tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-140809142023-11-15T08:40:36.119-08:00Other TimeThe natural chronotope of <a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl">Samuel Vriezen</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-50313646760889892402015-03-04T14:48:00.001-08:002015-03-04T14:48:20.124-08:00A Transitional Operation: an interview with Christian Wolff<div class="tr_bq">
My interview with / essay on Christian Wolff, <i>A Transitional Operation</i>, is now up at Academia.edu. You can find it by following <a href="https://www.academia.edu/11239598/A_Transitional_Operation_a_conversation_with_Christian_Wolff" target="_blank">this link</a>. The piece was written for the collection <i>Aesthetic Justice</i>, published by Valiz: Amsterdam, 2015. Discussing the relations between music and justice, in composition and teaching, linking Cage to Plato and examining what the political importance of experimental music could be today, forty years after the activism of the seventies.</div>
<br />
<blockquote>
<b>SV</b> Do you still feel this has a kind of political – well, I won’t use the word impact, but importance? </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<b>CW</b> I think so, just by the fact that it’s there. I still like to talk about experimental music, even though many people would say that it’s a non-category now. These days, the formula that I come up with is that experimental music, quite apart from its actual technical procedures and all that, is a kind of music which suggests to people the possibility of change. That things don’t have to be the way they are, to the extent that the way they are is no good. So you kind of make a model, if you will.</blockquote>
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-5649733458149357002015-01-05T10:20:00.002-08:002015-01-05T10:23:06.260-08:00Rituals of Contingency. Essay on Badiou, Wagner, Cage.<i>Theory & Event</i> has published my essay "Rituals of Contingency" in its <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.17.4.html" target="_blank">most recent issue</a>. The text can also be found on academia.edu, by following <a href="https://www.academia.edu/9838756/Rituals_of_Contingency._Badiou_Wagner_Cage" target="_blank">this link</a>. The abstract:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Badiou’s politics stresses the need for new fictions dissociated from the Great Names of history. By contrast, his views on art remain largely historical, focusing on names, schools and oeuvres, rather than on the artistic process itself. His views on Wagner, and his ideal of a non-transcendent ritual, are contrasted with the more process-oriented, open, immanent rituals of John Cage. Intersecting the poetics of the communist philosopher with those of the anarchist composer opens the possibility of a new interpretation of the immanent ritual and new values of freedom through the notion of a contingent form of discipline.</blockquote>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-53337686182806014302014-06-18T08:38:00.002-07:002014-06-19T15:26:16.696-07:00Sam Richards: The Engaged Musician (book review)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.centrehousepress.co.uk/centre_house_engaged_musician.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://www.centrehousepress.co.uk/_wp_generated/wp1f5ae736_05_06.jpg" /></a><span id="goog_2000466581"></span><span id="goog_2000466582"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>This book review first appeared in Tempo magazine, issue <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=TEM&volumeId=68&seriesId=0&issueId=269" target="_blank">#269</a></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<a href="http://www.centrehousepress.co.uk/centre_house_engaged_musician.html" target="_blank"><br /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The Engaged Musician: A Manifesto </i>by Sam Richards. CentreHouse Press, 2013. £14.99</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It has never quite become common to think about political engagement in the world of contemporary concert music, more so than in literature and the visual arts. Certainly, one can compose a piece of music to a political theme, yet the politics often feel a little extraneous to the music itself. Why? For one, music is abstract and evanescent, rather than a carrier of clear-cut meanings which can become permanent presences in discourse. Likewise, musical rituals are temporary things of limited physical effect – one does not occupy a public square with a symphony (at least, not for more than, say, fifty minutes). Furthermore, the ‘language’ of concert music has its own codes, which do not easily map onto those of the world and its struggles. The institutions, especially those of concert music, are often at a remove from the <i>agora</i>; indeed, in order to reach the kind of concentration that such music typically requires, one would generally like to keep the noise of the streets outside of the concert hall and the music school, so that the delicacies of the music can best be appreciated. This makes even the most progressive concert music, even when its ideological programme clearly supports political change, tend to operate in a disengaged manner.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is precisely this type of disengagement, not on the level of ideological reference but on the level of musical practice, that Sam Richards takes aim at in his book <i>The Engaged Musician</i>, published by CentreHouse Press. In the book, Richards uses an engraving by William Hogarth, <i>The Enraged Musician</i>, as a guiding image. Hogarth’s musician is a learned maestro, standing at the window of his studio, enraged because the world – with its manifold sounds of street life and workers and its popular songs – is interfering with his concentration, boxing his ears in a futile attempt to keep it all out. Richards takes this image from almost three centuries ago as his point of departure to critique the current musical situation, analysing the many layers and details in Hogarth’s picture and comparing them to our present world, arriving at an equally rich range of perspectives from which he formulates his own position, which is that of The Engaged Musician. If Hogarth’s maestro has opened his window in a gesture of impotent ire and frustration, Richards would like musicians to open their windows in order to let the world in.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://tpsaye.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hogarth-enraged-musician.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="273" src="https://tpsaye.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/hogarth-enraged-musician.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To do this, the musician should be ‘doctrinally non-doctrinal’ (p.22). Richards himself is a good example of this: his range of musical reference is impressively broad, writing with equal enthusiasm for and serious engagement with classical and contemporary music, experimentalism, jazz, political songs, and the various strains of folksong that he has studied in his capacity as folklorist. Similarly, his politics are identifiably to the left, yet he does not espouse any one final-solution-ideology, eclectically showing influences from anarchism, Marxism, Buddhism, as well as from a diversity of cultural and political critics.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For all this background, Richards’ writing is never academic in tone. Just as the contemporary musician should open the windows, the author does not want his message to get mired in merely academic discussions, believing that ‘practice, not theory, rattles cages’ (p.6) and approvingly quoting McKenzie Wark: ‘What has escaped the institutionalisation of high theory is the possibility of a low theory, a critical thought indifferent to the institutional forms of the academy or the art world’ (p.7). For Richards, this ‘low theory’ is formed of all the various musical practices that take up a political position against disengagement and oppression. Stylistically true to this position, Richards writes in an attractively amiable, informal register, giving the book an explicitly personal voice and making it a pleasure to read.