Archive for category Art
Darmstadt Overview
Well, I’m back from the Summer Course in Darmstadt, Germany. An absolutely amazing experience, in the sense that I heard live performances of music that I would be highly unlikely to come across in the United States. To give you an idea of what a typical day was like over this two-week period:
1) Wake up, 8:00 AM
2) Proceed to ballroom at Maratim Konferenz-Hotel in Darmstadt to begin daily intake of pork products, nutella, and shitty coffee.
3) Catch the first tram that you can. It’s quite possible that the driver of the tram you’re sprinting for will pull away just as you reach the door. They just don’t give a shit.
4) If you’re in the interpretation class, you’ll either have a studio meeting, rehearsal, or lessons for the morning. Or maybe all of those three.
5) If you, by the grace of God, have the morning off, you could attend a lecture by Bryan Ferneyhough, Hans Thomalla, Chaya Czernowin, or whomever else happened to be speaking their minds that day.
6) Repeat 3, 4, 5 for most of the afternoon.
7) 16:30 (that’s 4:30 pm). Time for lunch! That funny sound that you were hearing for half of the afternoon wasn’t the contrabass practicing next door, it was your stomach.
17:00–at this point of the day, if you haven’t started already, it’s a good time to begin thinking about your first beer of the day. Turns out it goes amazingly well with all the pork you’ve been (and will be) ingesting.
9) 19:30. Typically, the first concert of the night would begin between 6 and 8 pm. Most concerts at Darmstadt last at least 2.5 hours, with the notable exception of the finale concert (more on this later). Somehow, you never felt like it was that long.
Some of the highlights from the evening concerts:
The opening night concert, featuring the entire “Les Espaces Acoustiques” cycle by Gerard Grisey. While this is certainly not my favorite spectral work ever, it’s a rare opportunity to hear the entire cycle performed live, and there are certain elements in the work that you just don’t get listening to a recording. It was damn hot in that place.
Two nights later, the first of TWO concerts by Arditti Quartet. I would say at least three quarters of the works performed were premieres, and some of the better pieces I heard were those by Hannes Kerschbaumer (corpo a corpo), and Luis Aguirre (Ochosi). Also the piece by Ferneyhough was very good, although not a premiere.
The next night, we were shepherded into a few buses where the driver “forgot” to turn on the air conditioning for about half of the trip to Stuttgart. However, we got to see only the second or third staging of Chaya Czernowin’s chamber opera Pnima. Fantastic music, and really great performances by the orchestra and singers–I use the term singers loosely, because there were no words in the work, only phenomes and vowels. However, most people agreed that the staging, while impressive at times, was a little heavy-handed and obvious.
The best concert of the Ferienkurse for me came on the 22nd of July. This concert was shared by Arditti and the JACK quartet from New York. I rode the tram with the cello player of JACK who was very friendly, and we spoke about some of their past and upcoming projects. Let me tell you, this is a group that you will want to catch up on and follow in the coming years. They have an incredible DVD out of the Xenakis string quartets, and I’ve heard great things about their performances of Helmut Lachenmann’s work as well. The best music of this particular evening, however, was performed by Arditti. It included an absolutely incredible new quartet by Italian composer Pierluigi Billone (check this man out!), another fantastic new quartet by Hans Thomalla (some of you may remember the trio I played in my chamber recital), and another good work by Bernhard Gander. @Ty Forquer: you’ll want to check out Billone’s work for spring drum. I am not really sure how to describe Billone’s music, but in terms of reinventing the idiomatic qualities of the instruments and ensembles he writes for, I can’t think of anyone since Lachenmann who has done more. It felt like the earth was moving in a very strange way during this piece. I can’t wait for it to be recorded.
Back to the schedule:
10) 20:45. It’s more than likely that you’re at halftime for the evenings first concert. You know what that means: temporary relief from the weather inside the concert hall, and beer #2 (or 5).
11) 21:45. Now you have an important decision to make. Do you go get some food and tame the beast that’s been complaining during the first evening concert? Never have I heard a louder chorus of stomach growling than when I was at these evening concerts. If you do decide to go sit down for some food, your night has begun and you’re done listening to music. Trust me, once that third round of pork and beer enters your skin, you’re not going to feel like getting up.
12) 22:00. In the event that you decided to grab a snack and forego actual dinner, it’s now it’s time for the second concert of the evening, typically of the Atelier Electronik series. These concerts all took place at a local club, 603qm, and featured electro-acoustic music. I had the opportunity to perform on the finale concert of this series, a work by Portuguese composer Joao Pais. One thing I have to say about the festival is that despite some complaints about things being disorganized, they have their shit together when it comes to all things electronic.
