RAINFOREST2 - Jerome Joy website

B I U S link image code HTML list	Show page Syntax
!!Les enjeux musicaux de Rainforest Plusieurs distinctions sont importantes à éclairer. Elles peuvent amener à des caractéristiques liées à : * l'œuvre élargie (ou, ce que je cite souvent, la musique étendue ou « en plein air »), immergée dans des contextes multiples, parfois ubiquitaires, à partir de processus singuliers spécifiquement réalisés à cet effet, qui en questionnent à la fois le statut et la perception (la réception active) ; * l'œuvre flux (constituée de matériaux non reproductibles, continuellement renouvelée, et dont il faut faire à chaque fois l'expérience) * l'œuvre circuit (en ce qu'elle circule en permanence, ou met en circuit (en forme?) les flux précédemment évoqués) Au passage, et nous allons le voir, il me semble intéressant de souligner aussi que ce type d'œuvres pose un problème récurrent concernant leur archivage, c'est-à-dire leur conservation et leur reproductibilité. Ces œuvres peuvent assembler momentanément des éléments en flux, en créer une documentation et une présentation, les stocker (techniquement, si nous parlons des procédés numériques, dans des "buffers", des réservoirs de stockage dynamique, voire, dans le cas de ''Rainforest'', des enregistrements sonores momentanés captant des moments de l'œuvre), mais en fait cela fuit toujours. Si cela fuit, puisque les flux sont continuellement en train de se dérouler et de nous échapper, nous ne pouvons archiver. {small} '''''(à traduire)''''' — David Tudor rarely theorized about his work in live electronics, preferring instead to focus on the invention and performance processes themselves as the media of his artistic ideas. ^[...^] Deleuze, like Tudor, does not separate the technological and human components of a given constellation, but understands them to be “composed” into materially immanent assemblages or complexes of “images” (understood not just visually, but multi-sensorially). Gell, in turn, offers a vocabulary of “distributedness” of both art object and artistic agency that helps account for the shifting dynamics of complex, immanent performance situations. ^[...^] The much-noted emphasis of this music on process over product and the sound-ecology models that often underlie the artists’ conception of these works (from Tudor’s Rainforest to David Dunn’s environmental music projects and speculations on music as interspecies communication) resonate closely with Deleuze’s idea of the cinema image as a dynamic manifold of technical, material, and vital components. ^[...^] Deleuze has in mind the range of cinematic narratives that involve irrational narrative connections, undecidable multiplications of narrative versions, magical causations, time-loops and mental travel, and so on. I relate these two modes of temporal representation to the two basic technical modes that Tudor employed in his live electronic works: 1) Those works that treat the electronic environment as a space of “transduced objects” in which oscillation, echoing, and spatial focalizing and displacement are key processes (from Fluorescent Sound to Rainforest, originally a dance piece for Merce Cunningham and later a sculptural sound environment); 2) and late works such as the Neural Syntheses that enfold the specialized relations of the earlier works back into the structure of the electronic components for generating the sound environment, constituting a kind of technosonic brain or “neural network.” In these works, performance activates and expresses as sound-events some contingent sample of the network’s virtual connections, proximities, and distances. — (Tyrus Miller, Transduced Objects and Spiritual Automata: Dimensions of Experience in David Tudor’s Live Electronics){/small} {small}"I started with the idea that... sound could be obtained from sculptural material or actually from anything through reflections. But the thing that is turning my idea about how to form the piece ‘inside-out’, because, you see, I was starting from materials, and now I’m already working with waves which don’t exist” (Interview with Larry Austin, 3 April 1989). {/small} {br}{br} * '''Les enjeux de l'utilisation des "feedback" ''' {small}'''''(à traduire)''''' — In many pieces based on feedback systems, most notably in David Tudor's electronic pieces, there arises a situation in which the performer is improvising within (or sometimes against) an indeterminate context. A complex web of interconnections is constructed, leading to unpredictable and chaotic sonic results. The composer/performer then interacts with the system, attempting (with highly-varying degrees of success) to "guide" the system in a particular direction. Christopher Burns and Matthew Burtner describe this peculiar fusion of composition and improvisation in their article "Recursive Audio Systems":{br}"Once the system is established, improvisation becomes an essential mode of compositional exploration. The unusual parametrizations of feedback systems, including their high degree of dependence upon the current state and contents of the system, necessitate an investigative approach." (Christopher Burns and Matthew Burtner, "Recursive Audio Systems," Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 13 (2003): 73.){br}As a pianist, David Tudor simultaneously embodied two polar extremes: his performance technique demanded a precisely deterministic causal relationship between physical action and sonic result, while his chosen genre of indeterminism and chance strove above all to remove intentionality and control from the music. In his own works, however, these two "Tudors" are at last comfortably reconciled. Deliberate actions yield unpredictable results; virtuosity and failure can coexist. While Tudor's live electronic performances were frequently described as dazzling displays of virtuosity, "his physical contact with the electronic components resulted in a spectrum of sound possibilities, all a step removed from the physical impulse that had caused them." (Tamara Levitz, "David Tudor's Corporeal Imagination," Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 