DISPLACER :: c)i @ Tenri Cultural Institute | Friday, 20 May 8p

This Friday's concert at the Tenri Cultural Institute will be a hi-tech and low-tech exploration of how music embodies thought and is in turn disembodied. Through the course of this concert, musical material and sound itself will mobilized in the performance space, through the placement of the performers, the structures of the music, and the through the use of a sophisticated array of speakers and software supplied for the event by VRSonic, an audio technology company based in Arlington, VA.


Over the next few days, we'll be posting notes about the works to be performed, and technology being used, and the ideas behind the concert, including comments from the performers, the composers, and the technologists involved. Stay tuned for more information and some previews...

Felipe Lara on Livro dos Sonhos

I asked Felipe Lara to write a little bit on his work which will be performed tomorrow night on c)i's "Discourse: to hear and be heard" concert:

"I am really excited to hear my old piece (2004) Livro dos Sonhos (Book of Dreams) for clarinet and piano. I haven’t heard it live since the performances that took place that year, by duos formed by Jean Kopperud and Steve Gosling, as well as Michael Norsworthy and John McDonald.
I’m thrilled to be able to hear a performance of the work by two world-class musicians such as Ben Fingland and Steve Beck.

The idea behind my piece fits quite well with the title of the concert, "Discourse: to hear and be heard”, as it is about the negotiation of flow between two entities, in this case the clarinet and the piano. Both instruments are constantly interrupting, joining, amplifying, agreeing, disagreeing, and ultimately questioning the music presented by one another. This happens in the pitches, rhythms, timbres, and gestures. This very negotiation is at the core of the poetics of the work.

Both musicians start and end in perfect agreement (unison), but the journey through the piece becomes a game of differences and their negotiations. The piece gravitates strongly around Eb4 (middle of the piano) and in several instances unison on this pitch help punctuate and trigger each subsequent musical phrase. On the last section of the piece the musicians finally try to settle and play a Messiaen-inspired cantilena. This section of musical agreement doesn’t last very long, as the piano gradually perforates it with its somewhat violent and incisive attacks. This is perhaps a portrait of myself at the time trying to negotiate and subtly liberate myself from the enormous influence Olivier Messiaen had on me as young composer.

The title reflects on the seemingly disjunct, capricious, and perhaps unpredictable character of the events caused by these musical discussions. As on dreams, this piece attempts to create a vivid, but rapidly changing and non-linear sensory experience.

I’m honored, thankful, and extremely excited to take part on this concert presented by this great ensemble that is counter)induction."

On Discourses and Concert: c)i @ Transit Circle

Photo courtesy of
Frans de Waal.
[CC-BY-2.5]

c)i is thrilled to be performing at the Transit Circle concert series, curated by our own Miranda Cuckson. This concert,  "Discourse: to hear and be heard" the idea of conversation and its role in human relationships, and is sizing up to be an incredible concert, with works by Brice Pauset, Vinko Golbokar, George Rochberg, and Felipe Lara.For me the situating of my work 102nd & Amsterdam within an interrogation of musical conversation is particularly resonant for me;– my works in general and this work in particular has a strong dialogic element; 'conversations' amongst the performers en volant are foregrounded rather than hidden in the background of textures, or 'solved' in rehearsals.  There is a constant unfolding as the work is performed again and again.  The work, like all works, is not an object, but an exchange of roles, attention, instrumental color and motivic material;– these transaction that in themselves do not bear import, but by their being afford opportunities for music making.

I'm very excited to have the musicians performing the work again, c)i recorded the work in 2009, and it is avaolable for purchase as part of the SCI-Capstone Record series.   An (very full) note on the work can be read HERE , and a recording by the same performers can be found HERE.

Definitely a concert well worth making! This Sunday, 23 January 23, at 7:30p, at the Mannes Concert Hall

Thinking about our upcoming concert

8:13pm, Friday, September 10, 2010.

Exactly two weeks from right now we will have just begun our season-opening concert, DRAMA: music and its double. I think in many ways that this will be counter)induction’s most ambitious performance to date. Aperghis, Globokar, Saariaho, Schnittke… all works both intriguing and complex, asking questions that seem too tempting not to reflect upon. I’ve chosen these pieces because they all either explicitly or implicitly suggest a presence outside themselves. To me the idea of a “presence” assumes some content of being, some quality, maybe even an identity or a character. All these works engage with characters, either by their “presence” in the piece or in the tension of their absence.

