Giga-Hertz-Festival 2023 – Work texts

Three filigree intertwined purple elements on black

To the Giga-Hertz Festival 2023


In alphabetical order according to the composers' first names

 

Beatrice Dillon »Seven Reorganisations«, (2022), for ensemble, 17’ 

»Seven Reorganisations« presents Beatrice Dillon's first entirely acoustic work, created in collaboration with Explore Ensemble. Commissioned by Mark Fell for the 2022 No Bounds Festival in Sheffield, the project saw Dillon work with the musicians in translating her vocabulary of digital synthetic sounds and generative systems into the acoustic realm of the sextet. The result is a piece of 3 parts. 

Parts 1 and 2 present a teeming microcosm of fast though fleeting fragments knotted into shifting units. By contrast, part 3 offers a slower flattened horizontal plane in which each musician cycles through intimate timbres or gentle reverberant swells. Translation lies at the core of the project, where Dillon’s synthetic compositions were a starting point, followed by a collaborative unfolding of possibilities before a gradual reduction, concentration, and carving away of materials into the resulting sculptural forms.
 

Christian Mason »Hölderlin’s Madness«, (2023), for soprano, flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, percussion, theremin, electric guitar, video & electronics World Premiere

  1. Figure in a Landscape*
  2. Song of Destiny 
  3. The Half of Life
  4. Orpheus in the Underworld*
  5. ‘And little knowledge but much pleasure’
  6. Native Land
  7. Sybil
  8. Form and Spirit
  9. Tenebrae*

»Hölderlin’s Madness« is a sequence of nine songs setting poems - some original*, some ‘free adaptations’ of Hölderlin - from David Gascoyne’s 1938 collection of the same name. Gascoyne stated that «The whole constitutes what may perhaps be regarded as a persona«. In keeping with this idea, each song can be seen as expressing a facet of this remarkable poetic personality who - like Gascoyne himself - »went beyond romanticism, because his poetry is stronger than despair, and reaches into the future and the light.« 

– Christian Mason
 

David Gascoyne »Hölderlin’s Madness« (1916), Text basis for Christian Mason's work of the same name

1) FIGURE IN A LANDSCAPE
David Gascoyne

The verdant valleys full of rivers
Sang a fresh song to the thirsty hills.
The rivers sang

»Our mother is the Night, into the Day we flow. The mills
Which toil our WGters have no thirst. We flow
Like light.«
And the great birds
Which dwell among the rocks, flew down
Into the dales to drink, and their dark wings
Threw flying shades across the pastures green.
At dawn the rivers flowed into the seQ.
The mountain birds
Rose out of sleep like a winged cloud, a single fleet,
And flew into a newly-risen sun.

2) SONG OF DESTINY

Soft are your footsteps on the soft ground
In the great light, O peaceful Presences!
The shining winds of heaven
Lightly touch you
As the musician's fingers
Touch the sacred strings.
They have no destiny, the heavenly ones
Who breathe like a sleeping child.
And pure is in their keeping
The forever flowering mind,
And the blessed eyes gaze long
Within the clear eternal peace.
But never unto us was given
To repose.
Man in his suffering blindly falls
And vanishes again from hour to hour
Like waves against the breakwater
Flung to and fro into uncertainty through time.

3) THE HALF OF LIFE

Adorned with yellow pears
And with wild roses filled,
The earth hangs in the lake.
And wondrous love-intoxicated swans
In peaceful holy waters dip their heads.
My woe! When winter comes
Where shall I find the rose?
Where shall I find the sunshine and
The shadows of the earth?
The cold unspeaking walls rise up,
The flags flap in the wind.

4) ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD
David Gascoyne

Curtains of rock
And tears of stone,
Wet leaves in a high crevice of the sky:
From side to side the draperies
Drawn back by rigid hands.
And he came carrying the shattered lyre,
And wearing the blue robes of a king,
And looking through eyes like holes torn in a screen;
And the distant sea was faintly heard,
From time to time, in the suddenly rising wind,
Like broken song.
Out of his sleep, from time to time,
From between half-open lips,
Escaped the bewildered words which try to tell
The tale of his bright night
And his wing-shadowed day
The soaring flights of thought beneath the sun
Above the islands of the seas
And all the deserts, all the pastures, all the plains
Of the distracting foreign land.

He sleeps with the broken lyre between his hands,
And round his slumber are drawn back
The rigid draperies, the tears and wet leaves,
Cold curtains of rock concealing the bottomless sky.

5) 'AND LITTLE KNOWLEDGE BUT MUCH PLEASURE'

And little knowledge but much pleasure
Is given to mortal men.
Why dost thou suffice me not O lovely sun
On this May day?
Thou flower of my flowers, what have I more than thee?
Would that I were as children are!
I should be like the nightingale were I to sing
All my delight in one enraptured song!

6) NATIVE LAND

And no-one knows . . .
Yet let me walk
And gather the wild bays,
Expend my love for thee
O earth, upon thy roads,
Here where . . .
. . . and roses and their thorns
And the sweet limes send up their perfume from beside
The beechwood at noon, when the wild corn is alive
With the whisper of the growth in its straight stalks
And its ears bend all one way
As to the autumn — Now beneath
The lofty swaying of the oaks,
When I reflect, when I interrogate the airs,
The sound of bellsI know so well
Sounding like gold, is heard afar.
It is the hour when the birds wake anew.
Then all is well.

7) SYBIL

The stormbends the branches
And the raven sings
Thus is the time of God a journey sure
But thou Eternal song
And the poor pilot searches for the known
Look towards the star.

8) FORM AND SPIRIT

All is an inscape
And yet separates
Thus shelters the Poet
Fool ! dost thou hope from face to face
To see the soul
thou shalt go among the flames.

9) TENEBRAE
David Gascoyne

Brown darkness on the gazing face
In the cavern of candlelight reflects
The passing of the immaterial world in the deep eyes.
The granite organ in the crypt
Resounds with rising thunder through the blood
With daylight song, unearthly song that floods
The brain with bursting suns:
Yet it is night.
It is the endless night, whose every star
Is in the spirit like the snow of dawn,
Whose meteors are the brilliance of summer,
And whose wind and rain
Are all the halcyon freshness of the valley rivers.
Where the swans,
White, white in the light of dream,
Still dip their heads.
Clear night!
He has no need of candles who can see
A longer, more celestial day than ours.
 

Jessica Ekomane »Manifolds«, (2022), for Electronics & Acousmonium, 17’28’’

»Manifolds« unfolds around an equiheptatonic tone system from Malawi. The tuning is applied on 4 voices and fragmented in space during the spatialisation, to form gradually transforming and deconstructing polyphonies in the central part of the piece. The signal is mainly processed with feedback and the melody is algorithmically generated. The composition was commissioned by GRM Paris to be presented on the acousmonium for the Focus concert series at 104 in May 2022. 
 

John Croft »…ne l’aura che trema«, (2007), for alto flute and live electronics, 10’ German Premiere

After meeting the ancient poets and philosophers, Dante is guided from the first circle of hell, with its castle and its meadows, »forth from the quiet to the air that trembles«, into the second circle, where the excessively passionate are buffeted about in a »whirlwind of lovers« (as William Blake calls it). While not seeking to illustrate the scene, the piece exists on the border of these two worlds, stillness erupting into convulsions, which recede again into silence.

The electronics in this piece are derived entirely from the live sound of the alto flute. I have sought a sense of instrumental continuity between flute and electronic treatment while also allowing the resulting sounds to evoke the trembling air which sometimes envelops the player.

