m ,cxv,zvc,m
27.9.06
"Evolving Sonic Environment"
Twelve units comprised of speakers, microphones and electric circuit boards, are being suspended from the ceiling, each emitting sound of a different frequency. Mutual communication between the units balances the sounds, and maintains the sensitive sonic ecosystem that builds up inside the venue. Visitors entering the exhibition space interfere with the acoustic environment, and trigger at once the generation of a new ecosystem of sound. The subtle frequency changes are being exhibited outside the room in the form of audio-visual display.
Robert DAVIS + Usman HAQUE (UK)
26.2.06
Stars hum themselves to death
Anna Salleh
ABC Science Online
Milliseconds before a giant star dies in a spectacular explosion, it hums a note around 'middle C', astronomers say.
In the April issue of The Astrophysical Journal, Professor Adam Burrows of the University of Arizona and team will report the song that immediately precedes the explosion of a supernova.
"We were quite sure when we started seeing this phenomenon that we were seeing sound waves, but it was so unexpected that we kept re-checking and re-testing our results," says Burrows.
Astronomers have long been trying to understand what happens when a supernova, a massive star, collapses and explodes.
Once it reaches death's door, a supernova's core is so dense that it does not allow energy to escape, and the star collapses inwards towards the core.
Until now scientists had assumed that the spectacular explosion in a star's dying moments was due to the star's outer shell bouncing back off the core.
But, says Australian supernova expert Dr Stuart Ryder of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, none of the models of exploding supernovae to date have supported this theory.
Basically the models don't show enough energy coming from the core bounce to overcome the collapsing outer layers.
"The stuff trying to expand would keep running into the stuff that is still collapsing and it would literally stall the explosion," says Ryder.
There have been various attempts to tweak the models, including taking account of neutrinos, which are emitted from supernovae.
But scientists found that these subatomic particles also do not provide enough energy to make the models work. The models still stalled before the explosion.
Burrows and team have now developed computer models to simulate the events of a dying star, from the collapse of the core through to the supernova explosion.
"Our simulations show that the inner core starts to execute pulsations," says Burrows.
"They show that after about 500 milliseconds [after the core collapses] the inner core begins to vibrate wildly. And after 600, 700 or 800 milliseconds, this oscillation becomes so vigorous that it sends out sound waves.
"In these computer runs, these sound waves actually cause the star to explode, not the neutrinos."
The researchers say typical sound frequencies in the inner core are about 200 to 400 hertz, in the audible range around middle C.
The new models involve a million steps and simulate the full second between core collapse and explosion.
Previous models, which did not take into account sound waves, had only one fifth the number of steps and simulate only the first few hundred milliseconds after core collapse.
Ryder says Burrows and team could have found the "missing link" in understanding what makes stars explode.
"It seems that we haven't properly allowed for these sound phenomena in the core of the star when it collapses," he says.
"This might be like the death knell or the last alarm bell that something bad is about to happen."
22.11.05
listening room
-mariane pearl piece from speaking of faith
-'exploring my aggression' from radio rookies
-'my labotomy' from all things considered
6.11.05
contacts; stations
joel rose, whyy
star lee, t.a.l.
diane, t.a.l.
graham, a.t.c.
bobby hill, wpfw
anu's person, marketplace
j
http://www.airmedia.org/ops/local_stations.php
* WNPR / Connecticut Public Radio
PO BOX 260240
Hartford, CT 06126-0240
John Dankosky, News Director
jdankosky@wnpr.org
(860) 278-5310
http://www.wnpr.org
Use Independent Content: Yes
Genre: News and Info, Interviews and Discussion, Public Affairs, Other
Format: Series, Modules, Freelance
Independent Program Percentage: 25-30
More Content: Yes
Happy With Content: Yes
Appropriate Pitch: I deal mostly with a core group of independent producers who pitch material to me that I generally like. Mostly, though, we work collaboratively on stories and projects. I would accept more pitches from producers around the country if they could apply to my Connecticut audience. I've also done nationally distributed modular and documentary programs that aim to reach a broad audience. I'd like to do more of this sort of work, and would listen to pitches from all producers ...money is always the issue.
Compensation: It varies. Some folks are on long-term contracts to do in-depth journalism. Others have done grant-based series or documentaries. Our general freelance rate is based on the outdated NPR model of 75 dollars a produced minute. More experienced producers get a higher rate.