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Being doctrinally non-doctrinaire means that Richards spends most of the book explaining what his idea of engagement is not. It is not some kind of superior spiritual remove from the world. It is not escapism. It does not collude uncritically with existing power structures (‘music-as-consent’). It is not found in any specific form or genre and, indeed, it always questions every definition of tradition, always questioning by what powers, what artistic politics, a tradition has come to be recognised as such. Instead, every time the engaged musician is faced with some artificial boundary separating the ‘worthwhile’ from the ‘worthless’, or ‘music’ from ‘non-music’, he will open the window and try to cross the imposed limits. Therefore, the form that engaged music will end up taking can never be laid out in advance. This also implies that engagement is an attitude rather than a form, and one that can be unpredictable, even to itself. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Richards includes a very instructive analysis of the career of Cornelius Cardew. Famously, by the seventies, he came to reject all of the radical music that he composed before, proclaiming that <a href="http://guaciara.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cardew_stockhausen.pdf" target="_blank">Stockhausen served imperialism</a>, and he proceeded – by working with accessible tonal forms and materials taken from protest songs – to create an explicitly engaged music that would be useful to the working class. Yet he never quite lost his middle-class background and outsider perspective when actually designing his music for the workers’ use and, in the end, brought together neo-romanticist musical ideals with political activism in an uneasy marriage, which did not always speak to his target audiences in the ways intended. Characteristically, Richards does not use this analysis to condemn Cardew, but as an opportunity to show that engagement in music operates within a rich variety of stylistic, affective, formal, institutional and social dichotomies, and that each position may potentially have something to offer to emancipatory politics.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Given that engaged music could be anything, what, then, makes it politically relevant? In Chapter 3, Richards offers an analysis of contemporary capitalism, taking his cue from Slavoj </span><span style="font-family: Verdana; letter-spacing: 0px;">Ž</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">i</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; letter-spacing: 0px;">žek</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> (another writer who has expertly navigated the boundaries between high and low theory), specifically his concept of the <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/968-living-in-the-end-times" target="_blank">‘end times’</a>. In Richards’ reading, ’end times’ refers to a spirit of permanent crisis permeating capitalism in its present form. As is common in Marxist theory, Richards describes capitalism with equal admiration and revulsion, as a force of great creative power as well as one of oppression and slavery. What makes our days feel like end times is that capitalism no longer seems to be able to believe fully in its own motivating myth, which is the idea that all the sacrifice that capitalist production requires ends up making the world a better place with more wealth for all. These days, a variety of crises (ecological, financial, the erosion of democratic legitimacy resulting from neoliberal policies, and so on) is coinciding to generate a sense of permanent crisis. Our media reinforce this sense by constantly bombarding us with ‘hyper-news’ (p.61). As Richards observes, ‘We are hardly ever without news events that seem epochal’ (p.61), so we are permanently on edge, eroding our ability to believe in capitalism’s promises. Richards believes music must show consciousness of this cultural atmosphere, and be deliberately in opposition to the prevailing defeatist sense that there is no alternative to capitalist oppression and crisis. Music must be accorded agency. For one, music operates as a soundtrack to society, and the music that we play can greatly influence the way we affectively understand what is happening around us. For another, music can also be ‘the main event’: to play something is to act, is to actively <i>create</i> this sound-track, to create possibilities for alternative readings of our situation. To do this by opening any closed window one might come across is the task of the engaged musician. It is a very broad agenda, but also a modest one, working locally and without grandiose schemes.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I highly enjoyed this book. It is an important overview of how music can be used to take an engaged stance - even in our post-historical times, which offer no clear-cut roadmaps for any sort of utopian politics. It did leave me with a few questions. First, the doctrinally non-doctrinaire position is strong, but it could also easily be part of the usual liberal capitalist rhetoric, which would have it that the combination of a free market and democratic freedoms are generators and guarantees of cultural diversity and proliferation of forms. Richards does recognise this danger, and uses one chapter to rail against all the bureaucratic systems that marketeers, but also funding bodies and academia itself, use to simulate this diversity. As he observes, ‘in effect we now have a new enraged musician. The angry figure at the window is no longer a classical musician, but an arts administrator who appears to have let the street in but cannot bear its unruliness. Such a person is concerned to marshal the plethora of sounds into a controllable structure’ (p. 216). Still, the question remains, how exactly is the authentic diversity of music itself to be distinguished from its ideological and commercial simulacra?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For this, one may need to go one step further than being doctrinally non-doctrinaire. I find Richards’ argument that this attitude is a necessary condition convincing, but it is not sufficient to stand as an alternative to market ideology. In fact, the one thing that free market liberal thinking abhors most is precisely the opposite of the non-doctrinaire: a radical dedication to something specific rather than to ‘variety’ and ‘choice’; something that may even look ‘doctrinaire’. The one next step after the acceptance of non-doctrinarism then may well be to take up a seemingly doctrinal position, a radical dedication to specific musical rituals.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course, this is what every deeply serious musical practice really does. Though Richards does not explicitly write about musical discipline as a political force, the spirit of that idea is present in the book’s many examples of alternative, counter-hegemonic musical practices. The chapters are interspersed with many highly diverse case studies, ranging from <a href="http://soznak.com/" target="_blank">a band</a> made up out of refugee musicians from many countries, through a <a href="http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/discrete-moments" target="_blank">Tilbury/Prévost-recording</a>, or a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj3JUHYK7VY" target="_blank">protest blues</a> played to disrupt normal proceedings in a bank, to the <a href="http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/" target="_blank">Soundart Radio channel</a>. Each of these examples is lovingly described and stands as a vital form of engagement, one of the many forms that the engaged position might take on. Put together, Richards’ examples form the strongest argument he has. They are the substance of his ‘low theory’ and, apart from featuring attractively written analyses, the book is worth reading for this small anthology alone.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>© Cambridge University Press 2014</i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-25671912648401834022014-04-28T07:55:00.001-07:002014-04-28T08:00:10.810-07:00Wandelweiser book review<div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>This book review first appeared in Tempo magazine, issue <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=TEM&volumeId=68&seriesId=0&issueId=268" target="_blank">#268</a></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">JÜRG FREY: WERKBETRACHTUNGEN, REFLEXIONEN, GESPRÄCHE by Eva-Maria Houben (ed.). Edition Howeg, Zürich 2013</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">ANTOINE BEUGER: WERKANALYSEN UND HINTERGRÜNDE by Eva-Maria Houben & Burkhardt Schlothauer (ed.).