Performance by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, November 2008, in St. Johns, Newfoundland. 

Program Notes:
In searching for a satisfactory definition of “music” I have come across several remarkable and important contributions, a few of these are revealed by a cursory search of the Internet. The novelist Victor Hugo said, “music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent” (a sentiment held by many today). Oscar Wilde, remarked that “music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.” And, in the experimental environment of the early Twentieth Century, Luigi Russolo refers to “the art of noise,” and perhaps more famously, Edgard Varèse described music as, “organized sound.”
It is from this last definition that most of my thought on the matter has stemmed. In considering these and others together with my experiences in music listening, performance, study and creation, I have come to the following definition: that music is the artful parsing of memory by sound, or as is the case with acoustic music, by performed sound. I do not propose here that this definition is superior or more complete than any of its ancestors, nor that “Skeleton,” by any stretch of the imagination, exemplifies or epitomizes it. But in order to discuss the piece it is necessary to understand that the origins of its form and content depend very directly on the concepts in this definition.
An important addition to the Varèse definition is the term “artful.” In order for music to have a quality (be it ‘good’ or ‘bad’), there must be a scale by which it may be judged, even if that scale is as ambiguous and subjective as artfulness most certainly is. It is however, in my opinion, a better criterion than the degree to which a piece of music is organized. It is art’s very subjective nature that gives it such power and sway over the hearts and minds of those who receive it, and its capacity to provoke thought. Music is more than organized sound.
A slightly less important addition, but perhaps more pertinent to the piece at hand, is that which was hinted at by Oscar Wilde above, “memory.” In order to hear pitch for instance, one’s brain compares the memory of the sensations interpreted and transmitted to it by the ear in the past to those in the present. In music we are always comparing what we hear in the present to what we have heard in the past and the trained listener will apply learned structure to what he or she is hearing and thereby devise an interpretation. This, in combination with the term “artful,” elucidates a point that, though only implicit in the definition itself, is perhaps its most important feature: that music requires human agents and interpreters to be.
The meaning of the title, and the subsequent philosophy of the piece, is twofold. Skeleton simultaneously refers to the foundational function of the score to the music and the music to the memory, and to the ever-fleeting infinitesimal nature of the present moment. It alludes not only to the musical and social structures that support it as a ‘piece of music,’ but also to the decaying remains of the present as it passes through our memory of it.
The piece is made up of many short segments or quanta that are constantly developing or repeating in order to directly address the memory of the present as it flows through the mind the listener. The rate at which this flow occurs is also of interest to me, and methods of its control varying from the proportioning of silences to the fluctuating of tempo to the point of extreme rubato are employed herein. The quanta’s eventual combinations and interactions produce increasingly larger chunks of time to the point where their identities are indistinct from one another and little of their origins remain other than the inevitable silence that follows them.
The quanta are designed with the aim that they are fundamentally units of human expression (i.e. a gentle or melancholy ‘sighing’ motive, or clamorous outburst of anger). This directly ties the identity and humanity of the performers to the musical output of the piece.
-Michael Berger, Sept. 1, 2008

Skeleton

Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford and author of Sonic Wonderland, has discovered the world record for the ‘Longest Echo’. The 1970 Guinness Book of Records is the last claim for the ‘longest echo’, when the solid-bronze doors of the Hamilton Mausoleum in Scotland slammed shut, it took 15 seconds for the sound to die away to silence. In researching his new book Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound Trevor Cox discovered a place where the sound echoes around for a full minute longer, smashing the previous record.

Trevor Cox travelled to the oil storage complex at Inchindown, near Invergordon, Scotland. These reservoirs supplied the naval anchorage in the Cromarty Firth at the bottom of the hill. The tanks were constructed in great secrecy amid concerns about the strengthening of Germany’s armed forces during the 1930s and the threat posed by long-range bombers, which is why the tanks were dug deep into the hillside. The vast complex took three years to complete. His guide was Allan Kilpatrick, an archaeological investigator for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

Trevor had to enter the tank through one of the 18 inch diameter oil pipes because there are no doors. The tank could hold 25.5 million litres of fuel and has walls 45cm thick. The space is about twice the length of a football pitch, 9m wide and 13.5 metres high.

Allan fired a pistol loaded with blanks about a third of the way into the storage tank, and Trevor recorded the response picked up by the microphones about a third of the way from the far end. This is a standard technique used in concert hall acoustics; old black-and-white photographs show a gun being fired on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall when they tested the acoustics back in the 1950s.

