sound=light
[excerpted from Scripted Space: Film Form, Film Formlessness by dj spooky]

A couple of years after the Lumi=E8re crew
made their name in the film industry the Russian
composer Alexander Scriabin created works that
were meant to embody a concept where light
projections were extensions of the orchestral
works he composed. Light and sound were meant,
essentially, to be interchangeable. It's hard to
say whether Sciabin was a madman, a genius, a
philosopher, or a mystic. All that's certain is
that he wanted to, as he would put it, create a
'theater of sound' that immersed the listener in
an imaginary landscape. "I create you as a
complex unity" he wrote in his "Po=E9m de l'extase"
A visionary? Scriabin was all of this at the same
time - a personality that combined contradictions.


According to the Brazilian musicologist Lia Tom=E1s:
Sample clip begins:
We take a sample from a text, and flip it into
the remix file: In his first compositional phase,
which lasted until 1898, Scriabin was explicitly
influenced by Chopin. After that, he started to
be interested in philosophy, getting in touch
with several systems, yet not delving deeply into
any. Having read authors like Goethe, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, Plato, and Schelling, Scriabin
decided on systematizing a formulation of his
own, which would reflect more his conception of
the world. Wagner's idea of  =ABTotal Work of Art=BB
attracted Scriabin's attention, as it met his
early reflections. Like Wagner, Scriabin could
not consider music as pure music, having itself a
reference. That seemed absurd to him. Music had
to express something. This conception of
Gesamtkunstwerk was based upon a merger of
philosophy, religion, and art, where a
transubstantiation would be achieved through
music, sound leading to ecstasy. Through this
musical rite, he intended to recover the ancient
history of magic powers (Bowers 1970,1:319).

And it is in =ABPrometheus, The Poem of Fire=BB, his
last symphony, that his project comes true. One
of Scriabin's most daring compositions, it
requires, besides the orchestral apparatus
(orchestra, choir, and piano), a "tastiera per
luce", a keyboard for light that projects
predetermined colors in synchrony with the music.
In the original score, there is a supplementary
staff denominated =ABLuce=BB, where there are musical
notes corresponding to the colors determined by
the composer. For Scriabin, this correspondence
should occur in a synthetic manner. He suggests a
colorful audition of the work. With this view,
starting from an arbitrary, personal color scale,
he matches the colors chosen with the fundamental
notes of the inversions of the synthetic chord.
Thus, the =ABLuce=BB staff accompanies the harmonic
succession of the work.

With =ABPrometheus=BB, Scriabin opened a new
vocabulary in his musical language. He created
music where concepts of basic traditional harmony
such as the idea of tonality are replaced by
preconceived harmonic nuclei that can generate
the theme and unify the derivations of the chords
in the composition. Like "lego blocks" of sound,
we do the same thing with software. It's an
inheritance as much as from Duchamp's "found
objects" as it is from the idea of using
pre-composed blocks of sound (then having an
orchestra play them). The sample is an abstract
machine: it can be any instrument. Check it: For
Sciabin this "nucleus" in the middle of his chord
is a code generator - it's defined by Scriabin as
the =ABsynthetic chord=BB, also known as tonality
chord or mystic chord. It consists of a
hexaphonic chord composed by a superposition of
perfect, augmented, and diminished fourths: C -
=46# - Bb - E - A - D. This chord is continuously
used throughout the composition and, besides
serving as a basis and a unifying principle, will
be the producer and propeller of all the musical
discourse.  So to with multi-media. I draw a link
- it's up to the reader to connect the dots.

With a more careful reading of the composer's
texts, it can be observed that they have an
underlying thinking, an indicator that can lead
to another key to the understanding of Scriabin's
universe. This key is in another structure of
thinking, which cannot be seen as false or
deceiving, although its foundation lies on a
setting other than the rational one: myth
thinking becomes myth science. Play variable X to
generate variable Y, cut and paste the end
result. Edit, loop, break it down. Compile and
render the file. Repeat . Sample Clip Ends:
goto>text>file>original:

- posted by ...lg... @ 11:40