jwilzewske: herriott

Showing posts with label herriott. Show all posts

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Kari Johnson & Robert Burke: ‘Unity’ Concert

M any things to be enthused about last night, regarding Kari Johnson’s and Robert Burke’s KCeMA performance at Unity Temple.

Christopher Biggs – The Ends of Histories (piano, electronics, and video, 10-min)
Peter Swendsen – Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is (instrumented bass drum and electronics, 8.5-min)
Jeff Herriott – Velvet Sink (piano and electronics, 13-min)
João Pedro Oliveira – Liquid Bars (vibraphone and electronics, 12-min)
Scott Blasco – Queen of Heaven (piano and electronics, 23-min)

C hristopher Biggs’s ‘The Ends of Histories’ for piano, digital video and audio represents ideas regarding how history must end—any history, all Histories—including religious ones, socio‐political ones, geological histories, all of them. A primary-color-heavy, apocalyptic video of watery scenes and splotches of color is displayed on a screen adjacent to pianist Kari Johnson. The high-contrast, posterized quality of the video’s color palette adds to the non-human, bichromatic wolf-vision, Terminator-vision, Predator-vision, insect-vision viewpoint of the camera/cameraperson. The piano part is full of sforzando emphases, a hyper-percussive quality that is meant to mate with the punctate, unforgiving synth and cosmically abject waveform-samples on the digital audio tracks. Ms. Johnson provided a spirited, empathetic reading, flawless.

T he materials represent the following conceptions of the end of history: (1) a polarized religious End Time whereby everyone either ascends into a Pleasant World or descends into Fire—a prophetic, spiritual, transcendent End that has appeared in many forms throughout history and is currently represented by the idea that there will be some kind of cataclysm at the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012; (2) a sociopolitical End in which capitalist democracy supplants all other ideologies...; and (3) ‘scientific’ Ends... mass-extinctions.”
— Christopher Biggs, composer.

P eter Swendsen’s ‘Nothing is not there and the Nothing that is’ for miked/instrumented bass drum and electronics draws its inspiration from violent forces of wind and weather. Forces of Nature are the architects of the sonic space and textures, and humans are compulsory respondents to natural events that are not of their choosing. The majority of the piece consists of canticle-like ‘verse-and-responsory’ segments, each about one minute in length. The human percussionist (Robert Burke) is entrained in Nature’s mesh (electronics, plus waveforms captured by mics—his own playing, digitally processed, delayed, pitch-bent, filtered, and replayed through monitors adjacent to him on-stage). The piece is written in such a way that the performer becomes progressively more mindful of the sonic consequences of each gesture, each mallet stroke, for what the future will become—and we in the audience experience this sense of the long-term impact that we have, on each other, on other species, and on the planet as a whole. Burke’s finesse with extended mallet techniques—including inducing aeroelastic drum-head vibrations with his hypothenar eminence and including wiping a stick fitted with a red silastic scrubber on the drum-head to evoke wild-animal growls and anguished roaring—were ‘Never-heard-anything-like-that-before!’ breathtaking.

A long the coast, this collision is a constant negotiation: the land and sea changing back and forth; the clouds that hover near the shoreline. In the interior, however, wind and weather do not negotiate.”
— Peter Swendsen, composer.

J oão Pedro Oliveira’s ‘Liquid Bars’ delivers sonic textures that marry live marimba/vibraphone with the electronically-processed signals from two large dynamic ribbon mics positioned at approximately mid-resonator-tube height on the left side and right side of the instrument. The electronically-processed sounds mutate spontaneously under software control, modulated by the mallet strikes. The increasingly complex polyphonies and polyrhythms are fascinating and unnerving—almost like interviewing a person whose acute psychiatric problems have landed the person in your Emergency Room in the wee hours of a Saturday night. The notion of ‘self’ is called into question, not only who the self or ‘selves’ are—the one(s) in front of you—but also whether the whole assumption that ‘who’ any of us are is stable and ascertainable is faulty. The composition has ketamine-like psychotropic properties. Gee, should FDA and DEA regulate this music as a Schedule II pharmaceutical? Powerful! Robert Burke’s 4-mallet technique is superb...

L et us imagine a Marimba who can produce sound... Let us imagine that the Performer and the Marimba would each have the possibility of dividing themselves into two or more instruments and performers—and imagine that all of these play against each other.”
— João Pedro Oliveira, composer.