– John Croft
 

Laurie Spiegel »East River Dawn«, (1976), for GROOVE (minicomputer connected to an anlog sound synthesis system), 14‘16‘‘

[…] As to my inspiration for »East River Dawn«, the title tells it. Picture coming to the East River’s edge, with the breath-taking sense of spaciousness, light and energy there compared to the dense crowded rectangular small spaces we normally inhabit in New York City. Picture the feeling of having stayed up all night on the Lower East Side before it became known as the »East Village«, then looking out through the hazy dawn air at the river. Things are already busy. There are tug boats and freighters, a Fire Department boat, and seagulls flying around looking for their breakfasts. The day feels full of potential.

Laurie Spiegel »Four Short Visits to Different Worlds: I. Swells, II. Mines, III. Crying Tone, IV. A Garden«, (ca. 1971), for Buchla 100 and EML Electrocomp 200 modular analog synthesizers, ca. 9’30’’

1. Swells (Buchla 100 with tape delay)

2. Mines (Buchla 100)

3. Crying Tone (EML Electrocomp 200)

4. A Garden (Buchla 100)                      

I had started as an improviser, largely self-taught and playing by ear on »folk« plucked instruments, always making music directly with sound. Once I began the formal study of music, not until after finishing a Social Sciences degree, I had to learn to adjust to writing silent notes on paper with only a dim hope of possibly ever hearing them played by others. My lack of keyboard skills with which to compose and do theory exercises ultimately benefited my mental musical training, but I missed creating directly in sound.                    

When one of my teachers at Juilliard School, Michael Czajkowski, took me to see Morton Subotnick’s Buchla studio, upstairs from the Bleeker Street Cinema (Juilliard did not yet teach or even allow electronic music back then) and I soon began to work with the Buchla 100 modular myself. Music turned back into the medium I had loved. In fact, it went far beyond that, virtually turning from black-and-white into color. Not only could I work directly with sound itself again, like painters and authors do on their works, instead of indirectly encapsulating idea in abstract sets of instructions to others in an imperfect notational language. I was also able at last to represent the amorphous and vague sonic shapes that had always formed in my imagination and in which my inner emotions had always taken previously-inexpressible form.            

These 4 movements, individually created at various times, were typical of my first explorations of electronic composition.

Laurie Spiegel »Three Modal Pieces: I. A Cosmos, II. A Legend, III. A Myth«, (1982 – 83), for computer-controlled analog synthesizer McLeyvier, 14’30’’

1. A Cosmos

2. A Legend

3. A Myth

The McLeyvier was a computer-controlled analog synthesizer and composer’s workstation originally created by David McLey. I took over software development for it in 1982 when David decided he needed more time for other things. It had a macro language for implementing operations on materials and creating complex responses to input. Originally intended as a commercially available instrument, it railed in that respect and only 8 units were ever built.

To quote Mark Vail, »Like an object caught in the Starship Enterprise's malfunctioning transporter, the McLeyvier shimmered between existence and Limbo for a few years beginning in 1981.« Its console included a keyboard and sliders, connected by an LSI 11/23 computer to a bank of analog voice cards via a whopping 800 digital-to-analog converters and many digital relays, to feed all the control voltage inputs in a 16-voice system!. The macro language for configuration and composition, ability to display and print music notation, SMPTE synchronization, and a host of other features were not commonly available at the time. The 16-voice canon in augmentation in the last movement, for example, was generated from a simple motif by a simple macro I wrote in its language.                    

While working on these movements, I thought of them as distinct separate pieces in an ongoing series of musical archetypes. After recording them from computer disk onto tape, I realized that they formed the movements of a single trilogy, with the slowest and deepest movement, inspired by some of Dmitri Shostakovich's music, in the traditional center position.

Laurie Spiegel »Music Mouse — An Intelligent Instrument«

Why Music Mouse? - An Introduction

Up to this time, of the new powers which computers bring to music, commercially available music software has focused mainly on precision and memory. These are wonderful attributes, but one of the computer's greatest strengths remains barely touched. Logic, the computer's ability to learn and to simulate aspects of our own human intelligence, lets the computer grow into an actively participating extension of a musical person, rather than just another tape recorder or piece of erasable paper.

