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To
Be and Not To Be: Aspects of the Interaction Between Instrumental and
Electronic Compositional Methods
Flo Menezes
ABSTRACT
The
author provides an overview of the many consequences that the arrival of
electroacoustic music has produced on musical material and discusses the
advantages of an interaction between manifest instrumental and "subjacent" electroacoustic writing. By "writing" the author means the compositional processes
themselves. His discussion ranges from the use of particular harmonic
techniques to the revolutionary role that time expansion plays in obtaining a
deeper perception and evaluation of the sound phenomena. The author uses some
of his works to exemplify the compositional aspects discussed.
Although
instrumental music perhaps constitutes an irreversible genre of composition,
nowadays many composers tend to view composition via electronic means as a
powerful resource and a crucial aspect of their music. This is also the case in
my own work. Since my first attempts at creating electroacoustic music as a
guest composer at the Studio für elektronische Musik at the Cologne
Musikhochschule, where I worked from 1986 to 1990, my compositions have
centered essentially on the interaction between instrumental writing and
electronic resources. This was one of the reasons that in 1994 I founded the
Studio PANaroma de Música Eletroacústica [1] at the State
University of Sáo Paulo (UNESP) in cooperation with the Santa Marcelina
College (FASM), one of the most significant Brazilian centers for research and
composition in electroacoustic music. Students who have access to the studio
must have studied instrumental composition prior to their first experiences
with electroacoustic means.
My
musical language, as exemplified in Parcours de
l'Entité (Trajectory of the Entity), cannot be
understood or described without first discussing certain aspects of my
conception of the general implications of electroacoustic music on musical
thought [2].
The Status of Musical Material in Electroacoustic Music
As
is not the case in instrumental music, the composer of electroacoustic music is
directly confronted with sound phenomena, without the mediation of a figural
representation of sound, such as a written musical score. This fact gives rise
to many substantial differences in the approaches to musical composition.
Musical
writing (notation) was born as a graphical representation of verbal prosody, as
can be observed by studying the early vocal music of the Middle Ages. As a
consequence, it emphasized the construction of a notation devoted to intervals
and durations. Notation has historically allowed the composer to
compartmentalize sound through graphic symbolism. The arrival of musical
writing contributed incisively to the semiotic delimitation between verbal and
musical languages, because it placed emphasis on aspects that verbal writing,
its older sister, ignored. As we know, verbal writing centers around the
summary representation of vocalic timbre and was based on the primordial binary
opposition between vowels (sounds with determined pitches) and consonants
(noises). Such compartmentalization of musical notation was responsible for a
considerable amount of abstraction in the presence of raw sound, which is in
itself a totality of aspects. The articulation of such sound
parameters (basically, pitches and durations) has made possible the
construction of what we can designate as musical composition
proper: in fact, to compose signifies in essence the
recomposition of sound parameters---durations, pitches,
intensities, timbres (which have been historically compartmentalized by musical
writing)---into an organic whole.
Such
elaborated articulation of elements in musical time is generally called
musical material The material is therefore posterior, or
subsequent---derived from the musical writing itself---and essentially takes
on, in instrumental music, a relational character. This means that the essence
of musical material in instrumental music, as originated by musical writing,
reveals the interdependence between structural elements that constitute musical
form.
In
electroacoustic music, on the contrary, musical material acquires a double
function: on the one hand, it preserves and develops its relational character
(although now independently of a notational process), in that it continues to
elaborate the temporal discourse of musical form as a correlation of the
elements with which it orders the time; on the other hand, musical material is
introduced into the constitution of the sound spectra themselves. Therefore,
electroacoustic music, unlike instrumental music, first constitutes its own
sounds. Thus, the functions of musical material in electroacoustic music are,
in one sense, relational and, on the other hand,
constitutive in character. While in written instrumental
music the material originates from the writing itself, in electroacoustic music
the material precedes, in part, the process of composition in so far as the
material involves the spectral constitution of the sound and is partially
derived from the actual relational work of composition in the
studio. Thus, the material emerges partially from derivative processes
(manipulations of sound in time, mixing, etc.) regarding form, which are, in
any case, also essential to electroacoustic compositional elaboration.
