Per ferragosto, un brano un po’ inusuale nella produzione di S.N.O.W., basato su un arpeggio dal sapore minimalista, fondamentalmente tonale su cui si accumulano strati di suoni ed elaborazioni.
Come al solito, con gli altoparlanti del computer se ne sente metà.
Un altro brano di Tod Machover dopo Light. Anche questo è distribuito da AGP da cui potete scaricarlo in formato FLAC.
Si tratta di Soft Morning, City! che presentiamo con le note dell’autore, è per soprano, contrabbasso e suoni elettronici sia sintetici che ottenuti elaborando gli strumenti. Il testo è tratto dal monologo di Anna Livia Plurabelle, nel Finnegan’s Wake di James Joyce.
Soft Morning, City! (which was commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for Jane Manning and Barry Guy) presents its qualities more immediately and directly. This is due mostly to the presence of James Joyce’s text, the final monologue from Finnegans Wake. The particular passage that I have chosen here has interested me for many years. Coming at the end of this monumental epic, it is a melancholy and moving swansong of the book’s main female character, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Now appearing as a washerwoman, she recalls her life as she walks along Dublin’s River Liffey at daybreak. Many different planes of narrative are interlaced, the mundane with the spiritual, the sexual with the aesthetic, the personal with the universal. Joyce achieves the closest thing to the temporal parallelism of music by snipping each layer of narrative into short, constantly varying and overlapping phrases. The great beauty is that Joyce creates not the eclectic choppiness that such a procedure might suggest, but a majestic form of tremendous power and sweep. It seems to me that Joyce achieves this through an organization of the over-all sound of the passage in an unprecedented way. Listening to a reading-aloud of the text, one is carried by its cadences, tidal flows, crescendos and dvina-awavs, even while being sometimes onlv half-sure . , of the meaning of certain words. it is the rare combination of polyphonic verbal richness with inherent sonic structure that makes it ideal for a musical setting.
My setting takes the form of an aria, though a rather extended and elaborate one. Attention is always focused on the soprano, who alternates between long melodic lines and short interjections that change character quickly. The double bass lends support to the soprano, provides harmonic definition and melodic counterpoint, and often adds musical commentary.
The computer tape helps to amplify, mirror and extend the myriad reflections of Anna Livia, but at the same time acts as a unifying force. To emphasize closeness to the live performers, a new process is added whereby soprano and double bass music is directly transformed by the computer, producing at times sounds that seem to fuse the two into one musical image.
The work begins in stillness, with the soprano evoking the atmosphere of morning, surrounded by an ethereal transformation of her own breath. With the entrance of the double bass, various different strands of the textual polyphony are introduced one after the other, each with characteristic music. As the sonority of the tape gets closer to that of the live instruments, the musical layers begin to overlap with greater rapidity. In the lengthy middle section, many different layers are superimposed so that at the moment of greatest intensity and complexity a new unity is formed.
From this plateau, the rest of the work is built. Quiet communion is achieved between soprano and bass. This leads directly to a long melodic section, with soprano accompanied by a continuous harmonic progression in bass and tape.
After a final moment of lonely reflection (“O bitter ending!…”), an enormous wave washes over Anna Livia and carries her away. A quiet coda uses delicate, distant images to recall the stillness of the work’s opening. A chapter is closed, a deep breath taken, and we prepare, led by Joyce’s Liffey (“Riverrun…”), to begin again.
Tod Machover, Soft Morning, City!, per soprano, contrabbasso e suoni elettronici.
Testi tratti da “Finnegans Wake” di James Joyce
Jane Manning, soprano; Barry Guy, Double Bass. Computer parts realized at IRCAM, Paris
AGP ha ripubblicato recentemente alcune incisioni di musica elettronica degli anni ’80 che trovate nell’Internet Archive ai numeri 106, 107, 108 da dove potete scaricarle in FLAC.
Il 107 contiene due brani di Tod Machover, compositore americano del 1953 molto attivo anche in area multimediale.
Qui vi faccio ascoltare Light, un pezzo del 1979 scritto per l’Ensemble Intercontemporain più due flussi elettronici preregistrati ottenuti mediante elaborazione di suoni strumentali.
L’autore spiega in dettaglio il brano:
The piece takes its title from a quote by Rider Haggard, the English fantasy author: “Occasionally one sees the Light, one touches the pierced feet, one thinks that the peace which passes understanding is gained – then all is gone again.” The atmosphere and expressive content of the work reflect these words, which also influenced the choice and treatment of musical materials.
