Curve and lattice

Recently I’ve gotten pretty interested in some of Brian Ferneyhough’s ideas about music, especially what he has to say about his use of rhythm, duration and time. I have misgivings about a lot of his work, but I’ve become fond of Bone Alphabet, a piece for seven percussion instruments of indeterminate sound where adjacent instruments must not be of the same family. There’s an article by Steven Schick about the process of learning Bone Alphabet, which took him a maybe-not-totally-justifiable nine months. To get it right he cut up the score and pasted it on to graph paper so he could see the rhythms more clearly, did quite a bit of math to understand the polyrhythms, memorized stickings measure by measure, and other such feats of dedication and devotion. The result was, interestingly, a feeling of being deeply situated within his body. He talks quite a bit about the importance of bodily movement to the piece, mentioning at one point that an audio recording alone would not really convey the work. Here’s a good excerpt (Schick 1994):

My method of actually learning the piece involved first cutting out each bar and gluing it on graph paper so that I could better calculate rhythmical relationships. Then I made all decisions regarding sticking and mallet choice and memorized them before going on to the next measure. The advantage to this approach was that, by memorizing as the first and not the last step in the process, I could more quickly embed the material I was learning in the realm of physical gesture. As a result, from the first instant the piece became a theatrical arena where physical gesture was not the simple by-product of performance, but an integral part of a growing interpretive point of view. The instrument became a kind of stage for the enactment of, in Ferneyhough’s words, “a theatre of the body.”

Ross Karre has recorded his interpretation of Bone Alphabet and put it on YouTube. Unfortunately embedding is disabled, so to view it you’ll have to follow these links:

• Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough 1/2
• Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough 2/2

And, finally, a couple of quotes from Ferneyhough to round this all out. From his essay Duration and rhythm as compositional resources:

Whilst the impulse-structure and its audibility are clearly variably perceptible in concrete compositional situations, I maintain that enough of a correspondence is maintained in the middle to long term to enable the flow of space/density ratios demonstrated capable of carrying the main weight of formal organization. According to this principle, degrees of compression, distortion, convergence or mutual interference are calculable in respect of the degree to which the sense of clock time is supported or subverted by the specific tactility of impulse density setting the ‘inner clock’ of a particular metric space.

—

As always in the discussion of matters artistic, it is not the clear-cut cases which prove most pertinent, but the ill-defined and fluctuating ‘grey zones’ where a given rhythmic phenomenon may be called on to assume multiple functional roles.

References:

• Schick, S. (1994) Developing an Interpretive Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 32, No. 1: 132-153
• Ferneyhough, B. “Duration and rhythm as compositional resources.” Collected Writings Eds. Boros, J.; Toop, R. Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.

A fantastic YouTube video has been making the rounds. It’s a cockatoo named Snowball dancing to The Backstreet Boys. It’s all kinds of awesome, but it’s also one of, if not the first, totally conclusive demonstration of an animal enthusiastically entraining its movements to rhythmic sound. Here’s the bird:

Aniruddh Patel got on the case, did some experiments and wrote a paper on the cockatoo. He concludes that, while it’s confined to a relatively small range of tempos and isn’t particularly reliable, the dancing bird is basically for real. The paper is a great read. Its final sentence is oddly touching:

It will be interesting to determine whether the range of tempi to which Snowball can synchronize is expanded when dancing with a partner.

Here’s the paper:

• Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R., Bregman, M.B., Schulz, I., & Schulz, C. (in press). Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC10), August 2008, Sapporo, Japan. M. Adachi et al. (Eds.), Adelaide: Causal Productions.

More videos on Patel’s publications page.

A friend recently hipped me to Zbigniew Karkowski. He related that at one of Karkowski’s performances the music was so extraordinarily loud that the only way he could get into it was to listen from the parking lot outside, and even then the volume was uncomfortable. Karkowski studied with Xenakis, and the sense of weight and density in his improvised work reminds me of Xenakis’s large, sprawling orchestral pieces. But Karkowski is more destructive, willful, polemic, maybe evil.

From an essay by Karkowski written in 1992:

When an artist creates a new work, whether it’s a new book or poem or painting or piece of music, he presents new information. And what follows with it – new ways to process information. This is a social function, we create options and we have to take responsibility for it. It’s very simple, you either have something to say or, if not, you just create more information pollution. And if there is one general thing that one can say about most of the modern composers, it is that they may write well but they often have nothing to say. All good art has only one purpose – to show man his own true face, and its only prerogative must be the necessity to find out the truth at all costs. The truly evolutionary art must be concerned more with living than creating and must realize that the despair of our culture and civilization can only be defeated by acts of total honesty and a faith in the true condition of all men – perfection and the state of Godhead.

Noisejihad has two live sets by Karkowski up in their space on archive.org:

• Karkowski live at Splab, 15/04/2005
• Karkowski live at Splab, 12/10/2006

You’ve got to listen loud to get the full effect. There are a few moments in that second one which are really startling.

Recently I’ve done a lot of listening to Lionel Marchetti and Seijiro Murayama’s beautiful and terrifying album Hatali Atseli (L’Echange des Yeux). It makes me feel the same kind of nervousness I get when capturing a particularly scary looking spider in a glass so I can let it outside. Admiring that delicate insect exoskeleton reminds you that they were here first, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone.

Marchetti has a YouTube account with bunches of videos about his obsession with UFOs, or maybe his obsession with how the idea of UFOs generates obsession. Some highlights:

I was just video recording from my plane, in my dream, near Mont Pilat, in Lyon – France, in jannuary 2008. Suddenly, a strange light was under the clouds, with an incredible sound : with my DAT i recorded this… it’s now possible to listen this…
Lionel Marchetti : is it UFO sounds ?
Help me !

I met a very strange double-face E.T., in my dream, and i recorded our stange electronic contact…