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.

Rehearsals

Just finished a great rehearsal with Sumi and Ben; it's always a delight working with performers like c)i, but this concert has reminded me again not only how much is 'left of the page,' but how often that's the fun stuff.

This work is from a set of etudes that I'm working on that are etudes both in the sense of the systematic study of technical performative elements of music, but also studies in compositional technics. My program note is here, but better still to come and here it! Sunday night at 8p!

The Anticipation of Meaning

For reasons likely of interest to no one, I spent some time over the last week or so in Rome, rereading Gadamer's Truth and Method and the resonance between Sunday's concert and the following followed me around the city.

The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not a act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanenet preconditions; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Truth and Method, p. 293

Second, Revised edition

Continuum

It is easy for listeners, composers and performers to simply imagine the relation to the past as static, as simply given. But what we think of as the clear and stable fact of history is in fact delineated and maintained by our attention. Each act we take reshapes and reformulates (in however small an amount and discrete a method) the tradition in which we operate.

Kyle's meditation on collapsing cultures and crumbling empires, Rogerson’s elegy on human and cultural extinction and Honett’s fragmentation of material speak to time as the leveler of mountains, while Gilbert’s lament imagines an alternate history where the lost world is found again, Halka's trio connects the cultural to the individual, and my own work figures the interplay of the sculptor and the stone as the play between the composer and history.

As Ryan Streber's introductory essay in the program book will highlight, composition is a matter of technics, and thus of adoption the project of adoption is always a project of self discover, or, better, of auto-explication. The automatic, ineluctable discovery of commonality with the past, the unpacking of the forgotten givenness of one's capacity is the result of engagement with the past— what begins in an exploration of alterity becomes an emergence of ipseity. Adoption doesn't build a bridge to the past, it makes that past part of the now. The question here is not so much eternal as it is perpetual– tradition is opportunity and responsibility, and it is always old and new as once.

~douglas

Prize winners on March 28th

Sunday's concert will also feature two prize winning works from c)i's 2009 composition competition. Every two years, c)i reviews works submitted anonymously from around the world, and working with a panel of respected judges, pick the works that excited us, and spoke to the c)i sound. The two works on Sunday's program are Christopher Rogerson's 'Brothers' and Charles Halka's 'Trio.'

Christopher Rogerson is a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studies composition with Jennifer Higdon. He has won awards from ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, and the National Association for Music Education. 'Brothers' is a musical memorial to Buddhist monks executed by the Burmese army in 2007; it contrasts the bell-like tones of the temple with martial rhythm.

Charles Halka is completing coursework towards a Doctor of Musical Arts at the Shepherd School of Music; this season, his works are being performed by ONIX Ensamble, the Armonas Trio, and the saxophone and harp duo Pictures on Silence. His 'Trio' is hypotyposis of musical memories and interests, ranging across style, but striving for synthesis.

Come here these up and coming composers, Sunday, March 28th at 8 pm.