jwilzewske: antiphonal

Showing posts with label antiphonal. Show all posts

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.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

James Mobberley: Electroacoustic Excitation, Anodized/Bionic/Fleshly Hybrids

M y friend and colleague, Carter Enyeart, provided not only the idea behind the piece and its reason for being, but also the recorded sound material for the fixed media... [live cello plus recorded, digitally-processed] sculpted sounds from that same instrument.”
— James Mobberley, program notes.

T he Charlotte Street Foundation’s annual Generative Performing Artist Awards Celebration at the H&R Block ‘City Stage Theater’ in Kansas City’s Union Station last night was really excellent. I especially enjoyed the part of the program honoring UMKC Conservatory composition faculty member James Mobberley, featuring two of his compositions.

Mobberley – Alter Ego (2006) for cello and fixed media, Carter Enyeart (vc)
Mobberley – Icarus Wept (1994-97) for trumptet and fixed media, Keith Benjamin (trpt)

C onsummately beautiful DAW editing and engineering of the fixed media sound! The ‘immersive’ intensity was boosted by having the live performer positioned in between two powered monitors, less than 1 meter away. (Ordinarily, in electroacoustic performances the fixed media speakers are deployed around the periphery of the performance space, and the musician operating the mixing surface is typically located in the center or at the rear of the hall, the net effect of which is a sense of remoteness or detachedness of the fixed media from the live performers. By contrast, the close-range speaker config last night was ‘in-your-face’ proximity, tantamount to making the monitors into ensemble players sitting right the heck next to the human soloist.)

I f you are familiar with Benjamin’s and/or Enyeart’s playing, you know that neither of them ever lacks for intensity or conviction, even under ‘normal’ conditions. But these specific Mobberley pieces, plus the point-blank immersive set-up, plus the exuberant, celebratory buzz infusing the audience members and performers and Charlotte Street leadership in attendance—put the passion over the top... these factors all combined to make the sound totally cook, man!

H ave a listen to some previously-recorded sessions on the SoundCloud link below.

P .S.— Keith Benjamin uses a Bach 1-1/4 ‘B’ mouthpiece with a #24 backbore.

W as funded by the NEA, a U.S. federal agency; therefore, the original concept [for ‘Icarus Wept’], involving full frontal nudity, had to be abandoned... impromptu recording session and ‘brain-fry’ in which we came up not only with trumpet sounds of all kinds but also with the formula for a ‘partially androgynacious anodized serial copolymer,’ patent-pending... [digitized sounds including] Keith’s trumpet stand, swirling coins, laughter, and various expletives [see the Caleb Kelly MIT book, link below]... Icarus’s flight toward the sun and sudden realization of his [fatal] mistake... Three movement titles (Getting Waxed; Climbing the Blue Staircase; 11 Feet from the Sun) reflect themes of Icarus. However, the other two (Somebody Else’s Face; Strap on Your Lobster) have nothing to do with Icarus at all, or with weeping either, pretty much.”
— James Mobberley, program notes.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Britten’s ‘St. Nicolas’ Cantata Op. 42 in Aldeburgh: The Importance of ‘Place’

I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships. I want my music to be of use to people, to please them, to enhance their lives. My music has its roots in where I live and work.”
— Benjamin Britten, 1964, remarks upon receiving the Aspen Award.

I want to write for people... There is something very fresh and unrestrained in the quality of the music produced by amateurs. What annoys me more is the ineptitude of some professionals who don’t know their stuff. I have no patience with that.”
— Benjamin Britten.

B etween the two World Wars, composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and others fostered a kind of pre-WWII musical Renaissance. But in the 1940s, a new generation of artists began to differentiate themselves from the previous generation.

