Episode 181 of ADJ•ective New Music's podcast, Lexical Tones. Robert McClure interviews composer David Q. Nguyen.

Visit www.adjectivenewmusic.com for more information about ADJ•ective New Music, the ADJ•ective Composers' Collective, and Lexical Tones.

181 - David Q Nguyen

Broke

00:00  在海潮之下 …under the tides
02:56  在潮汐之間 …between tides
05:55  在波光之上 …above the waves
09:13  在消散之際 …while dissipating

〈無人知曉的海岸〉一曲完成於2023年夏季，為現代音樂協會 ISCM 委託創作之鋼琴獨奏作品。其創作靈感源自於我學生時期記憶的片段：在無人海岸凝望遠方時，湛藍的空氣中卻嗅出了寂寥的氛圍，就如同在是枝裕和的電影作品裡平靜的敘事之下，悄然滲入的悵然。我嘗試將這樣的氛圍融入這首作品中，並以當時目光凝望之處 —— 海浪、潮汐、波光等意象作為發想素材，來描繪記憶中曾佇足的無人海岸。

A Coast Where Nobody Knows〈無人知曉的海岸〉：for solo piano (2023)

The Gardens Between The Pillars

The Gardens Between the Pillars is one of five movements of The Elemental Cycles, where each cycle uses a primary element as the principal character.  In fact, all five cycles are considered works for “cinema for the ear.”  For this cycle, the sole element used is wood, including sound images pertaining to wood.  There are books and creaky doors, wood surfaces where steady and irregular footsteps walk, the flow of trees pertaining to The Pillars, as well as divine and earthly creatures, and pure and warpy, rough music to accompany this cinema for the ear.

The Gardens, first and foremost, are made up of interior and exterior scenes, motions and projections, and the emergence of figurative and explicit sounds from the decentralization of The Pillars.

In search of a narrative, doors open and close, pages turn,
The duality of images that represents:

Theory and Knowledge
Beauty and Violence
Life and Death
Temptation and Enlightenment

The duality of these sound-images contains the same motion ‘not two’: Advaya
The Pillars points at transcending this duality through 
The reallocated sound images, sound function, and motions
As ways to navigate The Gardens Between

The Pillars¬ are the paths, which reveal the interconnection of the natural, the inter-complexity of the nurtured, and the intervening of scenes through insertion
Which often feel that what is represented is horrific and cruel

We recognize from the far plane The Gardens as a gestalt labyrinth
Up close we perceive the many, many paths and narratives
Between The Pillars, we are presented implications of sounds that have neither beginning nor end

A wanderer severed from illusion in the infinite forest
An area of the Everblossom trees, a life of fleeting beauty 
It is the worldly sculpture of the Bas and High-Relief 

Realms of the Divine and Mortal

An immersion of boundless rhizome—a chiasmus of sonic ascription
An immersion of all materials of wood perceived 
A duality must be understood to walk the way broadly 
And you will hear it in everything 


The Gardens Between The Pillars

#acousmatic;  #electroacoustic; #musiqueconcrete; #electronic

Pictured Remnants

« Les chants et les danses qui nous effleuraient lorsque nous passions par là laissèrent dans nos cœurs de bien curieux vestiges.
Sans nous dérober à la vie, nous sommes-nous néanmoins jamais laissés entièrement aller à son onde, lâchés et souples, impassibles à demain ?

Pour nous qui n'avons jamais su rêver qu'au passé, demain fut toujours une menace.

Et pendant ce temps, nous n'aurons fait que dérober aux choses un peu de leur éclat.

Alors, nous allons.

Nous avançons, avec le rire comme défaite et pour seule gloire la gorge serrée.
Nous avançons, rassasiés des Judas de pacotille et des passions minables. 
Nous avançons, métal en bouche, les dents bien serrées pour ne plus rien lâcher ».

- Wahed Gotref, <i>Problèmes prosés</i>


Métal en bouche

This work is inspired by how often an idea or behavior of one individual is rejected by another with a simple phrase, “this makes no sense.” Too often have “sense” become a word of rejection in further understanding differences between individuals; it shuts down the opportunity of knowing and the celebration of diversity. However, this piece is not about conflict and rejection with a drama of finally being accepted. I am more fascinated by the rejected idea’s inner context, as it is a living organism that stands and lives by its own rights within its history and culture. Hence, following this idea, the piece is a practice of using minimal sound sources (a huge bag of Kraft paper) to create as many sounds and gestures with electronic engineering and granular synthesis (GRM tools); the monotone of the original sound source hence becomes the idea that “does not make sense,” and the processed result becomes the inner organism of the idea in question.

This piece has been recognized by the PRIX CIME 2019 as one of the finalist.
https://www.cime-icem.net/prix-cime-2019/

Parle Do I

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

__ Of Conducted Chaos

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

Broke

Pinda Ho

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