Kebyart ensemble
October 8, 2021
Mixtur Festival

Voces:sombras T Oliver (2021)

Convergence Lines
for ten instruments and electronics (2013)
Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain
Pierre-André Valade, conductor
Electronics realized at GRAME (Lyon)
LIVE RECORDING — 7 March 2014, Biennale Musiques en Scène, Lyon, France
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This project began with the idea of writing a new piece in 2013 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s V.—his ambitious first novel, a huge canvas drawing together a large cast of vivid characters, far- flung settings, and a disjointed sense of time.

Translating postmodern literary devices to music is a longstanding interest of mine, and here the most captivating challenge was to create a musical parallel for its unorthodox structure: two independent strands of narrative that converge towards the end of the book. The first of these, presented in straightforward chronological episodes, is rooted in 1950’s Manhattan, following the misadventures of Benny Profane and his cohorts in The Whole Sick Crew. The second thread features Herbert Stencil’s quest for a woman who appears in his father’s journals, known only by the initial V. The chapters recounting Stencil’s search jump freely through several eras of the past and multiple exotic locales—Egypt, Florence, Namibia, Paris, Malta—each a vignette with a new atmosphere and a sub- narrative of its own, loosely linked to the others only by a V-named woman who may or may not be the same in each instance...

The result is Convergence Lines, a piece in twelve parts, each lasting about two minutes. The odd-numbered episodes follow the New York storyline, often drawing inspiration from the sounds of 50’s American music: big band, salsa, jazz... These generally up-tempo and rhythmically intricate sections, often foregrounding the brass, are connected by shared material and sonorities, creating a sense of development and forward motion. Even-numbered sections on the other hand make no attempt to preserve continuity. Drawing on the novel’s fixation with travel-guide, romantic exoticism, each presents a self-contained, crystallized world with a sonic palette of its own. Material begins to progressively bleed over into adjacent sections as we approach the point of convergence (section XI.), where many previously-heard sounds interact—just before being subsumed by an intrusive wash of white, the closing whirlpool...

Another significant theme of V. is the widening divide between humanity and the inanimate, between man and machine. One musical translation of this idea is the use of mutes, preparations, and other unusual objects to physically alter the resonant properties of nearly all of the instruments. The brass play with multiple mutes, including a few functionally obsolete ones from the swing band era such as the cleartone and buzz-wow mutes. In the strings, preparations are even more extensive: paper, felt, and clothespins on the harp, clamps that buzz in the piano’s lowest register, a piece of aluminum foil wrapped around the low C string of the bass. Even percussion instruments are subject to washers and aluminum foil distorting the vibraphone’s resonance, needles and brushes rubbing almglocken and steel drums, thimbles places inside tuned cowbells for a prolonged rattle.

The second musical manifestation of the inanimate is provided by the electronics—a part constructed almost exclusively from prerecorded samples. Using the concatenative synthesis tool CataRT, samples (many of which were recorded in Lyon specifically for this project) are drawn from databases, selected according to search criteria, and retuned in real time to fit into a given pool of microtonal pitches. The result can be anything from a well-timed quick arpeggio to a kaleidoscopic effect, a swirl of changing colors which, when combined with the six-channel, encompassing spatialization, mirrors Pynchon’s breadth with its nearly cinematic scope. Longer sound files, also created from samples in OpenMusic (using SuperVP for retuning and OMPrisma for precise spatial movement). Two other important tools are the score follower Antescofo~, used for a precise rhythmic interplay in the odd-numbered movements, and live descriptor analysis, allowing the timbral characteristics of the live players to pilot the selected color, level, and timing of the playback samples.

I would like to thank the many musical and technical minds who contributed to this project, including Jean Bresson, Max Bruckert, Arshia Cont, José Echeveste, Martin Matalon, Marlon Schumacher, and Diemo Schwarz. Special thanks to James Giroudon at GRAME for providing unparalleled working conditions in the V-shaped city of Lyon, and above all to Christophe Lebreton, without whose expertise this piece would never have seen the light of day.

Convergence Lines was commissioned by GRAME in conjunction with the New Forum Jeune Création, and premiered 23 January, 2014 by the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain under Pierre-André Valade at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin. Repeat performances were given on 4 February, 2014 at de Singel in Antwerp and 7 March 2014, as part of the Biennale Musiques en Scène in Lyon.
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CONVERGENCE LINES 
LISTENING GUIDE