<i> </i>Edition Howeg, Zürich 2013</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In recent years, three volumes have appeared – published by Edition Howeg, a small publisher operating out of Zürich – dedicated to the works of the composers of the Wandelweiser group. The first volume, released in 2008, was a collection of short essays by some nine composers, called MusikDenken (‘MusicThought’). This year, two volumes were added, each dedicated to a single composer: one to Antoine Beuger and one to Jürg Frey, both including original texts, reflections and interviews. The texts are mostly in German but the Frey volume contains a few contributions in English.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">‘Wandelweiser’ itself is the name of a publishing company and CD label, run by Beuger, and it has become the name of a musical style or tendency that more and more is making its presence felt on the international experimental music scene. Or perhaps, rather, it names a network of musicians, or even, as Beuger likes to say, a certain atmosphere. The network includes the gradually expanding circle of composers that are published by Edition Wandelweiser, but also many friends, performers, concert organisations and sympathetic CD labels, such as the British label ‘another timbre’ which has published a 6-CD box set called <i>Wandelweiser und so weiter</i>.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is not quite possible to define what Wandelweiser music is about. In summaries, the use of long to very long silences and sparse isolated sounds is often mentioned, but this is in no way a defining characteristic of the music of the composers involved. A good bit of the work these days can in fact be quite lush, dense or melodic. If the composers have anything in common, it is mostly an attitude, which includes a willingness to take silence – and the passage of time itself – seriously as a musical resource. It is not uncommon for them to produce extremely long works that are perceivable as large-scale time architectures. Such works do not usually fit well with the typical requirements of the concert format of new music ensembles. It is hard to imagine a group like Ensemble Modern putting on a concert with a piece like Beuger’s relatively early <i>aus dem garten</i> for two performers, which lasts many hours and has at most one short sound per ten minute frame.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Hence the importance of the network of composers, performers and concert organisers, which is infused with a sort of DIY-mentality. Almost all Wandelweiser composers are active as performers, at least in each other’s music, and many are also concert organisers, working in places all over the world. What is shared is a performance culture, making it possible to work quickly on new shows with anybody who is familiar with the practices and aesthetic of this culture. This has made possible a flexible approach to instrumentation and ensemble organisation; the Wandelweiser catalogue is full of works for unspecified ensembles.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Full disclosure: the author of this review is part of the network, too, having released a CD with the label and contributed one essay to the Frey collection. This may disqualify me as a neutral voice, from looking with a dispassionate critical distance at the work and giving an objective appraisal of its worth, as one would expect from a critic writing on behalf of the public. Yet it is my belief that one of the reasons the Wandelweiser phenomenon is becoming stronger these days is precisely because this kind of neutral, disinterested public position is losing its credibility, as new music is pushed ever further into the margins of public discourse. Today, it’s no use fooling ourselves into thinking that New Music is somehow at the forefront of public culture, as was arguably the case in the immediate post-war decades when Cage could make a splash on national TV and Stockhausen could make it onto the cover of a Beatles record. A novel may still cause public controversy; a new compositional form, hardly. The withdrawal of the composer persona from the public eye does not mean that the energy of the experimental music project has run out, however: it is changing location, now increasingly residing in networks a bit less formal than your average new music festival. Wandelweiser presents one very successful example of how a musical culture can build institutions and tailor them to its own needs.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This also includes organising its own criticism, theorising, and discourse. Characteristically, the Wandelweiser composers are not waiting for some PhD student to come along and write theses about them. Instead, composers Eva-Maria Houben and Burkhardt Schlothauer have taken it upon themselves to collect texts by and about their colleagues, and to begin organising what will be the discourse on Wandelweiser practice. So what of the results?</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The two composer volumes present intriguing portraits of two related, but contrasting, thought-worlds. Both books include a few short texts by the composer, but most of the pages are devoted to analysis of the composer’s work and reflective essays, as well as some interviews. The focus of both books is on work from up to about ten years ago, comprising what we may today see as the ‘classic’ phase of Wandelweiser music.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">From the original writings, there emerge two different composer personalities, two different approaches to a shared aesthetic. Frey is much more concerned with musical form as an architecture of time, that allows for the experience of temporal ‘Leervolumen’ (empty spaces). This emptiness is often created through silences, which are themselves articulated by the sounds around them, which in turn have a sort of naked materiality. Those sounds have their own type of ‘silence’ for Frey, after Jabès: a type of ‘unexplored depths of the signs’, when they are most detached from the necessity to carry meanings. Instead, Frey seeks to find sounds that can simply carry the architectures of time in which he is interested. His sounds tend to be simple, more or less ‘found’: a tone, a triad or two, a roll on a drum. In many pieces, the sounds are extended and put together to occupy a length of time, and then brought into balance with silences and other types of sounds, so that spaces emerge with their own atmospheres. The experience of ‘silence’ in which Frey is interested ultimately depends on sonic presences, their contrast with other presences or absences, and their characters. In a wonderful phrase, Frey summarises his approach as “Ich lese [...] Klänge zusammen” – “I read sounds together”. </span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is different from Beuger, whose scores tend to look more recognisably conceptual, and whose inspiration is more explicitly mystical (the Beuger volume ends with translations from the Spanish into German of two cycles of St John of the Cross). Beuger is more interested in uncertainties surrounding the presence or absence of events. For example, the moment in which a sound has disappeared, but its atmosphere still haunts the listener. It is a fascination that Beuger attributes to his being exposed to the work of John Cage, and particularly to <i>4’33”</i>. The modality of ‘might have been’ is Beuger’s interpretation of Cage’s ‘indeterminacy’. As Beuger puts it in his lecture ‘Es könnte gewesen sein’ (‘It might have been’):</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“It might be, that something has happened,</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">it might have been music,</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">for I am touched and constantly think back to it.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To what?</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I cannot say. I don’t know.”