Expanded Relationship: Completed Programs or Modules, Freelance Features, News, Special Projects, Artist-In-Residence, Local Programming, Local Directory, More Independent Content
Advice: Contact me through E-mail. I'm interested in working with Indies and other stations to produce regionally and nationally interesting news and arts programming.
Method of Contact: E-mail
Submission Method: Snail mail, E-mail or website
Follow Up: E-mail
Biggest Complaint: A lack of understanding about my responsibilities as a programmer. I've got "the air" and I program it for my listeners' benefit. We don't do projects that are for our own benefit. Also, please don't tell me what my audience will or won't like. I may not know much, but I know the audience pretty well. That having been said, I want to take chances on new and interesting programming.
Like Best: New thoughts, new ideas, new skills, new contacts. They shake up my staff reporters and producers, and get them thinking about different ways to do what they do.
Final Comments: I consider myself an advocate for their work...it's why I'm an AIR member.
* WFCR
131 County Circle
Amherst, MA 01003
Michael Rathke, Program Director
rathke@wfcr.org
(413) 577-0541
http://www.wfcr.org
Use Independent Content: Yes PRX Member: Yes
Genre:News; Interview; Public Affairs; Spoken Word
Format: Year-Round Programs; Series; Freelance Features; Freelance News; Holiday Specials; Completed Work; Freelance Work; Mentoring; Special Projects; Local Content; Local Directory; Meeting With Indies.
Independent Programming Percentage: 1-2%
More Content: Yes
Happy With Content: Yes
Compensation: $65 per minute for ready to produce features
Expanded Relationship: Year-Round Programs; Series; Freelance Features; Freelance News; Holiday Specials; Completed Work; Freelance Work; Mentoring; Special Projects; Local Content; Local Directory; Meeting With Indies.
Advice: Self-contained 59 minute documentaries; for news features, pitch the story before final production; consult the news director to ensure that their story is consistent with audience needs.
Method of Contact: E-mail
25.10.05
24.10.05
26.5.05
possible galleries/museums
conner contemporary art 1730 connecticut
touchstone gallery 406 7th st ... (are we willing to pay to show this thing?)
corcoran
23.5.05
radio
documentaries sunday nights (8 - 10) on weta
wcpr - 'the local low-down' thursdays at 6; 'neighborhood power hour' sundays at 7
soundprint 'the aural equivalent of photojournalism' seeking 'documentaries of substance'
metro connection on wamu
this american life
studio 360
weekend america
the infinite mind
listen:
'if i get out alive' - kids in jail, 1-hour doc
'lost in america': Four people living on the edge--drug addicts, a prostitute and a blind woman--recount their journeys to a new life, revealing the connections between home and homelessness along the way
soundportraits.org
guidelines:
vocal technique
8.5.05
Pioneer. Composer. Psychoacoustician?
May 8, 2005
Pioneer. Composer. Psychoacoustician?
By ANNE MIDGETTE
JAMES TENNEY IN NEW YORK
Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Project Room, 619 East Sixth Street, East Village.
A PORTRAIT OF JAMES TENNEY
Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, 120 Park Avenue, at 42nd Street.
JAMES TENNEY is the Zelig of American composition. He has been there for a lot of the big moments. He has known most of the big names. He has been, so to speak, in all the pictures. Yet few people have even heard of him.
This week, two concerts - Sunday and Wednesday - may help change that by offering a cross-section of Mr. Tenney's widely varied work of the last five decades. The sampling includes a tape collage piece made up of tiny fragments of Elvis Presley's "Blue Suede Shoes." It includes "Postal Pieces," written as graphic scores that fit on the backs of postcards. And lest you think Mr. Tenney is purely avant-garde, it includes piano rags. Tonal rags.
Mr. Tenney, you see, resists characterization. You can't define what kind of musician he is. He is called a pioneer of computer music, having created some of the earliest computer pieces during a tenure as resident composer at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960's. At the same time, he is grouped with the Minimalists, having hobnobbed - and performed - with Steve Reich and Philip Glass during the same period.
He is associated with the Fluxus movement, and his first wife was the artist Carolee Schneeman. He was a friend and student of John Cage's and Edgard Varèse's. Yet this "downtown" composer is also a long-time academic and a respected theorist with a couple of important treatises on music to his name. His main musical concern today? Harmony.
In fact, most of the things Mr. Tenney is known for aren't supposed to be able to be done in the same room, let alone by the same person.