I t is encouraging that you too sense that something in the air that heralds a ‘renaissance’. I feel terrifically conscious of it—so do Peter [Pears], & Clifford [Curzon], & Michael Tippett & so many that I love & admire it—[and it] is good to add you to the list! Whether we are the voices crying in the wilderness or the thing itself, it isn’t for us to know, but anyhow it is so very exciting. It is of course in all of the arts, but in music, particularly, it’s this acceptance of freedom without any arbitrary restrictions, this simplicity, this contact with the audiences of our own time, & of people like ourselves, this seriousness, & above all this professionalism. One mustn’t and can’t deny the many heavenly genius[es] of the last century, but it is also a greater sympathy with the earlier centuries that marks this thing perhaps the most clearly.”
— Benjamin Britten, letter to Imogen Holst, OCT-1943.

T here is little doubt that Britten and his generation were ‘the thing itself’. Their sounds were not only ‘new’ but were emblematic of their nation and their generation. Britten’s Op. 42, the ‘St. Nicolas’ Cantata, represents one important embodiment of that.

O ne might think that a nationally and generationally emblematic sound would require in each performer a fully developed timbre and musical maturity to pull it off. But that is not so.

I heard a rehearsal yesterday (Saturday, 13-NOV) afternoon in Aldeburgh, and the choirs and the boy singing the part of young Nicolas are mightily motivated from their pure love of music. They simply and obviously love making music happen. Their upcoming performance of ‘St. Nicolas’ next Saturday will not only be really special in regard to the historic setting and all that; it will also be most consonant with Britten’s original intentions and ethos for this piece. This semi-staged production celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sir Peter Pears, who sang the part of Saint Nicolas in the work’s première in Aldeburgh Parish Church in 1948, as part of the very first Aldeburgh Festival.

T he Solstice String Quartet will lead the other performers from the front desks (a string quartet at the front, leading the rest, is a feature that Britten himself suggested). Andrew Staples (tenor) will perform the part of the adult Nicolas. The Jubilee Opera Chorus and the Britten-Pears Chamber Choir, along with members of local boys’ and girls’ choirs complete the ensemble, antiphonally positioned in the church sanctuary. The conductor will be Steuart Bedford.

S teuart’s conducting during the rehearsal last evening indicated that, apart from his great renown as a Britten scholar, he has a special talent for teaching youngsters. He communicates every bit of the excitement and humor in this score to the youngest of choristers in a very engaging manner.

T he conductor should be cool-headed...”
— Benjamin Britten, conductor’s notes for Op. 42.

Introduction
The Birth of Nicolas
Nicolas Devotes Himself to God
He Journeys to Palestine
Nicolas Comes to Myra and Is Chosen Bishop
Nicolas from Prison
Nicolas and the Pickled Boys
His Piety and Marvellous Works
The Death of Nicolas

W ithin the second movement are mischievous musical inventions, as when Nicolas swims in the bath, percussion imitating the water’s bubbling and splashing. During ‘He Journeys to Palestine’ all the musical components swirl into the tempest that threatens the voyager, and the melodic line becomes more dissonant as a storm approaches, silencing the male chorus. The children’s chorus, singing from the back gallery, rises like the flickering of lightning: ‘Winds and tempests howl their cry of battle through the raging sky! Ah!’ and the men plead for safety. As the storm subsides, the soloist emerges; his prayer is musically direct: ‘Pity Our Simplicity’ underlined by the hum of the tympani. The stars now visible in the clear sky twinkle in the light fingering of the pianist in the instrument’s upper octaves.”
— Jaime Robles, review of Chora Nova performance, November, 2007.

T he second movement (The Birth of Nicolas) initiates the account of Nicolas’ life, recounting the story of his miraculous birth, when “...from his mother’s womb he sprang and cried, ‘God be glorified!’” The tone of the boy treble singing the part of young Nicolas in this production—tender, flutey, and high, a clarion-call on high-E (E4) without vibrato or other world-wise colorings—is superb. The boy wanders through the sanctuary taking up various stations—from a back pew, to up front by a column, to the pulpit, to the chancel—emitting this high-pitched proclamation.

A ndrew Staples’ tenor voice has substance and a jaunty worldliness but is sweet as well—conveying that this is who the child grew up to become. When well-sung, these two parts are credibly the same person, heard across time. After six ‘stations’ or strophic episodes, the transformation of boy into the man is complete. When at the end of these the boy becomes a man, the movement closes with the full-voiced adult tenor singing the refrain. At the moment that Nicolas becomes a man, the supporting harmonies become dissonant, creating a sizzling semitone frisson symbolically marking the end of childhood.