Considering that any and all electroacoustic elaboration passes inevitably
through the procedures of synthesis, through those related to
treatment (for instance, filtering, transposing, time
stretching and time compression, shuffling and montage techniques) or---as has
been the case of the great majority of works composed in studios---through both
types of procedure, we can testify that the musical material is, in its
constitutive character, subsequent to the synthesis and prior to the treatment.
At any rate, musical material will always constitute the a priori condition of
compositional elaboration. Such compositional elaboration in the
studio---elaboration that renounces the decoding processes of traditional
musical notation without renouncing the relational aspects of the musical
material---I call latent or subjacent writing.
Latent
Writing in Electroacoustic Music
In
the absence of notation or notational abstraction in the studio, the composer
nevertheless is not free from compositional elaboration. Indeed, every quality
composition, be it instrumental or electroacoustic, shapes itself according to
the escritural or writing-based elaboration of its
structures. In electroacoustic music, the writing exists, thus, in a latent
state. We are faced with a kind of subjacent writing that
permeates speculative thought in the studio.
In
fact, such latent writing tends to regain, in the core of electroacoustic
activity and in its confrontation with raw and concrete sound, the abstraction
that is typical of instrumental writing, as demonstrated by its long history.
In this context, one of the most relevant aspects of electroacoustic
composition is, as has been shown by Stockhausen [3], sound
decomposition Just as instrumental writing implies the
compartmentalization of sound parameters, this segmentation is regained in the
electroacoustic studio, above all, through the procedures by which the sound is
treated, through which the sound object---to employ the
expression so beloved by Schaeffer [4]---unveils its many distinct facets.
In
the course of this process of decomposition/composition of sound in the studio,
the composer acquires an even sharper perception of the internal life of
sounds. The composer's awareness of the relationships of structural elements is
accompanied by a perception whose end result is an effective and constitutive
introspection into the sound spectra. This means that the perception concerned
above all with formal relationships is corroborated by a continual
textural comprehension of the objects. At the core of the
process of constituting sound texture, the formal relationships will thus
infiltrate as elements of the musical structure. In this way we arrive
effectively at the essence of the spectra, having thus effectuated a
substantially qualitative change (as compared to instrumental music). With this
change, musical time itself is considered as a relational and constitutive
aspect of the musical material.
From the Sound of Time to the Time of Sound
Ithink that, in the course of the short history of electroacoustic music, we can perceive a gradual and symptomatic shifting of interest in sound perception regarding time. After experiments with cutting and montage of analog tapes, through which we perceive the prominence of the attack in the perceptual evaluation of sounds---experiments that culminated in Schaeffer's theoretical exposition on temporal anamorphosis, in which he exposed the proportional relevance of the attack as compared to the duration of sound (the shorter the sound is, the greater the importance of its attack) [5]---there tended to be an increased consciousness of what Stockhausen has called the "unity of musical time" [6]. Through Stockhausen's theory, composers gained knowledge of the fact that frequencies and rhythms are nothing more than differentiated degrees of the same process, concerning the organization of the duration of vibrations on the microstructural spectral level. Gradually, through an increased awareness of the attack, a more clarified perception of the sustain of sound came about.
I
think that the electroacoustic experience thus caused a real revolution in the
heart of the musical conception of time and exposed a bipolarity from which no
aesthetic attitude related to composition can escape: either one considers
sound as a constitutive part of musical time and pays more attention to attacks
and to metric/rhythmic organization, or, on the contrary, one considers sound
as a textural phenomenon, and places emphasis on the perception of time as a
constitutive element of the sound spectrum. The first posture will inevitably
be associated with instrumental writing, which does not allow a radical
compositional intervention into the constitution of the sounds themselves. The
second will, in turn, constitute a typically electroacoustic stance, in which
one enters into the internal temporal relationships of the spectrum.
