening environment where your ears experience a heightened awareness of directionality—an exaggerated sense of where the sound is coming from. In the ‘LOVERS’ kiosk, the speaker in the center is the most voluble—it is almost always saying something. It is the sound-source that both you and your partner seated in the booth can both hear consistently. The testimony from this central speaker provides the one account that you both can agree upon—a veridical, trustworthy narrator. But I cannot hear the second voice coming from the speaker that is positioned behind your head over there, nor can you hear the third voice from the speaker that is located above my left ear.

A t times I believe that the intermittent/interjecting voice behind my left ear is that of the person whose ‘public’ voice is heard coming from the center speaker, but into my left ear comes this text of reflection, reconsideration, interpretation—an internal dialogue that the person is having with herself, either contemporaneously with the ‘public’ discourse or at some time afterward. The fact that the speaker on the opposite side of the enclosure, behind your head over there, is probably interjecting interior, confessional, discorroborative utterances—maybe with far different emotional tone or factual content—concerns me. I want to talk to you about this after we leave this gallery. But the 5 minutes we spend inside that ‘LOVERS’ box covers too wide a range of ideas and rambling evidence for us to possibly remember, let alone remember accurately. How long does this multi-character ‘LOVERS’ collage continue before it reaches the end of its ‘loop’ and starts again? 20 minutes? 200 minutes?

T he poetical phrasing and sonic punctuations—not just of the more theatrical parts of it, but the ambient, found-sound parts as well—are a joy to hear: the exquisite quality of the multi-track recording and playback, crystal-clear. The musicality of the recorded, processed speech; the wonderful rhythmic design and orchestration of the recordings’ dovetailings with each other; the antiphonality or spatiality of it; the Henry Brant-esque “oblique harmonies” of it—and the intimacy of these small glass chambers, and the discourses that they enact—are all emblematic of what we mean by the term ‘chamber music’.

I have seen Alesis HD24 digital recorders used for recording musical ensembles before, but until now I have not seen them used for multi-track playback in sonic installation-art exhibits. This equipment is perfect for this purpose!

W hat you know and I do not know… What I know and you do not… What we both know; what we both doubt; what we both positively disbelieve... And what we see, through glass cubicles, other people knowing and doubting and disbelieving... The ‘transgressiveness’ of eavesdropping on other persons’ intimate conversations, inner lives, confessions—and the luxury of being ‘permitted’ to do this ad lib in an art gallery installation… The beauty of the artist’s gifting us with these insights that are ordinarily forbidden to us—or gotten only at expense of big, ugly guilty feelings.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Gogol’s Terminal Psychosis, No Effective Medical Palliative Care in Sight

I n the last stage of his life Gogol is increasingly consumed by a religious mania. He considers his past work a sin and burns the second part of his major novel, ‘Dead Souls’. In the end he refuses to eat. In his final hours he is visited by the fantastic figures from his own works – and they show themselves to be more reasonable than he is himself at this point. Gogol has utterly broken with his previous life and renounces it; now it is avenging itself. … This opera is not so much a biography as a poetic and satirical study of one of the greatest Russian writers, whose emotional life is as mysterious and fascinating as his idiosyncratic works... Lera Auerbach … has found her own voice, and it is full of stylistic freedom and dramatic power.”
— Theater an der Wien opera, program notes, 2011.

T he person must, according to the DSM-IV, have at least two out of five symptoms:

(i) delusions, (ii) hallucinations, (iii) disorganised speech, (iv) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, or (v) functional incapacities or negative symptoms (such as alogia, avolition, etc)—for a substantial percentage of a one month period;
Plus, continuous signs of disturbance must continue for at least six months;
Plus, substantial social or occupational dysfunction must be evident;
Required exclusion criteria include substance abuse, mood disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder.

C heck, check, and check—with regard to Nikolai Gogol in the last 6 months of his life.

I f you are expecting in Lera Auerbach’s new opera a Gogolesque, cynical account of human nature, or about the ruling class (‘We are the 99%!’), or a scatology as absurdist art, you will not find it here.

N or will you learn famous Gogol’s concept of the untranslatable Russian word пошлость (‘poshlost’). [Vladimir Nabokov explained this as “posh-lust”, “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (Nabokov 1944, p. 70)—the falsely transcendent.] Пошлость reduces reality to a sort of cavalier mediocrity and unrepentant vulgarity—a moral and spiritual condition from which humankind cannot escape—compulsive smutiness, radical pointlessness, compulsive garish carnival, absurd superfluousness.

