James Dashow


'James Dashow James Dashow

"EFFETTI COLLATERALI" for clarinet + computer
"MAPPINGS" for cello + electronic sounds (analog)
"SECOND VOYAGE" for tenor voice + computer
"MNEMONICS I", for violin + computer

Soloists:
Mario Buffa, violin
David Keberle, clarinet
Luca Paccagnella, cello
Pamela Hebert, soprano

EFFETTI COLLATERALI
is the composer's first effort in using systematically his concept of AM and FM spectra harmonizations of specified diads. The specified pitches, those played by the clarinet, are made to generate their own accompanying frequencies, mostly inharmonic with respect to the generating pitches themselves, as a result of FM or AM procedures. Each interval, or, in fact, each pitchpair, can generate several possible spectra, but the similarity in sound quality between kinds of spectra quickly reduces the innumerable possibilities to a limited number of readily manageable families of chord-types. These chords are the basis for a variety of musically interesting relationship, and this work represents but one of many possible developments of these kinds of sounds. Requested for the 1975/76 new music concert series at the French Academy in Rome by François Bousch, then resident holder of the "Prix de Rome", EFFETTI COLLATERALI was realized at the Centro di Calcolo of the University of Padova using Hubert Howe's MUSIC 413F digital sound synthesis program. First performance was in June of 1976 at the French Academy, and has since become standard repertory for clarinettists specializing in contemporary music. It has been recorded on the PAN label (Roma) PRC S20–12, Phillip Rehfeldt, clarinettist.

MAPPINGS
is in three large sections, each of which explores a particular kind of texture by developing the compositional or structural possibilities implied in the timbral relationship between the cello and the electronic sounds. At the same time each section contains forward and/or backward references to later/earlier material. One of the major issues of the work is the degree of integration the soloist has with the electronic sounds. Generally the cello is heard to "initiate" the tape sounds—that is, the electronic sounds are temporally disposed to give the impression that they are proceeding FROM or OUT OF the cello's gestures rather than merely supplying the soloist with imitations or events to be imitated. In the third section, the cello/tape integration is brought to its maximum by turning the solo instrument into what might be called a "prepared cello". The timbral result, produced by an ordinary pizzicato of the G-string now stopped near the bridge by several paperclips, closely resembles those electronic sounds typically produced by multiplying two complex signals together (ring modulation).

Although the three section forms make it tempting to call this work a cello "concerto", the kind of structural development typical of the concerto is not the dominating principle here; rather, MAPPINGS is a study in reciprocal timbral relationships, the cello sounds suggesting electronic complements, and the electronic sounds so produced, in turn, suggesting ways to develop the cello's ideas. This composer is often asked about the emotional content of his work: it would seem that, at least from the preceding description, the music is a severe technical exercise in cold expressionless structure. Nothing could be further from the actual facts, as even a mildly attentive listening will notice. For the composer, these sounds, these gestures for the cello, are ALL charged with emotion, that kind of emotion that is expressable only in music and for which words are completely inadequate… which is why the composer writes music rather than words. A verbal description of the possible emotional responses to the work would only focus the listener's attention on a limited range of such responses with the net effect of robbing the music of the full expression potentially available to the open listener. The composer asks only that each listener attends to the music with his non-verbal understanding and allows himself the possibility of entering into the flow of the musical discourse without forcing or insisting on a conscious explanation of what is fundamentally an emotional experience outside capacities to articulate precisely.

The electronic sounds for MAPPINGS are entirely analog and have been realized in the Studio die Musica Elettronica Sciadoni in Rome.

SECOND VOYAGE
is a large-scale composition that attempts to develop and deepen the emotional background implicit in the text VOYAGE IN THE BLUE by poet John Ashbery. The flux of musical ideas and textures parallels and counterpoints the complex interplay of images, meditations, declarations and oberservations employed by the poet in his so characteristic manner. Ashbery's notion of our knowing without knowing that we do, what Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, is, in his work, extended to everything the poet chooses to contemplate, thereby giving special significance to the most humble of occurrences and redefining the import of those "great" thoughts with respect to the newly discovered implications of daily events now "charged with so much light".

For the composer, this poem was ideal for musical treatment. The choice of electronic sounds to form the accompaniment was motivated by the realization that the complex textures and spatial manipulations possible in the electronic medium were exactly right for matching the poem's stated and unstated content. The result is an extended concert "aria" or rather concert "scene" which contains moments of drama, conversation, meditation, as well as pure lyricism always accompanied by an enormous variety of electronic sound textures moving restlessly at various background levels.

For this work, Dashow rigorously applied his technique of deriving inharmonic chord-spectra from a variety of diadic and triadic groupings of the notes sung by the voice. The tenor line is always harmonized by inharmonic chords generated by the line itself through the composer's procedures as applied to the well-known sound generating algorithms, FM (frequency modulation), AM (amplitude modulation) and RM ("ring" modulation, or signal multiplication), as well as to other methods developed by the composer. Since each diad (interval) can be made to generate a large number of inharmonic chord-spectra, the composer's task is to choose from among the possibilities offered by each structurally significant diad that combination or succession of sounds that best suits both local and overall compositional purposes.