I. APOCHEIR
The low point: Christmas Eve 1955 in a Norfolk sailor's bar. A slow climb back upwards, en route to New York City.
Big band brass hits with swing-era mutes pile up in dense rhythmic antiphony, toward a frenetic climax, an
accumulation of energy as the yo-yo snaps back to the palm.
II. SAND
Alexandria and Cairo at the end of the 19th century. The desert pours in from all sides. Muted violin and breathy flute intertwine against a backdrop of buzzes and sibilant grains.
III. MIRROR-TIME
An Upper West Side waiting room. The hourglass becomes a ticking clock, slipping out of phase. Cup mute chorales meet their reflections. Time reversed and forward time dovetail and overlap.
IV. COLORS
Florence in 1899, or the unexplored ends of the earth. An exotic wash of sonorities, mystical metallic shades— almglocken, steel drum, harp multiphonics—spinning
kaleidoscopic patterns, all formless texture and insinuation.
V. ROLLICKING
Sticks slapping skins. Subway trains shuttling
back and forth. A continuous zig-zag of sound bouncing
through harp glissandi, drum riffs, and Puerto Rican salsa.
VI. SFERICS
Southern Africa. Disturbances in the electromagnetic field: whistlers, tweeks, the dawn chorus. The crack of the sjambok. A prepared harp blends with distant mbiras. 
VII. SPHERE 
Piano center stage, an angular Monk-inspired solo.
Replies from a virtual counterpart, progressively dampened and deformed by objects placed on the strings. Interjections by a jazz natural horn trio.
VIII. ROCK
Malta, cryptic and remote, a fortified outcrop in the middle of the sea, isolated in space and in time.
A grounded meditation, smudged brass and solo strings over a peal of rattling cowbells and prepared percussion.
IX. INANIMATE
Lush chords dry out into thin clicks and thuds.
A vector from emotion to numbness, man to machine, pitch to noise—a step into the lifeless world of objects.
X. DECADENCE
Paris. Lush textures, shimmering showers of consonant ringing percussion, coins falling onto metal. Delicate melodies in flute and violin, an indulgent romantic atmosphere undermined
by a prosaic loop of muted piano and pizzicati, disillusioned and cold.
XI. VALLETTA
Convergence point. The grid of sandstone streets, sea vistas from the ramparts, meandering towards the tip of the peninsula. V-shaped patterns of confluence are everywhere: lines, material, spatialization—all move towards or fan out from a central target.
XII. EPILOGUE (VANISHING POINT)
A sudden blackout on the island. A slip back in time.
A water spout in the Mediterranean sinks a small wooden boat,
its dissolving vortex the last trace, a pinpoint the center of the map.

Convergence Lines

Ensemble Linea
for 7 performers,
2016 MATA Festival
Conductor: Jean-Philippe Wurtz
Recorded Live at National Sawdust.

yES I dOESN'T for ensemble(2016)

Voix Nouvelles Royaumont
Talea Ensemble
Conductor: James Baker

Blot Out for ensemble (2017)

Gaudeamus Musicweek,
Ensemble Modern Academy
Conductor: Lucas Vis
Live-recording made by Kees van de Wiel for Concertzender and VPRO

und for ensemble (2017)

Live set with Induction Instruments at Livart Gallery in Montréal, March 21, 2019.
Kitsuné are mythical foxes in the Shinto tradition, elusive and mischievous. 
Binaural recording by Florian Grond. Try listening with headphones for full spatial effect.

Live at Livart: Kitsuné

'Fanfare' was commissioned by Music Biennale Zagreb in 2019 with theme "City and space" in mind. Six brass players of Ad gloriam ensemble are surrounding the audience, accompanied by 6 loudspeakers. The piece tries to portray time as if it were another spacial dimension, referencing the nostalgia of old chansons about Zagreb, that were used as source material. Hence the opening and closing movements are formally a mirror image of one another. Furthermore, the electronic was composed by reshuffling short sound units from various songs about the city, matching the spoken sound of the text of those same songs. Like collective memory, these sonic fragments become detached from linear timeline and pop-up from different corners of room as if site-specific.

Fanfare

string quartet II [2017]

My piece for opera gong, cymbal and vibraphone with electronics Performed by the Italian percussionist Andrea Pedron. 

Recorded in the studio of the Music Academy of the University of Zagreb in conjunction with the music production class of maestro Kresimir Seletkovič

Canone mensurale su un tema di Igor Stravinsky
for digitally controlled sawtooth wave generator, two performers

Score available at https://www.marcoll.de/archives/pieces/il3

Canone Monodico  a 2 [Interlock 3]

Conduct: Matthew Kline
Violin: Ilana Waniuk
Bass Clarinet: Madison Greenstone
Trombone: Berk Schneider
Percussion: Michael Jones

Piece was produced as part of the Actor Project.

Etude of Echoes- with spatialization

Davor Vincze is a composer of contemporary music and artistic director of Novalis Festival, whose artistic focus lies on meta-reality and musical narrative that is implicitly stated or explicitly concealed. 
 
Davor Vincze uses the compositional method ‘microllage’, which recycles musical material in a quasi ecological way. With microllage, Vincze is looking for latent acoustic spaces and properties present, but mostly left unexplored in the pieces he is referencing, which often includes self-referentiality. In shivering, hazy textures, Vincze explores the parallax effect, juxtaposing or subtracting multiple perspectives on a limited number of ‘borrowed’ sonic gestures. This enables him to create a meta-reality that contains multiple layers of inexplicit & ambiguous meaning.

After completing his composition studies in Graz and Stuttgart, Vincze specialized in electronic music at the Ircam and finally completed his doctorate at Stanford University in the class of Brian Ferneyhough. His compositions have been performed by renowned international musicians like Ensembles Modern, Recherche, and Intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, Talea and Slagwerk den Haag, JACK, Mivos and Del Sol Quartet, Secession and No Borders Orchestra. Slovene and Zagreb Philharmonic etc, at festivals such as Présences, Impuls, MATA, Manifeste, Darmstadt, Zagreb Biennale and others. In 2014, he launched an international contemporary music festival - Novalis. His works are published by Maison ONA.

Vincze won Alvin Lucier Prize, 2nd prize at the Pre-Art Composition competition, Impuls Festival competition, and has been awarded many stipends in support of his studies and creations of new works. In 2020/21, Vincze was the winner of "Boris Papandopulo Prize” for the best Croatian composer of contemporary music, winner of the European Contemporary Composition Orchestra competition, winner of the best audiovisual work at the International Competition Città di Udine (Italy), as well as one of five awardees of 'New Music, New Paths' competition in Hong Kong, and he got selected for the artist residency both at the Institute of Electronic Music in Graz (2021) as well as at SWR Experimentalstudio (2022).

Fanfare

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