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Perfect Strangers
This year, for the fifth time, the Ars Electronica concert evening will provide guests with fascinating insights into contemporary music—from orchestral music to live electronic sound to audiovisual performances. On the heels of Principles of Indeterminism (2003), L’Espace Temporel (2004), Listening between the Lines (2005) and Some Sounds and Some Fury (2006), our extremely successful collaboration with the Bruckner Orchester will continue in 2007,with conductor Dante Anzolini and Maki Namekawa at the piano.
This year’s concert takes a “musical” perspective on these days of frequent overlaps between methods, working principles and aesthetic convictions. What were once contradictions have devolved into similarities, giving birth to a wide variety of branches and the coming together of many utterly disparate aesthetic approaches. For the process of composition, this process had led to differentiation and increasing individualization. There are no guidelines anymore these days; the only rule is: each to his own. People set off in search of new methods and invent the rules as they go. Good creative instincts are called for here, because only a sufficient degree of independence can yield a new orientation and individuality.
The concert evening will span an arc from the 1970s, represented by the work of Luigi Nono (1924–1990), to contemporary artists—all of them sharing a common striving for new sounds, new rhythms and of late also for visualization possibilities. Luigi Nono can serve as a prime example here: searching for a way to extend the audio plane, he started at an early date to work with live electronics and to transform documented sounds in his pieces. Incorporating these new sounds into his compositions, he elevated the recording to the status of compositional element of equal standing. György Ligeti (1923–2006) by contrast concentrated especially in his late work on a new way of handling rhythm. Individual structures dissolve and become blurred in favor of a global framework. Rock musician Frank Zappa (1940–1993) focused in his cooperation with Pierre Boulez on attempting to break through genre boundaries and expand them. A completely different approach, a reversal of traditional composition methods, is espoused by Masahiro Miwa, winner of this year’s Golden Nica in the category of Digital Musics. Miwa has his musicians deploy computer-generated artificial rules and structures. Finally, the concert will feature a synthesis of sound and image in audiovisual performances by contemporary artists such as Scenic Panner, the trio @c + Lia as well as Ran Slavin from Israel and the Austrian “bad boys” Fuckhead.
Translated from German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
Perfect Strangers is a further step in an ongoing collaboration between Brucknerhaus Linz and Ars Electronica that attempts to create new experimental fusions between music and visual art.
PERFECT STRANGERS-PROGRAM
Scenic Panner Chicago / Munich
Luigi Nono
… sofferte onde serene … for piano and tape, 1976
A Pierre. Dell’azzuro silenzio, inquietum for bass recorder, bass clarinet and live electronics, 1985
Omaggio a Emilio Vedova for tape, 1960
Performed by Ensemble SurPlus and the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO für akustische Kunst e.V.
György Ligeti
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 1985/88
Performed by Bruckner Orchester Linz / Dante Anzolini
Piano: Maki Namekawa
Masahiro Miwa
Bolero by Muramatsu Gear Engine
Performed by Bruckner Orchester Linz / Dante Anzolini
Klangpark Intervention
Acoustic Memories of Landscape Soundingss—Vienna 1990 by Bill Fontana
The Sancho Plan
Black Page by Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa
The Perfect Stranger / Dupree’s Paradise, 1984
Performed by Bruckner Orchester Linz / Dante Anzolini
@c + Lia
the stage is the space and space is the place
Ran Slavin
Memory Tunes live audiovisual improvisation
Fuckhead
Void
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/s.bischoff & u.hofer/
Scenic Panner
The Scenic Panner allows users to create a film based on a seemingly endless view of a big-city panorama. During the past few years we photographed innumerable buildings, residents, vehicles and other objects that shape the cityscape in Chicago, Berlin and Munich, and generated out of this metropolis inventory an extensive digital image library.
Users can now access this library using an entry device. The selected objects appear on the left edge of the screen in a multiple video projection and then move to the right screen edge, where they disappear.The impression created is like riding in a train and looking out the window at the changing cityscape passing by.
The image content of the Scenic Panner can be replaced with completely different objects at any time, allowing the users to redefine the compilation and examine different connections. Our selection of cityscapes is just one possibility among many, merely demonstrating our own interest in illustrating the big city theme. The interactive concept also enables the Scenic Panner to be used as live performance. While the online version is operated with the keyboard, the performance is controlled by MIDI signals generated by several electronic instruments. For example, a percussionist can use a digital drum kit to influence the pictures. In the live show, the rhythm creates the corresponding images and vice versa.
