CD
2
1.
Michael Dessen2
Mountains and Waters 5:35
2.
Chris Mercer1
Untitled I (1999) 15:20
3.
Alan Lechusza2
side a/side b 9:22
4.
Juliana Snapper2 and Pieter Snapper
Eulogy for Verna Van Solkema 9:18
5.
Shahrokh Yadegari2
Tear (1999) 9:17
6.
Pamela Madsen1
The Red Shoes 11:56
7.
Erik Ulman1
Gertrud 17:59
1. Michael Dessen2
Mountains and Waters 5:35
Performers: Cosmologic: Michael Dessen2 (trombone and percussion), Nathan
Hubbard (percussion), Jason
Robinson2 (tenor saxophone), Scott
Walton3 (bass)
Recorded: Live Performance, February 24, 2000; Galoka Jazz
Scene, La Jolla, CA
"Mountains
and Waters" draws its title from a work by Eihei Dogen, who
helped bring Zen Buddhism from China to Japan in the 13th
century and founded the influential Soto School. This piece
was meant both as a vigorous warm-up for Cosmologic and as an investigation of what Dogen calls the "mountains
walking." Despite the reference to Zen, this particular piece
is neither slow nor quiet.
2.
Chris Mercer1
Untitled I (1999) 15:20
Performers: 6-Channel Tape
Recorded: Studio Recording, 1999
"Untitled
I (1999)" takes as a starting point a form of music-making
involving the use of consumer electronic devices such as turntables,
tape recorders, synthesizers, etc. The composer uses the flaws
of these devices and, where possible, seeks to induce in them
malfunctions of various sorts. In "Untitled I (1999)", this
idea is extended to the digital domain. Not only do defective
analogue devices provide source materials, but they inspire
the application of a similar concept to digital technology.
DSP software is pushed beyond its intended use to provide
a rich wellspring of digital artifacts. The idea of the defect,
the artifact, or the by-product serving as the subject for
yet further processing--and hence, the creation of even further
removed by-products--is the focal point of the work. Formally,
the work is concerned with an abstract, vaguely articulated
periodicity. The formal period is a series of processes and
transformations to which the materials are subjected. The
main signposts to the listener in this cycle are the recurrence
of chorale-like 'pitchy' material (which introduces a cycle)
and of a baldly iterative motoric passage (which ends a cycle).
The polarity expressed by these signposts suggests one of
the subjects of the work's structural 'middle ground,' namely
the Stockhausian notion of relatedness between sustained materials
and iterative materials and the fact that the two can be made
to approach one another through changes of rate or the application
of modulatory processes. Against this idea, a second dialectic
is played out, in which sine-based materials alternate with
noise-based materials and certain points in the formal period
call for them to impart qualities to one another. The entire
formal period is heard three times, each shorter than the
last. The work ends at the start of what may be a substantially
malformed fourth cycle. The ending is significant in that
its behavior encompasses both a timbral stasis and a form
of iterativity, suggesting an uneasy resolution of one of
the work's dialectics.
3. Alan
Lechusza2
side a/side b 9:22
Performers: Christopher Alder (conductor), Jeff Smith2 (winds), Jason Stone (winds), Alan
Lechusza2 (winds), Jason
Robinson2 (winds), Orion Rapp4 (winds),
Jonathan Rotter4 (trombone), Marques Lyons (trombone), Michael Dessen2 (trombone), Jerry Fenwick (trumpet), Scott
Walton3 (contrabass), Christopher Williams4 (electric and contrabass), Nathan
Hubbard (percussion), Vikas Srivastava4 (percussion)
Recorded: Live Performance, February 10, 2001; Erickson Hall,
UCSD
"side a/side
b" is a large ensemble project constructed to be both elastic
and challenging enough to continually grow and push the performers
into different and challenging areas. The music is a collection
of materials which are a mixture and juxtaposition of notated
and improvised materials. These two elements together help
shape the different compositions thereby giving further direction
to the entire event. The construction of this large ensemble
comes from the tradition established by Anthony Braxton's
creative orchestra and the Vinny Golia large ensemble.
4.
Juliana Snapper2 and Pieter Snapper
Eulogy for Verna Van Solkema 9:18
Performers: Musique Concrète
Recorded: Studio Recording, January 1999; by Juliana Snapper
and Pieter Snapper
Shortly before
her death in 1999, our mother gave us a box of dozens of cassette
recordings she had collected over the previous 25 years. Our
mother was a professional singer and music educator, and she
routinely recorded the music we made with her at home.
A few months
later we returned to the recordings to compose a eulogy for
her funeral. We augmented the low-fi home sessions with commercial
and concert recordings of her performances. The production
values of Eulogy are low, and the emotions quite raw. Somehow
the two seemed to go together. In its coarseness it calls
into question, explicitly and implicitly, broad issues surrounding
the motivations and pleasures of documenting ourselves and
our environments on tape. Eulogy is not so much a portrait
of our mother, but a sketch of the relationship we developed
with her through music.
Juliana Snapper
is a doctoral student in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices
at UCSD.
Pieter Snapper
is a professor of Composition and Tonmeister Studies at the
Istanbul Technical University Center for Advanced Musical
Research, Turkey.
5. Shahrokh
Yadegari2
Tear (1999) 9:17
Performers: 4-Channel Tape, based on improvisations by Mohammad
Reza Shajarian
Recorded: Studio Recording, 1999
"Tear (1999)"
is a study on the relationship between timbre and melody.