Sonic Wonderland - World's Longest Echo

DIANA RODRIGUEZ
FA[i]T[h]E (2015)
for Clarinet, Harp, Baritone, and Violin 

World Premiere live performance at the 2015 Etchings Festival.

Ecce Ensemble

Nicholas Isherwood, Bass Baritone
Vasko Dukovski, clarinet
Diamanda La Berge Dramm, violin
Virginie Tarrête, harp

Jean-Philippe Wurtz, conductor

www.eccensemble.com

Diana RODRIGUEZ FA[i]T[h]E (2015)| ECCE ensemble

Canadian composer, MICHAEL BERGER was born in April of 1980. In 2001, after two years of preliminary study at Kwantlen University College in Langley, British Columbia, Michael transferred to the University of Victoria where he studied with Christopher Butterfield to obtain his Bachelor of Music in Composition and Theory in 2005. Michael has completed his Master of Music Composition in 2007 at the University of Alberta with the support of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (S.S.H.R.C.). There he studied with Drs. Howard Bashaw, Andriy Talpash, and Mark Hannesson. In the Fall of 2007 Michael began studies in the Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition program at Stanford University with Dr. Mark Applebaum with renewed funding from the S.S.H.R.C. and a full scholarship from the school. In addition to his DMA work at Stanford, Michael completed a Master of Arts in Music, Science, and Technology (MA/MST) in June of 2010.  Michael received his DMA in 2012 after working with Drs. Mark Applebaum, Brian Ferneyhough, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, and Erik Ulman. Currently Michael works at Smule in San Francisco where he leads the team of composers and arrangers who produce all of the musical arrangements into all of Smule's apps (Magic Piano, Sing! Karaoke, Guitar!, and AutoRap).

    Michael looks at music as an art of time through one’s experience of sound and memory. An important aspect to his subsequent approach to composition is his attention to both the innately physical nature of sound and its production, and the energies that go into and come out of that production. Additionally, Michael’s music is also often informed by extra-musical concepts, issues, and ideas. In past works, these have included: religious extremism, universal continuum, arbitrariness, epistemology, and death and identity.

Michael began his musical training in elementary school with study of the ukulele and later the trumpet and doublebass. He continued on these instruments together with voice through high school and participated in various extracurricular ensembles. In college and university Michael focused instrumentally on trumpet, studying with Tom Shorthouse (1999-2001) and Lou Ranger (2001-2004).

After many years of dabbling, Michael received his first formal classes in composition at the University of Victoria with Michael Longton in 2001. Excited by the field, he applied and was accepted to be a composition major at the end of that year. Similarly in 2002, Michael had his first real exposure to the idiom of electroacoustics and immediately became fascinated by it. During his undergraduate degree Michael was fortunate to work with many talented and gifted artists (both teachers and fellow students) including Dr. W. Andrew Schloss, Dr. John Celona, Dr. Dániel Péter Biró, Trimpin, Gordon Mumma, Dr. Gerald King, David Cecchetto, Adam Tindale, Kirk McNally and many others.

In 2006 Michael was one of six participants in the Quatuor Bozzini’s “composer’s kitchen,” a week long workshop dealing with composition for string quartet held annually in Montréal, QC. He also had the opportunity to meet with and have a piece read by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal in October of that year. In the summer of 2007 Michael was one of three composers from across Canada to participate in Arraymusic’s 21st annual “Young Composers’ Workshop” in Toronto, ON. In 2008 he completed a commission from the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal as one of four participants in their “Génération 2008” Canadian tour. Michael then completed a piece for the Freiburg-based Ensemble Sur Plus that was performed in March of 2009 at Stanford University and in Freiburg in July of the same year. He is presently completing a solo Clarinet piece for his friend Heather Roche. In 2009-2010 Michael served as "Composer in Residence" for the Stanford University Philharmonic Orchestra under the directorship of Prof. Jindong Cai. Michael will complete a work for the ensemble for its premiere in Fall 2010.

    Michael's final project piece and dissertation paper "That Is Only A Mirror..." was composed and premiered in 2012 in Stanford, CA by the Talea Ensemble (New York). The piece and dissertation explore ideas of identity in an environment of constant change and reflection.

Skeleton

MichaelBerger

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