In
my work, such a reflection on time is responsible for constructions devoted to
the interaction between instruments and electronics, even when I compose for
percussion instruments---that is, for those instruments strongly related to
rhythmic aspects. A Dialética da Praia (The Dialectic
of the Beach) (1993), for 70 percussion instruments (played by two musicians)
and tape, reveals this preoccupation [7]. Although I use practically all the
kinds of percussion instruments there are in this piece, I have never made any
concessions to rhythmic or metric configurations. Alluding to the statistically
rich diversity of sound and the highly complex sound phenomena of the beach,
the piece elaborates a trajectory in which a textural perception predominates,
in spite of the rhythmic figures that could eventually be suggested by the
instruments used. In fact, in this work, the notion of the sound
grain, as exposed by Schaeffer in his typological study on
spectra [8], is much more prominent than the simple appeal to metric structures.
Pronunciation-Forms
If
we consider my work from the point of view of this textural perception of time
as a constitutive element of sound, the time-stretching of spectra emerges as
one of the most typical of my procedures.
From
this perspective, and in alliance with my preoccupation with the phonological
expressiveness of the spoken word, I have elaborated what I call
pronunciation-form, the most definitive results of which have
been reached since 1986 at the Cologne Studio. One of the most radical examples
is Phantom-Wortquelle; Words in Transgress
(Phantom-Word-Source; Words in Transgress) (1986--1987), a purely electronic
piece based entirely on sounds derived from the human voice [9]. In
PAN: Laceramento della Parola (Omaggio a Trotskij) (PAN:
Laceration of the Word [Homage to Trotsky]) (1987--1988), a piece for tape
alone (the first version of which was composed in 1985 for orchestra and tape),
the role of the pronunciation-form is also crucial. This composition marks my
first attempt at deriving an entire musical form from the phonological
structure of a given word, a process that I denominated subsequently as
Aussprache-Form (Portuguese:
forma-pronúncia; English:
pronunciation-form) while working in Cologne.
In what
simultaneously becomes a formal, musical and verbal procedure, a given word
whose meaning seems to be relevant to the concept of the piece is radically
extended in time, in a concrete or imaginary way. Its phonological moments, as
defined in structural phonology, are consequently lacerated, thus determining
essentially the succession of the sound textures that constitute the musical
form. In this process, both the proportions of durations and the sound
characteristics of the phonemes in the usual pronunciation of the given word
are considered in order to elaborate the musical form. For example, the
occlusive phoneme /p/ (from the word PAN) does not lose its identity, in spite
of its radical extension in time (in this case, the extension becomes
resonance). In regard to the vowels, which are characterized above all by their
first two formantic regions, I consider both formants and, observing their
frequential position in the vocal spectrum, project these formantic regions as
contrasting structures in chronological time. For this reason, when Henri
Pousseur became familiar with my procedure, he named it
Klangfarbendauernproportionen (proportions of durations of
timbres) in analogy to the term Klangfarbenmelodie In my
music, in fact, time appears mainly as timbristic durations, or, in
phenomenological terms (as in Husserl), as extensions of the now
(Ausdehnungen des Jetzt) [10]. Furthermore, time in my music
does not have a metric character, and in this sense I should say that I am
greatly influenced by Stockhausen. Contrary to Stockhausen's
Moment-Form, however, the dramatic succession of the
particular "moments"in the pronunciation-form assumes an
essential role [11].
Harmonic
Techniques: Cyclic Modules and Proportional Projections
Considering
that the musical material of my electroacoustic works is concerned equally with
its constitutive side and its relational functions, and also considering that
the central point of my work consists, although not exclusively, of the
interaction between instrumental writing and subjacent writing in the
electroacoustic context, I have developed, both in the electroacoustic and the
instrumental domain, certain harmonic techniques with which I have been
composing since the mid-1980s. I call these techniques cyclic
modules and proportional projections Although these
constitute autonomous speculative methods of harmony (in its broadest sense),
the conjunction of both techniques in the terrain of electroacoustic music with
instruments has led me to very satisfying results.
