+ Desmond Clarke - Hommage á Morton Feldman Hommage á Morton Feldman is an exploration of space, both musical and conceptual. The piece was directly inspired by the ‘family portrait’ image of the solar system taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, which shows the planetary solar system, excluding Mars and Mercury, from a perspective six billion kilometres (5.5 light-hours) from the sun. The planets are shown as scattered points of light, dwarfed by the spaces they inhabit. The most well known interpretation of the image is the great scientific educator Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, in which he focuses on the human ramifications of seeing our world in such an insignificant light – environmentalism, responsibility to ourselves and to our planet. However, my personal response to the image is not to hunt out the pin-points of light but to explore the vast darkness separating them, Hommage á Morton Feldman is the end point of this exploration. The title comes from the shared sense, between this work and that of Feldman, of an obvious, yet indistinct musical volume within which seemingly arbitrary, vastly extended events transpire. These events serve to define an imaginary resonant space while simultaneously hinting at forms and systems almost infinitely larger than the scale of the music itself. Feldman makes use of perceptually extreme time-scales to fully explore a sonic domain – here the music is relatively brief, an almost unintelligible fragment of another world, presented as a clear juxtaposition from the overt chaos of terrestrial existence. An example of this obscured systematisation is the process of the generation of tempos used in the metered sections. They are derived from the orbital velocities of objects in the belt of the solar system Voyager 1 was (and still is) travelling through. These velocities have values of 2.98 - 6.81 km/s and so can be translated into tempos of 30 - 68 beats per minute. With the exception of Uranus and Neptune, the two outermost planets, the objects used are Kuiper Belt Objects, irregular bodies comprised of rock and ice at the edge of the mapped solar system, typically with an orbital period of 200 - 700 years. While there are many dozens (if not thousands) of such objects, most of them are in orbital resonance with Neptune (they complete a whole number of orbits for every one of Neptune’s) and thus there are a distinct set of average velocities, of which I have taken a representative sample. This data, which directly represents relationships apparent in the physical world, is almost completely hidden from the audience’s perception, and instead contributes towards a feeling of fragmented and ultimately un-knowable organic structure. soundcloud.com/desclarkeHommage á Morton Feldman was performed in March 2009 by the Chimera Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Brigg Above image: the ‘pale blue dot’ image of earth, which comprises less than a thousandth of the entire ‘family portrait’ mosaic by area, and an almost infinitesimal amount by volume

+ Desmond Clarke - Hommage á Morton Feldman

Hommage á Morton Feldman is an exploration of space, both musical and conceptual. The piece was directly inspired by the ‘family portrait’ image of the solar system taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, which shows the planetary solar system, excluding Mars and Mercury, from a perspective six billion kilometres (5.5 light-hours) from the sun. The planets are shown as scattered points of light, dwarfed by the spaces they inhabit. The most well known interpretation of the image is the great scientific educator Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, in which he focuses on the human ramifications of seeing our world in such an insignificant light – environmentalism, responsibility to ourselves and to our planet. However, my personal response to the image is not to hunt out the pin-points of light but to explore the vast darkness separating them, Hommage á Morton Feldman is the end point of this exploration.

The title comes from the shared sense, between this work and that of Feldman, of an obvious, yet indistinct musical volume within which seemingly arbitrary, vastly extended events transpire. These events serve to define an imaginary resonant space while simultaneously hinting at forms and systems almost infinitely larger than the scale of the music itself. Feldman makes use of perceptually extreme time-scales to fully explore a sonic domain – here the music is relatively brief, an almost unintelligible fragment of another world, presented as a clear juxtaposition from the overt chaos of terrestrial existence.

An example of this obscured systematisation is the process of the generation of tempos used in the metered sections. They are derived from the orbital velocities of objects in the belt of the solar system Voyager 1 was (and still is) travelling through. These velocities have values of 2.98 - 6.81 km/s and so can be translated into tempos of 30 - 68 beats per minute. With the exception of Uranus and Neptune, the two outermost planets, the objects used are Kuiper Belt Objects, irregular bodies comprised of rock and ice at the edge of the mapped solar system, typically with an orbital period of 200 - 700 years. While there are many dozens (if not thousands) of such objects, most of them are in orbital resonance with Neptune (they complete a whole number of orbits for every one of Neptune’s) and thus there are a distinct set of average velocities, of which I have taken a representative sample. This data, which directly represents relationships apparent in the physical world, is almost completely hidden from the audience’s perception, and instead contributes towards a feeling of fragmented and ultimately un-knowable organic structure.

soundcloud.com/desclarke

Hommage á Morton Feldman was performed in March 2009 by the Chimera Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Brigg

Above image: the ‘pale blue dot’ image of earth, which comprises less than a thousandth of the entire ‘family portrait’ mosaic by area, and an almost infinitesimal amount by volume


+ DÚST - Samishii #1 (yuukyou) The three movements of Samishii (#1 yuukyou, #2 shin’en, and #3 Tree of Life) are abstract reflections of the Ghosts Inside a Moonchild album, created under my other pseudonym, Ghost-Dust. The original album is based on life experiences, political versus natural issues, a love for nature, and the torture of watching it die through a man-made modern lifestyle, human destruction it leaves on the earth, our beings, and the spiritual question this opens up. This is approached by deconstructing formal music writing (the restraints of modern music, structure, repetition, recognised melody, tangible rhythm), instead focusing on losing a focus on the rawness of emotion, feelings of isolation, and loneliness from a sense of outwards looking in. My opposing styles with DÚST and Ghost-Dust reflect the two opposites to my personality: the very light side, and the dark side. Ghost-Dust fulfils this dark side, through dirty, alternative, glitch music; abstract, contemporary, classical music is my light side, with an understanding of the bigger picture within spirituality. soundcloud.com/dust-in-abstractionsoundcloud.com/ghost-dust-official

+ DÚST - Samishii #1 (yuukyou)

The three movements of Samishii (#1 yuukyou, #2 shin’en, and #3 Tree of Life) are abstract reflections of the Ghosts Inside a Moonchild album, created under my other pseudonym, Ghost-Dust.