I n the third movement, which features the tenor soloist exclusively, Nicolas sings of his experiences after his parents’ deaths. In “the wider world of man” he finds hopelessness, faithlessness, and poverty, which made him angry and heartsick.

N icolas is ordained as bishop in the fifth movement, at the conclusion of which the audience joins in singing a familiar hymn, the Old 100th [Psalm]. Using the audience to sing the familiar Nunc dimittis in the ninth movement is likewise very atmospheric and powerfully evokes memories of remote childhood church experiences for adults. Scary engagement of primal, limbic emotions—in the face of which our ‘adult’ reason is quite helpless.

A new and important element in Saint Nicolas was the inclusion of the congregation in the musical action. These hymn tunes were familiar to a generation educated in English public schools, where chapel and hymn singing were daily events. It drew them back to their own childhood, at the same time demanded a level of participation beyond passive listening. This remarkable layering of musical elements . . . provides no small part of the pleasure we have in listening to this work. And the humility of a great composer writing serious music within the capabilities of ordinary people explains the continuing favor this music finds half a century after its composition. Britten was always a very practical composer who was equally at home whether writing for modest amateur performances or for international occasions with virtuoso professional soloists… Saint Nicolas was Britten’s first large-scale work written with mainly amateur performers in mind, and is a wonderful example of his outstanding ability to capture the essence of his subject-matter with a series of dramatic yet essentially simple ideas to which performers and audiences can immediately relate.”
— John Bawden, Musical Director (1994 - 2006), Fareham Philharmonic Choir.

T he seventh movement has tremendous drama and pathos. Here we have Nicolas as patron saint of children in the story of an innkeeper/butcher who robs and murders three young students, preserving and hiding their remains in a pickling tub. ‘Pickled Boys’: what a perfect gnarly image for all 9 year-old boys! Nicolas miraculously resuscitates the pickled kids, who then proceed to sing an enthusiastic Alleluia!

N o question: there’s something unmistakably ‘fresh and unrestrained’ about Britten’s score, something that comes directly from the pleasure he took in writing for these performers. From the dizzy waltz that underscores ‘The Birth of Nicolas’, through the powerfully dramatic tenor numbers to the resounding final chorus, Saint Nicolas unerringly hits its mark. Understandably enough, Crozier’s libretto glosses quickly over Nicolas’s role as protector of prostitutes and pawnbrokers – but the extended, deliciously macabre episode of ‘Nicolas and the Pickled Boys’ (added at Britten’s own suggestion) shows a gleefully Roald Dahl-like understanding of the less-than-wholesome tastes of the young ‘little blighters’.”
— Richard Bratby, program notes, Barbican 2008.

T he eighth movement is sung by the choirs alone, as they recall the kindness of Nicolas, keeping “his memory alive in legends that our children and their children’s children treasure still.”

T he ending, including the audience, singing “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform” is staggeringly moving, even for non-Christians, whipping up a transgenerational cosmic universality of the human condition and commending the moral necessity of our behaving civilly and charitably toward each other—toward our children and grandchildren, and toward our parents and grandparents. Heard in its original setting here in Aldeburgh Parish Church, the piece evokes a powerful sense of the importance of ‘place’—of how important our local culture and situatedness are, to the project of creating and conserving deep meaning in our lives.

I n all, it is ‘so very exciting’, just as Britten once wrote! Consider yourself very lucky to be able to attend next Saturday afternoon’s performance of ‘St. Nicolas’ in its ur-venue, the ancient and atmospheric church in Aldeburgh, and performed by local artists with audience participation. Tickets are nearly sold-out and, judging from the rehearsal, this performance will be fully up to the historic, ‘jubilee’ anniversary billing.

N icolas was born in answer to prayer,
in answer to prayer, in answer to prayer,
And leaping from his mother's womb he cried-
GOD BE GLORIFIED!

Swaddling bands and crib awaited him there,
awaited him there, awaited him there,
But Nicolas clapped both his hands and cried-
GOD BE GLORIFIED!