N o, in this fantastical new opera we get nonstop existential angst and horror—superbly manifested in Auerbach’s score and libretto, and in an exceptionally fine production by Theater an der Wien (who commissioned the work), with performances by ORF Radiosymphonieorchester, Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Grazer Kapellknaben, and Mozartknabenchor Wien… a convincing reenactment, showing the suffering Gogol, receiving no effective medical help for his end-of-life psychiatric condition.

I t is as though Gogol’s invention, пошлость, ironically haunted him during his final days. Which amounts to a lesson to us all, to be careful about what we dream, what we think, what we dwell upon. As our minds begin to fail late in life, those one-time droll ideas of ours—every hubristic preoccupation; every cynical mental posture we ever indulged—every one of them could become real in our waning days—and we may be powerless to make them stop from bothering us. Bad karma or poetic justice, hunting you down in your own lifetime! Ein Alptraum jagt den nächsten!

B efore writing a note of ‘Gogol,’ composer Lera Auerbach immersed herself in the writer’s complete works and over twenty books written about him. It would take similar efforts to begin to understand this opera: taking us inside the fevered mind of its title character, ‘Gogol’ is less a biographical narrative set to music than a phantasmagorical, psychological investigation. Given a virtuosic staging by director Christine Mielitz, it is also an overwhelming theatrical experience.” — Zwölftöner (Werner Kmetitsch), 17-NOV-2011.

A uerbach regularly collaborates with soloists and ensembles including Hilary Hahn, Vadim Gluzman, Leonidas Kavakos, Julian Rachlin, Philippe Quint, Gautier Capuçon, Alisa Weilerstein, David Finckel, Kim Kashkashian, Tokyo String Quartet, Borromeo Quartet, Artemis String Quartet, Vanbrugh String Quartet, Kremerata Baltica, Camerata Pacifica, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Auerbach was born in the city of Chelyabinsk, adjacent to Siberia. After writing her first opera when she was 12, she moved to the U.S. in 1991 where she studied piano and composition at Juilliard. Her piano studies took her to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. She was awarded the Hindemith Prize by the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Germany, Deutschlandfunk’s Förderpreis, selected as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and in 2007 she was selected as a member of the Young Global Leaders forum by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

G ogol’s ‘grotesque’ is a—] means of estranging—a comic hyperbole that unmasks the banality and inhumanity of ambient reality.” — Susanne Fusso, p. 69.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Midori: Close Readings of the Third Kind; ‘Deep Linking’ in Shostakovich’s Op. 134

Y ou just have to ‘see’ more music in this music.”
— Valery Gergiev, regarding Shostakovich’s musical/spatial imagery, quoted by Fanning, p. 77.

T here is a sense of space and gravity... of invisible forces and large-scale coherence in the moves by Midori (五嶋みどり, Gotō Midori), especially in her performance of the Shostakovich, Op. 134, with pianist Özgür Aydin. It is as though each phrase is a consequence of something more remote than what the immediately preceding bars contained. Her recital tonight was like an expedition...

Mozart - Sonata in E-flat Major K.380
Shostakovich - Sonata Op. 134
Schumann - Sonata in A minor, Op. 105
Schubert - Fantasy in C Major, D.934

T he Andante first movement of the Shostakovich with its twelve-tone parts embodies a kind of spacy ‘otherness’—an alien mysteriousness in this otherwise predominantly tonal movement. The violin’s expression of Shostakovich’s musical signature: D—eS—C—H (the music notes D—E-flat—C—B)... feels more like a “quotation” in this context—feels more like a citation of a statement made at another time by someone else, than a statement in its own right.

W hy does this sonata’s first movement evoke Bach for me? And what about the idiomatic ‘jazz’ figures in the piano part, about 2 minutes into the second movement (Allegretto) and about 8 minutes into the third movement (Largo)?

T he phrases are played as if they are in “double quotes”—reporting where they’ve been and what they’ve seen. They have an arresting effect. Are they accurate? Are they really meant by Shostakovich to reference artifacts of our own culture or are they instead a kind of caricature or impostor? Shrewdly constructed by an alien intelligence from outer space and sent to us for some alien purpose? Or is it devised by an empathetic terrestrial intelligence?