I firmly believe that logic, when used well, does not conflict with intuition, emotion, or other aspects of music which are often considered contrary to it. Rather than constraining musicality, logical structures can serve to support, extend, and amplify our ability to express and embody the undefinable qualities of aesthetic meaning which we are forever trying to capture.

This is a very exciting time for music. With the advent of computers, many of music's past restrictions can begin to fall away, so that it becomes possible for more people to make more satisfying music, more enjoyably and easily, regardless of physical coordination or theoretical study, of keyboard skills or fluency with notation. This doesn't imply a dilution of musical quality. On the contrary, it frees us to go further, and raises the base-level at which music making begins. It lets us focus more clearly on aesthetic content, on feeling and movement in sound, on the density or direction of experience, on sensuality, structure, and shape — so that we can concentrate better on what each of us loves in music that lies beyond the low level of how to make notes, at which music making far too often bogs down.

This simple program hopes to provide an introduction to the vast and still-barely-explored realm of musical intelligence in software which doubtless includes possibilities beyond anything we conceive of now. For those who have wanted to do music but have lacked the background, computer intelligence may make it possible. For those of us who have already gone a long way in music, it may let us go further than we ever imagined before. This program is a small beginning, written to some extent as a pointer.

— Laurie Spiegel
New York City, 1986

Laurie Spiegel »Sound Zones«, (1990), for »Music Mouse«, Macintosh IIci, Yamaha TX-816 6-operator FM synthesizer and Eventide SP-2016 digital signal processor, 8’07’’

»Sound Zones« is a capture of a realtime improvisation using my computer program »Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument« that I wrote back in the mid-1980s. It turns a Macintosh, Amiga or Atari personal computer into a music instrument for realtime performance. After quite a few years of work on various computer systems for music creation that were trying to be fully general purpose and reconfigurable for the infinity of ways that different people make music, I decided to code up a dedicated more highly-delimited life performance instrument. On my 1986 Mac 512Ke, the most obvious use of its mouse seemed to be for pushing music around in frequency space. I then decided to quantize pitch space to a various user-selectable scales and programmed the computer to create accompanying lines for harmonies in parallel and contrary motion. I also mapped the QWERTY keyboard into a bank of switches, faders and selectors. »Music Mouse« was widely used by others on personal computers, despite my having incorporated some of my own musical biases.                    

Back in the early 1970s Max Mathews and i had discussed an idea which we called »an intelligent instrument«, one in which the relationship between user input and musical output was mediated by logic that increased the power of the individual player via a number of musical variables that could be controlled in realtime. It’s an idea that is now widely implemented in many different ways.

Laurie Spiegel »Improvisation on a Concerto Generator«, (1977), for realtime digital audio synthesizer by Hal Alles et al at Bell Telephone Labs, ca. 3’

This composition was commissioned by Bell Labs and the Motion Picture Academy for the 50th anniversary of »talking pictures«, which had been a much earlier Bell Telephone innovation. It was one of the very first realtime interactive all-digital musical instruments, a massive system with an extensive number and variety of manual controls. When I was brought on to work with it, the instrument was still very early in the development of software to interface those controls with the capabilities of the hardware. Working with the Alles synthesizer was a real pleasure after years of GROOVE’s extreme restrictions. 

The interactive software I wrote for this composition recycled the player's keyboard input into an ongoing accompaniment for me as I continued playing. I connected the instrument’s sine oscillators into FM pairs, controlling the number of harmonics in the modulator and in the carrier of each voice in realtime using sliders.                    

Writing the software for it was a real challenge. I had to program it from a remote DEC PDP 11/45 computer that then downloaded the compiled code into the instrument, which was in another part of the building. I was programming in the brand new computer language »C« that was still undergoing frequent changes of syntax, all being done within a still-experimental UNIX operating system. Without the input controls or sonic output available to me while I was coding, under the tight MPA deadline, while the Alles synthesizer hardware was still under construction in a remote room, turned out to be quite an adventure. It was often hard to figure out whether my code didn’t work because of an error on my part, or due to changes in the compiler, changes in the operating system, or because unbeknownst to me Hal had taken the instrument apart or made hardware changes since my previous working compile. Every stage of the tech was still actively under development.

