Michael McNabb è sempre stato portatore di una elettronica che definirei “leggera”, il che non significa che non abbia fatto della sperimentazione, anzi, l’ha fatta e spesso anche molto avanzata, ma le sue composizioni non hanno mai abbandonato delle suggestioni post-tonali con funzioni prettamente emozionali.
Qui vi presentiamo Love in the Asylum del 1981, un brano che, al suo apparire, mi aveva colpito per la sua liquidità e per le continue mutazioni del materiale audio. Il pezzo è idealmente diviso in vari movimenti e sottosezioni:
- Mad as Birds
illusorio
allegro ridendo
accelerando perpetuamente - Pirouette
vivace - The Magician’s Daughter
inquieto
amoroso
carosello
lontano
Queste le note dell’autore:
Love in the Asylum is a love song to the calculated insanity and spontaneous magic that one must sometimes call upon in order to live in this strange universe of ours. It features an orchestra of familiar instrumental and vocal sounds, new sounds drawn from the imagination, and—perhaps most expressively—sounds that fluidly shift between the two. The work, which critic Paul Lehrman called “one of the most devastatingly beautiful pieces of electronic music I have ever heard”, is built of two psychological layers. Foremost is a layer of cheerful confidence and exuberance, colored and occasionally overpowered by a dark emotional undercurrent of anxiety and psychological imbalance.
All sounds in Love in the Asylum were synthesized except for the laughter and the player calliope music. It includes a number of musical quotations, including quotations from other works of electroacoustic music. The spatial sound paths at the beginning of the first movement are from Turenas (1972) by John Chowning, who was a primary mentor, and influenced McNabb’s decision to specialize in electroacoustic music and performance.
Love in the Asylum premiered on November 2, 1981, at the Monday Evening Concert Series in Los Angeles.
Love in the Asylum has been realized on the Systems Concepts digital synthesizer at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.
L’originale è in quattro canali. Qui ascoltate la riduzione stereo curata dall’autore.
Altra musica e video di McNabb sono disponibili sul suo sito.