T he Allegretto scherzo in E-flat major is impulsive, vehement. The Largo is infused with drama, but it too is mysterious—ambiguous in its direction and tonality and genre... A Bach-like passacaglia that has now returned from outer space, changed by contact with unknown extraterrestrials? (Maybe I should not have had the absinthe before the concert...)

K ristian Hibberd’s 2005 dissertation was the first application of the ideas of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin to understanding Shostakovich’s music—theories of ‘carnival’ and ‘registers,’ voiced in discourse. Since then, others have likewise found Bakhtin’s concepts helpful (see the Chapters in Part II of Pauline Fairclough’s multi-author edited volume, plus Chapter 6 and the Epilogue in Judith Kuhn’s book, links below). They examine Shostakovich’s musical language, exploring controversies pertaining to the composer’s labile and contradictory meanings.

T hese authors give an account of the diverse interpretations by partisans in the musicological “Shostakovich Wars,” reporting that the Wars have demolished the notion of one, fixed meaning in Shostakovich’s music. Political? Hard to tell for sure whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident! Expressions of post-modern subjectivity, filled with various voices, inscribing each other, filled with uncertainty? Hard to tell whose narratives these are!

T o me, Shostakovich’s design in Op. 134 seems prophetic of our current hyperlinked, cross-referential age. In each movement I wonder: Is Shostakovich expounding, or quoting, or inline linking (referring to the expressions of others)? Did the Soviet authorities hold him liable for his musical deep linking? for carnivalizing or caricaturizing or referencing Soviet and Western culture? Do Midori and Aydin?

A nd, 40-plus years after it was composed, how should we feel about these deep-link references? Its gestures are “late-20th Century” through and through, and I wonder how it will be received in 50 years or 100. But I am after this performance impressed by it also as a composition about composing—a ‘meta’ commentary about reporting and referencing and linking. It is that aspect of this music that interests me most. And I wonder whether it is that aspect that will contribute most to this sonata’s continuing attractiveness and relevance in the distant future.

T he ‘inner’ sounsdcapes of writing and reading bear resonance of [and refer to, or link to—] ‘outer’ soundscapes... the world is always full of sounds... they enter and depart in processions as events pass us or as we pass them. This is why the music of the streets has no beginning or end but is all middle.”
— Marianne Ping Huang, ‘Gestures of the Unheard,’ in The Novelness of Bakhtin, p.168.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Memory of the Future: Joan Grossman’s Video and David McIntire’s Music

H istory is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history’s bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and cognition—The Blackout—as a condition that plagues history, and is particularly problematic in an era of mass media, in which memory is increasingly disembodied and virtualized, undermined by [what might be called] a ‘Generalized Media Disorder’. Technologies of media and war are creating a condition in which the virtual world is displacing the ethical world. The Blackout is a space of memory and thinking that collapses with Catastrophe and falls into a stupor. Humanity has been nearly extinguished by the tremendous violence it has enacted, pushing philosophy, language and ethics to their limits.”
— BLACKOUT, jacket blurb.

A nd music can be both a political act and powerful antidote to the collapse of social memory and the erosion of community... the withdrawal into passive, vegetative isolation, each at home, continually surfing Netflix, surfing the web.

McIntire – ‘Revenants’ (electroacoustic recording, live percussion, 20-min)
McIntire & Grossman – ‘Singing Bowl’ (video, electroacoustic, live percussion, 47-min)

T he combination of the video imagery and the live and the electroacoustic music was imaginative and highly listenable and watchable. Joan Grossman’s video was elegant... with a simple beauty that leveraged symmetries across the vertical and/or horizontal axes in the center of the 8 x 6-meter projection screen in Epperson Auditorium. The video involved replication and reflection of imagery in kaleidoscope fashion, at times with superimposed additional imagery blended into the central part of the visual field.

U nlike certain computer music / media compositions where the composer-artists ‘try too hard’ or succumb to temptation and use too many of the diverse array of techniques and patches available to them (resulting in sensory overload for the audience, hindering our grasping a memorable meaning or narrative arc), McIntire and Grossman achieved a satisfying, deliciously cohesive, coherent effect.

