UPDATE (20 Aug 2015): What made the comet sing? Scientists working on Rosetta's RPC instrument have found out why 67P/C-G was singing. Via http://wp.me/p46DHN-1nN
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ORIGINAL Citation (Oct 2014): Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording. This sonification of the RPC-Mag data was compiled by German composer Manuel Senfft (www.tagirijus.de).  Read full details in ESA's Rosetta blog: http://wp.me/p46DHN-Li 

Copyright Notice

Original Data Credit: ESA/Rosetta/RPC/RPC-MAG
Sonification: TU Braunschweig/IGEP/Manuel Senfft, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Thumbnail image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

A Singing Comet

Break Up Make Up exists essentially because two Vancouver groups—the Nu:BC Collective (piano trio) and Turning Point Ensemble (chamber orchestra)—wanted to perform together. They approached me to compose a piece that would place Nu:BC as concerto soloists within the larger Turning Point instrumentation, setting up what is essentially a modern interpretation of the baroque concerto grosso.

Immediately my mind went to the idea of pitting the two ensembles against each other: opposing forces that try to wrestle the musical material away in a sort of tug-of-war. But I didn’t want this to be a one-trick pony, so sometimes the ensembles would have to cooperate too, putting aside their differences and playing together as one big happy orchestra. 

That framework allowed me to set up a sort of consonance/dissonance relationship in terms of how well the two groups were “getting along.” It also reminded me of the stereotypical stormy couple: that high-drama, off-again-on-again pair that fights, breaks up, and gets back together repeatedly much to the exasperation of their friends.

Inspired as such by the idea of romantic melodrama, I turned to Liszt—whose music I’ve always hated—but who was perhaps a useful resource in terms of finding musical materials to fit my theme. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, I thought why not try to bend the Lisztian zeitgeist to my will? Why not fully steep myself in that uninspiring world of empty flourishes to fish out some kernel that actually resonates, that I can make my own and build upon in an interesting way? 

So that’s what I did. The piece isn’t neo-Romantic, and I didn’t quote Liszt anywhere in it, but I distilled the essence of his music as I see it, reimagining and transforming it in ways that make sense to me. It is an homage? A reconciliation? A giving of the middle finger? I’m not sure, but the journey led me into an exciting sound world that highlights the strengths of the concerto grosso format in a decidedly non-traditional manner.

Break Up Make Up

Love in the Time of Connectivity is a collage. In fact, even the title is a collage: I took the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and combined it with a reference to the culture of Internet file sharing. I have been interested in collage and the reappropriation of material for some time, because as the saying goes, good artists borrow but great artists steal. Collage is the most honest way to honour that principle, and I spent most of 2008 working in this direction.

Collage, as well as related ideas such as sampling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few unifying forces driving artistic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMixter, these ideas have been responsible for renewing amateur art on a mass scale, for challenging the standards of creativity, for expanding musical taste, and even for influencing legal precedent.

For the first time in history, we are drowning in art. There is too much music of the highest artistic quality for anyone to ever hope to experience. So how can artists contribute to culture in a situation like this? I think collage is an important part of the answer, and the proof is in the attitudes of those who grew up with the Internet. For many of them, art is not something simply to be experienced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While composing Love in the Time of Connectivity, I gave myself some restrictions in order to inspire creativity. For example, I decided to try to present all quotations in as recognizable a form as possible. I did not allow myself to transpose fragments from their original tonalities, and I did not allow myself to compose my own new material to bridge together the quotations—every note is borrowed. I also made tempo an integral part of the musical development, and I tried to make grammatical sense of all the text fragments I combined. Finally, every quote relates to the others in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obviously) musical sounds.

Love in the Time of Connectivity

Composed to celebrate what would have been the hundredth birthday of avant-garde pioneer John Cage, this work pays homage to the ideas and philosophies embodied in his music and his words. Cage was famed for integrating non-traditional instruments into his work and for coaxing unconventional sounds from traditional ones; accordingly, Lizée—herself noted for incorporating turntables and other electronic devices into the concert-music setting—here makes extensive use of various objets trouvés (including typewriters and vinyl records on portable turntables struck with mallets) as percussion instruments, regardless of their original purpose.

 The idea of “preparing” instruments, one of Cage’s most significant contributions to modern music, is reflected here in alterations made to the surfaces of vinyl records, generating new patterns and melodies by creating new paths for the stylus. Lizée has described this piece as a kind of dance party for Cage: “a re-imagining of a rave.”

This work was premiered on March 2, 2012 at the 'So Percussion' concert presented at Koerner Hall in Toronto (Canada).

For more information about Nicole Lizée and her work, please visit our SoundMakers website: http://www.SoundMakers.ca/composers/nicole-lizee


White Label Experiment by Nicole Lizée

The first part of Nicole LIzée's "Vertigo Beach, Études pour piano à Tom Verlaine"

Recorded Nov. 2, 2012 at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main

Love in the Time of Connectivity

Aaron Gervais Composer

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