Amplified Viola and Electronics

performed by Jacqueline Scavetta

Banter And Pixies

Textures Arc The Points is dedicated to my late teacher Mark Chambers, who was a great composer that often introspect about music. Thank you for introducing me to the world of “Spectra and Pixies” and the world of electronics

Textures Arc The Points was commissioned by the Debris Project; utilizing sound solely from their database.

Engulfed by the many points, as these materials conglomerate within the plane 
Matter as figurative and external

Conglomerates veil the arcs

Meandering through the flow, at times with extreme exaggeration Flow that is never the same
As flow is made up of impermanent elements

Cyclic material that occurs “once”; an ephemeral quality 
Often unfair

Endure with an inner rhythm of
Textures of a phantom-like movement
Veiled by the engulfment of the points

We endure through perception of, not form, but rather

Yielding the flow
And respond to the “through” material

Textures Arc The Points

A [void] ance for solo violin

Chaining

Stages For Stereo Fixed Media

#acousmatic;  #electroacoustic; #musiqueconcrete; #electronic

Pictured Remnants

Misprints is influenced by the third cantos from a novel written by Nabokov called Pale Fire, a literary work that is part poetry and part prose.  In the third cantos, the character John Shade has a near death experience and sees a “tall white fountain.” He later reads in a magazine about a woman who came close to death, also claiming to have seen a “tall white fountain,” but soon comes to discover that the woman’s account in the magazine was a misprint, learning that in actuality the woman saw a “tall white mountain.” 

If a question is translated into a different language, words sometimes are misprinted and change meaning, yet the question still retains the understanding that it is a question. Therefore, if a Bach cello suite is played on viola, does it still ascribe to the same meaning?  This implies that rather than text (sound source), just like the words mountain and fountain, texture (sound qualities) plays more of a significance.  

This piece is conceived using string sounds to emulate the different worlds of poem and prose.  In Misprints, I attempt to sonically resemble the contrast between poetic and prose structures in terms of having music material phrased as a pseudo-poem that resolves as well as abruptly changes to different environments, versus music material phrased as proses, which sonically resemble a continuous flow of iterations.  The iterations of string sounds become less apparent to their sources and dissolve into a texture of gestalt spaces.  As the piece progresses, the flow is interrupted by a constant change of different sound environments with delayed reverbs imitating sounds of the cinema, in which case the cinema is a misprint of reality.  Both poem and prose become “textures interlinked” to develop a “web of senses.”

Misprints

for 8 channels (stereo version)

The light and the heavy

The static and the wet

The oblique and the reflective; 
The tight and the loose

Precisely indecisive


Weight Stranding was inspired by anamorphic art, as the piece explores exaggerated sound qualities and processes of each of the aforementioned pairs of adjectives.   There are essentially two types of anamorphic art; the first is oblique where the distorted image is immovable (static) and the beholder has to change their point of view to see the real image.  The second is catoptric (mirror), where the image is completely distorted and upon placing a mirror at the center the true image is revealed.  The two types of anamorphic art relate to Weight Stranding by utilizing excessive manipulation of stereo imaging in a multichannel context.

Through form and musical gestures the pair of contrasting adjectives describes the qualities and processes of each corresponding section of the piece, but each pair can also be used to describe every section in terms of the sound quality and/or the sound process. This results in a piece that can be heard as monolithic but still remains linear, as traditionally we listen to music from beginning to end.  Each section can live on its own, but all are connected through exaggeration (precision) instead of development (indecisive) of the qualities and processes of the musical material.  The qualities and processes can be heard as a metaphor: as we all carry our own personal Weight our qualities and processes become motionless, and life is Stranding us, engulfed, in the moment both figuratively and literally.

Weight Stranding

Adumbration: to suggest, disclose, or outline partially; to foreshadow vaguely; overshadow, obscure.