Briefly,
a cyclic module is a cyclic and expansive interval field derived from a
frequential basic structure, which I designate as a harmonic
entity [12]. Considering any interval structure---synchronic (as a
chord) or diachronic (melodic, sequential)---as a harmonic field derived from a
certain interval propagation (from lowest to highest tones, in the case of
chordal entities as natural resonance phenomena; from the first to the last
tone, in the case of diachronic entities as chronological phenomena), one
deduces that every entity is originally circumscribed by the relationship
between its extreme notes/frequencies and is internally constituted by the
discrimination of the harmonic space consisting of the notes/frequencies that
compose the internal space of this interval.
I
was interested in developing to the utmost the structuration of harmonic
entities. For this purpose, I have projected the proper interval structures of
these entities above and beyond the entities' extreme limits. The result of
each one of such projections is a limited number of transpositions of a given
entity over itself, in which for each transposition, the point of departure is
always constituted by the respective last note (either as frequential highest
note or as temporal final note, depending on the essential character of the
basic entity).
After
a certain number of transpositions, one necessarily returns again to the
original notes of the entity (regardless of the octave in which these notes are
placed). Such a process leads to a cyclic phenomenon and thus constitutes a
module with recurrent notes in which the number of transpositions is determined
by the interval in the octave between the extreme notes of the basic entity. As
each note of a new transposition will serve doubly in the constitution of the
module (as the last note of a transposition is the same as the first note of
the next transposition), the total number of notes in the cyclic module will
thus be determined by the following equation: the number of possible
transpositions multiplied by the number of notes of the entity, minus the
number of possible transpositions. Although many entities can present the same
characteristics, each one will be responsible exclusively for the constitution
of its own module and no other. Each module will therefore be constituted
basically from the internal structure of the harmonic agglomerate (entity) and
will be typical of its own entity, but not of any other, constituting thus the
specific harmonic field of its basic entity. The delimitation
and the density of the modules are thus directly derived, respectively, from
the interval between the extreme notes of the entity and from the entity's
internal harmonic density. On one hand, the internal interval connections
(particularly the transitions between the transpositions), the recurrence of
certain notes and the harmonic structures that are derived from the selective
and periodic operations in the temporal evolution of the module presented
uninterruptedly make the cyclic modules highly interesting structures as
speculative organizations of pitch. On the other hand, by means of expanding
the original field of the basic harmonic entity, such modular structures
curiously reveal, at times, certain correlations (such as identical notes and
intervals) between entities or harmonic archetypes (that is,
harmonic structures that are present in distinct phases of history---including
the history of our century---independently of the harmonic systems in which
they appear) that could never have been foreseen by the composer before the
constitution of the cyclic modules. The modules thus enhance the potency of the
identities as well as the peculiarities that are in a latent state in the
harmonic entities themselves. It is as if we make a paraphrase of the Cartesian
premise: the essence of an entity is revealed by its extension.
Curiously,
many cyclic modules complete the total chromatic tempered space at the moment
of their last note before completing their own cycles, while others obtain the
total chromaticism exactly on the pivot-note from the last transposition of the
entity. This last scenario is the case of the cyclic module that serves as the
basic structure for ... Ora .. (1991--...), a work in
progress for orchestra, as well as for A Dialética da
Praia and Parcours de l'Entité (1994) for
amplified flutes, metal percussion and digital tape [13].
Although
the cyclic modules lend themselves to a careful and multiform elaboration of
harmonic structures in the spatial terrain of the tempered system, they must
nevertheless not be circumscribed exclusively to instrumental music. I employ
this technique---as structures of intervallic proportions in cyclic
expansion---in the electroacoustic context also. For instance, in A
Dialética da Praia, the module served as the structuration of
profiles made from processed, sampled percussive sounds.
In
addition to being interested in the possibilities offered by the modules, I was
also interested in the construction of a method for intervallic manipulation
that would permit me to transpose, on the level of the harmonic space or
dimension, the variations of perceptive dimensions that are typical of the
operations that one can make on the temporal scale and that are free from
metric or rhythmic impositions---i.e. dilation and compression of durations.
Dilation and compression of durations would be converted, in this case, to
expansions and contractions of interval structures. If elaborated in both
directions, the new technique thus would differ from that used to form the
modules, because these modules are used exclusively and necessarily as an
"enlargement"---that is, as an expansion of the harmonic
field of the original entity.