Stefan Bischoff (visual design), Urs Hofer (programming), jayrope aka J. Siegele (baritone guitar, electronics without computer), Arik Hayut (percussion) http://scenicpanner.com
Luigi Nono
… sofferte onde serene … for piano and tape, 1976
A Pierre. Dell’azzuro silenzio, inquietum for bass recorder, bass clarinet and live electronics, 1985
Omaggio a Emilio Vedova for tape, 1960
The dual performance of Omaggio a Vedova, … sofferte onde serene … and A Pierre dell’ azzurro silenzio, inquietum represents an attempt to mark off in time-lapse the horizons of the electronic sound world of Luigi Nono. Omaggio a Vedova, created in 1960 at RAI’s Studio Fonologia, is unique in Nono's oeuvre with its limitation to exclusively electronic sounds. Not much longer than four minutes, it constitutes an abbreviated four-channel counterpart to Nono’s almost simultaneously composed magnum opus, the music theatre piece Intolleranza, with which it shares the alternation between eruptive brutish sound and gentle lyricism. The piece is dedicated to Emilio Vedova, a close friend of the composer and stage designer for Intolleranza, who has multiple ties with Nono. The music attempts to replicate Vedova’s style of action painting, but this presumed portrait is a brief one, probably due to the extremely complicated and time-consuming process of producing synthetic sounds with the analogue technology available at the time. Although, after this acousmatic sideroad, Nono no longer pursued purely electronic pieces as a means of expression, its many-layered sounds and calculated intuition represent a veritable nucleus of the electronic oeuvre.
... sofferte onde serene … for piano and tape stands here for the series of compositions in which Nono plays off instrumentalist (Maurizio Pollini in the premiere) against tape (or more precisely tape player). Through the sound director’s individual modulation, the tape as counter-world is able to emancipate itself and become an equally valid partner in the dialogue.What is merely a stereo system (on which the tape is played) becomes the room-filling element in the piece, elucidating the idea behind the work: “In my home on the Giudecca in Venice, the ringing of bells can be heard at all hours; the sound arrives in various resonances, with various significances, day and night, through the fog and in the sunshine ... and life goes on amidst it with all its suffering and the cheerful necessity of equilibrium deep within, as Kafka says.”
A Pierre dell’ azzurro silenzio, inquietum from 1985, exemplary here for the third and central way electronics are used (tape alone, tape + artist, live electronics), can be briefly described as working at emancipating space as an equal parameter. Space means here not only the movements of sound in space as shaped by Nono's use of hallophone speakers, but also the interior space of the sound itself, which by means of live electronic modulation can make, for example, a single note played on a recorder seem to have the spectral multi-layeredness of a Beethoven symphony.
Translated from German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
Musikinformatik und Klangregie: Joachim Haas, Michael Acker
György Ligeti
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, 1985– 1988
Sound design was the main focus of the work of György Ligeti (1923–2006). After emigrating from Hungary in 1956, he worked in the electronic studios of Cologne and was able to forge contacts there with prominent pioneers in the electronic music scene. He began to undertake his own experiments, which formed the springboard for his very individual composition plans. His work went through a variety of phases in which Ligeti applied diverse compositional techniques, from neoclassicism to electronic music to “sound surface” (Klangfläche) compositions. In Ligeti’s late works, a new way of handling rhythm and meter, so-called polymeter, comes to the fore. Of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra he composed during this period he wrote: “While listening we soon give up trying to follow the individual rhythmic progressions; the temporal events seem to us instead to be something static, self-contained. If the music is played correctly, at the right speed and with the right accentuation within the various layers, it will after a time “take off” like an airplane. The rhythmical happenings, too complex to be pursued individually, merge into a kind of floating. The dissolving of isolated structures into a different species of global structure is one of my compositional principles [...].”
The piano concerto was written during the years 1985–88 and was expanded to five movements in two phases of work. It premiered in Graz in 1986.
Along with the dialectically conceived piano part and the stereophonic arrangement of solo and orchestra parts with their different harmonies, rhythms and dynamics, Ligeti brings atypical instruments into play, including the ocarina and chromonica (mouth organ) to produce new nuances in sound.
Translated from German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
Masahiro Miwa
Bolero by Muramatsu Gear Engine
Similar to Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which is based on Spanish folk dance, Bolero by Muramatsu Gear Engine for Orchestra represents the music of a fictitious ethnic minority, the Giyacks, expressed in the language of Western European music. Masahiro Miwa composed this work as a Romantic Nationalist composer in 2003 during the British-American Iraq invasion. The performance of ceaseless sounds from castanets and tambourines is called the “Muramatsu Gear,” which borrows from the festival music of the Giyacks. The whole orchestral work is constructed based on this “Muramatsu Gear.”
