Search Results for: albright

Music Notes

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Virgil Thomson: for Four Saints in Three Acts came up with motifs corresponding to Gertrude Stein's words without writing them down. Eventually when the same motifs had recurred from memory enough times he decided those were the ones worth keeping and they became the opera. He worked the same way with his portraits--musical interpretations of people that resulted from sitting in the same room with them.

Eric Satie: "furniture music" consisting of more or less interchangeable parts that filled space and time but did not dramatically engage the listener

George Antheil: a piece for player piano no longer governed by time as music had always been. it can be compressed and uncompressed more or less instantly like a piece of visual art.

--notes from memory on Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent. Not quotes and the ideas may be slightly altered from Albright's meaning.

Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project (Belated Thoughts)

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torcito project

Just came across a passage in Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Other Arts that rang a bell: "...John Cage, a painter-in-sound...could refigure a Japanese garden as a trombone piece--or take the outline of Marcel Duchamp's profile, turn it ninety degrees, and instruct a performer to interpret the profile as a continuously varying musical line." (see Solos for Voice nos. 65 and 70)

The bell was Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project, which digitally updates the Cage piece. Here's how Neural.it described it:

This work is composed of seven portraits made...in the summer of 2005 using Virtual Drummer, an "old" Macintosh software. A 48x64 grid is the canvas used by Ramocki. In this grid the bitmap image of a human face becomes the score of an endless sound loop. Each horizontal line corresponds to an instrument (for a total of 48 instruments) which is activated each time the cathode ray beam hits one of the portrait's pixels. Ramocki's work brings to mind Jacquard's punched cards, but also the pianola and the automatic piano.

To clarify somewhat, imagine a vertical line sweeping the face above. Each time it encounters a darkened pixel, a note from the "general MIDI" list (shown below the portrait) is played. The sweep begins quietly and is cacophonous by the time the cursor reaches the middle of the face. The general MIDI spec is heavy on percussion, so that's a lot of timbales, cowbells, etc., firing at once. The Albright book credits George Antheil, composer of Ballet Mecanique, as a forerunner of Cage in abstracting musical notes from their normal background and function. Ramocki injects the element of kitsch through the use of outmoded software and the somewhat rigid and dated MIDI assignments of notes to sounds. He has found a way to "play" an entire face, as opposed to just a profile.

Aesthetic Use of Deterministic Jitter 90 Years Ago

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American Girl

Daniel Albright on the Cocteau-Picasso-Satie-Diaghilev collaborative ballet Parade:

Cocteau's most remarkable instruction to [the "American Girl," played by Marie] Chabelska, was this: "The little girl...vibrates like the imagery of films." Elsewhere Cocteau wrote: "One day they won't believe what the press said about Parade. A newspaper even accused me of 'erotic hysteria.' In general they took the shipwreck scene and the cinematographic trembling of the American dance for spasms of delirium tremens." If I read these sentences correctly, Cocteau asked Chabelska to shake in the way a film image shakes when the projector wobbles--that is, she was asked to imitate the technical errors associated with the film medium... That a newspaper would mistake her trembling as "erotic hysteria" is a delightful proof of the tenacity of systems of intepretation based on feeling-expression, even in the excitingly apathetic and technical world of Parade, where the medium is the message...

From Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts, 2000. The shaky GIF was made from an image in the book, fair use, etc.

Assorted Listening: Repetition and Not

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...mp3blogging, meaning these will have a short shelf life:

Carl Orff, Wiegenlied bei Mondschein zu singen (Lullaby to be Sung by Moonlight) [mp3 removed]

(Orff-Shulwerk Vol 2 - Musik fur Kinder)

Orff's daughter Godela is reading the poem by Matthias Claudius (in German). From the liner notes: the piece "...develops its specific force not only from a rocking 6/8 rhythm but also from the rhythmic ostinato of a bass-xylophone and the lute-like chordal accompaniment of two marimbaphones which alternate between G-major and d-minor with unshakeable consistency." I EQ'd it and raised the volume from the CD, as it was barely audible. The text of the poem is here. Anyone with a better translation than Google's, please drop me a line, I am curious about this work.

Moondog, Bird's Lament [mp3 removed]

On this latest DJ Kicks release, Henrik Schwarz takes it back to the music's spiritual beginnings with 23 deep and esoteric selections. This is not a party mix. In addition to more recognizable names, the album incorporates Moondog's jazz shuffler "Bird's Lament" (which served as sample fodder for UK producer Mr. Scruff)...

Moondog in 1969:

"Lament I (Bird's Lament) was written in honor of Charlie Parker, on hearing of his death. It is a chaconne, a four-bar accompaniment that is repeated over and over with a free melodic line over it, played by an alto sax, Bird's instrument, with an obligato played on a baritone sax. Bird used to stop by my door-way back in 1951-2 and talk about music. One night I met him in Times Square and shook a shaking hand, not realizing that would be the last time we would meet."

This music is drop dead gorgeous but I'm not sure I agree that it's a chaconne. Also the term obbligato has contradictory meanings. It's interesting that the part sampled by Hendrik Schwarz on the fade is the bari sax, not the "main" melody.

The Orff and Moondog are notable for the use of repetition, which is a strong interest of this page, but Daniel Albright's description of Arnold Schoenberg's short opera Erwartung tugs from the opposite end of the musical spectrum:

But for Schoenberg--at least the "atonal" Schoenberg of 1908-13--music is not exempt from time; music is time, time given a voice. Music does not set itself the task of constructing memorable units; music instead sets itself the task of rendering the contours and discontinuities of a shifting subjectivity.

And:

In Erwartung, Schoenberg has not surrendered the authority of musical form to the authority of literary form: he has instead employed a shattered, splintery sort of diction in order to help him investigate form at a level of improvisation almost unprecedented in the history of the arts.

If you are feeling adventurous you can listen to this piece online. I think I like Albright's writing about it more than the music, but I'm open to having my mind changed through...repeated listenings. (Albright says he listened to it 2 or 3 times a day one summer: "I wanted to assimilate its wonders, to understand its discontinuities as occult forms of continuity." That simply rocks.)

[hat tip to shm for the Moondog]