Name: Mario Davidovsky - Quartetto No 3 by counterinduction
Duration: 12 min 43 s
Description: a recording of a live performance by counter)induction in Oct 2011 at the Tenri Cultural Institute

CAPTCHA for Baritone and Piano
Duration: 16'
Text by CAPTCHA
Performers: American Modern Ensemble, Jesse Blumberg, baritone; Blair McMillen, piano
Publisher: Bill Holab Music: http://www.billholabmusic.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1473
Online Perusal Score: https://issuu.com/robertpaterson/docs/paterson_captcha_perusal
For More Information: https://robertpaterson.com/captcha-baritone-version

PROGRAM NOTES
CAPTCHA originated with an assignment I was given as a participant in the American Opera Projects (AOP) Composers & The Voice program. Throughout the year, we wrote a variety of arias and songs and were given various "challenges." Some of the challenges included using no more than four lines of text, using found text, using prose, and also trying to avoid the passagio (a term used in classical singing to describe where different voice ranges cross over, for example, where the chest voice and head voice cross). I neglected to incorporate any of the challenges into previous pieces, and I only had one song or aria left, so I had to incorporate all of the remaining challenges into a single piece.

For found text, I decided to use CAPTCHA texts. The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that only humans can pass. For example, humans can read distorted text presented as a graphic, but current computer programs cannot. To find interesting words and phrases, I spent many tedious hours in front of my computer loading CAPTCHA texts. Actually, what I ended using are reCAPTCHA texts, which are derived from a free version of CAPTCHA that uses combinations of real words from scanned books that need human confirmation and gibberish text.

I initially wrote one song entitled CAPTCHA, but later decided to compose an entire song cycle that incorporates the original song. Each songs uses a few key words (the few that are actually real words and phrases) as a springboard. I attempt to phonetically interpret the other words and phrases that don’t make sense, infusing emotion where none exists. Ultimately, my goal is to create an emotionally moving experience, despite the nonsensical nature of the words.

Winter Songs

CAPTCHA - IV. voix Gustroor

The many violent foldings of the Tertiary era took place at the expense of this very ancient Mediterranean, much larger than the present one. All the mountains, from the Baetic Cordillera to the Rif, the Atlas, the Alps and the Apennines, the Balkans, the Taurus and the Caucasus, were heaved up out of the ancient sea. They reduced its area, raising from the great sea bed not only sedimentary rocks-sands, clays, sandstones, thick layers of limestone-but also deeply buried primitive rocks. The mountains surrounding, strangling, barricading and compartmentalizing the long Mediterranean coastline are the flesh and bones of the ancestral Tethys. Everywhere the sea water has left traces of its slow labour. The sedimentary limestones outside Cairo, "so fine-grained and of such milky whiteness that they allow the sculptor's chisel to give the sensation of volume by working to a depth of only a few millimetres"; the great slabs of coraline limestone from which the megalithic temples in Malta were built; the stone of Segovia which is easier to work when wet; the limestone of the Latomies (the huge quarries of Syracuse); the Istrian stones of Venice and many other rock formations in Greece, Italy and Sicily-all these came from the sea bed.
Fernand Braudel
"Memory and The Mediterranean"




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"Statues so thoroughly shattered that out of the debris a new work of art is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the footrace; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it ...a profile in which beauty survives with a complete absence of human or divine anecdote"
Margerite Yourcenar, 
"That mighty sculptor, time"

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Tethys is a peculiar mythic figure; sister and consort of Oceanus, her position in the mythic structure of ancient Greece and Rome assigns her tremendous power, reordering the stars and constellations, and giving birth to rivers and lakes as well  as the sea nymphs.  And yet, she never inspired the development of any cult in the ancient world, or any trace of worship.  A forgotten member of the elder divinities, she remains as an often invisible yet extraordinarily powerful presence– like the forces of deep time, she is slippery, omnipresent and often invisible within the human time frame. In the modern, she presides over new matters and regions while maintaining the link to deep time and the transcendent; she is the metonymic (and matronymic) of one of Saturn's moons and is the name given to the sea which existed between the continents of Gondwana and Laurasia during much of the Mesozoic era (25 to 65 million years ago).


It is this later trajectory which interested me while look for a framework for composing a concertino for violin and ensemble. The Tethys Sea, over its aeons years of existence was site of both the constructive and ruinous forces of nature and time; it was the site of the evolution of the whale, and the origin of the modern Mediterranean, and its destruction and fragmentation can be found in the floors of the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Aral seas.  Geologic time is always undermining the order of the present, but it is also the means by which new orders are composed.


This resonates with my interest in the special role that a soloist can have on the unfolding of a piece; transforming material, but also the relationships between performers, and the sense of the performance space experienced by the audience.  In Tethys the soloist couples and decouples from three distinct groupings of instruments, pushing and pulling harmonies and motives, but also forming connections which pull the music across the space of the performance.  

The work was written for violinist Miranda Cuckson, and counter)induction. (DB)

Tethys for violin and ensemble

A performance of Elena Mendoza from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2018.  Fabulous composer, great hall, great band!

Nebelsplitter: Elena Mendoza

Live performance of Tedesco's Scherzo by counter)induction at Scorca Hall, New York, 23 April, 2019.  (New York premiere)

Scherzo by Diego Tedesco

a recording of a live performance by counter)induction in Oct 2011 at the Tenri Cultural Institute

Mario Davidovsky - Quartetto No 3

counterinduction

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