Innocent and joyful, naked and fair,
naked and fair, naked and fair,
He came in pride on earth to abide-
GOD BE GLORIFIED!

Water rippled Welcome! in the bathtub by his side,
bathtub by his side, bathtub by his side.
He dived in open-eyed, he swam, he cried-
GOD BE GLORIFIED!

When he went to Church at Christmastide,
at Christmastide, at Christmastide,
He climbed up to the font to be baptized.
GOD BE GLORIFIED!

Pilgrims came to kneel and pray by his side,
to pray by his side, to pray by his side.
He grew in grace, his name was sanctified.
GOD BE GLORIFIED!

Nicolas grew in innocence and pride,
in innocence and pride, in innocence and pride, in pride....
His glory spread a rainbow round the countryside, round the countryside.
‘Nicolas will be a Saint! Nicolas will be a Saint! Nicolas will be a Saint!’ the neighbors cried.
GOD BE GLORIFIED!”
— Op. 42, ii.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Quadrivium Novum: Unity with Autonomy

A [filmic] image combined with a sound placed in a context--none of which matches expectations--creates a metaphor and invites an individual search for meaning at a physical, emotional and psychological level (in that order).”
— Paul Rudy, UMKC Conservatory.

T he performance last night at Unity Temple by the electroacoustic quartet Quadrivium Novum was the final event of the 2009-2010 season for the Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance, KCEMA.

Q uadrivium is comprised of Rebecca Ashe (flute), Kari Johnson (piano), Cheryl Melfi (clarinet), and Mark Stauffer (cello). [‘Quadrivium’ may not only allude to their quartetness but also to each member’s equal, autonomous role in bringing new, disruptive repertoire and techniques to the ensemble’s collaborations—much as though each member were a canonical ‘subject’ to be studied, learned, mastered?] Each of Quadrivium’s members is associated with the UMKC Conservatory’s Community Music & Dance Academy.

Daniel Eichenbaum: Orbit (flute, clarinet, live electronics; 20 min)
Jason Bolte: Scrap Metal (prepared piano solo, fixed media; 10 min)
Mara Gibson: E:Vespers (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio; 8 min)
Andrew Seager Cole: A Slow Unraveling (flute, clarinet, cello, piano, electronics, video; 8 min)
William Lackey: The World Falls Asleep (cello, digital recording of cello; 10 min)
Christopher Biggs: Bioluminescence (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio, video; 12 min)

E ach of the works was rewarding, and I should apologize for not commenting here on each of them. Let me at least offer a few impressions of the three pieces that were world premieres: ‘E:Vespers’, ‘Orbit’, and ‘A Slow Unraveling’.

M ara Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, a ‘fantasie’ or tone-poem composed on the occasion of observing an eclipse, was remarkable for the organic, natural way in which the digital audio functions as an equal to the three live performers. The partitioning of human assistants and digital tracks programs all the tasks into one application, run by a single assistant at the console workstation in the center of the performance space. This approach does not ‘reduce’ the interpretation to ‘assistant vs. trio’ duality, nor does it risk dichotomizing the technology and the performers at the front of the performance space. Rather, with the house lights dimmed, the effect is one of a thoroughly integrated ‘whole’ in which the individual parts reveal their character and ideas—beginning with the tolling of delicate, repeated notes by the piano.

T he technology actually helps to maintain the textural and timbral cohesion of the other parts (clarinet, flute, piano), whose acoustic spectra are otherwise diverse. Unlike some electroacoustic works in which the technology is intrusive or merely ornamental; unlike works where the digital tracks, having been laid down and sequenced in advance, are inflexible and impose too much determinism on the live executants. In the case of Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, the composer is still the creator, and the 3 performers and 1 assistant are the directors in charge of interpreting the musical elements of the work, whether they are for an acoustic instrument or combined with a computer sequencer. The performers are responsible to recreate the world the composer has envisioned: here, a contemplative, reverent, panoramic one—punctuated with worries but ultimately beneficent—captured in the twilight of the eclipse and return of the sun after 'totality'.