It is based on a melodic improvisation by Mohammad
Reza Shajarian, one of the greatest
living vocalists of Iran, in the mode of Bayat-e Tork (similar
to the western major scale with the 7th degree flatted a quarter
tone.) It is often a very difficult task for electronic/computer
music to stay in a realm of a certain tradition without misappropriating
some aspect of that tradition within the context of the Western
frame of mind. "Tear (1999)" presents these two musical realms
as complementing material. The piece first establishes a mood
in which the vocal melody would ambiguously enter, however,
as the piece progresses, both opposing qualities - the traditional
beauty of the melody and the mechanical precision of the accompanying
timbres - keep their own character yet move in the same direction.
The preservation of the original feeling of the vocalist and
the content of the poem by Hafez (Persian poet of 13th century)
was the initial assumptions and difficulties of this study.
All the sounds, except the voice of Mohammad
Reza Shajarian, have been synthesized by the Recursive
Granular Synthesis method devised by the author.
NOTE: This piece is a 4-channel tape piece. The 4-channel version
is available for ADAT or DA-88/DA-38 formats.
Mohammad
Reza Shajarian is the undisputed
master of Persian traditional (classical) singing. He is regarded
as a national treasure by both musicians and Persian music
lovers around the world. His singing is technically flawless,
powerful, and strongly emotional. In music of Iran, traditional
singing is the most difficult art to master. Shajarian is
the embodiment of the perfect singer and a major source of
inspiration.
6. Pamela Madsen1
The Red Shoes 11:56
Text: Anne Sexton
Performer: Patti
Cudd3 (spoken voice, percussion)
Recorded: Live Performance, 1997; UCSD Intercampus Arts Tour
"The Red Shoes",
commissioned by percussionist Patti
Cudd3, is from The Sexton
Cycle, an hour-long cycle of works for soloists, ensembles
and electronics based on the poetry of Anne Sexton (1928-1974).
The facts of Anne Sexton's troubled and chaotic life are well
known: no other American poet in our time has cried aloud
publicly so many private details. She was a mad housewife
in the fifties who, after giving birth to her child, was dissatisified
with her life and started taking courses in writing poetry.
She wrote about the social confusions of growing up in the
female body and of living as a woman in postwar American Society.
"It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently
on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience…"
(James Dickey, New York Times Book Review). This fascination
for revealing the physical body through her poetry, however,
made her work extremely attractive in setting for my work.
My music shares some of the same concerns as her poetry, including
the fascination for revealing the physical body, the body
of the performer, and how it relates to music. Sexton's trademarks
are also similar to techniques that I use in this work:
- The use
of simile (like).
- Repetitious
structure--associative forays that do not develop into thoughts
but terminate in surreal images which stretch or suspend
time.
- The use
of a consistent pool of metaphors from which the works are
drawn.
- Sexton's
signature of "clang"--the knock and jangle of assonance
translated into sonic assonance of percussion and text.
As a solo
for spoken text and percussion, the work conveys the inner
duality and conflict of the self with the image of the mother
as expressed in the poem through the cultural construct as
well as through the struggle of the individual performer over
the score or the composer. In the course of the work many
different struggles of self take place which are articulated
by how the percussionist speaks in relationship to the multiple
layers of percussion on which she is performing.
The Red
Shoes
By Anne Sexton
I stand in
the ring
In the dead city
And tie on the red shoes.
Everything that was clam
Is mine, the watch with an ant walking,
The toes, lined up like dogs
The stove long before it boils toads,
The parlor, white in winter, long before flies,
The doe lying down on the moss long before the bullet.
I tie on the red shoes.
They are not
mine.
They are my mother's.
Her mother's before
Handed down like an heirloom
But hidden like shameful letters.
The house and the street where they belong
Are hidden and all the women, too,
Are hidden.
All those
girls
Who wore the red shoes,
Each boarded a train that would not stop.
Stations flew by like suitors and would not stop.
They all danced like trout on the hook
They were played with.
They tore off their ears like safety pins.
Their arms fell off them and became hats
Their heads rolled off and sang down the street.
And their feet---oh God, their feet in the market place---
Their feet, those two beetles, ran from the corner
And then danced forth as if they were proud.
Surely, people exclaimed,
Surely they are mechanical. Otherwise…
But the feet
went on.
The feet could not stop.
They were wound up like a cobra that sees you.
They were elastic pulling itself in two.
They were islands during an earthquake.
They were ships colliding and going down.
Never mind you and me.
They could not listen.
They could not stop.
What they did was the death dance.
What they
did would do them in.
Permission
granted by Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright 1972 by
Anne Sexton.
7.
Erik Ulman1
Gertrud 17:59
Performer: John Mark Harris3 (piano)
Recorded: Studio Recording, April 13, 2000; Warren
Studios, UCSD
After hearing
John Mark Harris play several Debussy preludes, I was extremely
impressed by his sensitivity to sonority and pacing, and I
wanted to write for him. The result was "Gertrud", whose title
refers to Carl Dreyer's beautiful 1964 film, and from whose
theme music (by Jørgen Jersild) some of my work was
ultimately derived. One might suggest that my piece attempts
to give voice to the turmoil underlying the film's serenity;
certainly the compositional process was a turbulent one, relinquishing
much initial planning in the hope that the piece could, as
it were, find its own form. Perhaps some of my own sense of
search and discovery are audible in the finished work. "Gertrud"
is dedicated with great affection and admiration to John Mark
Harris.
|