Laurie Spiegel »A Paraphrase«, (2019), for thereminist Dorit Chrysler and piano accompaniment, 4‘30‘‘

All through the years when my electronic and computer music were getting all the attention, back then being new media and new ideas, and during an era when computer technology was widely regarded as ‘dehumanizing’ and not suitable for the creative arts, I had continued to write music as notes on paper too.                        

I had originally written the piano part of this piece as a paraphrase of Johann Sebastian Bach’s »Well Tempered Klavier’s Volume 1 C Major Prelude«. When Dorit asked me for something she could play, I remembered how the »Ave Maria« had been superimposed on Bach’s keyboard prelude and thought to do likewise.                        

It turned out to be more difficult to play on theremin than I had hoped, due to some of the melodic leaps.

(The piano was recorded by Dorit Chrysler and is based on Laurie Spiegel’s original MIDI file of the accompaniment.)                                            

Dorit Chrysler - Theremin

Laurie Spiegel »Passage«, (1987), for Macintosh IIci, Amiga 1000 & Yamaha TX-81 6-operator FM synthesizer, ca. 14’05’’

For »Passage«, I used Mark of the Unicorn's »Performer™ 2.3« Macintosh MIDI sequencer to compose the basic event structure, initially not in realtime but by entering individual notes and preset changes one at a time as event lists. Then I recorded, in realtime recording passes, the timbral and amplitude curves and also the fast patterned material, playing them on »Music Mouse« running on an Amiga 1000 right next to the Mac, and using its faders for MIDI continuous controller and timbral changes. The MIDI output of the Mac then went to control a Yamaha TX-816 FM synthesizer, which fed audio an Eventide H3000 digital signal processor.

Laurie Spiegel »Pentachrome«, (1974), for »GROOVE« (minicomputer connected to an analog sound synthesis system) at Bell Telephone Labs, ca. 7’18’’

Ironically, my need for greater control, complexity, replicability, subtlety and precision led me within just a few years to an even less direct means of composing: the writing of computer code to describe my own musical decision-making processes, to automate what I could, and by use of logic to attempt to enhance the musical power of any individual through new instrument creation.

Unlike non-realtime Music V, the GROOVE system provided realtime computer control of analog audio modules. Max Mathews had built several wonderfully resonant filters with voltage-controlled cut-off frequency and Q that could be triggered to oscillate by a sharp transient pulse, an easy form of signal for even the Lab’s slow limited 1960s computers to produce. For the 5 voices in this piece, I used 5 of the 14 available analog control voltages the computer put out for the amplitudes and 5 for the pitches of the 5 sustained oscillator tones. The remaining 4 analog control lines gave me control of reverb mix, global amplitude, and the frequency cut-off and Q of Max’s filters. 

I produced the bursts of notes by having the computer hold back what it calculated, notes it would have played in a steady rhythm had I not thrown a toggle switch to hold them back, until I released the stored up pre-computed notes by throwing the switch to release them, so they’d burst forth in a rapid stream. As in most of my GROOVE pieces, I imposed a sense of meter by using 4 amplitude levels for both the sustained and the percussive sounds (piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte).

Lea Bertucci »A Visible Length of Light«, (2021 – 23), for alto saxophone, flute & electronics

A Visible Length of Light" is a solo performance by Lea Bertucci playing alto saxophone, flute and electronics that presents material collected from 2021 - 2023. Expanding on Bertucci's solo album of the same title, field recordings of post-industrial American landscapes articulate clouds of sustained timbres from saxophone and flute. Storms of tape noise melt into walls of shimmering sustain to contemplate longing, imagination and identity, using landscape as metaphor for emotional states of being.