Take the two-piano piece "Chromatic Canon," which Mr. Tenney dedicated to Mr. Reich in 1983. The ultimate juxtaposition of opposing elements, it fuses Minimalism with the 12-tone system, starting with a single repeated interval and gradually building it into a tone row.
"Reich went to the concert with me," Mr. Tenney said. "Afterwards he looked at me with a mock glare and said, 'You've put me in bed with Schoenberg.' I said that was the whole point."
Of his desire to reconcile opposing forces, he joked, "It's a personal characteristic that derives from the fact that my parents fought all the time, and I was always trying to bring them together."
Mr. Tenney was speaking by phone from Dartmouth College, where he was visiting last month during the Festival of New Musics. But home is California, where he is in his second stint at California Institute of the Arts (having taught there in the 1970's, he took a post at York University in Toronto and returned after reaching York's mandatory retirement age). He is also in his fourth marriage (to Lauren Pratt, who manages a number of new-music artists, including her husband) and his third or fourth compositional focus.
"The things I was concerned with early on involved timbre, dissonance and complex texture," he said. "Then the focus shifted to form. And after that it shifted to harmony. There's an evolutionary process of harmony in Western music that came to a dead end around 1910. The harmonic resources of equal temperament had really been exhausted." Mr. Tenney's ideas of how to reanimate it involve things like alternative tunings (touching, incidentally, on principles he encountered when he worked with a guru of alternative tuning, Harry Partch).
Even in this area, he has achieved some unlikely reconciliations. He recounted a phone call he got in 1988 from Cage, who, after hearing Mr. Tenney's "Critical Band" at a conference in Miami, told him: "If that's harmony, I take back everything I ever said. I'm all for it."
Mr. Tenney didn't set out to be a composer. Born in Silver City, N.M., in 1934, he went to Juilliard to study piano with Eduard Steuermann, a student of Schoenberg's. He met composers through his roommate, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who let him tag along to meetings with Cage and Varèse. After a year, Mr. Tenney dropped out to study composition with a student of Varèse's, Chou Wen-Chung. A meeting with the pianist and composer Lionel Nowak led to his entering Bennington, where he also worked with Henry Brant and Carl Ruggles. Somehow it makes sense that a guy as eclectic as Mr. Tenney should graduate from an institution that was, at the time, a women's college.
When he saw an advertisement announcing the first class in electronic music, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he and Ms. Schneemann drove there, and Mr. Tenney ended up working with another scientist-composer, Lejaren Hiller. It was there that he also worked briefly for Partch, but Partch fired him, Mr. Tenney said, because he was more interested in provocative conversations than serving as a disciple.
At Bell Labs, Mr. Tenney, though working as a composer, was technically hired to do research in psychoacoustics, which involves sound perception. It wasn't altogether a front; he has a scientific bent. After he left Bell, he was able to support himself by doing technical research at places like the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Indeed, he approaches many of his pieces as if they were scientific experiments. In "Ain't I a Woman?" (1992), he tries to mimic, with stringed instruments, the speech patterns of a text by Sojourner Truth.
"It involves analysis of the acoustic of speech," Mr. Tenney said, "and an attempt to work with the format of the vowel sounds. It's a process I have tried three times so far in my career. It never works completely. You can't actually understand the speech. But it sounds different from anything else you've ever heard."
Each of his computer pieces in the 1960's was an experiment of sorts. They culminated in 1969 in "For Ann (rising)," which explores something called a Shepard tone, a sound creating the illusion that it is continually getting higher. And with that, Mr. Tenney left computer music altogether. After the birth of his first daughter, he took his first teaching job at CalArts, where the computer equipment ran to Moog synthesizers.
"I'm not a knob-twirler," Mr. Tenney said emphatically. Rather than work with equipment that couldn't do what he wanted, he returned to acoustic instruments - with, it seems, no regrets.
"For the previous decade, there had been ideas for instrumental music that I didn't have time to work on because I was doing so much for computers," he said. "Once that got loose, the floodgates were open. And it's still going."
A scientific approach is evident in other aspects of Mr. Tenney's music, like his desire to remove emotion from the equation. He views music as an object of perception rather than a dramatic narrative. Instead of allowing themes to unfold and develop in the conventional Western sense, he lays out all the elements of a piece clearly at the start, leaving the listener to contemplate their permutations.
"Ergodic music," he calls it, borrowing a term from thermodynamics: music that simply exists as an object. It's like focusing on the sounds of leaves in the forest or waves on the seashore.
