Love trek

Very NICE.

addtive synthesis

Nice waveforms mechanized. It reminds me of how I often think about granular synthesis ideas and also where they come from. This is a fun video to watch and the reultant sculptures are quite wonderful.

play

The other component of life!


Lest I focus on goals oppressive routines to the point of neglecting something that I take to be a given. Or as my dearest likes to call it, my manic side.

Now go play!

Perceptual Music

What in the world is that? It is a question that has come up and it is one that is important to me as it is what I believe I will devote my PhD and possibly many more years to developing and understanding.

The thumb nail sketch is music that address the perceptual organs as the recipients of a piece, not the human. What I am trying to differentiate between is the social, cultural and personal factors that shape perception versus the "absolute" (meant in the sense that they are probabilistically similar across humans) parameters of sound that the human ear and brain perceive.

The goal is music that is based on a deep understanding of the perceptual routine and from here creating things that take advantage of and explore the range of possibilities. This is in opposition to notions of constructing music that is based on rule sets that are concerned with a specific language or notion of what music is. In the end it is sound and beginning from this starting point and mastering sound in terms of it's attributes and the how it is then perceived seems to me a more fruitful approach.

Certainly there is a great deal that contributes to this knowledge base; acoustics, psychoacoustics, psychology, music traditions, philosophy, communications, etc. This list is not clear in my head yet, nor is the manner in which what I am advocating will combine these various disciplines. The notion that does resonate though is beginning with auditory illusions as they indicate limitations and are a place to work from. What I have mind here are; shepard tones and acoustic beats because they show how a limitation can be utilized toward aesthetic investigations of the human condition.

I suppose the most important music trend for me is music that I consider to timberal composition. This is in fact how I often think about my work. Here I am thinking of works of Scirrino, Lachenmann, Debussy, Barlow, Roads, Risset, Tenney, Chowning, Vaggione and others. There is a use of the parameters of sound in order to achieve constructs that are timberal evolutions and explorations predominantly, while there are certainly other aspects to these works, the sound seems first and foremost. It is vague and I have not found the correct manner to indicate my notions, but then that is what I have the rest of my life for.

Decision

Today Scott Cazan and myself tasked ourselves with the creation of a new piece in one day. I suppose I am the one who came up with that rule as Scott noted, but all the same, we finished the piece. Along the way I learned some pretty interesting stuff.

We began by talking about how the piece would go, workflow ideas and there we stumbled on the fact that I tend to work with a conceptual framework and Scott tends to make things that are performative. By this I understand that he creates pieces of software that the computer performs or he creates a set or rules/ideas etc and then performs the piece. I on the other hand place layers in a time line and have a sense that I will make decisions about direction and implementation along the way.

So once he graciously agreed to work in my format we were off. I suppose we never debated the merit of working one way or another, we just noted it.

Once we had each taken the role of creative director several times, we had amassed a good amount of material and a decent form. The creation of this material had been the result of instructions by one and performance by the other. I had instructed Scott to create the "A monkey in the sound of an angel" while he directed some of my violin improvisations and ordered the textual components.

Now that the first version was complete there was a bit of manipulation to be done, for this we each took the bounce of the piece and had 20 minutes in which to manipulate it. This was very revealing.

I took and compressed the piece again and again, did some pitch shifting, then expanded it. Essentially I created a rule and did it repeatedly and with some variation. Scott took two sections and looped them, then swept the bit crusher. This was very performative. I didn't really pick up on this until the end of the project.

So then the final edit, where we dumped all the tracks in and attempted to form it all into a nice mass. And well, I think it worked well.

LISTEN HERE
As Scott said, "Sort of a one day vacation." Yeah, sonic vacation.

litte ones and crab

These are my new nephew and niece. Hunter and Savannah

In other random things that come across my desk....

We had crab at Joe's Crab Shack tonight and the people next to us gave Christine Crab! What else can I say. The girl loves crab, so much that random people just give her crab.

Karkowski and Gehry

The importance of play. The rubric of academic work does not encourage the playful creation of art. Is this true? I was speaking with Zbigniew Karkowski about his style of working and his practice of creation and I thought this little quote to myself. Looking around at myself and my work, I think the limitation that playfulness is not part of the academic rubric is only partially justified. The importance of play, and this video of Gehry (down at the bottom) comes to mind, really holds a great deal of resonance with me. So, it seems that a portion of the lack of play is a personal infliction.

That said, there is a moment in the Gehry video where he notes how much of his own personal decision it was to divide the work that one does for others and the play that one does for oneself. I remember last year making a couple of short play pieces that I considered as play, nothing worth exhibiting. Yet when I played those for people there has been this sense for various listeners, that these little shorts are truly "Christopher".