I
use the term proportional projection to refer to the
projection of the intervals of a given harmonic tempered entity---an entity
that occupies a certain range, according to a logarithmic subdivision of
pitches---to differentiated extents, preserving, however, the same original
interval proportions of the entity. If one considers that the tempered system
subdivides the harmonic space based on the ratio of 1.0594 for the minor
second, one can deduce that the expansion or contraction of the harmonic space
will cause a non-tempered alteration of the internal subdivision of the new
space, occupied by the projected entity. For the calculation of the
projections, I again use the logarithmic law, except that the exponent of the
root and the ratio for the interval between the first and the last note will be
changed [14]. Independent of the direction to be taken by the projection
(contraction or expansion), I will always consider two aspects of the basic
entity: first, the number of subdivisions in semi-tones that fill the harmonic
space between its lowest and its highest note; second, the evaluation of the
discrimination between such subdivisions or degrees, thus verifying which
frequencies are utilized by the original entity in its original extent.
In
Parcours de l'Entité there is a good example of the
combination of both harmonic techniques. The cyclic module derived from the
basic entity---with its main profile as executed by the flutist ---is submitted to four contractions via proportional projections.
Figure 1 reproduces the table of derived frequencies for such projections, in
which the bold-faced numbers in each harmonic space or extent (represented as a
column) show the discriminated frequencies, corresponding to the frequencies
used in the main tempered profile (fifth column).
After
the conversion of the values into traditional musical notation, I obtain as a
result a directional expansion of the main profile through five stages . I employed the process of mixing both techniques in Parcours de
l'Entité for the elaboration of instrumental writing for the
flute, the use of which is concomitant with proportional projections for the
spectral constitution of the synthesized sounds, which I made with the computer
program Music V and which are present on the tape [15]. This process of mixing
both harmonic techniques also served for the expansion of sequenced profiles of
FM-synthesized sounds in the last part of the tape in Profils
Écartelés (Disrupted Profiles) (1988) for piano and
quadraphonic tape, realized at the Cologne Studio [16].
The Future of an Illusion
In
my opinion, the great Hamletian dilemma of existence and its antagonistic
exclusion, according to which one places in opposition presumably mutually
exclusive poles in order to resolve specific problems, has been definitively
overcome. Although such an antagonism can survive in social conflicts, which
are exposed to the conditions of subsistence and tend sometimes to resolve
their problems through exclusivist attitudes, directions in the aesthetic
domain point to a greater consciousness of the antinomy present in each
communicational linguistic act, regardless of its specific semiotic code.
Roman
Jakobson explained in a magnificent manner the antinomy in the core of each
sign, in the center of the relationships between the signifier and the
signified, which is responsible for the dramatic condition inherent in each
communicational act:
The relationship between the sign and the signified object, and particularly
between the representation and the represented, the identity of each, which is
at the same time the difference between them, constitutes one of the most
dramatic antinomies of the sign. This antinomy is unavoidable, because without
contradiction there is neither conceptual nor semiotic interplay, the
relationship between concept and sign becomes automatic, the course of events
becomes paralyzed, the consciousness of reality dissolves [17].
Thus
the lemma of today can be summarized as the non-conciliatory coexistence of
opponents, the constant doubt that permeates the semiotic dichotomy present in
each act of communication, the illusion that is destroyed each moment
concerning a presumably undeniable unity of the perceived thing, the richness
of the perceptual diversification in the equivocal and propellant drama of the
sign, which is present at the heart of each musical gesture as a sign of
musical language---regardless of an eventual representational character and
absolutely independent of an external referentiality that would transpose the
music beyond its own bounds---and is found in musical structures themselves. To
be and not to be: that is the condition of our aesthetic
actuality.
Particularly
where it concerns the relationships between technological means and
instrumental writing, electroacoustic music reveals itself as a fertile field
for the cultivation of such dichotomies. Opposing the acoustic world to one
diffused through loudspeakers---through live electronics, through the
concomitant propagation in the acoustic space of pre-recorded musical
structures, or even through computer-generated events that are opposed to those
derived from instrumental performance---electroacoustic music with instruments
materializes as one of the most advantageous modalities of contemporary music.