"His music is quite delicate," said Jenny Lin, the pianist who organized the two New York concerts. Ms. Lin herself discovered it a year or so ago. While preparing a recording devoted to the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, she encountered a piece Mr. Tenney had dedicated to Crawford Seeger. (Most of his pieces bear dedications, often to other composers. It's one way he establishes that despite being labeled a maverick, he sees himself as solidly inscribed in musical traditions of the past.)
"It wasn't like something incredible hit me," Ms. Lin said. But as she began to learn more, she added, "it started to grow on me."
"I came to the conclusion that he was totally brilliant," she said, "and it dawned on me I had to do something in New York."
Still, Ms. Lin, a musically omnivorous pianist with a taste for the contemporary, had to knock on a lot of doors to find a presenter. Many of the people she talked to hadn't heard of Mr. Tenney, either. Finally she found Boo Froebel and Limor Tomer, past and present curators of performing arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, who both loved the project - and after the Whitney signed on, Ms. Lin had no trouble attracting more interest .
Interest, in fact, is growing everywhere. Mr. Tenney's music has been performed from Aspen, Colo., to New York, from Los Angeles to Donaueschingen, Germany, and he is increasingly well known in Europe. In fact, he is just finishing a commission from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. "He stands for an all-encompassing thing," Ms. Lin said. "A complete artist. He's someone who remains truthful to tradition, which isn't obvious at first. And he's so curious."
She added: "People give me a hard time: 'How can you play at Tonic one night and the next day do Chopin and Bach?' I say, I don't see a difference. Today, everything is coming together and crossing over. That's what hit me hard about Tenney. He's playing Ives and doing electronic music and film music: there's always something to discover."
a new direction
May 8, 2005
Wake Up. Wash Face. Do Routine. Now Paint.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
CHRIS OFILI'S watercolors at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the spring art season's rapturous sleeper, are of imaginary heads. There are 181 of them, all the same size, of men and women in bright African garb, deliriously colored and intricately detailed. Mr. Ofili is, obviously, the British artist (lately transplanted to Trinidad) whose "Holy Virgin Mary," with elephant dung, caused a ruckus a few years back when the "Sensation" show was at the Brooklyn Museum. He is also adept at rather lovely, clever and not at all inflammatory art, including these silhouettes and straight-on portraits, which are titled "Afro-Muses."
Mr. Ofili, it turns out, has been painting his watercolor heads nearly every day for 10 years - for himself, mostly, although some of them have made their way into the world. Watercoloring is his daily ritual. A few years ago he added the occasional bird or flower, to stop the routine from becoming a rut.
Everyone has routines. What works for one person may not for someone else. Routines can be comforting. They may be our jobs. They define our limits and we try to make something constructive out of them.
The myth is that artists are somehow different. That they leap from one peak of inspiration to another. That they reject limits - that this is precisely what makes them artists. But of course that's not true. Most artists work as the rest of us do, incrementally, day by day, according to their own habits. That most art does not rise above the level of routine has nothing necessarily to do with the value of having a ritual.
Twyla Tharp wakes up every day at 5:30 and takes a cab to the gym. Chopin played Bach. Beethoven strolled around Vienna with a sketch pad first thing in the morning. Giorgio Morandi spent decades painting the same dusty bunch of small bottles, bowls and biscuit tins. Chuck Close paints and draws and makes prints of nearly identical dots or marks, which, depending on how they're arranged, turn into different faces. "Having a routine, knowing what to do," he has said, "gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It's calming." He calls his method Zenlike, "like raking gravel in a monastery."
There are routines and there are routines. On Kawara, the Japanese-born artist, paints the date. Since the 1960's, he has made thousands of "Today" paintings. His routine entails at least four or five coats of the same brand of paint, the letters white and hand-drawn, always in roughly the same proportion to the size of the canvas.
Out of routine comes inspiration. That's the idea, anyway. To grasp what's exceptional, you first have to know what's routine. I once spent several months watching the American realist painter Philip Pearlstein paint a picture of two nudes. He has followed the same routine for years. One of the models, Desirée Alvarez, who is also an artist, said that the value of watching someone else's studio routine was "in terms of discipline and day-to-dayness and commitment to work even when it isn't going well."
"I know Philip is interested in Zen monks," she continued. "They have their routines, because they think that within routine, and only within routine, enlightenment comes."