It seems that incorporating this approach of playful as well as the other more precise refinement of "doing it to the best of your ability" is not as mutually exclusive as I have thought them to be. Karkowski noted how he liked the immediacy of Japanese culture, the sort of giving a piece everything you have and then being totally detached because it is done. At the time of thought about the severity of total immersion in a project and indeed, there is a common thread of the tortured artist in history of the art that I based this mental model on, but, I am now glimpsing that torture component is not necessary. In fact, is it possible that the "tortured artist" notion is a misinterpretation of an artist at work? Maybe people who are not actively creative on a day to day basis the way that a devoted artist is mistake the dedication to a project for a tortured soul. After all, if you are not inside the work, as one is when working through some truly resonant creation, there is really no portal to understanding the emotional depth and connection that is part of the working process. The playfulness component Certainly there are people who were "tortured souls", but possibly this is a mental place that they strive for. After all, one need simply look at the practice of S & M to be reminded that not everyone has the same desires.

What I keep thinking and locking into is the positive implication of "play." I will have to focus on that for a while and see where it leads.




This one is also on point.

nyc and BOS goes my new piece

I won't be able to go out for the show, but I am having a new piece played. Here is the info...

March 13th at 10:00pm at Lilypad: loadbang and ai ensemble



New York based New Music groups loadbang and ai ensemble will make their Boston area debut Friday, March 13th, at Lilypad. loadbang will be playing music of American experimentalist John Cage; premiering brand new arrangements of music by the Velvet Underground, written for loadbang by Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Lang; and playing new pieces by young composers Christopher Jette and Daniel Highman.

ai ensemble will be performing music of 20th century masters Iannis Xenakis and Kaija Saariaho, as well as pieces written for them by composer friends Nicholas Demaison, David Grant, and Scott Scharf.



loadbang, a New York based contemporary/electroacoustic quartet (Andy Kozar, trumpet; Philip Everall, bass clarinet; William Lang, trombone; and Jeffrey Gavett, baritone voice) met during the inaugural year of Manhattan School of Music’s one-of-a-kind Contemporary Performance program, and have been playing together ever since. In addition to commissioning over 10 pieces in the past year, loadbang performs original music, improvised and composed by all members of the band. Their recent appearances include two shows at John Zorn’s venue The Stone, and a concert of the music of John Cage as a part of artist Neke Carson’s music series at The Gershwin Hotel.



Based in New York, the ai ensemble is a duo founded by clarinetist Alejandro Acierto and cellist Isabel Castellvi to promote contemporary works for clarinet and cello. Founded in 2007, Alejandro and Isabel met while pursuing performance degrees at DePaul University and have worked together on several projects including performances with ensemble dal niente, TACTUS, ThingNY, and Chicago Composers Forum. Since their conception, they have already had over a dozen works written for them by emerging young composers featured on programs that also included works by established composers such as Xenakis, Lim, Saariaho, and Ran. The 2007-2008 debut season featured 9 concerts in New York and Chicago in various venues, drawing a diverse crowds. This season will feature several premieres, collaborations, and touring. Currently Alejandro and Isabel are pursuing a Master's Degree at Manhattan School of Music for Contemporary Music Performance.





Ticket and Venue Information:



Tickets: $10/$5 with student ID



Tickets are available at Lilypad 30 minutes prior to the show.



Lilypad

Inman Square

1353 Cambridge St.

Cambridge, MA



lily-pad.net

myspace.com/loadbangensemble

www.dalniente.com/aiensemble.html

March 15th at 8:00pm at The Tank: loadbang



New York based loadbang will be playing music of American experimentalist John Cage; premiering brand new arrangements of music by the Velvet Underground, written for loadbang by Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Lang; and playing new pieces by young composers Christopher Jette and Daniel Highman.

loadbang, a New York based contemporary/electroacoustic quartet (Andy Kozar, trumpet; Philip Everall, bass clarinet; William Lang, trombone; and Jeffrey Gavett, baritone voice) met during the inaugural year of Manhattan School of Music’s one-of-a-kind Contemporary Performance program, and have been playing together ever since. In addition to commissioning over 10 pieces in the past year, loadbang performs original music, improvised and composed by all members of the band. Their recent appearances include two shows at John Zorn’s venue The Stone, and a concert of the music of John Cage as a part of artist Neke Carson’s music series at The Gershwin Hotel.





Ticket and Venue Information:



Tickets: $10/$5 with student ID



Tickets are available at the The Tank 30 minutes prior to the show.



The Tank

345 W. 45th St. between 8th and 9th Ave.

New York, NY 10036



www.thetanknyc.org

www.myspace.com/loadbangensemble

blog reduction

Remove the images and play with the words and this is what you get. Well, you have to use the wordle algorithm to.