13) 24:00-5:00? Beer. And more beer.
14) Go back to #1.
Some other concert highlights:
Chicago’s own ensemble Dal Niente, which gave energetic and precise performances of works by Mark Andre and Hans Thomalla. The group won a stipend award to come back for the next festival, which is a huge deal. Congrats to them!
Fathom String Trio–I unfortunately missed their portion of this concert, which was both good and bad. Bad because I missed their fantastic playing (I heard them perform earlier in the week in a reading session of my friend Jesse Ronneau’s string trio, and then later in the finale concert), but good because then I heard the new-age crap of another group that will go unnamed, which was happily accompanied by ambient garbage truck.
The finale concert. This was the concert to end all concerts. Although I think we would all agree that we like our new music concerts to only last circa one hour, I have to say that most of the time, I didn’t mind the length of the concerts I heard. Most of the music was fairly interesting, although perhaps not always ground breaking. The finale concert, on the other hand, began at 6:15 pm and didn’t finish until after midnight. Granted, there was a malfunction on the one electro-acoustic piece performed, four intermissions which may have gone a little overboard, and the presentation of the Kranichsteiner prizes, but this concert took some serious dedication. Luckily, a lot of the best music came in the last quarter of the concert, featuring works by Enno Poppe, Georges Aperghis (perhaps the most performed composer of this conference), Ferneyhough–awesome performances of Funerailles I and II, plus Cassandra’s Dream Song in between, and other great works by Franz Martin Olbrisch, among others.
Once this concert was over, we went to 603qm for the finale party, where I drank wine out of a glass jar (thanks, Ammie!), more of my beloved Heffe, and I’m not sure what else. Then it was back to the hotel to pack and sleep as much as possible before shipping out the next morning.
I would write more, but finding all these links was tiring. I didn’t even mention the great saxophoning experience I had with Marcus Weiss, but suffice it to say that Marcus is an incredibly gifted and thoughtful musician–as much of a thinker as a performer. Darmstadt is more about the composers and the music, anyway. An inspiring and exhausting few weeks, to say the least…
make – share – repeat
Contemporary scholarship in music composition has always born a close relationship to technology. From mechanical improvements in acoustic instruments, early developments in computer music at Bell Laboratories and the current glut of inexpensive “off the shelf” software and hardware solutions for non-linear audio editing and signal processing, composers such as Beethoven, Stockhausen and Radiohead have integrated the newest technologies into their output. This affinity with technology now raises questions about the very nature of the composer. The laptop I’m using to type this page has many times over the audio processing and synthesis power of all the computers at Bell Laboratories in 1957 where Max Mathews created MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music. This growth in computing power (and related telecommunications technology) reaches across domains, transforming the manner in which people find, create, experience and use music (and all media), affording those with access the freedom to create and share their work and identity as a multimedia artist with unprecedented ease. This begs the question, “Why would someone want to limit themselves to being a composer?”
For the student composer, emphasis falls on preparation for making a living off of and contributing to the classical canon, while the cultural authority of this music wanes . This approach ignores the realities of modern cultural production where the artifacts created and the artist that create them are increasingly difficult to describe within traditional disciplinary boundaries. Internationally recognized creativity scholar Ken Robinson stated in his 2006 TED Talk, “Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.” If one may count on the consensus that composition is in fact a creative activity, then certainly music scholarship may profit from interdisciplinary work. The broader social benefit is clearly described by biologist and social theorist Edmund O. Wilson, “Most of the issues that vex humanity daily – economic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, poverty – cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is . . .”
So – What does it mean to be a composer in world where an inexpensive laptop grants easy control over audio, video, photographic content, graphic design, text and the means to easily share your products in a space where physical proximity will eventually be of no hindrance at all? My current work addresses this paradigm from the perspective of music composition, a point of view often neglected in multimedia arts. Commonly this portion of the audio component is hired out to composers tasked with creating a work to specification and in service of the other media elements. More often audio is selected from batches of banal pre-fabricated clips in a manner similar to selecting from stock photography. Devices to capture, create and manipulate media are growing in power and connectivity while shrinking in size and we are creating the content. Humans create, share and engage culture through what’s in our pocket, on our kitchen tables, in rows by the dozen at university computer labs. Modern Scholarship in music composition must embrace this paradigm or leave matters to the media conglomerates where monetary returns are the only obligation.