Mr. Ofili said, "That's exactly it," when we spoke the other day about his daily routine. He arrives in his studio at 9 or 10 in the morning, he explained. He sets aside a corner for watercolors and drawings "away from center stage," meaning where he paints his big, collaged oil paintings. "I consider that corner of the studio to be my comfort zone," he said. First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, "nothing statements, which have no function."
"They're not a guide," he went on, they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start."
Watercolor goes on top. He estimated that each head takes 5 to 15 minutes. Occasionally he'll paint while on the phone. He may finish one watercolor or 10 in the course of a day.
"There have been days I have not made them," he added. "Sometimes it felt absolutely necessary to do pencil drawings instead. It was cleansing. There's a beautiful sound that pencil makes when it's scratching on paper. Very soothing. Watercolor is like waving a conductor's baton. It's very quick. I almost don't even have to think."
"Sometimes," he added, "I will return to the watercolors in the evening. And that's a completely different atmosphere. If things haven't gone well during the day, I can calm down. The big paintings are like a performance - me looking at me. It's self-conscious. There's a lot of getting up close to the canvas, then stepping back, reflecting on decisions, thinking about gestures. I try to take on all sorts of issues and ideas. So my mind is busy. With watercolor, it's just about the colors and the faces. They're free to go any way they want to go. I may tell myself, 'This will be the last one I do.' Then I'll do another. That's liberating."
No two heads are quite alike. There are ballooning Afros and pointy beards, ponytails and hairdos that resemble butterfly wings, earrings that look like fishhooks or like raindrops, necklaces in gold, turquoise or emerald. The heads are as modest and charming as the work that made Mr. Ofili famous is outsize and occasionally over the top. It is wrong to make too much of them. But if they can become repetitive, they convey - like the passing of days, each day akin to the previous one but also a little different - something about the nature of variety in life, which can be subtle.
Despite the care he has taken to attend to this daily ritual, Mr. Ofili said he had never really stopped to think about it so explicitly until someone happened to ask. "I never realized I was so set in my ways until now," he said, thinking it over during our conversation. "But I guess I have tons of rules. They say Morandi mixed and mixed color until he felt there was no color left and then he would begin to paint. He painted his little objects, but I think he was trying to paint what you might call the spaces between the objects. Philip Guston is another example. He had his own routine. He was heavily into political subject matter, into issues in his own life, but he was looking to get beyond those issues, to find the zone. He talked about the process of painting as an emptying out: he said everyone was in the studio with him when he started and gradually they all left until finally he left, too, and then there was only the work."
"In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint," Mr. Ofili concluded. "It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people. Someone else's routine would seem restrictive to me. But rules and limits are something to push against. It's like doing your morning exercise. Things don't kick in until you push at your limits."
After we spoke, I came across the composer Eric Satie's "Memoirs of an Amnesiac." It's an irreverent gem, like his music. "The artist must regulate his life," Satie wrote, then listed his daily activities:
Up at 7:18. From 10:23 to 11:47: inspiration. Lunch at 12:11. Leave the table by 12:14. Only white foods, including boiled chicken and camphorized sausage. More inspiration: 3:12 to 4:07. Bed at 10:37. "Once a week I wake up with a start at 3:19," he wrote. That's on Tuesday.
"I sleep with one eye open. My sleep is very deep. My bed is round, with a hole in the middle for my head."
Hey, whatever works.
6.4.05
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:
15.2.05
christian wolff, cardew, other things
::from an interview w/ c.w.:
'On a more pragmatic level, many of these pieces that are indeterminate are not, in the conventional sense, difficult to play. That had a lot to do with the fact that I myself am not virtuoso by any stretch of the imagination, but on the other hand, I very much wanted to be playing. These pieces were originally done at a time when it was very difficult to get professional performances. We had almost no resources. To make music that was available for performance to a wide range of performers, not necessarily professionals, that was definitely a factor. It's a little paradoxical, because I was hanging out with people like David Tudor. It really pleased me to be able to make a music that on the one hand would be interesting for somebody like Tudor, who could do wonderful things with it, and at the same time, would also be available for people like myself, who were basically amateurs, as far as performing went.'
::from an essay on marxist musical practice, Music as Metaphor for Social Order and Process:
'Wolff, during the 1970s especially, pioneered the concept of pieces in which the process of rehearsal and performance becomes a model of social interaction, a way of revealing to the performers what kind of power struggles erupt in interactive situations, and how to avoid them. His early pieces such as For One, Two, or Three People (1964) had placed performers in the situation of reacting to each other according to rules, with some leeway. Wolff says that he was later made aware of the political implications of the "democratic interdependence" required by such pieces...
