Our concert series continues Wednesday January 20th at noon with:
Steven Takasugi's
- Die Klavierübung -
notes about the program:
Steven Takasugi's large scale computer playback work Die Klavierübung is, at its core, a grand meditation on the recorded piano. It is a piece of music created from thousands of recorded samples. From these samples a virtual music is created wherein the basic tension of the piece is derived from the music's varying awareness of its own virtual/illusory state. From another perspective the piece presents the listener with a dizzying array of textures from the brutish to the highly refined. These textures are composed of snapshots along a continuum of possible pianos - from the almost sacred, privileged status of the Steinway concert grand to the humorous and sometimes profane honkey-tonk upright.
About Die Klavierübung Takasugi writes:
Die Klavierübung might be subtitled A Journey Through Falsehoods. There is no piano after all, there is no pianist, there is no practicing.
Perhaps it is about the recorded piano samples, digitalized manifestations, that still believe they are a “real piano,” disembodied as they are, attempting to create for themselves some fiction in which they can believe they are still live, even beautiful.
They gather themselves as if the pianist were still present and imagine he is sitting at the keyboard—“on the bench”—or leaning precariously forward, head under the top-lid, plucking and striking the strings in a variety of manners, bringing them to life. Nonetheless, he always cannot help but notice that the ear, unlike the eyes, perceives not a resonant chamber with a fixed and solid soundboard, but rather an endless abyss of eternal resonance and echoes. For the ear, then, the danger is to fall inside the piano—into a chasm of its own imagination.
The creation of any fiction, as a hallucination, is inevitably subject to other unintended, unforeseen forces. The piano samples find themselves in contexts they never wished to be: as references, they turn up as a player piano accompanying a silent movie, a concert grand in a neoclassical concerto, even peering at themselves as midi-piano samples, falsehoods gazing at their still falser reflections.
They flee from this piano-nightmare, from coerced roles of alienation, but from one falsehood to another, to find their own sonic bodies distorted beyond recognition. They seem strange: internally detuned, though notes are coherent, intact, each key no longer the tre corde in tune with themselves, rather many strings detuned within a quarter-tone interval: a note has become more a microtonal wobble. “What’s wrong with me?” This line of questioning has its consequences.
By traversing through, not around, the falsehoods of their nature, their medium, their culture, these samples hoped to reclaim the “real” and “true”for themselves, though the arena for this was far more remote and the source of its energies far more extreme than what they ever imagined them to be.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Monday, November 30, 2009
concert no. 1 - environment
The first concert of the series presents a collection of 5 works each of which interface with the idea of environment in a unique way.
Program:
Ambiences - Chris Warren (USA)
Aether - Hans Timmermans (Holland)
Écologie Matérielle - Adam Basanta (USA)
Passing Landscapes - James Moses (USA)
Blanc Distance - Junya Oikawa (Japan)
About Aether Hans Timmermans writes:
The concept of "aether" has existed for centuries in the physical sciences. Although aether has never been proven, many physicists were and still are convinced that the earth floats in a highly elastic substance that carries radio (and television) and light waves that permeate all space. The ancient Greeks described aether as a medium that not only supported the earth but also steered all light.
The works of Einstein and colleagues have left little room in the present day sciences for this style of postulation and the laws of electrodynamics have made it clear that there is no substance needed for the transport and/or propagation of electromagnetic waves. It is truly a shame that such Romantic ideas cease to exist when they have lost their theoretic necessity.
Imagine the earth floating in a light blue, iris-like, watery substance in which ripples as in a lake, like catapulted sailboats, are witnessing of significant cosmic events or reminiscing the existence of the human race. It follows the earth, the tail of the comet, electromagnetic garbage. I don't consider myself to be a poet yet the concept holds me in its grip.
The studio composition AETHER lasts 14 minutes and 33 seconds. This specific length is not a coincidence.
Specific timings and musical events lose their traditional roles in AETHER. The hope is that the listener may even lose their sense of time and place. Sounds simply occur, or they are already there, and the listener by coincidence hears them or possibly misses them. They may even just pass by without engaging the listener in any conscious way. The listener is immersed in a sonic poem that expresses an unused and untouched
concept. It offers an experience that begins and ends but actually exists all the time, without start or finish points.
This work was inspired by the ancient and current concepts surrounding the phenomenon ether (historically aether) as described above. The compositional process included, in part, a study in the development of certain gestures that were necessary for the expressive quality of the work. The audio material consists of synthesized or complexly modulated acoustic samples by using granular synthesis, resonators and various parameter controls via constructed (data)gestures.
In the mid 1980’s I developed, in an analog electronic music studio, 12 sonic modes. These modes have proven to be very useful in my compositions. They are broad clusters with carefully designed consonants and dissonants in specific regions of the sonic spectrum. When used in sequence from 1 to 12 they form a lovely and often very useful harmonic progression. They also relate directly to other important aspects of my
electronic music where timbre, sonority, color and sonic development occur. In AETHER I use modes 1 and 12.
About Écologie Matérielle Adam Basanta writes:
Between the natural environment and the consumer products which are derived from it (paper/plastic bags and wrappers/foil) lies a sonic and metaphoric continuum. Within this scope, I chose to explore variations on the theme of extraction and re-deposition of one sound image to another, as well as create an evolving musical interplay between the ecological organization characteristics of each sound world.
About Passing Landscapes Jim Moses writes:
Passing Landscapes is sonic/musical impression of a passing day. The work blends realistic surround-sound environmental recordings and electro-acoustic compositional techniques. The work reflects the omnipresence of machines in our lives (and in our acoustic environments) and the contrast between the serene and the intense. There are three movements - ‘waking’, ‘drive-time’ and ‘drifting’. Thanks to Brian Knoth for help engineering the field recordings, and thanks to the MEME program at the Brown University Music Department where the piece was realized.