J eff Herriott’s ‘Velvet Sink’ is a piece that explores the possibilities of the piano through both extended performance techniques and the use of digital audio. I worry that technical obsolescence tends to make works like these short-lived. Several works realized on the IRCAM’s realtime audio processor 4X, for example, can no longer be performed, because the equipment and operating-system become obsolete so fast and cannot readily be ‘refactored’ and ported to new configurations that can render the same effects as the old ones. There are maintenance problems even with well-structured software. Pieces for ‘tape’ survive: the process of recording will always be ported to more recent technologies, such as CDs, DVDs, and hard disks. Here, though, Herriott’s Max/MSP scripts and Peak and ProTools elements are fairly portable and are likely to withstand the technology changes of this decade and the next. Kari Johnson gives tactile, delicate treatments of the keyboard passages. Repetitive eighth-note patterns, very insistent, have undulating up-down microtonal bends applied to them, until the patterns feel like waves, a gentle-swell aquatic envelope—the sonic surface is a kind of ‘minimalism-built-out-of-complexity’, sort of oxymoronic jumbo-shrimp. Then she stands up, reaches into the piano and begins plucking strings with fingertips and fingernails; hammering piano strings with percussion mallets; modifying the placements of rubber erasers between strings, prepared-piano-style—at times music-box-like, at times chime-like.

S amples were recorded using both a baby grand and an out-of-tune piano-harp from a destroyed upright piano. Some of these sound snippets were then processed and patched to generate longer sound files that were, in turn, reconfigured with ProTools. Others, notably the plucked gestures in the third movement, sound in performance much as they did during the recording. Ultimately, a unique Max/MSP patch is used in performance to control the playback of the recorded material.”
— Jeff Herriott, composer.

S cott Blasco’s (b'79) Queen of Heaven, composed for Ms. Johnson and premiered last night, consists of five movements, each conceived as [a religious—] icon, concerning itself with a single idea, turning it over and over, meditating on it from different angles. ‘Queen of Heaven’ is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “a source of comfort and inspiration to Christians from the earliest years of their history,” in the composer’s words. Blasco’s composition, informed by his Master’s degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and degree in Composition and Music Theory from Calvin College, is a highly personal exegesis. The angels’ ‘greeting’ the Mother of God in the first movement conveys more of a confrontation—as in Awed and Struck Dumb—than a ‘greeting’. Sonority and terror appear linked in other of the movements as well, enough to cause most to have second-thoughts about the appeal of the Pearly Gates.

W hen I write music, I’m not writing it ‘for me’ per se. I see it as holding out an olive branch to my audience, and offering praise by mirroring the Creator.”
— Scott Blasco, composer.

K ari Johnson is a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory where she studies with John McIntyre. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Central Missouri, a master’s degree in Piano Performance from Bowling Green State University, and a master’s degree in Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Johnson has won or placed in competitions throughout the Midwest, including the MTNA Steinway Young Artist Competitions in Missouri and Illinois and the Venetia Hall Concerto Competition. An active performer of new music and chamber music, Ms. Johnson’s recent performances include collaborative concerts at the University of Central Missouri and Pittsburg State University, UMKC’s “Carter and Messiaen at 100” festival, and the CMS Great Plains Chapter 2009 Regional Conference. In the coming year she will perform at the 2010 UCM New Music Festival and the 2010 SEAMUS National Conference.

R obert Burke is also a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory. He has enjoyed an eclectic carrier performing, studying and teaching throughout Canada, The United States, Japan and Europe. He is originally from Alberta, Canada although for the last decade has hailed New Orleans as home. A strong advocate of new music, Mr. Burke has commissioned and performed countless solo percussion works in recital and held member ship in New Works Calgary, Syncronia (St. Louis) and Conundrum New Music Ensemble. He has also been a regular member of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, The Calgary Philharmonic and The Louisianna Philharmonic. As a drumset player, Mr. Burke has performed and toured with a remarkable number of recording artists in clubs and festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including Brian Lee, Johnny Sansone, Preston Hubbard, Frankie Ford, Cyril Neville, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Peter Nero, Marvin Hamlish, and Robert Goulet. He holds degrees from University of Alberta and the University of Calgary and has served on the faculty of the University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, the University of Missouri-Columbia and Central Methodist College.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Jeff Herriott: ‘Dissipation of a Thought’, Emergence of Another, Yet Another

I ’m working now with some very high-pitched material... It’s seeming likely that I’ll end up with something for two soprano saxes, with some high multiphonics cascading on top of one another. Right now, the form is seeming like it will consist of some close intervals that slowly open up and out, with focus on some intricate tuning adjustments or quarter-tones. There will likely also be a few little ascending and descending lines as the piece progresses, and the whole thing will probably end up being close to 100 seconds. My plan is to take my thin electronics part and try to flesh out the ‘live’ part a bit more.”
— Jeff Herriott blog, 28-APR-2009.