This
is because electroacoustic music produces a dichotomy that is present at the
core of both the manifest and subjacent writing of musical composition,
pointing in totally different directions. From a spatial point of view there
is, on the one hand, the situation of an audience responding to purely
instrumental music; on the other hand, there is music as constituted by the
solo diffusion of a non-accompanied tape.
When
listening to an instrument, one localizes immediately the sounds and their
undoubted physical source. Space and its potentialities as elements of musical
structure are almost never properly considered by one who listens to the work.
The structural question in composition involving spatiality became gradually
more pressing in instrumental compositions in the course of our century.
Previously---with the exception of some rare examples in ancient musical
history---the confrontation of the listener with the live instrument almost
never involved the spatial relationship between one who listens and one who
plays: the first has always been practically neutralized by the presence of the
second. From the vantage point of such a confrontation, there is no discussion
about the position that the listening occupies in the space
itself.
However,
something very different transpires when one listens to sounds that are
diffused through loudspeakers evenly placed around the audience. If, when
listening to instrumental music, the listener localizes the sound and its
physical source in an almost unconscious way, the potentiality offered by
electroacoustic music, in which sounds permeate the air through displacements,
rotations, crossed stereophonies or spatial multiphonies, drastically inverts
the situation. The extremely mobile sounds in space induce the listener to
localize him- or herself in the space where the listening takes place.
Confronted with the strong mobility of electroacoustic diffusion and surrounded
by a whirlwind of sound, the listener localizes his or her merely pointillistic
and even impotent presence in the face of the spatial/temporal dynamism of the
electronically diffused sounds.
In
short, if the listener localizes the sounds of instrumental origin through
automatic and almost unconscious deduction, it is the spatial dynamism itself
of the electroacoustic sounds that will localize that individual listener in
the space through which the work is diffused.
The
interaction between instrumental and electroacoustic means gives a
diagonal dimension to the structural question around
spatiality in music, in the sense that the space is not related exclusively to
the stage or to the audience. Although the pure listening forms of
music---purely instrumental or constituted by electroacoustic diffusion
alone---conserve their pertinence [18], the dialectic between instrumental
writing and electroacoustic structures makes possible the weaving of a
transitional web between that which is localized through listening and that
which localizes the listener through his or her hearing. In this way a kind of
spatial continuum is established that diagonally "cuts" the
perceptual auditory space.
Based
on elaborated artifices of correspondence and opposition, of fusion and
contrast between instrumental writing and electroacoustic
structures---artifices that should be established by detailed work on musical
material in its double function (constitutive and relational), for which the
harmonic techniques explained here can be of great utility---such a diagonal
dimension causes an emergence of interest in listening to mixed electronic and
instrumental media, which cause one to respond to that which one hears by
contrasting the question "to be or not to be" with the more
predominant situation in contemporary listening: one substitutes the
conjunction or with the conjunction and
Although
I have written about an illusion destroyed at each moment concerning a
presumably undeniable unity of the perceived thing, the certainty of the
non-conciliatory coexistence between the thing and its representation is
transformed, in mixed electroacoustic music, into something else---into an
advantageous, constant and at the same time nebulous illusion.
It
is from this "auditory illusion" that, in part, my
compositional poetics concerning mixed electroacoustic works are nourished,
such as in the case of Profils Écartelés A
Dialética da Praia, Parcours de l'Entité or the most
recent of these, ATLAS (1996--1997), for oboes, membrane
percussion, quadraphonic tape and live electronics. In light of such
compositions, the listener constantly wonders about the nature of what he or
she hears, questioning whether it comes from instruments in performance or from
pre-recorded, projected sound; whether I have dynamized the instrumental
writing spatially, harmonically, temporally and timbristically or if instead
the listener is faced with purely electroacoustic structures that were
pre-elaborated in the studio and either derived from the instruments themselves
or from other sources that are timbristically related to them.