W e orbit and float in our space gondola and watch the oceans and islands and green hills of the continent pass by at five miles per second. We move silently and effortlessly past the ground. I want to say ‘over the ground’ as I write this, but remember: in space, your sense of up or down is completely gone and my description must reflect this fact. In addition, the breathtaking speed of the ship is an odd and confusing contrast to the feel of perpetually floating within the spaceship. You do not sit before the window to view the passing scene, certainly not down upon it. Are you speeding past oceans and continents, or are you just hovering and watching them move beside you?”
— Joseph Allen, U.S. astronaut.

D aniel Eichembaum’s ‘Orbit’ is an antiphonal piece for flute, clarinet, and electronics. Rebecca Ashe and Cheryl Melfi are dressed in black, in near-total darkness, barefoot. They perform Orbit’s several movements as a duo, gliding anticlockwise between the four ‘stations’ that are set up on-stage. The stations are separated around the perimeter of a 10-meter circle whose perigee is closest to the audience and apogee farthest away.

T he ephemeral, ambient quality of electroacoustic elements is abundant, at times dominant. But it is important to note that the digital tracks are derived entirely from recordings of Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s own playing, breathing, moving—not from Eichenbaum’s digital waveform library or independent geek artistry in a vacuum. Extensive digital signal-processing (DSP) and editing have been done to produce what are now rendered by the sequencer in performance as, say, massive, rocket-like, spine-shaking ‘rumbles’ [from the multiple studio monitor speakers that are arrayed around the performance space, controlled from the assistant’s digital audio workstation console] or celestial chirps or high-energy quantum particle ‘tweets’. We had no idea of this in advance. But when Rebecca and Cheryl remarked after the performance that all of the electroacoustic effects we had just heard during this piece had begun from sounds that they themselves had made, and that Eichenbaum had recorded and processed and sequenced them as the three of them sat together at the DAW console in the studio, it was heartwarming evidence of a deeper sort of collaboration between performers and composer. Composer/DAW-artist/engineer as performer; performers as engineers/editors/co-composers. There is something profoundly ‘right’ about this.

W hat I mean is, composers, performers, computer musicians/DAW-artists have accepted, for the most part, the progressive abstractions from older analog and now-obsolete digital hardware into software modules and sequencer patches... not just ‘miniaturization’ per se but now total automation and virtuality, including software to manage the multiple applications and equipments and software to insert random aleatorics and emulate human-like variability effects. These abstractions are motivated by reliability, by productivity for the composer, by aesthetic considerations—all valid and admirable. But the abstractions have incrementally impoverished the electroacoustic performance experience, I think—compared to, say, my first experience of a Moog Synthesizer as a child of 10 at the Minneapolis Symphony (now Minnesota Orchestra) in 1963, teeming with patch-cables and wires and mad-scientist musician (I regret I cannot remember who, or which composers’ works were performed) at the keyboard, clearly *not* in complete control.

B ut in Eichenbaum’s ‘Orbit’ we have a focused assimilation of the digital and acoustic environments, in which the digital realization is a cohesive part--‘gluey’ elements that hold the entire composition together. The live performers are not ‘bystanders’. They are confronted, yes, by their own DSP-processed previously-recorded sounds. They are reacting to the aleatoric expressions of the DAW assistant who is reincarnating the sequences at one remove, so to say. And they know this, even though we in the audience did not, until the remarks following the performance.

H aving heard Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s post-performance commentary on ‘Orbit’, though, we now comprehend aspects of the performer-electronics interactions that we hadn’t grasped at first hearing: the intimacy of the part that you are now playing, live; the musical subtleties of rediscovering the state-of-mind you were in when you made the sounds that you are now hearing emanate from these electronics; the expressive stimulation of being re-reminded now, of how that sequencer patch was co-edited by you and Daniel not so long ago. This can be a truly productive process—and a provocative montage of active, creative roles and meta-roles for performers in their interpretations of electroacoustic music, as it was with the Quadrivium performance last night!