T he thing that troubles me about the analysis in Peter Kivy’s new book is that it seems to crystallize both music and text—holds them, for the sake of analysis, to be ‘static’ when in fact they are dynamic and ‘emergent’, particularly when the material is new to us. Implicitly, the analysis undervalues the processes of remembering or forgetting—of retrieval, of dissipation. In other words, the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and music seems to depend on our ignoring major aspects of neurobiology and how our cognitive processes handle qualitative complexity. Dependent, too, on our ignoring not just the emergent aspects of reading, playing, and hearing the piece, but the emergent aspects of the compositional process itself—embodied by remarks like the ones that composer Jeff Herriott makes in his blog (blockquote above).

T his thought occurred to me as I listened to Jeff Herriott’s ‘dissipation of a thought’, right after finishing reading Peter Kivy’s book.

H erriott’s compositions are often surprisingly textual—even the ones that are wordless, instrumental pieces. How can we know this? Well, text linguistics studies structural and formal variants of textuality, for which separate descriptive and ontological models are developed beyond surface-level syntax. A ‘text’ is defined as an utterance or communicative occurrence that meets [most of] seven criteria of text-ness (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981):

Expressive cohesion,
Coherence,
Intentionality,
Acceptability/Consensuality,
Informativity (conveying something or bringing about a change in [many of] the text’s readers/hearers),
Situationality, and
Intertextuality, including persistence and/or replication-publication.

[‘dissipation of a thought’, for flute, vibraphone, cymbals, crotales, voice and live electronics]

T he structure of ‘dissipation of a thought’ meets most if not all of the seven criteria above. It is not only a ‘text’ in the sense of a persistent, published, replicable, intertextual document. It is coherent, cohesive, and localized to a situation or context. The intentions... may be ambiguous, but the evocative title is enough to focus our reception of the piece, beyond what the music itself does.

T he hermeneutic ambiguity in the first section of ‘dissipation’ arises in its complex harmonies, paradoxically at odds with the piece’s ‘primrose path’ development. It also arises in Herriott’s ingenious manipulation and deviation from prevailing electroacoustic topoi. Examples include a deviation from deceptive cadences and voice-leading, as well as Herriott’s use of subtle, remote tonal relationships—between the tonal base of ‘dissipation’ and the modulation in later sections.

E ven the ambiguity that we experience can be assessed from the perspective of the seven standards of textuality:

the musical text itself [‘dissipation’] as process and product, including harmonic relationships and voice-leading in cohesion and the relationships among underlying morphemes caused by the manipulated topoi in coherence (including novel, remote tonal relationships);
the participants’ intentionality (manipulation and deviation from topoi) and the recipients’ [listeners’, performers’] acceptability concerning various approaching interests rather than contextual understanding (the reasons for the perceived ambiguity);
the broader context of informativity (including the musical events based on the simulation of resolutions, the deception instead of fulfilling of expectations and the compensation for the deceptions as well as unexpected deviations from usual topoi), the situationality of the title ‘dissipation’ concerning its genre and intertextuality involving similarities to other mixed-ensemble electroacoustic compositions.

S o how we interpret a piece while playing or listening should be decided not only by intuition but also by a contextual understanding of musical flow. We get clues from the application of rubato, for example; from the manipulation of expectation and deception in the management of rhythmic flows. Through the correlation of Herriott’s [explicit] ‘temporal management’ to his [implicit] ‘compositional plot’, the tension and relaxation of a composition become clear to us—become informative.

I t may be crucial that some [sub-]systems stay constant or do not learn, whilst some must have ‘flexible-response’ characteristics, including learning and innovation and forgetting. Taken-for-granted movements of the hands and feet may be focused-on with uncustomary, acute consciousness in music, dance, visual art.”
— Jenks & Smith, p. 204.

T o find a piece informative, we don’t need to posit a ‘persona’ or ‘personae’ who are engaged in a representational tableau. Nor do we need then to concede that a narrative piece that is not inhabited by personae is necessarily ‘program music’, a point that Kivy persuasively makes (Ch. 5). So here we have a case-in-point, this ‘dissipation of a thought’ by Jeff Herriott. Not that it doesn’t or couldn’t have personae represented by the parts; it could. My points are that we are not sure about this during our early engagements with it, and that our comprehension of the piece’s textuality ‘grows’ on us, emerges, is subject to ongoing revision as we absorb it.