</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To recreate such experiences, Beuger’s scores tend towards the careful definition of a performative uncertainty. An early, very radical work, consists of only a single sound lasting ten to forty minutes, followed by a silence of at least twenty and at most eighty minutes. Both the sound and the piece itself are uncertain in their temporal definition, though the form still creates the situation of disappearance and memory with precision.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The most revealing part of the Beuger volume is probably the interview with James Saunders, which was conducted in English originally (and published in the collection <i>The Ashgate Companion to Experimental Music</i>). Saunders elicits comments from Beuger on many individual pieces, addressing the development of his compositional thought as it goes from work to work and touching on many issues that are not so explicit in either the scores or the short texts. The importance of the number of performers is discussed, notably the number two, which for Beuger is connected to love – hence his duos are all about the love relationship, the experience of being together, sharing life, even while being fundamentally different. Likewise, time is discussed, long durations, and how they influence the concert form itself.</span><br />
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Both books contain many other interesting approaches to discussing the music. There is a radio interview with Frey on his use of spoken words as material for some text compositions, using bird names and obscure Swiss place names for their sounds. There is a list, compiled by composer and pianist Dante Boon, of remarkable features of Frey’s music, simply enumerating ideas that have caught his eye (and ear) as he looks at Frey scores. Both books have some beautifully engaged essays by Eva-Maria Houben, meticulously recording the psychological effects of sounds, forms, textures and changes as they occur while listening or playing.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span>
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The essays tend not to be very technical – a striking exception is Kathryn Pisaro’s essay on non-standard oboe fingerings in the oboe version of Beuger’s <i>calme, étendue</i>. But mostly, intricate analyses of formal structures and material relationships are absent, as is to be expected from a music that, at first glance, seems so simple as to be almost self-evident. Yet serious music never is self-evident, certainly not when the uncertain is so deep a part of its aesthetic. Such music has complex worlds of thought behind it, of the people thinking them, and the environments within which they work and play. The existing music-theory jargon is not always best suited to discussing all that. Hence the need for books like these, attempts by the community to find its own, appropriate and clear ways of talking.</span></div>
<div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">©</span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> Cambridge University Press 2014</span></span></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-68648682982543362792014-04-01T15:15:00.002-07:002014-04-01T15:33:30.622-07:00Mixed Economy, Ensemble Klang<iframe width="100%" height="450" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/139248161&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true"></iframe>
(from the score:) "Six individuals negotiate a mixed economy, which consists of four different ways of organizing the collective into subgroups. These four
planes are intertwined, so the performers must constantly shift their relationship to one another and to the whole, and out of the four
planes' motivic shreds create their song."<br><br>
<i>Mixed Economy</i>, written in 2010, is probably the most complex score I have written. The idea was to base everything on the way the sextet can be seen as a rich multiplicity of sub-ensembles: six solos, one sextet, fifteen duos (one for each couple of instruments), two trios (the winds and the 'rhythm section', mostly playing chords, however). However, instead of presenting these formations in sequential order, they all happen at the same time. In the densest sections of the piece, everybody is constantly related to everybody else in shifting ways. This puts a lot of pressure on individual parts as well as on the sense of ensemble playing - while creating a polyphony of very high density.<br><br>
The ideal of a completely saturated polyphony has been a constant in my composing, but not merely from a fascination with high information density. I'd like to create forms that do not only create complex textures, but also make their complexity somehow transparent. You can't be expected to hear and follow everything, but you should be able to zoom in and zoom out on the processes as they unfold while you listen. To achieve this type of complexity, I have ended up rather simplifying the basic motives of my melodic style, while making heavy use of canon-like relations and repetitions, but always in intricate mosaic patterns and flexible rhythmic relationships.<br><br>
Within this big, messy flux, sub-ensembles organize themselves: tiny duos that should be completely together, trio or sextet entrances that are coordinated. Like so many attempts at community in a world where all stability is under constant threat of drifting apart. The soft, slow "solos" offer a form of repose.<br><br>
The piece is in seven sections, each featuring different mixtures of the "planes". The fifth section is the longest, most continuous onslaught of total counterpoint.<br><br>
<i>Mixed Economy</i> was written (with support from Fonds Podiumkunsten) in 2010 for <a href="http://www.ensembleklang.com">Ensemble Klang</a>, and premiered by them in March 2014 at <a href="http://www.delink.nl">De Link</a> in Tilburg. This recording is of the first performance.
<br><br><br><br>
<i>also from the score:</i><br><br>
<i>Mixed Economy (Worlds on Four Planes)</i> is part of a series of works which share similar musical concerns. Other works in this series include <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/20Worlds.html">20 Worlds</a></i> (2005) for 2 pianos and <i>Worlds and Harmony</i> (2006-2008) for 12 instruments, <i>Sept Germes Cristallins</i> (2008) for voice and three instruments, <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/Crawling.pdf">Crawling</a></i> (2010) for any ensemble.<br><br><br>
These are some of the musical assumptions that these works mostly share:<br><br><br>
<b>Melody</b> is thought primarily as changing vectors of pure speed and direction that are woven together in varying patterns, rather than as rhetorical, expressive gestures;<br><br>
<b>Rhythm</b> and <b>meter</b> are directly related to melodic contour;<br><br>
Techniques of <b>indeterminate coordination</b> between parts leading to unpredictable polyrhythmical ("metametrical") structures, like moiré patterns;<br><br>
Decentered formal structures based on <b>interdependence</b> of the performers instead of centrally organized (conducted, determinate) structures, every performer being an equally important chain link with equal responsibility and influence on the total musical form, and requiring every performer to continually play and listen to the other performers at the same time;<br><br>
Dense, saturated types of <b>counterpoint</b> based on elaborate forms of heterophony, or variable canonic textures, organised in extensive blocks of almost static large-scale surface development, but of permanent internal variation;<br><br>
An interest in <b>diagonal listening</b>, in which listeners are encouraged to shift their attention freely from part to part, or between individual details, contrapuntal relationships and full textures;<br><br>
As in certain kinds of minimal music, <b>repetition of motivic cells</b> is used to facilitate textural transparency and flexibility of performer contribution, though the aural effect tends much more towards complexity and permanent change;<br><br>
Mixed Economy in particular explores the possibilities of <b>mixing multiple types of material</b> and <b>ever changing phrase structures</b> within individual parts.<br><br>
These technical assumptions seek, in a focused way, to bring about a ecstatic sense of multitudinous collectivies and of a multiplicity of possible points of view, a liberatory musical experience on the verge of the uncontrollable.<br><br><br><br>