14 (2004): 61) Built in to the architecture of feedback is a distancing—a failure of communication—that occurs between the composer, the performer, and the instrument. For Tudor, this "aesthetic of failure" (Kim Cascone, "The Aesthetics of Failure," Computer Music Journal, Vol. 24 (2000): 12-18.) results in a new level of interaction that is absent in modernism, chance, and improvisation alike. Though he remained a loyal Cage supporter to the end, hedelicately admits as much himself in his 1972 article "From Piano to Electronics":{br} "I wasn't interested in playing a game or dealing with a set of finite circumstances but rather in the fact that the world was completely open, and through a set of finite circumstances one could be led into something completely open. This was always uppermost in Cage's works, but a lot of the pieces I was getting seemed to be more attracted by the idea of structures rather than by the possibilities these open up." (David Tudor, "From Piano to Electronics," Music and Musicians (August 1972): 24.){br}Though none of the Rainforest installations incorporate feedback explicitly (each "speaker" is simply fed a looped recording of the participant's choosing), the project clearly reflects an early interest in pseudo-biological acoustical ecosystems. To a certain degree, of course, the resonance of a particular object in Rainforest will be affected by the resonances of others, and this does induce a more subtle element of feedback into the work. By Tudor's own admission, however, the disembodied structure of the installation did not allow for a significant feedback effect:{br} "I did experiment several times .... where I did get feedback into the system. But that isn't so interesting when the output is so small; it gets very interesting when they're larger." (David Tudor, "An Interview with David Tudor by John David Fulleman," EMF, http://www.emf.org/tudor/Articles/fullemann.html ){br}As effective and influential as Rainforest turned out to be, Tudor expresses some dissatisfaction with the arbitrariness and occasional inappropriateness of the source materials. Tudor somewhat sarcastically hypothesized that, "You can give a tango party and play tango through all of these instruments and one after the other and it would be glorious, I can guarantee you. But it is not going to be my piece." (David Tudor, "Interview with David Tudor," EMF, http://www.emf.org/tudor/Articles/rogalsky_inter1.html ). His subsequent compositional efforts attempted to address this perceived shortcoming while retaining the complex networked structures of the Rainforest series. The answer came in 1972 when Tudor discovered that, when compiled correctly (or incorrectly as the case may be), electrical components such as mixing boards, effects pedals, and equalizers will spontaneously create sound without the aid of any external input. Tudor describes the process of the discovery in an interview with Teddy Hultberg: {br}"Rather than think of tone generators or recordings of natural sounds etc., I experimented with principles of amplification, trying to make amplifiers oscillate in an absolutely unpredictable manner. In the end, it turned out that I didn't even need any amplifiers because most electronic equipment uses the principle of amplification. You need filters,modulators and mixing equipment which have gain stages. By piling these components up, I was able to work without any sound generators and I made several pieces in that manner."{br}The first piece that Tudor realized with this newly discovered technique of "noinput feedback" was called Untitled (1972) and was composed to accompany a reading by John Cage of his Mesostics re Merce Cunningham. — Weisert, Lee. ''IN/OUT/IN : Feedback Systems in Music''. Dissertation Doctor or Music, Field of Music Composition. Northwestern University Evanston. 2010. http://leeweisert.com/inoutin.pdf ){/small} {small}"I want to find ways of discovering something you don't know at the time that you improvise.... The first way is to play an instrument over which you have no control, or less control than usual" (David Tudor, In Richard Kostelanetz, ed., "Conversing with Cage" (New York, NY: Limelight, 1987).(^[the instability of the feedback system makes it an equal partner in the improvisational process^]) (quoted in Christopher Burns and Matthew Burtner, RECURSIVE AUDIO SYSTEMS: ACOUSTIC FEEDBACK IN COMPOSITION){/small} {br}{br} * '''Le rapport à l'espace''' \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|tl {small}'''''(à traduire)''''' — "Little real work has been done using spatial positioning as a compositional technique. The science of acoustics has not often been applied to isolating sound phenomena to specific positions in space. There can be a world of musical compositions utilizing the distribution of localized sonic events in space rather than time: sound designs in physical dimensions and musical architectures, both static and dynamic. The exploration of these musical worlds is dependent on the development of tools and techniques for localizing vibration in air." — (Tudor research proposal, circa 1970 ) — This idea led Tudor to experiment with highly directional rotating loudspeakers. These devices would allow the performers to interact with each other in a more complex manner and would enable them to work directly with the acoustic space, pointing their sounds directly at parts of the space or at other sounds. Tudor's group, Composers Inside Electronics, experimented a great deal with these designs. Tudor's "Pepsi pieces" were also a result of his keen interest in spatial positioning. These were a group of pieces composed for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Expo in Osaka. Tudor had a large dome constructed within the pavilion to hold thirty-seven loudspeakers that would enable him to place his sounds in virtually any part of the pavilion. Custom components were designed to switch signals, automatically and manually, in various ways to the different speakers. The Pepsi pieces were all composed specifically for this speaker set-up and many were never performed in that way again. — (D'Arcy Philip Gray, "The Art of Impossible"){/small}\| {small}'''''(à traduire)''''' — I argue that the “experimental sound ideal” had as its banner an aesthetic of liberation and that such liberation was won by control over the musical parameters through procedures of quantification. ^[...