The
illusion, constantly transformed into doubt, induces the certainty that what
is can also not be. And it is the future of
such an illusion that, I believe, will dictate in the years to come the routes
of the new poetics of electroacoustic music.
References and Notes
1. The
word "panaroma" was invented by James Joyce in
Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) p. 143.
Although it sounds like a typically Brazilian word originated from the
tupi language, it actually demonstrates the international
character of our studio through the symbol of Joycean complexity and
multireferentiality. The Studio PANaroma achieved national and international
stature through significant activities such as the CIMESP (International
Electroacoustic Music Contest of São Paulo), the BIMESP (International
Electroacoustic Music Biennial of São Paulo), the Panorama of
Avant-Garde Music concert series and the Maximal Music CD label. The Studio
PANaroma is the only one in Brazil to take part in the Forum-IRCAM. In October
1996, Pierre Boulez visited the studio.
2. In
addition to the writing cited in this text, see the following theoretical works
of mine on electroacoustic music: Luciano Berio et la Phonologie---Une
Approche Jakobsonienne de son Oeuvre (Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/New
York/Paris/Vienna: Peter Lang Verlag, Publications Universitaires
Européennes, Série XXXVI, Musicologie, Vol. 89, 1993);
"Un Essai sur la Composition Verbale Électronique
Visage de Luciano Berio," Quaderni di
Musica/Realtà No. 30* (Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1993);
"Do Som do Tempo ao Tempo do Som," Proceedings of
the II SBC&M---Second Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music,
Fifteenth Congress of the Brazilian Computer Society, Canela---RS, pp. 228--231
(1995); "A Espacialidade na Música
Eletroacústica," ARTEunesp
11 (São Paulo: Editora da Unesp, 1995) pp. 53--61;
Música Eletroacústica---História e
Estéticas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1996); and
"Atualidade Estética da Música
Eletroacústica" (post-doctoral work presented at the State
University of São Paulo-UNESP, in 1997).
3.
Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik 1970--1977, Vol. 4 (Cologne:
Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1978) pp. 369--376.
4. Pierre
Schaeffer, Traité des Objets Musicaux---Essai
Interdisciplines (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966) pp. 387--472.
5.
Schaeffer
[4] pp. 216--243.
6.
Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen
Musik, Vol. 1 (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1963) pp. 211--221.
7. This
work, in its abbreviated version titled A Viagem sobre os
Grãos (1996)---the premiere of which took place at Carnegie
Hall in New York in April 1996---won the First Prize at the "XVIII
Concorso Internazionale 'Luigi Russolo' di Musica
Elettroacustica" in Varese, Italy, in September 1996.
8.
Schaeffer
[4] pp. 548--555.
9. In
1995, I realized a new and temporally reduced version of this piece at the
Studio PANaroma, titled Words in Transgress.
10. Edmund
Husserl, Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins
(1928), in E. Husserl, Phänomenologie der
Lebenswelt---Ausgewählte Texte II (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag,
1986) pp. 80--165.
11.
See
also Flo Menezes, texts (in Portuguese and English) about the compositions
Parcours de l'Entité; Contextures I (Hommage à Berio);
Contesture III---Tempi Reali, Tempo Virtuale; PAN: Laceramento della Parola
(Omaggio a Trotskji); Profils Écartelés; and
Words in Transgress; in the booklet of the CD
Música Maximalista---Maximal Music, Vol. 1,
São Paulo 1996.
12.
The
first theoretical exposition of the cyclic modules was published in Flo
Menezes, Apoteose de Schoenberg---Ensaio sobre os Arquétipos da
Harmonia Contemporânea (São Paulo: EDUSP/Nova Stella,
1987).
13.
Parcours
de l'Entité won the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, in
1995.
14. The
logarithmic law for the tempered scale is 12 2. For the calculation of
the proportional projections, a special program for the Atari 1040 ST computer
was conceived in 1987 in Germany by Marcel Schmidt, technician at the Cologne
Studio für elektronische Musik. At the time of writing, I make the
calculations for the projections through a patch that I wrote in collaboration
with German composer Hans Tutschku using the program Patchwork (developed at
IRCAM) for the Macintosh computer.