Other works that feature related ideas include <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/EindigStuk.html">Eindig Stuk</a></i> (2004) for string quartet and electric guitar, <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/PanoramicVariations.html">Panoramic Variations</a></i> (2004) for 6 instruments, <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/2Suites.pdf">2 Suites</a></i> (2004) for violin and piano, <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/TheWeatherRiots.pdf">The Weather Riots</a></i> (2002) for 2 or more high instruments, <i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/ToccataIII.html">Toccata III</a></i> (2001) for 2 Glockenspiels.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-5003481904081827592014-03-29T16:27:00.000-07:002014-04-01T15:32:10.490-07:00'Action Time', essay for The Ear Reader<div class="moz-text-flowed" lang="x-western" style="font-family: -moz-fixed; font-size: 12px;">
My essay, <i>Action Time,</i> is now up on the weblog
of <a href="http://earreader.nl/archives/735" target="_blank"><i>The Ear Reader</i></a>. It looks at works by various composers (including Cage, Wolff, Beuger, Werder
and myself) trying to discover what an 'inside-out' view of time could look
like. One where time is a function of actions rather than the other way round. And it looks at how ideas about time affect the art of composition. At the heart of it, the piece discusses the Number Pieces, b<br />
<br />
The piece is pretty long; at the top of the article, you can find a link to a printable .pdf-version.<br />
<br />
<i>'In this history there are three related tendencies, although they occur in
changing configurations within specific works. The first tendency is to see
composition as definition of potential actions and action grammars. The second
is the dissolution of compositional signature and idiom. The third is the
emergence of interaction and the being-together of musicians as such as a
compositional parameter. The tendencies signal a shift in how musical material
is understood, a move away from material as that what is heard, to material as
the internal dynamics of events, in excess of their audible manifestation and
identity. Likewise, form shifts away from being concerned with sound
architecture (“organized sound”) to being an operation on time types. In
particular, action grammars delineate temporal fields that have a dimensionality
different from that governing the ‘real time’ of performance. Yet their ‘other
time’ is a virtual accompaniment to performance time, forming an indiscernible
part of it, and the relationship between these different time forms becomes the
subject matter of composition.'</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-38102108833537688642013-09-16T16:37:00.000-07:002017-11-09T14:36:17.123-08:00Presents<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The original version of this text was written in Dutch, written for the Flemish literary journal DWB as part of a special on music and literature. It discusses some ideas that were in the background of my mind while composing </i>Toccata III<i> for two glockenspiels. Here is a recording of this piece, on the UbuWeb page on my music, of a live performance by </i>Duo Vertigo<i> (Niels Meliefste and Claire Edwardes) from 2004: </i></span><a href="http://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/vriezen_samuel/mp3/Vriezen-Samuel_ToccataIII_060304.mp3" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">Toccata III [MP3]</a><br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Presents</b></span></blockquote>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the end of 2001, I caught a glimpse of an echo in time. I don’t mean a memory, flashback or reflection in the now of something that had happened before, but I could see the shade of a movement that was able to exist in several moments at once, that could let two points in time echo one another, without the one point having to precede the other.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That is not how we usually experience time, and it seemed to me that the shade had to exist within another kind of present, a simultaneity of multiple moments, that within our normal time should occur within some linear order, but that would enter into a different relation within the time of the shade. In that way, this echo-time was adding an extra dimension to linear time itself. Between the two moments the shade moves back and forth in its own echo-time, and that way an extended present comes into being, a present that is no longer the point of intersection that separates the future from the past, but one that encompasses both future and past in an internal dynamic within still unknown extra dimensions.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The occasion was the request to write a piece for the two percussionists of Duo Vertigo, Niels Meliefste and Claire Edwardes. We were talking about the possibility to organize a concert in the series that I was programming at the moment in Amsterdam, and without thinking too much about it I blurted out that I would like to contribute a piece of my own for two glockenspiels. Immediately upon saying that I saw the shade of the movement before my eyes, seeing how it would echo back and forth between the two instruments, with the two layers of the music illuminating one another, without being in a linear relationship of question and answer. Rather, the two would form each other’s mutual reflection or echo.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This led to a composition called <i>Toccata III</i>: a work in which the two players simultaneously play motives that are based on simple ascending and descending scales and arpeggios, in a constant tempo relationship of three to five. Figures appear in both parts in repeating mosaic-like patterns, making the whole unfold to kaleidoscopic effect, in which the motives would continually shift across one another into changing combinations. While listening this leads to a dislocation of temporal experience, because as a listener you can’t entirely tell at what moment you heard a motive exactly, or even which part played a particular motive first: the faster or the slower one. Additionally, the patterns contain a polyphony within themselves (much in the way that J. S. Bach could weave an entire polyphony into a single melodic strand in his works for solo instruments, such as in the Cello Suites.) Since playing is always simultaneous, the ear of the listener can always jump from a line that it hears within one part to one within the other part, making the piece as a a whole into a very complex crystal of potential paths of listening. Performed with the complex resonant sound of the glockenspiel, a sonic world comes into being of an indeed almost hallucinatory spectral quality.</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>*</b></blockquote>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The score was furnished with a motto from J. G. Ballard, out of his short story </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">News from the Sun</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. In the aftermath of 9/11, for a few months Ballard was the only prose writer that I could read at all. It was a time in which an intellectual hardening seemed to spread all over the entire Western world at astonishing speed. Everywhere, the attack on the Twin Towers was received, almost even welcomed, as finally a real moment in time, a fixed point, an origin out of which finally the axes could be laid down of a coordinate system to measure good and evil. For people of a great diversity of political positions, this event could serve as the irrefutable proof of their particular insights and as the unmistakable announcement of an epoch of truth in time. The religious become more religious, those who hated religion began to despise religion more, anti-imperialists saw empires finally teeter while experts on terrorism were making calculations of risk assessment and intelligence analysis in order to unfold even grander visions of mad carnage. A mythomaniac composer saw an artwork of cosmic destruction and a literary journalist who was considered influential in the Netherlands saw a final end to postmodernism. Everywhere, time was pulled taut. Myself, I went back to one of my first favorite authors, the only one who at that point seemed to have anything meaningful to say about the relationship between modernity and violence – and about escaping linear time.