Adumbrations goes through a series of statements towards a sensibility of ideals and shadows, utilizing female voices reciting a series of tongue twisters that iterate sibilant, fricative, and bilabial sounds. If spoken incorrectly, the sound qualities of these tongue twisters are heard as curse words. Therefore, there needs to be consistency in the process of speaking these tongue twisters explicitly. In the English language curse words can function as multiple parts of speech, and as the saying goes, people who curse more frequently are more honest. 

This piece explores the dichotomous relationship between certain ideals and shadows, i.e. consistencies and inconsistencies, actuality and potentiality, and the explicit and the honest, as it goes through a series of musical adumbrations that “halo” the process of these tongue twisters. Through these adumbrations, the contradictory can be either one or the other of the ideals or shadows turning on itself, and at times the appearance of the clarity and the inaccuracy are in an indefinite flux through these halos.  This occurs as inconsistent phonemes are turned from inaccurate iterations of the tongue twisters into something sounding consistent.  The halos are supplementing the voice within varying simultaneous parameters that include shimmering, radiating around the iterations and vice/versa, and existing as a spatial supplement revolving in different stereo planes around and as a process, and out of the immersive comes our personal perception of the contradiction.  One can think of this adumbrated halo, in this sense, as a place where the dichotomous relationship becomes indistinguishable, and laughter for a flawed system. 

This piece is partially inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona.

Thank you so much for the wonderful voice recordings:
Elizabeth Gartman
Caroline Mckinzie
Logan Piker

Adumbrations

Whale Song Stranding


Inflections as sound process to sound quality
Emanating otherness of the
Sound quality to sound process from the reflective

Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the omnipresent of the dream like and the very literal 

As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above, below, before, and after, to neither rise nor sink but only float 

A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and dream-like

And

A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a constant movement and the abstract ingenuous stillness, a sound world of the discursive and the narrative

Chiastic process and quality is undermined as the reflections and inflections recur in rounded proportions.  The immersive and form is only tangible through this insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in real-time

Figuratively
Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is

Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding within,
Stranding

Whale Song Stranding

David Quang-Minh Nguyen is an audio engineer, sound designer/re-recording mixer, and composer of concert music. His current interests lie in composing acousmatic works that explore multi-channel loudspeaker expansion, various types of sound spatialization, and immersive audio.

Recognized nationally and internationally, David has had his works presented at the June in Buffalo New Music Festival, where he received individual master classes with Harvey Sollberger, Martin Bresnick, Roger Reynolds, and Brian Ferneyhough. He was an active participant in the Festival DME under the direction of Åke Parmerud, Musique & Recherches Académie d'été de composition électroacoustique under the direction of Annette Vande Gorne and João Pedro Oliveira, and the Sounds Around Me Festival under Thomas Gorbach. He was also selected by Master Artist Robert Normandeau for a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

His works have been presented at more than fifty national and international events, and he is a laureate or finalist in numerous competitions.  He has been published on ABLAZE Records' Electronic Masters Vol. 7 and received an honorable mention at the XII° Destellos Electroacoustic Competition 2019 for his work Misprints.  He also placed 2nd in the XIII° Destellos competition for Adumbrations, was a finalist for the PRIX CIME 2019, and won 2nd place for the ASCAP/SEAMUS Award for his work Weight Stranding. In 2021, his SEAMUS-commissioned piece Whale Song Stranding was selected for presentation on the SEAMUS 31 CD and received the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis selection.  David was awarded the Prix CIME 2023 Residency Award for Whale Song Stranding.  His work Texture Arc the Points won 1st place in the ULJUS Međunarodno Pijanističko Takmičenje Smederevo Competition and 2nd place in the prestigious Concours Biennal de Composition Acousmatique Métamorphoses.

David Q. Nguyen holds a BM from Old Dominion University, where he studied with Andrey R. Kasparov and Mark Chambers.  He also graduated at the top of his class from The Omega Studios School of Applied Recording Arts & Sciences with a focus on Audio Engineering in the Music Industry and Film/Television.  He has received his Master's degree and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his primary teachers are Reynold Tharp, Erik Lund, Eli Fieldsteel, Sever Tipei, and Scott A. Wyatt.

David Quang-Minh Nguyen

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