Below is film_2: role strain. Taken with film_1: three variation, these films begin the narrative that will form a self-reflective exploration of what happens when an expensively trained composer tries to reach out beyond his sphere – when music in a multimedia work is central to the formal and aesthetic constitution of the work – not just clip art.
sound?
While preparing to kick off my dissertation project (read more about my dissertation at sammerciers.com), I sought advice from people with a background in video or film. I was confident I could handle the technical aspects of making film projects. What I was looking for was the sage advice of an Obi-Wan to my Luke Skywalker – some overarching principles to guide me. The most common advice I got was something like this, “Don’t just throw the video portion in as an afterthought. Make sure that it has a reason to be there.” Good advice no doubt, yet the more I’ve considered this advice the more I’ve realized that this is the way music is treated in film projects most of the time. How often in your average summer blockbuster could you take the existing score and replace it with something from Sibelius with no one being the wiser? I recently found this film through ubu.com. If you have an interest in sound as art, you should check it out.
25 Magnificent Modern Day Movie Illustrations (Repost)
I stole this link from a friend. It highlights modern artwork interpretations of movie posters and novelizations of some famous movies. Check it out:
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/25-magnificent-modern-day
Ghost Busters and The Dark Knight posters, reimagined
Twistori
Ok, I know I just posted a piece of Twitter-based web art last week. Since I discovered that, though, I’ve come across another one that I like even more. It’s inspired by We Feel Fine, which we showed you a few months ago. Twistori compiles new tweets with the words “I love,” “I hate,” “I think,” “I feel,” “I believe,” and “I wish.” You can select any of those six, and tweets will roll by. The presentation is simple and elegant. My favorite that I’ve seen so far is “I wish I were a llama in a great big llama world!!!” Check out Twistori!
Twyric
Yes, that’s a made up word, but I didn’t make it up. The Christian Mähler at Twyric.com did. Twyric is one of many web art projects that are taking advantage of the rapid pace of the creation of new, personal content on blogs and websites like Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and others. Mähler’s program constantly combs through new Twitter posts in search of poems (by looking at hashtags). Then, it looks through the words of the poem, and tries to find tagged images on Flickr that it thinks pair appropriately with the poem. The results are mixed, but I kind of like that the poems and pictures don’t always make a clean connection or that either the poem or the picture (or both) might not be very good. Check it out for yourself: http://twyric.com/. It can also be your screen saver. You can even customize it to look for specific kinds of Twitter poems (like haiku) or Flickr images.
Here’s one I saw recently:
Catharsis
When I visited the St. Louis Art Museum as a kid, this was always one of my favorite pieces. Now, thanks to their eMuseum, I can share it with everybody. I liked to think of Paganini sawing a way so hard and fast that his violin exploded and was somehow captured in a kind of three-dimensional photograph.
Paganini's Soul
| Paganini’s Soul 1979 |
| Arman American (born France), born 1928 |
| charred violin in plastic |
Wandering in the Wilderness Vol. 2: The Sound of Silence
And the sign said,
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence”
- from “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
In this installment of WitW, I would like to discuss the use of silence as a compositional tool. I don’t mean short, dramatic uses, such as the GP commonly found in classical music, but significant spans of time devoted to silence for compositional reasons. To this end, we will explore three distinct approaches to silence by three different 20th/21st centuryAmerican composers. Any discussion of silence as a compositional device, of course must begin with John Cage’s 4′33″.
4′33″ is the infamous piece of silent music, whose entire score consists of three movements of indeterminate length, each marked “tacet” (the movements are traditionally, but not necessarily, marked off by the performer in some way). For Cage, any sound was music. He is quoted as saying that he would rather listen to the sounds of traffic than to the symphonies of Beethoven (I’m paraphrasing from memory, although I’m pretty sure that’s the essence of it). 4′33”, therefore, is a framing device. It sets a certain boundary, and says, “anything within this boundary is art, pay attention to it.” Consider the following images:
"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp
Some urinals
Both images are of urinals. The first, however, is found in an art gallery, while the second image is from a public restroom. While both objects are essentially similar, the context, or the framing, of these objects significantly impacts the way we think about these objects. With the first, we may think of questions like “Is this really art?” or “If I pee in this, where would the pee go?” or “Would I get arrested if I tried to pee in it?” or “Why did I let Ty drag me to this modern art museum?” With the second, this is a context in which we (at least those of us who are male) are used to encountering urinals, and little thought is given to them (with the exception of special rules which apply to public urinals). Anyways, back to John Cage. The brilliance of 4′33″ as a framing device is that any sounds that arise during these boundaries are unintentional, the sounds that are normally blocked out or ignored during “normal” performances. It provides a new context for listeners to consider sounds which would normally be dismissed.