W hat else? The noise gradations range from total silence (a bus is heard faintly, passing by outside Unity Temple on 47th Street) to 100 dB butt-shaking. ‘Really Noisy’ (what Stockhausen would call ‘sehr geräuschaft’)–filtered ‘pink’ noise and rumbling ‘red’ noise, convolved with other signals on the track to the point where it pervades the space and progressively washes out and obscures Rebecca’s flute and Cheryl’s clarinet. ‘Sort of Noisy’ (‘etwas geräuschaft’) – square and sawtooth waves convolved with the rest, but with enough high-frequency spectral content to meld with and preserve the listener’s attentiveness to upper-register activity in the flute and clarinet parts... A dense polyphony, reminiscent of György Ligeti’s writing for the score of the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’: a choir of myriad voices; the mixing and intermingling and asynchronous entries and departures of thousands of voices; microtonal voices, sounding notes a quarter-tone higher or lower than their neighbors; cosmic cacophony tending toward pantheism.

A ndrew Seager Cole’s ‘A Slow Unraveling’ applies combinatoric permutations to tiny musical elements to generate large [fractal?] structures. The fast-tempo elements that begin the piece devolve into slower ‘child’ elements that enclose and subsume the ‘parents’ until the music completely unravels, finally coming to a rest. The music was genuinely interesting and admirably executed, regardless of its formal compositional methods and inspiration. Kari Johnson’s piano and Mark Stauffer’s cello were especially compelling, as regards imbuing the piece with vivid kinesthetic impressions of velocity and depth/space. The piece has narrative; a story unfolding among the performers. It is intimate ‘chamber music’, yes. But it is the paradoxical ‘intimacy’ of space itself, on an astronomical scale.

B ravo!

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Ferneyhough’s ‘Chûte d’Icare’: Inter-Part Contagion

Brian Ferneyhough, photo © Regine Koerner

A previous CMT post about inter-part communication and diffusion phenomena between parts caused one reader to ask whether I’d ever looked at Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Chûte d’Icare’, a 10-minute septet (clarinet, flute, oboe, vibraphone/marimba, piano, violin, and cello) composed in 1987-88. It’s a fascinating and, to me, beautiful piece…

[50-sec clip, Nieuw Ensemble, Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Chûte d’Icare’, 1.6MB MP3]

E ach individual part ‘clings’ for a time to its idiosyncratic ‘status quo’, and then it decamps for elsewhere, perturbed by utterances emitted by its neighbors. There is a threshold of temporal and spatial ‘proximity’ that allows one part to affect others. If you are further away than that proximity limit, then you continue on your autonomous way. But if you are within the proximity radius, then you will likely be ‘infected’ by your neighbor(s).

T he ‘infection’ (with the expressive motif(s) emitted by adjacent part(s)) takes hold, lasts for awhile (and alters the affected part’s own utterances), and then subsides. The ‘infected’ part recovers. Or, alternately, it does not recover (“mortality”) and is reincarnated with new ideas, new expressions some bars later.

H ere is a little spreadsheet that illustrates a simple 3-state “S-I-R” (susceptible-infected-recovered) simulation of epidemic spread—the sort of contagion we hear in ‘Chûte d’Icare’. You can click on the screenshot to download it and play around with it.

Spreadsheet for Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic simulation

T he point of doing simulations and mathematical analyses like these is not to get lucky and say “Aha! I get how it works!” or “The composer employed an algorithmic/formulaic tool to compose this!” Instead, the point is to be able to figure out a new gambit that could go into a composer’s toolbox, to deliberately create a visceral, real sensation of diffusion, or contagion, or some other natural process in her/his compositions—as part of a palette that can embody/represent Nature and call into question our roles in life and the cosmic [non-]scheme. Something that could be used either as an aid to composing, or as a convenience for testing and editing a work-in-progress, to confirm that the work does in fact accurately embody or emulate the intended natural process that is the subject or expressive element of the overall work. Alternatively, the point may be to help [some of us] find deeper meanings in the work, or prepare for listening/performing in such a way that we feel more at home with its expressions or patterns.

[50-sec clip, Harrie Starreveld, Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Mnemosyne’, 1.6MB MP3]