P eter Kivy is right in saying that there is nothing wrong with absolute music affording [empty] pleasure to the ear and mind—providing that and nothing more. Some music happily does precisely that. But it seems to me a mistake if we so narrowly define what a musical ‘text’ is in such a way as to rule out the possibility that it provides much, much more—define it so narrowly and statically as to rule out processes that routinely do happen to us… happen inside us as we perform or listen to absolute music, such as Jeff Herriott’s ‘dissipation of a thought’.

E mergently, each thing leads to others.

O ften [in a piece that is new to us, or that we have heard or played only a few times], we don’t appreciate what the meaning of a passage is until its successor is already upon us, or maybe not until much, much later. In some cases, our recognition of the meanings conveyed by a musical text takes a lifetime to emerge. How about you?

T here is a kind of Gradgrindian mentality at work [when researchers report that listening to Mozart improves academic performance, etc], which must find a utility in every innocent pleasure, pleasure itself not being enough—perhaps a waste of time; worse still, harmful in some way or, at least the product of mere ‘amusement’, which Aristotle described as a form of rest, necessary ‘because we are not able to go on… and therefore not an end, since we take it as a means to further activity.”
— Peter Kivy.

U nfinished Music’ draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin: ‘The work is the death mask of its conception.’ The work in its finished, perfected state conceals the enlivening process engaged in its creation… We need to rescue the experience of absolute music from the clutches of that damning word ‘pleasure’.”
— Richard Kramer.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Soundscape: The Large, Ambient Instrument We Occupy

T wo thematic elements threaded through all of the works performed at last night’s KCEMA event in Kansas City, ‘I See You’ [ICU]: (1) exploring modes of urgency/emergency/criticality, and (2) confronting the natural tensions between aural and visual perception.

James Mobberley—‘Going with Fire’ (Rebecca Ashe, flute; James Mobberley, sequencer and tape)
Matthew Dotson—‘Song Cycle for Haruki Murakami’ (Bart Woodstrup, video; Matthew Dotson, electronics and tape)
Peter Lawless—‘Tim Sequence’ (Timothy Eshing, viola; Peter Lawless, sequencer)
Jacob Gotlib—‘Filaments’ (Rebecca Ashe, flute; Jacob Gotlib, sequencer)
J.T. Rinker and Carolyn Tennant—‘Directed’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)
Len Lye / Per Magnus Lindborg—‘Tusalava’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)
Jeff Herriott—‘Barnwork’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)

T he first piece, by composer James Mobberley, is a rich and compelling work, powered by Rebecca Ashe’s incendiary flute playing Walter Piston-esque chromatics and 12-tone phrases against a sequencer track that covers an astonishing range of timbral and rhythmic textures during the 7-min work. The electronics and the flute form a duet, with phrases in the flute part carried over into the synthesizer part, turned over and mutated, pitch-bent, and—freed once again—on their independent way. The piece has jungle-ous percussive sounds admixed with rustling and emulations of wind in the trees...

EQ spectrum of simulated wind with drum sticking

followed by aqueous ripple-ey sounds that suggest a soundscape in nature.

G oing With the Fire’ is the third in a series of works that utilize only the solo instrument as the source for the taped sounds. The piece embodies the flash of creative fire that takes over as a work begins to gel. After the inevitable frustration period, with idea after idea, suddenly the grid unlocks, the boundaries slip away, and I find myself giving up the formal structures and preconceived notions, and simply going with the fire.”
— James Mobberley, program notes.

T he experience for us in the audience is ‘immersive’, and the reality that the music conjures is a coherent story of ‘going’, of ‘discovery’—a spontaneously-forming linear narrative that has an immediacy and an arc that makes sense.

T he Dotson-Woodstrup piece likewise has a playfulness and spontaneity. Excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s novel ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ form the text around which the music and video are organized. The animated text fragments projected in front of the audience engage in a duet with the musical utterances—at times corroborating each other, and at times carrying on a dispute.

S onically, Murakami’s work made it evident to me that, in the words of his main character, it should be ‘something concrete’... The material was derived from several ambient recordings that took place both inside and outside of my apartment in Chicago... symbolize the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds.”
— Matthew Dotson, program notes.