From a single melody (heard in entirety only at the climax of the piece) a complex polyphony is developed that creates layers of simultaneously overlapping, shifting musical planes, like independent clouds that move each at its own speed, and part momentarily to allow rays of light to pass through. Each of these layers is characterized by a different musical elaboration of the same basic materials. The largest contrast is between the instrumental ensemble (14 players) and two separate computer-generated 4track tapes. Each of these tapes represents a different (and opposing) approach to the elaboration of musical structures. The first uses traditional instrumental timbres and playing techniques as a starting point and transcends the “normal” by extending past the human capacities. The second explores microscopic details of sounds derived from these same instruments, although the connection between the two worlds is made clear only gradually during the course of the piece.
The instrumental ensemble is musically situated between these two approaches. It is divided into four sub groups (string quartet; woodwind quartet; piano, harp and wood/skin percussion; trumpet, trombone and metal percussion), each of which develops a distinct set of musical tendencies, and possesses a clear timbral identity. The piece was conceived for IRCAM’s experimental concert hall, or Espace de Projection, where all acoustical and physical characteristics are controllable. The instrumental ensembles are placed in the four comers of the room, on platforms, with the public seated in the middle. Tape I is distributed through 4 speakers, one placed over each instrumental group, thus emphasizing the “instrumental” departure point for this tape’s electronic sound. Tape II emanates from a set of 4 speakers placed on the ceiling of the hall, to exaggerate the separateness of this ethereal and delicate murmuring that develops gradually into the thunderous crashes that mark the climax of the piece.
The piece begins by emphasizing the distinctness of all its various layers. Each group follows its own developmental principles in a section that culminates in a series of cadenzas. After each group has had its say, all material is combined in the large solo of Tape I which builds until the first crashes of Tape II. In the quiet that follows, a new, more homogeneous order is built up gradually, and leads to a final section of delicate chamber music, where equality prevails among all the diverse elements. The main harmony of the piece provides the basis for a meditative coda, which dissolves into the isolation and bareness of the final piano notes, a shadow of the defiance and brilliance shown by the same instrument at other points of the piece.
The musical form is dramatic, the expressive mood quite romantic, and both are founded on a conviction of mine: that faced with todafs confusing kaleidoscope of equally valid parallel lifestyles, cultures and ideas, the only response is to search quietly but resolutely for a deeper truth, perhaps out of nostalgia for a lost simplicity, but hopefully from a courage aid belief in a “new order” of synthesis and unity behind the surface choas. It is this search that I have tried to portray in Light.
Tod Machover – Light (1979), per ensemble e suoni elettronici
Members of the Ensemble InterContemporain with two computer-generated tapes. Conducted by Peter Eötvös. Computer parts realized at IRCAM, Paris.
“a pressure triggering dreams” (1996-1997) è un brano del compositore americano David Felder (b.1953), per orchestra ed elettroacustica dal vivo nella forma di campioni di flauto elaborati elettronicamente e affidati a un campionatore per l’esecuzione. Completano la parte elettrica un basso elettrico e una amplificazione selettiva di alcuni strumenti.
Concettualmente ho qualche riserva (i.e. perché proprio suoni di flauto?), ma il risultato sonoro non è male, frenetico e ad alta energia, anche se gli interventi elettronici si sentono solo in particolari punti e a volte si fatica a discernerli nella massa orchestrale.
Ma forse questo è proprio quello che il compositore voleva. Comunque ognuno può farsi la propria opinione. Ecco le note di programma e il brano
“The work a pressure triggering dreams was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra for Carnegie Hall, for a premiere in May 1997 … [It] was to be a work that included electronics. I elected to respond to this request by incorporating a companion ‘orchestra’ consisting entirely of computer-processed flute sounds within the orchestral tapestry and to expand the orchestra by using live sampler keyboard, electric bass, and by selectively amplifying solo instruments. […]
“The title is a rough translation of some remarks made by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1870-1871) when he is speaking of the effect of Richard Wagner’s musical language upon the listener — this remark characterized my subjective response to the piece I was then composing and therefore serves as a kind of emblem for the composition. A wide variety of materials (extracted from my series of ‘Crossfire’ pieces — soloists, electronics, video, and computer processing of acoustic materials made by the individual musicians) is deliberately compressed in the attempt to create an atmosphere of saturation somehow related to the experience of persistent musical afterimages suggested by Nietzsche’s brilliant observations. […]”
David Felder – a pressure triggering dreams (1996-1997), per orchestra e elettronica
Buffalo Festival Orchestra, Harvey Sollberger, conductor
Un’orchestra di gamelan campionati è quanto esce dalle mani di Evan Ziporyn, compositore americano nato nel 1959, che si dice fortemente influenzato dalla cultura balinese.