^] Letters to Tudor from Cage, Feldman, Brown, and others indicate that the undefined relation between composer and sounding result in the indeterminate works was nonetheless accompanied by aesthetic criteria that would allow a “correct” performance. ^{...^] the experimental sound ideal entails procedures that enable both performative uniqueness and a kind of sounding objectivity that is premised on the erasure of subjective agency. Here I argue that these procedures allow certain stylistic features to emerge and that these features define the governing sound ideal. Tudor’s performance procedures allow him not simply to avoid traditional types of melodic, harmonic, and formal constructions but even further to realize an alternate type of musical design. The papers clearly show that Tudor approached his realizations of the indeterminate works by objectifying the musical parameters with quantifying procedures of measurement and lists. Thus, musical rhythm becomes, metaphorically, events in space, and sound quality becomes a performance action. ^[...^] I begin with Tudor’s sense of an enveloping as opposed to an “out front” sense of temporal space. This differing temporal sense is linked to a “non-gridded” articulation of time. Traditional music notation produces an implicit temporal grid that contextualizes the temporal progress of musical sound. Without such an implicit grid, events in musical time occupy a relational temporal space into which listeners may place themselves. The resulting overall sense is one in which events “float” and articulate spans of time. — (Judy Lochhead, Controlling Liberation: David Tudor and the “Experimental” Sound Ideal){/small} {small} In his electro-acoustic sound environment, Rainforest IV, unexpected gong sounds emanate from the oil drum and chirps from inside the suspended barrel. Tudor effects these sound transformations by physically modifying his instrument, by experimenting with resonance, electronic feedback, amplification, and filters, and by distributing the acoustically and electronically modified sounds through the performance space. The physical space, which can mean the performance site, the physical object (in which sound resonates), the instrument or environment generating the source sounds, and the electronic configuration, becomes the catalyst for the composer’s exploration and for the listener’s perception of sound as malleable, sculptural material. ^{...^} Tudor’s electronic music thus concerns itself less with sounds as sounds, and more with the complex relation between sounds and the physical spaces in which they vibrate. This situation raises intriguing questions about our point of view as listeners. Is there a particular vantage from which we hear the sound, or has the vantage become the entire (performance) space? How do we, as listeners, connect the sounds with what might be called their “source space”? Or do we? To what extent does this preoccupation with space, and the dependence of sound on physical spaces, present an important difference between Tudor and his longtime collaborator on indeterminate piano and taped pieces, John Cage? In Tudor’s live electronics of the 1970s and 80s, the performing musicians respond in real time to unpredictable feedback loops amplified by the acoustics of the performance site and fed by the musicians through multiple channels in a custom designed sound system. Sometimes pre-recorded sound provides the input signals. Other times, the chain of electronic components produces the signals. Tudor conceived of Microphone (1973), for example, as an “interface between a performer and the feedback of his sound.” For his environment installed at the 1970 World’s Exposition in Osaka, performers sent feedback of directional microphones into the space of the Pepsi Pavilion, where loudspeakers arranged in spatial patterns controlled the incidence and duration of the resulting signals. Modulators, designed by Gordon Mumma, were placed into the signal paths in order to vary the musical content of the feedback signals. If sound moved quickly enough from speaker to speaker, Tudor mused, there would come a point when listeners could no longer distinguish the source sound from the feedback it generated. — (Nancy Perloff, Hearing Spaces: David Tudor’s Collaboration on Sea Tails){/small} {br}{br} * '''Les enjeux de la "continuité" ''' {small}'''''(à traduire)''''' — “All of a sudden there was a different way of looking at musical continuity, having to do with what Artaud called the affective athleticism… It was a real breakthrough for me, because my musical consciousness in the meantime had changed completely… I had to put my mind in a state of non-continuity – not remembering – so that each moment is alive” (Tudor , quoted in Holzaepfel 2002, p. 171).). (Holzaepfel, J. (2002). “Cage and Tudor” in D. Nicholls (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge: CUP, pp. 169-85.) {/small} {small} The “surround-space” of possibilities that Tudor describes is perhaps the greatest tool of differentiation between pre- and post-1945 approaches, yet it also stands as a potent field of internal tensions and re-workings of musical structure across the board of post-war compositional history. — Danae Stefanou and Pavlos Antoniadis, "Inter-Structures: Rethinking Continuity in Post-1945 Piano Repertoire", In journal of interdisciplinary music studies, spring/fall 2009, volume 3, issue 1&2, art. #0931205, pp. 77-93) {/small} {br}{br} ---- {html} <iframe width="960" height="720" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0mdgNgWyhEg?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <br><br><small> Rainforest IV (Stockholm Performance) (1980)</small> {/html} {br}{br} ----
Password Summary of changes		↓ ↑

[Edit] [History] [UP] [List of all pages] [Create page] [Erase cookies]