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Klangpark 2006 - Music for a Landscape
The leitmotif for the ongoing Klangpark project is Music for a Landscape—for the Danube and the riverside park adjacent to the Brucknerhaus. A high-performance loudspeaker system delivering superb sound reproduction will be set up to provide an optimal listening experience throughout the alfresco concert venue.
For Klangpark 2006, we’ve plumbed what might be called the historic depths of media art and come up with Robert Ashley’s Music with Roots in the Aether project, a very exciting approach to staging music and linking it up with visual forms of expression. This contribution to the Festival’s programmatic emphasis on music visualization dovetails nicely with the Festival theme by offering a refreshing immersion in one of the most intensive phases of minimal music.
Music with Roots in the Aether
Video Portraits of Composers and their Music
Produced and Directed by Robert Ashley
Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. Originally I hoped that it could be realized as a live performance piece, in a much different form, but that was too impractical to think about for very long. Among the real choices, video is by far the best medium for many reasons.
The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily! and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner.
The piece turns out to be, in addition, a large-scale documentation of an important stylistic that came into American concert music in about 1960. These composers of the “post-serial”/“post-Cage” movement have all made international reputations for the originality of their work and for their contributions to this area of musical compositions.
The style of the video presentation comes from the need I felt to find a new way of showing music being performed. I have always objected to the meaning that camera editing in television—which derives from the most mundane and dumbest practical considerations in film-making—gives to music. (Film is montaged, first of all, because it has to be. Cameras can’t run very many minutes at a time. Everybody who has ever tried to film music being made has had to deal with this problem. Then it got over into television from our habits.) The idea of the visual style of Music with Roots in the Aether is plain: to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not “cut” the seen material in any way—that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions.
The visual style for showing the music being made became the “theater” (the stage) for the interviews, and the portraits of the composers were designed to happen in that style.
I am also indebted to the artists who helped work out the realization of this music/video style in the recording process. In particular, I think that the camera ideas of Philip Makanna and the sound recording of Maggi Payne use a kind of concentration of attention that is very new to “visual” media and that is more like music than like film or like television.
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