Il brano, in 6 movimenti, si intitola Amok! ed è del 1997. L’autore scrive
[Amok!] uses sample technology and the incredible virtuosity and dedication of the musicians to create an impossible musical landscape, a virtual gamelan and then some. Our voracious sampler eats up the whole gamelan and spits it out again, with chromatic gong scales, gigantic gangsa chord-clusters, six reong sections in different keys. Robert Black’s effect boxes and triggering devices allow his bass to match the 25-piece gamelan blow for blow. Melodies begin in the gamelan and find themselves someplace else; simple bass melodies, transformed by delay and harmonization, find their way to Bali and end up sounding almost traditional. The technology makes anything possible with enough megabytes of memory, and the exhiliration this creates is matched only by the terror of figuring out what to do with it. As soon as one abandons the safety of traditional form, western or Balinese, what is to be done? Nothing but to run amok and see what’s left standing when the smoke clears
Robert Black, double bass
Gamelan Galak Tika
Evan Ziporyn, director, kendang (barrel drum)
with
Dan Schmidt, sampler
Alex Rigopulos, gamelan sampling
This new sound output [Seroton EP] of Sascha Neudeck (biochemist and musician, based in vienna) is to carry out a test by the idea of different drone-interpretations. It is more a collection of different quotations in doing with such these topics. The result is quite different to his previous work, which was more noise- and random-oriented. This new section is quite a try to arrange such these things – from totally abstract elements to poetic narrative parts. Different ideas come out from an abstractness and get into an often sparely melodic part – otherwise a changeover from the lightness of sound into a deep and noise drone, which is interrupted by fragement spikes of sound. Neudeck is working only with software, sinus generators, self produced sound equipment and lately with the sidrassi organ (totally crazy tool). So I am often surprised by the result, when it sounds like a field recording. But when I see, how he works in his nerdy laboratory, I understand that his output can irritate.
[ liner notes by Heribert Friedl / photo by Sascha Neudeck ]
Some excerpts
Due giorni fa, Michel “Crackle” Waisvisz, creatore di diversi sistemi elettroacustici come il CrackleBox, il CrackleSynth e The Hands, si è spento prematuramente nella sua casa, dopo vari mesi di malattia.
Nato l’8 Luglio 1949, ha diretto lo STEIM (STudio for Electro-Instrumental Music di Amsterdam) per 27 anni.
È una pura coincidenza, non lo sapevo, ma mi fa molto piacere aver passato gli ultimi due giorni a suonare un nuovo cracklebox arrivato recentemente dallo STEIM, così come mi rende felice il fatto di averne regalato uno proprio il 19.
Tu te ne vai, ma i tuoi suoni restano…
Tellus era una “rivista su audio cassetta” lanciata nel 1983 a New York e pubblicata solo su abbonamento con cadenza bimensile. Rimase attiva per ben 10 anni grazie ai finanziamenti del New York State Council of the Arts e del National Endowment for the Arts.
In questo periodo venne raccolto e pubblicato molto materiale della avanguardia americana e più tardi, europea. Oggi gran parte di questo audio viene riproposto dall’impagabile UBUWeb. Inoltre esiste un archivio di Tellus qui.
Nel frattempo, ascoltate alcuni brani. Come era tipico dell’epoca, parecchi sono vere aggressioni sonore che però hanno una carica e una energia che è difficile ritrovare attualmente.
Questo brano di Costin Miereanu (Bucarest 1943, naturalizzato francese dal 77) è stato registrato al 9° Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea di Torino nel 1986 ed è scritto per clarinetto in Sib, corno, violino, violoncello, 2 perc., 3 synth DX7.
Costin, relativamente noto in Italia, avendo avuto anche un disco edito nella storica serie Cramps (Luna Cinese), è sempre stato un creatore di atmosfere raffinate e si conferma tale anche in questo brano che potete scaricare in flac da AGP o ascoltare qui sotto.
Costin Miereanu – Ombres lumineuses (1986)
Ensemble Antidogma, Daniel Tosi cond.
Niente a che fare con l’omonimo poema di Lautréamont. È un brano di musica elettronica composto da Rainer Riehn nel 1965/66 (revisione 1968/69) che ascoltavo spesso quando ero piccolo (16/17 anni).
Si tratta di un collage di materiali molto eterogenei, a tratti molto vicini al rumore, che sembrano derivare da fenomeni di interferenza, accostati spesso brutalmente, senza nessuna evoluzione.
Non posso dire che mi piacesse, ma mi affascinava perché era formalmente agli antipodi di quello che mi piaceva a quei tempi, cioè la stasi più totale: un solo suono che cambia lentamente in un tempo infinitamente lungo. Devo dire che, a distanza di tanti anni, mi affascina ancora. Comunque non ho ancora afferrato il collegamento con il poema di Lautréamont.
Rainer Riehn – Les Chants de Maldoror (1965/66 – 1968/69)