E shing’s viola and Lawless’s sequencer tracks plumbed the reverberous La Esquina acoustic space. In fact, the rhythmic patterns of the piece engaged the room beautifully, invoking the performance hall itself as a large, ad hoc ‘instrument’, waiting to be played. The ‘surfaces’ of each part; the interface between each pair of them—the ‘liminality’ of our expression and its inevitable fading so soon after we have uttered/played it—are illuminated by this beautiful piece.

T usalava’ is a 9-minute black-and-white animation created in 1929. ‘Tusalava’ is a Samoan word denoting the idea that ‘eventually everything is or becomes the same.’ It originally had a piano score written by the Australian, Jack Ellitt, who had known film-maker Len Lye in Sydney. The original score has been lost, and Sinchak and Herriott perform using a new score written in 1999 by Norwegian composer Per Magnus Lindborg. Transmute and augment the sounds of traditional instruments, creating novel sound scapes and acoustical/expressive spaces!

T usalava’ was constructed using 4,400 drawings or animation ‘cels’, each of which was photographed—the classical process known as cel animation. The film begins with the screen divided into three rectangles, with vertical arrays of dots and circles wriggling and twisting. Eventually, they collapse into two rectangles, and the wriggling shapes continue to mutate and form intricate patterns. Out of one of the rectangles a totem figure appears and is parasitized by a wriggling shape, with several suckers. The shape scrolls off the screen, displaced by a number of spirals, which are in turn consumed by a primeval black dot.

T usalava’ is an abstract film, in a 1920s surrealist idiom. Lye (a New Zealander) was influenced by Australian Aboriginal art, though, so what strikes us as surreal may simply be exotic ‘otherness’. Tusalava references organic shapes that sprout bio-arms and devour each other, not Modernistic shapes or mechanistic parts and actions. Reportedly, Lye was a doodler and sketcher, activities that he viewed as ‘pre-conscious’ truth bypassing rationality. ‘Tusalava’ can be seen as a film about morphogenesis—in and of itself; and about movement as an irreducible evidentiary primitive. It has a concretism about it, a literality that is not concerned to symbolize other processes.

Jeff Herriott, Per Magnus Lindborg ‘Tusalava’ score

T his entire concert is, I sense, opposing the oculocentrism of most of Western culture. Aural vs. Visual space. A new dialectic, one that grants equal rights to ears.

O h, in Western culture, sight has been ever-predominant—philosophers since ancient times have been sighted people, who held that ‘The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears and other senses’ [Heraclitus]. We have the Mind’s Eye; before now, we never had the Mind’s Ear.

T he historical prominence of eyes, while understandable, needs to be shaken up from time to time—as the artists performing at La Esquina tonight were able to do.

T he notion of a ‘Shared Sonic Environment’ was introduced ... Public Sound Objects (PSOs)? The works performed last night each revealed the disrupting effect of acoustic velocity and the latency in musical communication over room-sized distances, with studio monitors splayed out around the hall about 2 meters above the seating.

T he Gotlib composition juxtaposes the human voice of the flute with the alien, matrix-oid sequencer/tape. Sounds are transferred and colored, such that each part constitutes a ‘sonotope’. The trajectory of the piece has the flute becoming more dispassionate and automatized, while the synthesizer part becomes progressively more ‘human’—my impression only; barely implied by Jacob’s program notes. The failure to merge leads to the re-individuation of the parts’ personalities and a satisfying resolution to the encounter.

T wo threads—the flute and the electronic sounds—struggle to merge and connect. They meet briefly in the calm middle section of the piece before falling away again.”
— Jacob Gotlib, program notes.

T hese works rely on story-crafting that is considerably different from conventional compositional methods. They are not assemblages of abstract sounds or disparate textures; they are not comprised of ‘movements’ in any classical sense. Instead, they have ‘scenes’ and ‘acts’—they are closer to opera than to traditional chamber music idioms. The videos predominantly serve the role of ‘set’ and ‘props’—creating the atmospherics that enable the narrative and contextualize the other performers. The performers’ ‘inhabiting’ their roles and delivering the inspired performances that they do—these things don’t happen just anywhere: they happen here, situated in this soundscape, in this video scenery.

S o, beyond ‘set’, the video and the soundscape—the aleatoric front door opening and slamming as people come and go from La Esquina; the antiphonal freight trains rumbling-scritching by on steel rails 200 feet from the building; the rustle of shoes on the concrete floor—all comprise a larger, ambient ‘instrument’ in which the performers and the audience are together immersed. Hard not to be caught up in the hyper-moment. Bravo!