In 1975, I remember performing, as a student among many others, in Exercises at the June in Buffalo festival. Afterwards the performers engaged in a discussion to examine how the piece went. Those who had taken an aggressive leadership role during rehearsals and made decisions for the group declared that the process had indeed been a model of democracy and cooperation. Those of us who had been quieter and held back pointed out that the others had been rather dictatorial, and that we felt like we had been railroaded. The performance had been a model for the problems of a democratic cooperative, but not necessarily for the solutions. The other issue for such pieces, of course, is that in a sense they seem to be performed for the benefit of the performers, with little regard for what the audience will experience. In this way one could say they assume a non-European performance practice, such as Native American dances in which every member of a village participates either as musician or dancer.'
::cardew:
'a composer who hears sounds will try to find notation for sounds. one who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated.'
::christopher hobbs' Voicepiece (see p.4), rad concept, rigid rules interacting with near-randomness
::syr 4...
essay by william winant on the genesis of sonic youth's "goodbye 20th century" project... page includes 3 graphic scores:
--------- ---------
---- - --- -- -----
pauline oliveros
::from Deep Listening™ Bridge To Collaboration
In 1970 I began a body of work called Sonic Meditation. Sonic Meditations are recipes for ways of listening and sounding and are scores transmitted orally without conventional musical notation. I found that I could involve all kinds of people in Sonic Meditations whether or not they had any musical training. What mattered was an interest in participation, the cultivation of listening strategies and willingness to explore sound. At the time I was teaching composition and experimental studies in the music department at the University of California at San Diego. My Sonic Meditations flew in the face of traditional harmony and counterpoint and also of the complex written scores of contemporary music.
::a Sonic Meditation:
Sounds From Childhood
Can you imagine a time in your child hood when you loved to make mouth noises?
Can you imagine freely making those sounds now?
In the next five or more minutes make as many of those sounds as you want
in spaces you hear and claim as your own.
::3 downloadable scores
otherminds.org
::Charles Amirkhanian, sound poet
::includes 10+2: 12 American Sound Text Pieces
::spoken word and music samples from meredith monk, pauline oliveros, christian wolff, don byron, many more
::streaming audio from omradio
7.2.05
zorn
::the game pieces, a review, with quotes from jz, like: "The content of the piece is improvised according to complex instructions. The rules establish structures without dictating outcomes, much as the rules of baseball determine the conduct of the game but not its final score."
::from Ugly Beauty:
John Zorn and the Politics of Postmodern Music by Kevin McNeilly:
"Zorn's music does something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening; it activates the listener...
eventually it came back to using genre as musical notes and moving these blocks of genre around....
the well-worn, commercially-exploited genres remain intact. Zorn himself exploits the expectations of a repetition-hungry consumer culture, turning those expectations, so to speak, on their ears. Zorn's organization of noise consists not in the dismantling or disabling of genre by noise, but rather in the stream of cross-talk between noise and genre....
Zorn disrupts all forms of contemplation (especially the listener-passivity encouraged by electronic reproduction and anaesthetic stereo background), and calls instead for an active, deliberate, offensive engagement with the world, a praxis,...
when he composes for his "family" of players, he writes in such a way as not to limit the potentials of those players, while providing a structure within which they can work; the tension between noises--intentional and chaotic, parodic and expressive--which we have been examining in Zorn's music is thus reproduced on a compositional level, as Zorn seeks to balance improvisational freedom with the parameters of a notated structure, a balance discovered, for that matter, within structurality itself....
The "score" of _Cobra_ illustrates this push toward engagement. It consists of a series of hand signals, each of which corresponds to a type of interaction ranging from quickly-traded bursts of sound to aggressive competitions. Any one of the players may choose at any time to change the direction of the piece and to alter the type of interaction; Zorn's function as conductor is merely to relay that change to the rest of the players, through a hand signal, and to offer a downbeat. Players may also, individually or in groups, engage in "guerrilla tactics," for which there exists a whole new set of signals, by which they attempt to wrest control of the group from the conductor and to conduct their own series of interactions. The game itself is thus antagonistic and collaborative, at once reproducing the composer-conductor hierarchy of traditional "classical" music and subverting that hierarchy from within the "composition" itself. No two performances are the same, as the recent double-edition release of the piece indicates, but all performances exist within the same parameters, as collective communal works."
graphic scores
text-instruction score (with audio sample) for turntable from architect/musician janek schaefer
graphic score from some 2nd graders in england:
graphic scores in tribute to cage:
more kids' work: "journey around a supermarket", with audio
"Composed by Joanne Cannon, software by Stuart Favilla, this work for improviser/s and interactive computer algorithms takes a performer/s and the audience through a 17 year history of Joanne's leukemia. Players navigate a complex map of musical events which document personal experiences of the disease, desperate contingencies, treatment, and long lasting effects....