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In <i>News from the Sun</i>, Ballard presents a mysterious illness that is encroaching on the entire world. It is a spiritual kind of disease, a consequence of the travels through space which humanity has embarked upon. The exploration of space has opened humans up to a completely other way of experiencing time, and that mode is spreading like wildfire. Those who suffer from this disease (which will in the end come to include all humankind) no longer experience moments as being isolated within a linear progression; instead, subsequent moments are increasingly compressed into ever more static, but also ever deeper experiences of time, perhaps a bit as in cubist painting, only more brilliant.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As in many of his stories of that period of his career (the 60s and 70s), the main characters are gradually being initiated into this resplendent new world liberated of linear time, which also has the effect that their normal, old existence grinds to a halt entirely. Ballard’s obsessive evocations of a time that disappears from the world seemed to me to be more truthful and fitting to the big trauma of the New World Order than the many battle cries of the Epoch of Truth, and by taking up a quote in my score I made his work godparent to mine:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The sky was filled with winged men. Franklin stood among the mirrors, as the aircraft multiplied in the air and crowded the sky with endless armadas. Ursula was coming for him, she and her sisters walking across the desert from the gates of the solar city. [...] Happy now to be free of time, he embraced the great fugue. All the light in the universe had come here to greet him, an immense congregation of particles.</i></span></blockquote>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There exist strong similarities between Ballard’s vision and the image that I had in mind while composing <i>Toccata III</i>. But in the end, the visions do not coincide. If Ballard evokes the transition of linear time into static time, my composition remains a musical composition throughout, working with motives and motions, which always retain an aspect of linear development. What I was interested in was to see motion, or gesture, as such, and to pry its quality loose from a temporal fabric that would be linear by necessity, in order to fashion deeper forms of time out of it. Just as positing a mystical form of time as a contrast to linear time may not be a sufficient answer to the stasis of the ideological hall of mirrors, the swamp of lies, of covert operations and manipulations that the world had gotten trapped in during the Bush years following 9/11 (and I’m not sure we’ve quite managed to get out of that swamp today).</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>*</b></blockquote>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Music lets us experience how an act defines time. However, the time of a musical action (a motive, say, or every single sound that is emitted) is not subject to any absolute measure, neither being formed of pointillistic nows, nor existing within static infinity, but it always comprises an internal measure and composition that determines its specific quality. Such temporal units I will call time zones. Put together, time zones can merge into a fabric that we could call a music(-al composition). The specific composition of time zones determines the form of a present, of a space within which acting is possible.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All time zones are accompanied by other time zones, they reflect on one another. Sets of time zones can compose themselves into a linear process, a one-dimensional time with future and past, but other compositions of time are possible as well. Time zones can mutually act on each other, let their particular measures interfere with one another; they overlap and form lines, fields, circuits, zones of unanticipated dimensions; they compose into larger time zones or divide into smaller ones; and both the pointillistic now and eternity are limit cases of temporal compositions. The time of gesture, which always has its own measure and composition, is primary; life in the world such as we lead it, one of many possible compositional results.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not only can we dethrone linear time or expose the present such as we live it day by day as a false kind of time, but we can also deploy time and motion as the building blocks for creating another experience of the present. One that is deeper and more livable than the rhythms of the world as we know it, and more so than those all too brilliant and static visions. A present that invites us to acting differently.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-13547302809291727992013-06-27T15:58:00.002-07:002013-06-27T16:05:20.288-07:00The Othertimely - On history and Jürg Frey<i>The following text was written for a collection of texts in celebration of Jürg Frey's 60th birthday: <a href="http://www.editionhoweg.ch/houben-eva-maria-hg/" target="_blank">Jürg Frey, Werkbetreachtungen – Reflexionen – Gespräche</a>, edited by Eva-Maria Houben, published by Edition Howeg in Zürich. The book also includes texts and interviews by Frey himself, by Eva-Maria Houben, Dante Boon, Jack Callahan and others.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
When is Jürg Frey's music? Not from when, but at what moment in time does it work? Does it belong to now, whatever the moment 'now' may be, or does it speak from some other time, gone or to come, or is perhaps timeless? These are fundamental questions that can be asked of any music. Like no other art form, music seems to exist 'now', but at the same time it always relates this 'now' to something outside, some virtual other time that gives 'now' its shape in the music, a time of hazy memories or vague expectations. Let’s, for the moment, call this virtual time from which music speaks the othertimely dimension of music. In my experience of the work of Jürg Frey, this dimension of relating now to the othertimely has become particularly uncanny.<br />
<br />
Some background, to begin with, on how I encountered this dimension first, which goes back to music education. During the years of my formal training at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, a very large thing called 'music history' was always present. It was the thing that somehow would always condition the now that we were creating in our own works, and in the teachings of The Hague School, consciousness of your relation to this music history was always stressed. Moreover, in that environment, it was clear that there existed a major opposition in how one could deal with ‘music history’, exemplified by Schönberg on the one hand and Stravinsky on the other. The difference could be said to be this: Schönberg was seen as a believer working inside music history and giving it shape and direction, whereas Stravinsky worked with the ironic wisdom of one who can't afford to fully believe any more, and was circling around music history from the outside.<br />
<br />
While both were revered, the aesthetic environment of the conservatory made it clear that the more advanced compositional sensibility should include a Stravinskian moment of distance. We were taught to see music history as a repository of models, of styles, forms and techniques, and one defined one's own artistic persona by relating to these models, but always through a distancing function, usually called 'commentary' or ‘irony’. As a composer, the ideal was to become an individual by the way you commented on a model, which was a thing that was available to you through the big medium of music history. You could call this position “post-historical”. The distance was necessary not only to form your own position, but also to guard yourself against getting trapped too much in the believer's position, that of the belief that one could live the actual Truth of music history.<br />
<br />