All string parts are played in 18-tone scale (which divides an octave into 18 equally spaced pitches), and glissando. Absolute pitches at each moment are not designated in the musical score, rather, string players are only instructed by the relative pitch of the previous note they played. In this regard, the sounds they play become gradually vague as a whole, and only the vertical movements of sounds will be heard. This comes from the Giyacks’ singing style, in which they pay attention not to the absolute pitch but only to the movements of sounds. This approach is called “the elevating vibration” and is a musical concept unique to the Giyacks. It is represented using the instruments of Western music, including marching drums and trumpets.
Frank Zappa
The Perfect Stranger / Dupree’s Paradise, 1984
Frank Zappa (1940–1993) was a rock musician, composer and guitarist who burst through genre bounds in America at a time when Europeans were still preserving the status quo. He rose to fame with his politically charged and socially critical lyrics, becoming a prominent figure in American pop culture. Zappa’s music is eclectic, multilayered and often contains abrupt stylistic breaks. He was influenced not only by rhythm & blues and rock & roll as well as Hollywood film music and TV commercials, but also by composers including Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. His goal was to create an autonomous brand of music —to achieve for entertainment music the same independent status as “classic” music.
Already during his rock career and the founding of the band The Mothers of Invention in 1964, he began to compose orchestral pieces, working in the 1970s and 80s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano and also Pierre Boulez. In the Ensemble Modern, he found a sounding board capable of performing his compositions as he intended, with the requisite precision.
The pieces The Perfect Stranger and Dupree’s Paradise were created in collaboration with Pierre Boulez and his Ensemble Intercontemporain and were recorded in 1984 on Paris’ IRCAM label.
Translated from German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
@c + Lia
the stage is the space and space is the place
@c + Lia perform as a digital audiovisual trio, with Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela operating the audial layer as Lia performs the visual instrumentation.
Built upon composed and strong structural starting points, each performance is distilled from ongoing laboratory work and becomes unique in its balance between minimalism and complexity, dynamics and contrasts, due to a free-form approach to composition, algorithmic improbability and improvisation. @c + Lia are known for their mature and rigorous approach to the manipulation of immaterial data, for the mixture of techniques, media and allocations related to the objective essence of audiovisual composition. They “perform” intuitions and organize the imponderable in a very unique kind of “stage writing”.
http://www.at-c.org, http://lia.sil.at
Ran Slavin
Memory Tunes live audiovisual improvisation
Ran Slavin is a cross media audiovisual artist. An image hunter. He works with various forms of video and sound, live audiovisual improvisation, non-interactive video, cinema, digital and acoustic music, painting. Working within the contemporary art world and the new music scene, his visual and sound oeuvre are hard to define and have been described as multifaceted, intensely urban, dark and often surreal. His audio work is a wide culmination of sonic processes and panoramas of electro acoustic digital manipulations, often guitar and piano derived.
His exploration into live audiovisual improvisation is image-based, hindering the narrative. Digital formations of non-linear story telling and generative sound. Maintaining close interaction between real time sound and video where the visual flow triggers sound alternately, based on data such as colors and speed of the moving image, like a mind stream or a reassembly of memory. For this he has built a program in which he can take control or lose control over the course of things, in real time, in a platform where text sound and image juxtapose, streams of images morph and surface. His diverse catalogue of videos is a hybrid body of works ranging from short mini “stories” to medium-length feature videos.
http://www.ranslavin.com
Fuckhead
Void
A multimedia educational event for the subconscious, featuring stroboscopes, digital image and sound generators and 4 insufficient human performers.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we come from the outer zones with beautiful songs, all kinds of technical equipment and personnel of dubious repute. Assisted by angels, dwarves and tattooed giants, we operate on the subconscious.
In every one of you is a divine spark, but it is trapped in a dirty, defective body, exiled in base material. The external senses deceive us. You who are blinded by your own subjectivity—don't trust what your eyes tell you! Feel the special hidden energy we release in you with delicate frequencies and pulsing lights. A tugging in the lower back, perceptual disturbances, a vague sense of forlornness, white intoxication, excess, perforation and self-sacrifice ultimately culminate in the spark being set free.
(Remember: There is no linear time and no absolute space, but there are multiple echoes of particular events in the state of simultaneity.)
Team: Siegmar Aigner: audio processing + song and dance; Didi Bruckmayr: openGL + song and dance: Michael Strohmann: audio processing + dance; Dieter Kern: drums + dance; Alex Jöchtl: sound mix: Peter Pittermann: light design
http://www.fuckhead.at
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