P ercussionists Jennifer Wagner and Christopher Howard performed at percussion tables on the right- and left-hand sides of the auditorium, while the recorded electroacoustic tracks were played through Mackie SRS 450® powered monitors and SRS 1500® subwoofer at the front of house. Seated as I was front-and-center, the antiphonal bells and gongs and cymbals, and glass wine goblets bowed across their rims with violin bows, and hammered and brushed brass bowls, and Equilibrium® tuned-box slit-drums, and Daisy® BBs rolling on the underside of a tom-tom drum head—all of this was wonderfully ‘immersive’ with the house lights dimmed. Great sibilance of the live percussion sounds, creating a rich contrast to the electronically-filtered and distorted sampled-voice and other sound content in the digital-recording tracks. [The ‘live’ elements might be better still if yet another pair of percussionists were added, positioning them toward the rear of the auditorium/performancespace so that the entire audience could experience the intense immersive effects that we did at the front.]

T he electroacoustic recording and reproduction/sound-reinforcement EQ was expertly done by McIntire. Both of the pieces have a low-pitch ‘red-spectrum’ rumble—almost boilerroom-like, or intrauterine—that imparts a subtle but pervasive ‘interiority’ to the music, very chesty, very warm.

G etting the pre-recorded digital tracks to ‘sit’ well amongst live performers relies on the tracks having an even level, a congenial tonal and level balance, and the right reverberant ambience. McIntire does this superbly, gracefully executing minor adjustments at the workstation control-surface in response to moment-to-moment performance decisions made by Wagner and Howard. Compressor and gain automation settings were spot-on, so that the percussion sounds sat happily in-track, with none of the live percussion effects sounding too loud or too quiet or clashing with the pre-recorded sonic material and synthesizer tracks.

F or some of the voice content (e.g., DECtalk Hawking-esque recitations of NOAA National Weather Service Marine Forecasts; alpha-bravo-charlie...romeo-sierra-tango...zulu), McIntire adds density to the voice sample by upping the compression ratio to maybe around 6:1 or 8:1 and then adjusts the threshold to a couple of dB on average-level parts. This means quieter sections are left alone and anything louder is jumped-on hard, bringing it closer to the average level. The coherence or cohesiveness of these two compositions, each with its volume level and acoustic complexity ascending to a climax about two-thirds of the way through and then tapering to a quiet conclusion, is nicely enhanced by this approach.

M cIntire’s EQ and engineering are commendable as noted above, and he does not go overboard on special effects. His EQ cuts are made over quite narrow bands, and his boosting is gentle and wide. McIntire gently applies boosts in the 50-300Hz band to add warmth. He applies cuts in the 1 KHz band, to deemphasize nasal vocal sounds, and adds generous ‘presence’ with boosts between 4 KHz and 8 KHz. The magical sense of Nature and air and space involves a wide boost applied between 12 KHz and 20 KHz, and that was really beautiful up-front, seated in Row #1. With these two compositions that explore the interplay between Nature and Technology, between humankind and other species—between inanimate noisy things like water (sometimes seemingly talking to us, almost alive, almost human), and supposedly-sentient creatures (humans) who often act in hostile, destructive and uncaring ways as though they were inanimate—the musical and artistic success absolutely depends upon making these EQ choices right.

I n summary, a fantastic, powerful experience—beautifully composed, engineered, filmed, edited, and performed. Very happy!

T he ArtSounds series, of which the McIntire-Grossman ‘Memory of the Future’ program was a part, is co-sponsored by UMKC Conservatory and Kansas City Art Institute.

J oan Grossman is a Brooklyn, New York-based independent media artist and producer. Her work has been screened in more than 20 countries and won numerous awards. She is currently Visiting Professor in Film & Media Arts at UMKC. Grossman was formerly a producer for NPR and Voice of America on a variety of programs, including All Things Considered, Afropop Worldwide, Kids America, and The Territory of Art. She has worked in Africa, China, Russia, and throughout Europe, has produced media for public interest organizations and NGOs, and has also worked as producer on European documentaries and feature films. Joan has a Ph.D. in Media and Philosophy from the European Graduate School and has taught film production and theory. She has worked with leading theorists and filmmakers such as Agnes Varda, Claude Lanzmann, Chantal Akerman, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. Her book, ‘Blackout: On Memory & Catastrophe’, was published in 2009 (link below).

D avid McIntire is a Kansas City, Missouri-based composer who, with composer-musicologist Kyle Gann, co-directed the 2009 Second International Conference on Minimalist Music at UMKC Conservatory. In 2010, he launched Irritable Hedgehog Music, a record label focusing on minimalist and soundscape compositions. McIntire has performed with Colorblind James Experience. With pianist R. Andrew Lee he has produced a recording of Tom Johnson’s ‘Hour for Piano’ (link below).