Such a belief was of course Schönbergian. Indeed Schönberg is a historical composer if ever there was one. Maybe he even was the last one, of perhaps very few such composers at all. It remains striking to read a work like the <i>Theory of Harmony</i>, a book that I've often thought of as a “novel about tonality”, meticulously reworking the past at the very moment that the composer's own works were consciously exploring the future. In the book centuries of tonal experience are critiqued, turned upside down, explored, speculated about, even as in the book, Schönberg explicitly refers to his own practice as “ultra-modernist”. Thus the Schönbergian ‘now’ was a point from which one had to look back and forward at the same time to locate oneself at a pivotal moment in music history, and so be fully part of its project. The problem of course is that the project called ‘music history’ is not a general thing. Music history is a construction for understanding music, and its form in classical music was conceived to help the Western bourgeois class explain its own rise to prominence. Hence, music history is a project that only really gets going with, say, Mozart's attempt to work independently (Father Bach’s work still being ‘early music’), and ends with the very gradual decline of the bourgeois project of Bildung and political participation, with the role of the citizen gradually being replaced by that of the consumer. This more or less defines two centuries of work that even today is recognized by us, late-bourgeois consumers, as “classical music”, with Schönberg working at just about the end of it.<br />
<br />
Neither model was satisfactory for me as a young composer, though I wasn't quite able to articulate why. I learnt the tricks and tactics of commentary without learning to trust them; I also learnt the forms and techniques of music history without learning to live them as Truth. I think these are conditions that very many artists have been working under for decades, and by now, the majority of working composers have matured in these conditions.<br />
<br />
The great influence of John Cage on composers working now may in part be explained by this. His work can make you feel that there are ways around the whole problem of “music history”, as if he found a way to sidestep the conundrum. Morton Feldman in fact used that idea in his polemics against the European avant-garde composers, claiming that Boulez and Stockhausen were still too much within history. By contrast, in Feldman’s beautiful mythology, the New York School could come out of just six weeks in 1951 during which nobody knew what was happening. That’s without doubt an exaggeration, but it does feel like the othertimely dimension of Cage’s work can’t be reduced to “music history” as we know it. Instead, Cage’s work speaks from a different place, closer to the texture of time itself as it is moulded and shaped in his temporal structures, using chance techniques that can be applied to whatever material it encounters, whether historical or not. Sometimes, Cage’s work uses some kind of “music history” (say, in <i>Hymns and Variations</i>, the <i>Europeras</i> or <i>Cheap Imitation</i>); sometimes, it hardly seems to do so (say, in the <i>Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra</i> or in <i>Music For...</i>). Cage’s othertimely position is like a diagonal cutting through history; indeed, as Marjorie Perloff has argued, his tradition is a piecemeal personal construction: the “tradition” of Schoenberg, Satie, Joyce, Thoreau, Fuller and Suzuki. <i>Bien étonnés</i> indeed!<br />
<br />
One of the things then that one might get from Cage is the sense that art need not speak from, or about, music history in order to have interesting or important things to say. Or perhaps even that it’s possible to redesign the othertimely place from which the music speaks. A looser relation to music history helps open artistic awareness to other possibilities, to help us realize that there is in fact an irreducible plurality not just of musical styles, but of temporalities themselves. Many can be discovered. Music can speak from the other time of social organization and class struggle (Wolff, Cardew), from awareness to sound itself (Oliveros’ Deep Listening) or its physical structure (Lucier), from the timeless realms of mathematics (Johnson, Tenney) or even from outside of time (as Ashley called his collected writings).<br />
<br />
This, then was my situation when I first heard Jürg Frey’s music: I had become familiar with the idea that music could speak from within music history (as did Schönberg), or from a deliberate distance to music history (the Stravinskianism that was taught in The Hague), or from places that are somehow entirely tangential to it, even outside of time. But in Frey, I heard again a voice speaking from history - but not as I knew it. Here, history was neither an intensely lived actuality, nor a distant repository of objects and materials. History itself seemed to be a place outside of time.<br />
<br />
This is probably not a situation unique to Jürg Frey’s work, but thinking of what I heard in some of his pieces made me more aware of this possibility than anything else. Perhaps you can hear a composer like Satie in a similar way - Satie, a composer who was dreaming of the middle ages as he lived the life of the bars of exciting metropolitan Paris. His early works sound like a dreamed reconstruction of some very old music, as if he was trying to dream Gregorian chant and the middle ages back into our time (even up to inventing entire holy knighthood orders for his personal church). Likewise, Xenakis, in key moments in his work, dreamed of a music that would speak from ancient Greece. But with Jürg Frey, the dream is harder to grasp. It’s not even clear if it’s a dream at all.<br />
<br />
The clearest example I can think of is the use of triads in pieces like <i>Sam Lazaro Bros</i> and the <i>2nd String Quartet</i>. In neither of these pieces do the triads “refer” to historical material, as a triad would do in a piece out of the post-historical commentary line. But neither are the triads ahistorical things, pure objects, as they might have been in a James Tenney piece. What happens instead is a consistent evocation of history, though I’m never quite sure what history is being evoked exactly. The piano piece has something Satie-like, but at times one feels a turn could almost be from the 16th century. Or is it Schubert, or rather the place from which Schubert’s work speaks as well, that we are hearing? Then again, our piano is a modern instrument, and the piece might also just be modern music. Between all these possibilities, <i>Sam Lazaro Bros.</i> (with its bluntly noncommittal title) never quite settles into a specific one. It seems to skirt the boundaries between historical identities as it ambles along in its own time, just as its own phrase never settles, never quite cadences, drawing us along with it, constantly passing many othertimely times that virtually dance around it in the background.<br />
<br />
In the quartet similar effects happen through different means. Here, we’re not drawn along by an ambling line; instead, the sounds are separate, but each new sound again sucks us into an inner world that itself sounds like a vast superposition of other-times. This time, it’s not the turns of phrase that suggest these, but there are many voices submerged into the sound itself. The insistent atmosphere might remind you of Schubert, the sonic complexity, of Scelsi; but if you listen deeply, you can sometimes hear what sounds like entire orchestras and choirs in the sound, playing symphonies that sound from an unknown place. Each chord itself could belong to many eras at once. Again, it is as if they are all virtually present, shaping our now without disclosing their own location.<br />
<br />