Ludger Brümmer »Nyx«, (2001), Fixed Media, 27'39'' 32-channel version

Nyx is the goddess and personification of the night. Hesiod wrote in his »Theogony« (11.116 138) "Erebus created Chaos and the dark night Nyx; Nyx gave birth to the bright atmosphere Aether and the day Hemera, which she received from the union with Erebus, her brother."
The work »Nyx« consists of two very different sound materials. It is an excerpt from Claude Debussy's »Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp« and sounds produced with the help of physical models. Both materials have been processed using various algorithms or the existing structure has merely been distorted and stretched. 
This piece is a virtual prosaic narration with many actions, images and states. This requires a different way of listening, as there are subtle tonal nuances that draw the listener's attention. The material develops over long periods of time along a few pitches. The listener is transported into fantastic virtual situations full of tension, color and playfulness. I was inspired in the creation of this work by the fantastic creatures and the colored windows from the 12th century of the famous Gothic Cathedral St. Etienne of Bourges. Since this piece was created in the studios of the IMEB, I was able to go back to the cathedral again and again between the processing steps and expose myself to the overwhelming effect of this artistic architecture. 
 

Ludger Brümmer »Deconstructing Double District«, (2011), Fixed Media, 4'51'' Multichannel version / Video: Volker Kuchelmeister 

»Deconstructing Double District« was originally created as music for the eponymous video by Volker Kuchelmeister. It combines the visualization of a dance duo with spatial sounds and a gripping drama. The result is an infinitely changing three-dimensional visual and acoustic form with different rhythmic movements and speeds. The dramaturgical development of the music is decisive for the work, which lasts just under five minutes. After the sudden beginning, the energy spirals upwards in a permutation, only to suddenly fall back into nothingness in a turbulent climax. 

»Deconstructing Double District« is based on stereoscopic video recordings of the installation »Double District« by Saubro Teshigawara (2008).
 

Ludger Brümmer »La cloche sans vallees«, (1993), Fixed Media, 21'55'' Multichannel version

Similar to the way an old Gregorian melody becomes the bass melody (cantus firmus) of a new composition in the Renaissance, the work »La cloche sans valles« uses the piano sounds of Maurice Ravel's »La vallee des cloches« exclusively as material. Several algorithmic grids were placed over a sample of the original piece, the original form was decomposed and reassembled into a new arrangement, creating an interaction between the sound material of the original work and the algorithmically determined parameters. This results in a mixture of different time concepts: Sometimes artifacts of the original compositions shine through, in other situations the algorithmic structure dominates. The most important structures in this work are ritardando and accelerando (deceleration and acceleration). The first 560 seconds of the piece are accelerated seven times until the resulting transposition collapses in a short click. After this collapse of time, the time window opens again and gives more and more insights into the piano sound until a longer melodic quotation with its reflection is heard (a reference to Ravel's cycle »Miroirs« from which »La vallee de cloches« originates) 

The work was written in 1993 as the last of a trilogy of compositions on the music of Maurice Ravel. It was created in the Next network of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University using William Schottstaedt's »Common Lisp Music« and Rick Taube's »Common Music« as well as Paul Lanski's RT Mixing program and premiered in February 1993 at Stanford University's Dinkelspiel Auditorium.
 

Prof. Sabine Breitsameter (Translator and publisher) »Die Ordnung der Klänge«, (according R. Murray Schafer »The Tuning of the World«, 1977)

Book launch
 
The Future Viability of Acoustic Ecology
On the new edition of R. Murray Schafer's »The Tuning of the World» presented by Prof. Sabine Breitsameter
 
The Canadian composer and auditory teacher R. Murray Schafer coined the term »Acoustic Ecology« in the late 1960s. His book »The Tuning of the World« was published in 1977 and embeds this concept in cultural history. It is one of the most influential publications in the field of »sound«. Currently, the German translation of this book has been reissued by Schott Music under the editorship of Prof. Sabine Breitsameter. Breitsameter introduces the new publication and elaborates which aspects of Schafer's Acoustic Ecology are of particular importance for the future of art, everyday life and media.
 