A performance of 'Speak' is constructed from three structural components. These include the graphic score, the sound experiences and the computer algorithms."
stockhausen's "kontakte":
potential graphic score, increasing the aleatory:
(Average literacy score of population aged 17 to 25 relative to the cross-section mean)
and how about this one, also from google image search for graphic score:
(An analysis of gaming consoles, old and new.)
1.2.05
google: "text score" music
algorithmic.net "provides a comprehensive resource in systems for algorithmic music composition, including links to research, software downloads, documentation, and audio (sound-file) examples. Systems that function as compositional aides and utility tools for composers are also included." (site of composer/sound designer Christopher Ariza)
text scores from composer gavin bryars
american gamelan institute: includes a streamable GONGCAST, plus some other recordings
"frog peak music (a composers' collective) is an artist-run organization devoted to publishing and producing experimental and unusual works, distributing artist-produced materials, and in general providing a home for its artists."
j. simon van der walt::Ritual Preparation of the Performance Space text score
the keyboard of eternal change (1951 - 1957)
"Earlier, having experienced audiences who laughed during his pieces which he thought to be sad, Cage came to distrust the idea that music was all about communication, and was distressed that he could not discover a clear reason to compose music; he even considered giving up. Then Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player, told him 'The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.'"
graphic scores (sort of small images) from earl brown (p.36), morton feldman (p.43), anestis logothetis (p.44); and a text score from christian wolff (p.45):
"Most commonly, text scores have been used to 'give a more or less clearly stated basis for ensemble improvisations.' . . . In cases where the notation, or a lack thereof, makes the music still more indeterminate,
the performer’s responsibilities increase exponentially."
stockhausen text score ("RIGHT DURATIONS") at this page about Thermoscore: A New-type Musical Score with Temperature Sensation, wow
Some composers associated with pieces which utilize performer indeterminacy are: Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Cornelius Cardew, Witold Lutoslawski. Some composers associated with graphic scoring are: Feldman, Martin Bartlett, Robin Mortimore. Some composers associated with text scores are: Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Dick Higgins.
david toop on john zorn
Zorn has claimed that music is not about sound, not even about time, but at a fundamental level an instantaneous communication of thought. Much of his music is an audible realisation of actions set in motion.... [His performances shift] 'the focus from the performer's manipulations to the objects themselves ... the objects became for me like solid sounds, different shapes, textures, colors, histories, to be ordered in musical fashion.' .... Zorn's interest in structures based on linear assemblages of blocks....
To listen to two albums back to back - _Cynical Hysterie Hour_ and _Cobra:Tokyo Operation_ - is to plunge into a vortex in which simultaneous memory and precognition of all stimuli within the pleasure dome is permanently switched to stun power. The music fulfills his criteria of an immediate communication of thought, an insight into the idea-streaming of a person wholly alive to the chaotic marvels and horrors of 20th- and 21st-century culture.
One of his contributions to contemporary music is his search for new compositional means to organise this illuminated consciousness. ...gamepieces... methods for raising the potential of group improvisation to a vehicle for extreme diversity.
---David Toop, _Haunted Weather_
31.1.05
scores
morton feldman
::the king of denmark (audio)
john cage
::fontana mix (audio)
phillip glass
::1 + 1 for One Player & Amplified Table-Top
steve reich
::pendulum music for microphones, amplifiers, speakers and performers
lamonte young
::DREAM THE TWO SYSTEMS OF ELEVEN SETS OF GALACTIC INTERVALS ORNAMENTAL LIGHTYEARS TRACERY (audio)
::dream music
aymon de sales
::musical scores and glyphs
terry riley
::keyboard study #2
marcel duchamp
::(notes from three pieces) (audio)
kurt schwitters
::ursonate (audio, notes, and commentary)
sound poetry scores, with audio
::(1914-1919)