The computer solo sections further develop some of the implications of the musical ideas evolved in the accompaniment, and prepare for the sometimes radical texture changes between major sections. Composed for and dedicated to tenor George Shirley, Second Voyage was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts for the United States Bicentennial. The work was realized with the Music 360 language for digital sound synthesis (Vercoe) using the resources of the computer center at the University of Padova. The composer wishes to thank warmly the staff of the computer center for their cooperation and patience, and especially G. Tisato for his continuing assistance and encouragement. Second Voyage received the Jerome Prinze (New York) for recording and has been released on the CRI label, SD-456, George Shirley, tenor.

Voyage in the Blue
John Ashbery

As on a festal day in early spring
The tidelands maneuver and the air is quick with imitations:
Ships, hats appear. And those,
The mind-readers, who are never far off. But
To get to know them we must avoid them.

And so, into our darkness life seeps,
Keeping its part of the bargain. But what of
Houses, standing ruined, desolate just now:
Is this not also beautiful and wonderful?
For where a mirage has once been, life must be.

The pageant, growing ever more curious, reaches
An ultimate turning point. Now everything is going to be
Not dark, but on the contrary, charged with so much light
It looks dark, because things are now packed so closely together.
We see it with our teeth. And once this

Distant corner is rounded, everything
Is not to be made new again. We shall be inhabited
In the old way, as ideal things came to us,
Yet in the having we shall be growing, rising above it
Into an admixture of deep blue enameled sky and bristly gold stars.

The way the date came in
Made no sense, it never had any.
It should have been a caution to you
To listen more carefully to the words
Under the wind as it moved toward us.

Perhaps, sinking into the pearl stain of that passionate eye
The minutes came to seem the excrement of all they were passing through,
A time when colors no longer mattered.
They are to us as qualities we were not meant to catch
As being too far removed from our closed-in state.

And ideally the chime of this
Will come to have the fascination of a remembered thing
Without avatars, or so remote, like a catastrophe
In some unheard-of country, that our concern
Will be only another fact in a long list of important facts.

You and I and the dog
Are here, this is what matters for now.
In other times things will happen that cannot possibly involve us now
And this is good, a true thing, perpendicular to the ground
Like the freshest, least complicated and earliest of memories.

We have them all, those people, and now they have us.
Their decision was limited, waiting for us to make the first move.
But now that we have done so the results are unfathomable, as though
A single implication could sway the whole universe on its stem.
We are fashionably troubled by this new edge of what had seemed finite.

Before and now seems infinite though encircled by gradual doubts
Of whatever came over us. Perhaps the old chic was less barren,
More something to be looked forward to, than this
Morning in the orchards under an unclouded sky,
This painful freshness of each thing being exactly itself.

Perhaps all that is wanted is time.
People cover us, they are older
And have lived before. They want no part of us,
Only to be dying, and over with it.
Out of step with all that is passing along with them.

But living with it deep into the midst of things.
It is civilization that counts, after all, they seem
To be saying, and we are as much a part of it as anybody else
Only we think less about it, even not at all, until some
Fool comes shouting into the forest at nightfall.

News of something we know and care little of,
As the distant castle rejoices to the joyous
Sound of hooves, releasing rooks straight up into the faultless air
And meanwhile weights its shadow ever heavier on the mirroring
Surface of the river, surrounding the little boat with three figures in it.

MNEMONICS
is a large-scale work that includes moments of drama, lyricism and austere structuralism within broad panoramas of rich inharmonic textures, all as support for the solo violin that is engaged in a complex dialogue with the electronic sounds that accompany it. The work involves over a carefully worked out structure that is designed to bring to the foreground level of immediate perception those inharmonic chord spectra that combine particularly well with the violin's characteristic timbre.

As always, Dashow exploits the techniques he has developed, and continues to explore, for creating groups of related inharmonic chords from specific diads or trichords using both standard and not so standard signal modulation algorithms. Here, the background structure from which the violin part is derived yields the electronic part as well: combinations of intervals drawn from the basic note groups become the generating diads for the electronic chord-spectra. At times additive synthesis is employed to articulate a fragment of the fundamental note structure, followed by a variant of the same material now harmonized by the inharmonic sounds, the violin providing the focal point around which these quasi-variations are worked out. The piece is built up out of clearly defined sections that progress either by gradual transition or by abrupt interruption whose appropriateness is "explained" by the material that follows the interruption. In short, it is the sequence of musical ideas taken AS A WHOLE that determines the work's individual form, shaped in accordance with the implications of those specific timbral-melodic ideas that were the original impulse for the piece.

Commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mnemonics was composed in 1982, revised in 1984 and electronically realized in 1984–85 at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale of the University of Padova (Italy) using the composer's version of Vercoe's Music 360 program for digital sound synthesis and with the additional help of the Center's ICMS program (Tisato).