While a recording of 4′33″ is not necessary (one only needs a stopwatch to perform the piece in the comforts of one’s own home), I couldn’t resist linking to this performance, which I find particularly compelling.
Another interesting use of silence is found in the music of Morton Feldman. Feldman once said that the most beautiful thing a sound ever does is decay. In his works, the textures are often very sparse, so that you can appreciate the sound in its entirety, decay and all. Feldman’s counterpart in the visual art world is Mark Rothko, who uses simple designs to invite the viewer to appreciate the subtleties of color and texture in the works. For an example of Feldman’s use of silence, check out this recording of “The King of Denmark” for solo percussionist:
In “The king of Denmark,” the sparse textures isolate individual sounds and allow the listener to appreciate their qualities more fully than they might in a more dense musical situation.
The final composer I will discuss in this post is Thomas DeLio. In addition to being an influential composer, DeLio is also one of the foremost scholars in contemporary music, with a special interest in the music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Iannis Xenakis. The most striking characteristic of DeLio’s music is his use of long periods of silence. In a few of his pieces, the total duration of the silences is greater than the total duration of the musical material. The reason for this is that DeLio approaches silences functionally in a way that is fundamentally different from that of Cage or Feldman. For Cage, silence was a framing device to invite the unintended; for Feldman, it was a blank canvas on which individual sound colors are accented. DeLio’s use, however, is to frustrate the listener’s memory. The natural tendency of listeners is to process sounds by putting them in the context of sounds which proceed and follow them. This is a natural process, and most music relies on this contextualization to create coherent musical ideas. DeLio, however, attempts to isolate musical material by use of silences, so that each sound or gesture can be appreciated individually. The listener hears a gesture, followed by a long span of silence, and by the time the next gesture occurs, the listener has forgotton what the preceding gesture had sounded like. This music can seem strange and even unsettling to the casual listener; such long spans of silence are very uncommon in music, and create a certain amount of tension between the audience and performer. To give you an example of DeLio’s music, here is a performance of this author performing DeLio’s wave/s for solo percussionist:
This concludes my look at three different composers and how they use silence in unique ways. I hope you have found this interesting and that it gives you another point of view as you approach contemporary music. See you next time, when we’ll explore…something. I don’t have a topic picked out, and I am open to suggestions. Peace.
The Wall Project (part 1)
The Wall Project is one of my many goofy ideas, but unlike most of my goofy ideas, this one has actually grown in to a cool, collaborative piece of art.
I’ve always enjoyed doodling, and I think a lot of my visual art is really a slightly grown-up form of doodles. One day during an idle office hour (redundant?), I began doodling on some 3×5.5-inch scraps of paper that I had leftover from printing scores for a saxophone piece the night before. I kind of liked my doodle, but I was running out of room on the small card. So, I grabbed another card and continued my doodle onto it. I ended up liking my doodle so much that I decided to tape it to the wall of the office that I shared with 9 other music theory teaching assistants. Later that week, a couple of other TAs grabbed cards and continued my doodles in interesting and unexpected ways. I thought, “How cool is that? We should do another one.” So, with the same scraps of paper and armed with some colored pencils, I started a collaborative art piece that I now call either the Wall Project (as it was originally sticking cards to the wall here at the Guidonian Hand Executive Office Suite) or the Big Board (as it is now sticking cards to a big piece of foam board).
The piece has grown beyond what I ever expected it could, and the board only has room for about ten or so more cards (as of this writing). People that have contributed are mostly composers and musicians, and none of us have any formal training in art. They are friends and acquaintances from all over the place that have just so happened to be in the same room as the big board and were in a creative mood. I like to take the board to parties and invite people to add to it. Some of my friends like it so much that they have added four, five, or even six cards to the project.
I’m starting a series about the Wall Project here on the blog. Each post will include a photo of an individual card, and then that card with the other cards that were on the board when it was added (moving more-or-less in chronological order).
Here’s the inaugural card of the Wall Project, created by yours truly:
Wall Project: Card 1 (David MacDonald)
It’s intended to be rather non-descript. I didn’t want to impose myself on the work at the beginning, but I needed to start with something. I tried to start a trend of initialling and dating each card (bottom right conrner), but that never really caught on. Stay RSS-fed for the next installment, and keep your eye on that blue squiggly thing. I think of it as a river viewed from above, but I wonder what other artists are going to do with that…
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