This engagement is the “drama” of DRAMA: music and its double. It was important to me to create some dialogue between these compositions, to lean into the idea, present in our concerts from the beginning, that by placing one musical work alongside another creates a meaningful relationship that enriches both. We are going to dwell in those in-between spaces through improvisation stemming from these works, creating music that can only exist by the physicality of combining elements from different pieces, different stories, bringing them fleetingly into each other’s gravity. That’s the double.

Braided into this, words- letters, essays, poems- will “un-explain” obvious associations and add another layer of connection and potential meaning. Very nice, but what is the audience supposed to think of all this? I really value this idea from the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky,

“The method whereby the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception of the film. And indeed from the point of view of mutual respect only that kind of reciprocity is worthy of artistic practice.”

I am sure that this holds for music as well, and for performance, and for creating relationships between performances and music. I hope everyone will come to the concert on the 24^th, slightly less than two weeks from now, and help us create this unusual, and special, musical event.

c)i @ ICAD in Washington, DC | 12 June, 2010

c)i has been invited to perform a concert at the 2010 conference of the International Community of Auditory Display,  at the Jack Morton Auditorium on the George Washington University campus on the 12th of June. The main portion of the conference will run from June 11-15.


ICAD is a forum for presenting research on the use of sound to display data, monitor systems, and provide enhanced user interfaces for computers and virtual reality systems. It is unique in its singular focus on auditory displays and the array of perception, technology, and application areas that this encompasses. In keeping with its theme Sonic Discourse—Expression through Sound, the conference will feature a relaxed day of demonstrations and poster presentations, and an evening concert of sonifications and compositions written expressly for the conference.

On my new piece "Present" for the 5/16 and 5/21 shows

Sometimes the starting point of a piece is a particular sound-texture or a melody; sometimes it’s a story. Sometimes it’s a poem or a picture. Sometimes it is a case of finding the right metaphor for something (a feeling? an idea?) that escapes direct analysis. For this piece I first felt a sense of movement, free movement, movement impeded by obstacles, movement that travels long distances, and movement that stands in place. I had the idea that the music from the piano behaved like a liquid. At the beginning of the piece it is sloshing around in there, from one end of the keyboard to the other, very turbulent. So turbulent that sometimes some of this music would splash out of the piano onto the violinist, whose music would be colored or diluted by the piano. The strings become soaked with this music, and the piano’s leftover liquid becomes more and more viscous, clotting up into funky rhythms and chords. The strings have two identities, they can be “stringy”-those piano notes are expressed as long, drippy glissandos- or they can be brittle, with very short, sharp digs into the string making more noise than tone. (Only later did I realize that these properties are shared exactly by Laffy Taffy. Sorry.) And the winds? The flute behaves like a flame, playful and agile, producing a lot of heat and light. The clarinet is earth. Most of the time it is just damply observing. But under the right circumstances it turns dry, abrasive, gets into everywhere it shouldn’t. Maybe this is all a bit too surreal: what I have are different chords, textures, melodic fragments. The instruments each have their own ways of expressing these materials, their own dialects, perhaps. Experimenting with different combinations of material, in different combinations of instruments, is my (and the piece’s) motivation.

Even with a clear starting point, the final product can be surprising. I don’t like to plan everything out beforehand. When my intentions become too ossified, I tend to lose interest, like knowing the end of a suspenseful movie. Instead I compose outward, and let myself be drawn toward what is necessary. Last fall when I was asked what would be the title of this work, for the press materials, I replied, “How to disappear is how to appear completely.” It was the fall, and I was completely submerged in the emotional and compositional challenges of The Lost Child, the most complex and deep-driving work of my career. Perhaps I was subconsciously thinking of making a quick getaway. But as the spring arrived, with the success of The Lost Child, getting back with old friends, making new ones, deepening emotional connections and feeling more power and more purpose, this music had to be renamed. The piece is lively and rhythmic, with bright, astringent harmonies and showy demonstrations of virtuosity. Cheerful, even! I chose the title “Present,” which refers first to “being present,” a wonderful sense of being alive in the world, being alert and immersed in activity; and second, “present” as a gift, a gratitude for that feeling and for the musicians who so beautifully render my work.

(the foundation of this article comes from a blog entry generously commissioned by the Philadelphia Music Project e-zine: http://pmpmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/sound-diary-kyle-bartlett/ )

New Old thoughts on "The General Schemed"

At two upcoming c)i concerts, my work The General Schemed will be performed– it is always a happy thing to return to past works, especially with players like these. The work was premiered by counter)induction on 13 June, 2008 in New York NY; it is always interesting to return to a piece after some time, in that interval between performances provides perspective on the successes and failures of a work and on the technical compositional devices employed, but more interestingly for me at least the shift in context of presentation will reveal new aspects and implications of the work, opening new dialogues with other works and practices.