Amplified Viola and Electronics

performed by Jacqueline Scavetta

Banter And Pixies

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

performed by Robin Meiksins (Summer 2018)

Transcription/ Microwave Popcorn was composed for flautist Robin Meiskins for the occasion of a University of Illinois Group for New Music event. The first incarnation of this work was premiered by Meiskins on 1/20/18 in Urbana Illinois at the culminating concert of this event. This is a revised version of the work.

	Microwave Popcorn, as the title suggests, involves the  transcription (in this case, mostly rhythms/ durations - converted to pitch frequencies via reciprocal of those durations as wavelengths) of popcorn popping in a microwave. The musical structure of this process is fairly straightforward and to me, the aural image is associated with joy and anticipation. I have been interested for some time in instrumental re-synthesis and computer-assisted transcription as part of an algorithmic compositional approach. The unique opportunity and circumstance for which this piece was originally composed provided an opportunity to do this kind of musical ‘still’-life.

Microwave Popcorn (for flute solo)

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

short excerpt from Prisma Interius IX (52 minutes), New World Records recording made with Dedalus Ensemble, 

"Mahler moment"

Prisma Interius IX - Dedalus - (Mahler moment, excerpt) 2018

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

Microwave Popcorn (for flute solo)

Eric Zurbin

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