I have initiated the series APT (Artist Phone Takes). Recorded in our apartments and in live performance with our everyday devices, and posted on Soundcloud, APT presents excellent and evanescent music without waiting for studio setups.

C Cooper- Is It A Boy Or A

ConstanceCooper-CONSULTING THE DELPHIC ORACLE FROM SPACE

sharp satiric avant-garde short electronic piece with my processed voice   poem by Wislawa Szymborska.  translated by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

Szymborska IN PRAISE OF FEELING BAD ABOUT YOURSELF

Note for Open-Space CD

Mimesis.  From the start, my project was to write a movement in the same form as Ben Borretz’ piano/MIDI-piano composition for Bob Morris’s 70th birthday.  “Same form” in the sense that 

          “7,  3,  2,  7,  3,  9”     and    “hot, sweet, salty, hot, sweet, sour” 

have the same form.  The project is paradoxical because one thing I love about Ben’s piece for Bob is it resists dividing neatly into sections—building blocks.  It’s not clear where to put in those commas.  As I got going on it, I fell into imitating or responding to other characteristics as well, but not systematically:  textures, tempi, rhythms, and so on and--and wouldn’t you know--trying hard to imitate the very flow that resists defining form.  I do think it is fun to listen to one piece with the other in mind, but I would be disappointed to conclude that my Mimesis could not offer some pleasure all on its own.  The music indulges in one further reminiscence.  For harmony in Mimesis, I re-used the same box of crayons as in my violin and piano sonata Remembering minor dreaming of major.”  My excuse is that Ben once complimented me on its harmony.  I don’t know how much of a connection is thereby established; certainly, my harmonic method was  successful as a deadline meeting strategy.   Re-use, implying imitation, promotes fluid working.  As I understand it, the richness and rightness and helpfulness of the notion of “mimesis” in its philosophical tradition is refusing to oppose imitation to invention, understanding them as complementary.  D.L.

Mimesis 11.26.15 (1)

David Lidov

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