Speaker: Prof. Sabine Breitsameter, Berlin/Darmstadt
Contact: Christian Müller, Schott Music, Mainz
 

Thomas Köner »Compendium Narcoticum«, (2023), Fixed Media, 45'  World premiere

The intoxicated one hears all sound like infrasound and like the space of emptiness. Her mind is pure and boundlessly free. The sound of the intoxicated is without form and free of envelopes. Those who hear themselves as well as the noise and understand the equality of these two is living a dance without dancing. Bodies and sensations cannot be determined by numbers. No dancing can be determined by numbers. Differentiation is never numerical - the intoxicated one lives this. The hearing one is inaudible. The hearded is also not heaering. The hearing and the heard become transients and intoxicate all worlds.
 

Yu-Jung Chen »After the Ashes« (2023), for violoncello, AI musician & live videos, 13’10’’  World Premiere

»After the Ashes« is a composition by a cellist and an artificial intelligence musician, a huge database of cello sounds and fragments to automatically generate electronic sounds and improvising interactive performances with the cellist. Endless amounts of information with enormous bounds and extremely changing speeds are prevalent in our actual lives. The physical body will gradually disappear. However, is it possible for our consciousness to become a part of the data in other forms? This piece explores whether matter can be preserved in other forms after being destroyed. Can these remaining marks and memories produce another identity and role, and be reproduced in a new way? With »After the Ashes«, I sought to explore the disappearance and resurgence of the matter. Perhaps we all shall be able to exist in the future and communicate with each other in another form. 

Yvette Janine Jackson »EXTANT« (2023), for bass clarinet, cello & game engine, 15’ World Premiere

»EXTANT« is a reflection on the affordances of language. While language has the capacity to unite, the weaponization of language is used to disenfranchise individuals and communities. Words help those in power deny culpability or maintain distance from truths. Written into law, language erases, invalidates, and criminalizes identity. The proliferation of censorship leaves the question: who will remain?

Inspired by Duke Ellington who composed for specific people rather than instruments, »EXTANT« has a tripartite score (aural, western notation, and graphic) composed for Sam Dunscombe and Judith Hamann, collaborators who have been a part of my musical language since 2012.

 

Statement Laurie Spiegel:

General Statement about my music and music tech:

Why do I make this music?  What is it for? What do I hope to experience or accomplish by doing it? More than anything else, it’s to document my internal experience, and to communicate. I also love doing both the coding and the music and following them where they lead. It's exciting and I get swept away.           

I want to record an existence proof for the depth and exhilaration of whatever my life seems to be. My work pulls me in, the same way that the arts and imagination pull technology toward innovation. You might find your own different ideas about this all when you listen because there are quite a lot of ideas which can be linked with this music - how logic and intuition and imagination can support each other instead of conflicting and then end up expressing emotion, many thoughts about algorithmic logical and the many procedures involved composition, the relationship between the planned and the spontaneous, the unity of tool maker and end user in a single person compared to when those are different individuals, or about the design of human interfaces to sound in general. But ideas, methods, processes and forms miss the point, which is mainly to deal with, capture, document, express and communicate emotions and the previously incommunicable products of imagination.          

For me, music is more than anything else a way to deal with the extreme intensity of being alive. I use the process of making music, and also whatever new tools and methods I need, in order to do it the way I feel it, and as a way to prove to myself that it is somehow possible to positively embrace the full intensity of being alive without being overcome by it. In doing music, am trying to document the process of being alive on some level where other means of communication are not adequate.  I hope to accomplish this in such a way that it will make you glad to be alive too as you listen, or less alone or more inspired or whatever else it might be that you’re looking for.         

I’ve limited the notes for the individual pieces to technical data and context because music is something not dealt with at all well in words. I hope you can find feeling and maybe some beauty in this concert. 

 - Laurie Spiegel, New York, December 2023