15. The
sounds synthesized through the classic program Music V were realized in 1991
with the technical assistance of Andrea Provaglio when I was composer in
residence at the CSC (Centro di Sonologia Computazionale) at Padua University
in Italy.
16. Profils
Écartelés has represented the production of the Cologne
Studio several times at festivals in Europe. In November 1993, the piece was
awarded the International Composition Prize at TRIMALCA---Tribuna de
Música para América Latina y el Caribe---in Mar del Plata,
Argentina.
17. Umberto
Eco, "Il Contributo di Jakobson alla Semiotica", in
Roman Jakobson (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1990) p. 290.
18. My
own work also tends toward such less-hybrid solutions. In addition to the works
already mentioned in this text, examples include the following: (1) purely
electroacoustic pieces (without instruments): Contextures I (Hommage
à Berio) (1988--1989), Kontexturen
II---Schachspiegel (1989--1990), La Ricerca Panica di
Eco (1991), La (Dé)marche sur les Grains
(1993); (2) purely instrumental works: Vertikale Augenblicke in
Wien (1989), TransFormantes II (1995),
Concenti---Sul Canto e il Bel Parlare (1995--1996),
On the other hand . . (1997); (3) electroacoustic
compositions with instrumentation: Contesture III---Tempi Reali, Tempo
Virtuale (1990), Contesture IV---Monteverdi
Altrimenti (1992--1993), Fenomeno di Massa
(1995--1997), ATLAS---Foles e Peles (1996--1997) and
TransFormantes III (1997).
Discography of Works by the Author
Contesture
IV---Monteverdi altrimenti, in Brasil! New Music!
Vol. 2 (São Paulo: Camerati, 1994). Interpretation: Grupo Novo
Horizonte, directed by Graham Griffiths.
Contextures
I (Hommage à Berio), in Nuova Officina Bolognese,
January 1992 (la città incosciente) (Bologna, Italy: Galleria
Comunale d'Arte Moderna, 1991) compact disc ST.OSTI5.
A
Dialética da Praia, in Duo
Diálogos---Contemporary Percussion Music from Brazil (Brussels:
GHA, 1995) compact disc GHA 126.033. Interpretation: Duo Diálogos de
Percussão (Joaquim Abreu and Carlos Tarcha).
Música
Eletroacústica---História e Estéticas, book and
compact disc (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1996). Includes La
(Dé)marche sur les Grains and PAN: Laceramento della
Parola (Omaggio a Trotskji)
Música
Maximalista---Maximal Music Vol. 1, electroacoustic works realized in
Germany, Italy and Brazil from 1986 to 1995 (Sã Paulo: Studio PANaroma,
1996), compact disc. Flutes: Antonio Carlos Carrasqueira; percussion: Eduardo
Gianesella. Includes Parcours de l'Entité (flutes:
Antonio Carlos Carrasqueira; percussion: Eduardo Gianesella),
Contextures I (Hommage à Berio), Contesture
III---Tempi Reali, Tempo Virtuale (pianos: Paulo Ãlvares),
PAN: Laceramento della Parola (Omaggio a Trotskji),
Profils Écartelés (piano: Paulo
Ãlvares) and Words in Transgress
Parcours
de l'Entité, in Prix Ars Electronica 1995
(Linz, Austria: Oberösterreichischer Rundfunk, 1995), compact disc.
Flutes: Isabelle Hureau; percussion: Thierry Miroglio.
Profils
Écartelés, in Brasil! New Music! Vol.
2, compact disc (São Paulo: Camerati, 1994). Piano: Paulo
ãlvares.
A
Viagem sobre os Grãos, in XVIII Concorso
Internazionale "Luigi Russolo" di Musica
Elettroacustica, compact disc (Italy, 1996). Interpretation: Duo
Diálogos de Percussão (Joaquim Abreu and Carlos Tarcha).
This article is part of the Leonardo special project "A Radical Intervention: The Brazilian Contribution to the International Electronic Art Movement," guest edited by Eduardo Kac.
For the print version of this article, see Leonardo Volume 31, No. 4 (1998), available from the MIT Press.
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