Bill Alves' Mystic Canyon for violin and gamelan, performed by Susan Jensen and the HMC American Gamelan, from the CD of the same name from MicroFestRecords.

Mystic Canyon

Angel's Crest is a piece in the Javanese slendro tuning system almost entirely for the metallophone (keyed) section of the gamelan. Unlike traditional gamelan music, it explores constantly shifting, expanding, and contracting cycles of time.

Angel's Crest

Sounds Ineffable sets a text from the Therigatha, a collection of Pali language verses of early female Buddhists. The sounds of the singer are simultaneously stretched out by real time computer processing, creating different copies of the sound progressing at different rates. This process does not include any pre-recorded singing and results not in a delay exactly, but in what would have been called in the European Middle Ages a mensuration canon -- a piece being combined with itself at different speeds. These tempos are related to the original sound by the same integer proportions used in the tuning of the notes, creating resonances both in time, as the sung lines converge and diverge, and in pitch, forming just harmonies with each other. The words, though, dissolve in the paradox of sensory perceptions leading to the insensible.

Sound Ineffable

When I was living in Bali and studying the famous gamelan music of that culture, one of my most memorable musical experiences was not of that tradition. It happened at an oton, a ritual that is performed 210 days after the birth of a child when the baby's feet touch the earth for the first time. Before that time she is considered still too close to the realm of the gods to be allowed to touch the ground. The only music at this ceremony came from the chanting of the officiating priest and the small bell whose sounds he wafted to the fascinated baby's ears.
Those chants, or mantra, are essential in Hindu worship not just as carriers of ritual text, but as a way of tuning oneself to the vibrations of the universe. These are in a very real sense the sounds of the transition from the celestial to the terrestrial world, a transition also symbolized by the screen of the Balinese shadow puppet play, the wayang kulit. In this revered form of drama, puppets, whose shadows flicker evanescently on the screen, act out mytho-religious epics accompanied by the bell-like tones of the gamelan, but through the screen we can only glimpse these ghostly echos of the world of gods and demons.
In some Hindu traditions, the sounds of mantra represent "music of the spheres" (to use the term from the ancient West) made audible, and as with ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras, there is a fascination with the literal connection of sacred number and sound, as represented in vibration ratios and the tones of the syllables (such as the trinity represented in the three sounds of the sacred syllable "aum," sometimes transliterated as "om"). In these traditions, the music of this transition from the celestial to the world of heard vibrations is known as "luminescent sound."
Witnessing the entry of my own children into this uncertain and violent world of today, I decided to set a Sanskrit text that expresses the Hindu ideal of ahimsa, or non-violence. I have set it in pitches derived entirely by ratios of 3 and 7, pitches which therefore depart considerably from the twelve-tone equal temperament standard of modern Western music. The choir sings together with computer-generated sounds, recapitulating the transitions of luminescence, of children still too close to the divine to set their feet on earth.
This recording is from a live performance by the Donald Brinegar Singers in Pasadena, California in 2003.

Luminescence

Metalloid for just intonation ensemble, performed by the HMC Electronic Music Ensemble: Bill Alves, keyboard; Steven Berler, clarinet; Brian Dolphin, electric guitar; Nicholas Herman, electric guitar; Cory Hills, drums; Martin Hunt, keyboard; Stephen Jones, bass guitar; Jakob Spjut, saxophone

Metalloid (excerpt)

Rational Basis for 8 electric guitars performed by the Los Angeles Electric 8: Gabriel Deutsch, Nicholas Deyoe, Tom Frazer, Jeremy Kerner, Eric Kiersnowski, Andy Lee, Felix Salazar, JohnPaul Trotter. On Guitars & Gamelan from MicroFest Records.

Rational Basis

For an installation at Berlin's ohrenhoch der Geräuschladen. Can be set to loop.

The Geometry of Time

Luminescence for just intonation choir and electronics, performed by the Donald Brinegar Singers, MicroFest 2003.

bill_alves

Popular tracks