Notes on Golden Gate Redux 

Binaural field recordings, found sound and digital processing.  Stereo. (multi-channel version in process)

The primary compositional material for Golden Gate Redux is taken from a single night of binaural field recording made in January of 2006.  The location of the recording was San Francisco's China Town and the marina at the north end of the city - specifically at the site of the Wave Organ.  The Wave Organ is a permanent sound installation created for the San Francisco Exploratorium by Peter Richards in 1986.  The guttural and soothing breathing sounds emitted by the Wave Organ combined with the sounds of China Town winding down following the Chinese New Year festival combine to create a surreal and soporific atmosphere.  Overlaying the mingled atmospheres of the San Francisco locations is audio harvested from a discarded Hypnotist’s instructional cassette discovered in a junk shop.  Golden Gate Redux is an audio portrait of a sense of place; specifically, it is an illustration – poetically rendered of my own immersion into the fabric of life in San Francisco. Sounds of the tidal motion through the Golden Gate and the transient life of the city personified by the post festival sounds of China Town are an aural reference to the fluid nature of life in San Francisco.

Golden Gate Redux

The piece is not formally organized but could be considered to be a three-part composition with a brief statement and exposition followed by a cannon and ending with a reduction of the opening statement.  It was my intention to begin with a simple theme (in this case a two note melody with an interval of a perfect fifth) and see how far I could develop it.  The title “Untying the Knot” refers to the unfolding of possible themes from a simple kernel of a motive – the analogy is a length of cord unravelling out from a tightly woven knot. 

The quintet is City Winds from San Francisco

Untying the Knot

If the human ability to articulate thought and communicate with lexical language is an attribute inherited from God, then perhaps an understanding of the musical language of the birds and beasts can be achieved by contemplation of God's creation… To me, God is creation; creation in the embodiment of all living things on this tiny planet. The complexity and the interconnectedness of all things is unfathomable… But we are not separate from the world, even in ignorance. We share music with all living things. It is in our language. Our music is a way of preserving a scrap of a memory of a time when we knew how to understand the forest…
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