jwilzewske: sonic space

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.

James Drew, amid instruments made by sculptor Lin Emery

T he work’s timeless quality draws attention to a spatial world not unlike the movement within an Alexander Calder mobile, or parallel forms found in Asian court music ... a protest against the flow of musically-experienced time, rather than a space-drama imaginatively constructed from one fragment of a micromusical idea.”
— James Drew, program notes, Manhattan School of Music, 1970.

I aspire to incorporate spiritual immensities in my music through masses of sound which intensifies by the process of refraction or blurring, while allowing submerged melodic lines to appear and disappear. It’s like painting with a very large brush. Like those old fresco guys—or like Asian calligraphy on a massive scale—even with one tone. You know ... like a big swipe with a very loaded brush.”
— James Mulcro Drew.

I n thermodynamics, an adiabatic process is any thermodynamic process in which no heat is transferred to or from the surrounding space. The term ‘adiabatic’ literally means impassable, coming from the Greek roots ἀ- (‘not’), διὰ- (‘through’), and βαῖνειν ("to pass"). It means a total absence of heat transfer.

A t temperatures near 0°K, nearly all molecular motion ceases and the entropy change ΔS = 0 for any adiabatic process. Pure substances can (ideally) form perfect crystals as T→0.

Entropy change, adiabatic process, in the limit at absolute zero

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Animating’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ’12 Centers Breathing’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Drew et al., Animating Degree Zero, ‘Solemn Acts in Rain’, 1.6MB MP3]

I n this wonderful recording we have members of the Barton Workshop performing several works that James Drew composed between 2001 and 2005.

A t very low temperatures in the vicinity of absolute zero, matter exhibits many unusual properties including superconductivity, superfluidity, and Bose-Einstein condensates.

A t [musical] temperatures close to absolute zero, quantum [musical] particles begin taking on new ‘collective’ properties. Delinquent waves begin to act in concert. At low temperatures where everything occurs in slow-motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the ensemble are revealed. I wonder whether it could be measured... wonder whether quantum phenomena like the ‘observer effect’ occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of macroscopic processes like human beings playing and listening to music. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the Universe can naturally flow only from a state of greater energy to lesser energy.

T hrow a stone into a lake, and the ripples it makes eventually die out. My cup of hot coffee can [left by itself in a setting where the ambient temperature is lower than the coffee] only get cooler, not hotter.

B ut near absolute zero the particles comprising an object behave differently. Although the ensemble ‘atoms’ are still part of a ‘gas’, they behave more like atoms of a metal—like one smeared-out single entity, similar to experiments with rubidium gas by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1995, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. The James Drew expressions form what I think is a musical equivalent to a Bose-Einstein condensate—a peculiar property of atoms slowing down so much that they are zen-like, almost at rest.

T he sonic attributes that I’m referring to can be heard in each of the compositions on this disc... the ‘direct sound duration’ of each note, as contrasted with indirect sounds and their durations and decay. Listen to the sympathetic resonance between notes and the quadratic effect, especially in the piano part [when applicable].

I n the piano, a very high soundboard Q-factor shortens high frequencies’ durations. The piano’s soundboard mechanical impedance affects the global sound duration of the instrument, and, for the instrument performed and recorded on this disc, the high impedance yields longer-duration sounds, slower decays. The tones ‘blossom’ after the initial attack, and sympathetic resonances bring the ensemble of waves in-line. Electron-cloud-like, metallic.

O n hard [piano key; viola; etc.] attacks, the nonlinear part of the string response increases, producing frequencies with twice the values of the normal ones. The quadratic effect influences the loudness of this nonlinear response, and, when the score has such low entropy [close to musical absolute zero], the nonlinearities are very prominent—and are probably related to the superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate-like quality of the collective, coalescing, long-range musical effects that are created here. Similarities to quantum software algorithms (see writings by Matt Hastings at LANL, and others), in terms of process and in terms of how you go about measuring statistical physics properties of music like this...

D rew was born in 1929 and studied with Wallingford Riegger and Edgard Varèse. He taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, UCLA, Cal State, and other institutions. He has performed with and co-founded several musical groups, including the Crossfire Mission Orchestra in the late 1960s in New Haven (radical performances, often behind barbed wire), the Mysterious Traveling Cabaret, the American Music Theater in California, the Blast Opera Theater. In his quasi-retirement he has undertaken concerts and arts education work with the Grey Wolf Project. Barton ‘Zero’ disk is simply excellent.

jwilzewske

Sunday, October 23, 2011

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

Sunday, April 5, 2009

James Mulcro Drew, Chamber Music at Extreme Temperatures