These pieces speak from an uncharted virtual world that is hidden within music history. The music does actively seek out that world and so it does engage history, but without fixing it. Instead, it encounters material that is historically loaded, but the material is immediately being returned to virtuality. I hear a minor triad, but I don’t know from what place it came, like a piece of driftwood washing ashore which clearly must have had a history. I’m in fact not sure if I know the triad or not. Perhaps it needs to be heard again. And so we realize we should listen once more to the things that seemed known, perhaps to discover that they are, in fact, starting points for things we did not know we knew.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-28384125968551482892013-05-05T07:01:00.006-07:002013-05-05T07:46:37.195-07:00Now on Youtube: Disaster Songs, poems by Rob Halpern, music by Samuel Vriezen, performed by the David Kweksilber Big Band and the amazing Claron McFadden earlier this year. I'm very happy to have it as a video, because the ensemble playing was meant to be seen as well as heard, particularly in the third song.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/sVNSdQy7R5g" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14080914.post-76167307765690377722013-03-07T14:19:00.000-08:002013-03-07T15:40:06.589-08:00A hidden non-hierarchical structure. Block Designs and The Weather Riots<i><br /></i>
<i><br /></i>
<i>Below, an exchange with musicologist Gilbert Delor, on my composition </i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/TheWeatherRiots.pdf" target="_blank">The Weather Riots</a><i> and on </i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_design" target="_blank">Block Designs</a><i>.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
The Weather Riots<i>, for variable instrumentation, is one of my most performed pieces. Written in 2002, it constitutes my first compositional response to John Cage's idea of structuring pieces with 'flexible time brackets', which he did in his late series of compositions, the so-called </i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Pieces" target="_blank">Number Pieces</a><i>.</i><i> Links to performances of the piece are given at the end of the post.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Block Designs<i> are structures from the mathematical field of combinatorics. I used one such structure to determine the harmonies in </i>The Weather Riots<i>. Upon learning of this technique, composer<a href="http://www.editions75.com/" target="_blank"> Tom Johnson,</a> who is a good friend of mine, explored the subject much more deeply, which led to a whole series of wonderful pieces.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Hi Samuel<br />
<br />
I have a question for you: when it comes to combinatorial design, Tom often refers to a piece of yours he heard "around 2003", which was based on a series of 11 five-note chords, each one having two notes in common with all the others. Can you tell me which piece it was, and, with some precision, when this took place? Thanks for your help.<br />
<br />
Gilbert<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Dear Gilbert,<br />
<br />
Block designs appeared in my music briefly in 2002, as basic harmonic structures that were used to develop elaborate contrapuntal possibilities. First this happened in <i>Seasons</i> (2001-2002) which used systems of 9 chords of 4 notes each. The (11, 5, 2) system appeared in <i>The Weather Riots</i> (2002) and <i>Krise</i> (2002); Tom heard <i>The Weather Riots</i> in performance in 2003. <i>The Weather Riots</i> remains among my works the strongest composition to use block designs; the piece has been played more than any other piece of mine so far.<br />
<br />
Samuel<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Dear Samuel,<br />
<br />
Shall I conclude from what you say that you were already aware of block design theory in 2001? Tom says in his writings that you're the one who led him toward this field of mathematics, but that you probably didn't know about it yourself by this time. As if you had settled your collection of chords for The Weather Riots only through empiric approach. Is he wrong?<br />
<br />
G.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Dear Gilbert,<br />
<br />
No, that was more or less the case. I do have some background in mathematics, but I never studied the field of combinatorics deeply so I didn't know about block designs. I was simply looking for a harmonic system which would have certain symmetrical properties, and I found a few block designs. These I used in my pieces. Then I showed my structures to some music theorists & mathematicians online, and people told me that these were in fact "block designs".<br />
<br />
Shortly after that, I told Tom about the structures when he happened to be in Amsterdam, at a concert I organized, on which the ensemble <i>HPS Band</i> performed their version of <i>The Weather Riots</i> (this was in fact on march 11, 2004). In our correspondence, I find the first mention of Tom's investigating "Steiner triple systems" a few weeks later, on April 1, 2004.<br />
<br />
I never used block designs seriously in my later works after that; Tom more or less "took over" with the technique, and applied them differently than I did. For me, block designs were a solution to a compositional problem about harmony. For Tom, the block designs were given, and the compositional problem was how to translate them into music! As a consequence, I think Tom's approach to block designs is much purer than what I did.<br />
<br />
The real subject matter of <i>The Weather Riots</i> is not block design harmony as such, but how to integrate the time structure of the Cage number pieces (with flexible time brackets) with what you could call a neo-baroque kind of contrapuntal language.<br />
<br />
My problem was this: all the motives in <i>The Weather Riots </i>(each with its own contour & metrical feel) have a similar harmonic structure, being all based on five notes. The time structure in <i>The Weather Riots</i> was supposed not to be about hierarchical relations between the harmonies. That being given, how could I find harmonic families that would relate chords to one another in a <u>minimally</u> hierarchical way - i.e. no two chords were supposed to have a "stronger" relation than any other pair, so that <u>any</u> progression would have the same structural meaning - while also allowing for a <u>maximum</u> of variation of harmonic quality - so that the harmonic feel of the piece would have something "chancy" about it?<br />
<br />
Block designs were the solution to the problem. In <i>The Weather Riots</i>, everything is based on eleven sets of five pitch classes (you could say "chords"), with every two such chords having exactly two notes in common. Finding the (11, 5, 2) system (though not yet knowing that it had a mathematical name!), I found a specific set of 11 chords in which I would integrate the two maximally opposed harmonic qualities possible in 12-tone tuning. That is, one of the eleven chords was to be a pentatonic scale (stacks of fifths), another one was to be a chromatic segment (stacks of minor seconds). Taking those two chords as my starting point, much of the choice for the other 9 chords was already fixed, and among the options that were left I chose what I felt would give me the most varied harmonic quality.<br />
<br />
For Tom, however, it was a question of taking known block designs and then figuring out the best musical forms for them, which led him to quite different problems, such as how to order them, which scales to choose, what instrumentation, what types of phrasing. He's more interested in choosing all that with an eye to making the block design as such musically clear, whereas for me block designs were more like a hidden structure for governing non-hierarchical relations within a free and highly varied polyphony.<br />
<br />
Nowadays, I do feel that, after all of Tom's excellent work on them, I should perhaps go back some time to block designs and explore them again in the context of my own interests (which is often more about "musical games" than about "musical structures"). They remain highly suggestive models for organizing musical actions.<br />
<br />
Samuel<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Some performances of The Weather Riots:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/WeatherRiots1.html" target="_blank">Number Night Ensemble, Amsterdam 2002</a> (first performance)</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><a href="http://sqv.home.xs4all.nl/WeatherRiots2.html" target="_blank">Dante Boon & Samuel Vriezen</a>, Vienna 2005</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><a href="http://f.cl.ly/items/0H2s3J3w0G2G2I0f323I/The%20Weather%20Riots.mp3">Ensemble of Moments Musicaux</a>, Aarau 2011</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0