About Blanc Distance Junya Oikawa writes:
"The consciousness is like a surface or skin of enormous, unknown territory of the unconscious." (C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology)
A blurring sensation of something not physical - it is almost tangible, but cannot be touched. Just like going in between dream and reality, it is woven in the space of interaction between tension-laxation, arousing the unconscious.
Persistent sounds that subordinate the consciousness, glitch sounds that distance the consciousness, palpable primitive voice and attack/release of sounds - they transform the structure flexibly, giving corporeal quality to the space. In other words, it is to render a space as a virtual sense organ, through sound texture, distance,sensation on the skin created by sound pressure.
Program:
Ambiences - Chris Warren (USA)
Aether - Hans Timmermans (Holland)
Écologie Matérielle - Adam Basanta (USA)
Passing Landscapes - James Moses (USA)
Blanc Distance - Junya Oikawa (Japan)
About Aether Hans Timmermans writes:
The concept of "aether" has existed for centuries in the physical sciences. Although aether has never been proven, many physicists were and still are convinced that the earth floats in a highly elastic substance that carries radio (and television) and light waves that permeate all space. The ancient Greeks described aether as a medium that not only supported the earth but also steered all light.
The works of Einstein and colleagues have left little room in the present day sciences for this style of postulation and the laws of electrodynamics have made it clear that there is no substance needed for the transport and/or propagation of electromagnetic waves. It is truly a shame that such Romantic ideas cease to exist when they have lost their theoretic necessity.
Imagine the earth floating in a light blue, iris-like, watery substance in which ripples as in a lake, like catapulted sailboats, are witnessing of significant cosmic events or reminiscing the existence of the human race. It follows the earth, the tail of the comet, electromagnetic garbage. I don't consider myself to be a poet yet the concept holds me in its grip.
The studio composition AETHER lasts 14 minutes and 33 seconds. This specific length is not a coincidence.
Specific timings and musical events lose their traditional roles in AETHER. The hope is that the listener may even lose their sense of time and place. Sounds simply occur, or they are already there, and the listener by coincidence hears them or possibly misses them. They may even just pass by without engaging the listener in any conscious way. The listener is immersed in a sonic poem that expresses an unused and untouched
concept. It offers an experience that begins and ends but actually exists all the time, without start or finish points.
This work was inspired by the ancient and current concepts surrounding the phenomenon ether (historically aether) as described above. The compositional process included, in part, a study in the development of certain gestures that were necessary for the expressive quality of the work. The audio material consists of synthesized or complexly modulated acoustic samples by using granular synthesis, resonators and various parameter controls via constructed (data)gestures.
In the mid 1980’s I developed, in an analog electronic music studio, 12 sonic modes. These modes have proven to be very useful in my compositions. They are broad clusters with carefully designed consonants and dissonants in specific regions of the sonic spectrum. When used in sequence from 1 to 12 they form a lovely and often very useful harmonic progression. They also relate directly to other important aspects of my
electronic music where timbre, sonority, color and sonic development occur. In AETHER I use modes 1 and 12.
About Écologie Matérielle Adam Basanta writes:
Between the natural environment and the consumer products which are derived from it (paper/plastic bags and wrappers/foil) lies a sonic and metaphoric continuum. Within this scope, I chose to explore variations on the theme of extraction and re-deposition of one sound image to another, as well as create an evolving musical interplay between the ecological organization characteristics of each sound world.
About Passing Landscapes Jim Moses writes:
Passing Landscapes is sonic/musical impression of a passing day. The work blends realistic surround-sound environmental recordings and electro-acoustic compositional techniques. The work reflects the omnipresence of machines in our lives (and in our acoustic environments) and the contrast between the serene and the intense. There are three movements - ‘waking’, ‘drive-time’ and ‘drifting’. Thanks to Brian Knoth for help engineering the field recordings, and thanks to the MEME program at the Brown University Music Department where the piece was realized.
About Blanc Distance Junya Oikawa writes:
"The consciousness is like a surface or skin of enormous, unknown territory of the unconscious." (C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology)
A blurring sensation of something not physical - it is almost tangible, but cannot be touched. Just like going in between dream and reality, it is woven in the space of interaction between tension-laxation, arousing the unconscious.
Persistent sounds that subordinate the consciousness, glitch sounds that distance the consciousness, palpable primitive voice and attack/release of sounds - they transform the structure flexibly, giving corporeal quality to the space. In other words, it is to render a space as a virtual sense organ, through sound texture, distance,sensation on the skin created by sound pressure.
How it begins:
Greetings earthlings. Welcome to the "Music under the influence of computers" blog.
Over the course of six concerts the Music Under the Influence of Computers series presents an international collection of music conceived with a special relationship to technology. It is currently (and generously) sponsored by the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), CALIT2, and Wavelink.
All concerts are held in the Atkinson Hall Black Box theater on the campus of U.C. San Diego.
Each event is both a presentation of music as well as an opportunity for discussion regarding the concerns of composers, performers, and listeners. This blog is intended to provide documentation of the events and the discussions that follow.
Over the course of six concerts the Music Under the Influence of Computers series presents an international collection of music conceived with a special relationship to technology. It is currently (and generously) sponsored by the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), CALIT2, and Wavelink.
All concerts are held in the Atkinson Hall Black Box theater on the campus of U.C. San Diego.
Each event is both a presentation of music as well as an opportunity for discussion regarding the concerns of composers, performers, and listeners. This blog is intended to provide documentation of the events and the discussions that follow.
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