The original album is based on life experiences, political versus natural issues, a love for nature, and the torture of watching it die through a man-made modern lifestyle, human destruction it leaves on the earth, our beings, and the spiritual question this opens up.

This is approached by deconstructing formal music writing (the restraints of modern music, structure, repetition, recognised melody, tangible rhythm), instead focusing on losing a focus on the rawness of emotion, feelings of isolation, and loneliness from a sense of outwards looking in.

My opposing styles with DÚST and Ghost-Dust reflect the two opposites to my personality: the very light side, and the dark side. Ghost-Dust fulfils this dark side, through dirty, alternative, glitch music; abstract, contemporary, classical music is my light side, with an understanding of the bigger picture within spirituality.

soundcloud.com/dust-in-abstraction
soundcloud.com/ghost-dust-official
























+ Simon Kinch - 2494.8cm² It feels so stupid now, but it took me ages to see the extra dimension (of depth) that Earl Brown mentioned in his graphic score December 1952. When I finally got it, it clicked, and I could no longer not see it - like how the hidden image in one of those magic eye pictures supposedly stays with you (although I wouldn’t know - I’ve never been able to see past the swirling top layer on those either). This extra depth - an extra dimension, an additional characteristic to realise in that score - opens the score up to further, differenting interpretations - in whatever way you can imagine this depth being represented sonically. It is very common for graphic scores (including Brown’s aforementioned work) to present ‘block’ elements within their graphics: shaded areas defined and distinct from the background. More often than not, such blocks are interpreted as individual gestures or contrasts between differing sounds or silence (although on a score without instructions, such as 2494.8cm², any element can be realised as and how the interpreter desires). The intention was to give the score for 2494.8cm² additional depth through the detail within each block - each block made up of perpendicular lines, warping as they approach the centre. The featured recording is a realisation by Francesco Serpetti, on piano and electronics. Simon Kinch is a composer of contemporary music, based between Oxford and Seville. He curates and edits the magazine CNCPTN, and maintains CLLCTN - a blog collating selected works of modern art music.

+ Simon Kinch - 2494.8cm²

It feels so stupid now, but it took me ages to see the extra dimension (of depth) that Earl Brown mentioned in his graphic score December 1952. When I finally got it, it clicked, and I could no longer not see it - like how the hidden image in one of those magic eye pictures supposedly stays with you (although I wouldn’t know - I’ve never been able to see past the swirling top layer on those either).

This extra depth - an extra dimension, an additional characteristic to realise in that score - opens the score up to further, differenting interpretations - in whatever way you can imagine this depth being represented sonically.

It is very common for graphic scores (including Brown’s aforementioned work) to present ‘block’ elements within their graphics: shaded areas defined and distinct from the background. More often than not, such blocks are interpreted as individual gestures or contrasts between differing sounds or silence (although on a score without instructions, such as 2494.8cm², any element can be realised as and how the interpreter desires).

The intention was to give the score for 2494.8cm² additional depth through the detail within each block - each block made up of perpendicular lines, warping as they approach the centre.

The featured recording is a realisation by Francesco Serpetti, on piano and electronics.

Simon Kinch is a composer of contemporary music, based between Oxford and Seville.

He curates and edits the magazine CNCPTN, and maintains CLLCTN - a blog collating selected works of modern art music.


+ Patrizia Mattioli - Incoronazione 2 Incoronazione 2 (trans: coronation) is part of a musical theatre project, inspired by the short story Un Re in Ascolto (A King Listens) by the Italian writer and essayist Italo Calvino. The novel outlines a King’s fear of being overthrown (or even worse), his paranoia leading him to listening to the noises of the building, which becomes the King’s ear. The palace is like a weft of regular sounds and noises coming from below, from a dark depth, while occasionally a kind of thunder can be heard. A woman’s voice carries a love song, the dream of a woman’s voice within a long nightmare. The King sings, or thinks he has sung: in the story, the sounds which are heard never find a correspondence with reality. The composition uses dissonances, crushing sound / noise, a mixture of real and artificial sounds, enhancing the rapid flow (impetuously natural) of the word, not linearly, but punctuated by tremors, convulsions, breathing, gurgling, delirious soundscapes, and sudden appearances. Patrizia Mattioli is a musician, composer and performer, based in Parma, Italy. She is a previous winner of IRCAM’s international electroacoustic music competition.

+ Patrizia Mattioli - Incoronazione 2

Incoronazione 2 (trans: coronation) is part of a musical theatre project, inspired by the short story Un Re in Ascolto (A King Listens) by the Italian writer and essayist Italo Calvino.

The novel outlines a King’s fear of being overthrown (or even worse), his paranoia leading him to listening to the noises of the building, which becomes the King’s ear. The palace is like a weft of regular sounds and noises coming from below, from a dark depth, while occasionally a kind of thunder can be heard. A woman’s voice carries a love song, the dream of a woman’s voice within a long nightmare.

The King sings, or thinks he has sung: in the story, the sounds which are heard never find a correspondence with reality.

The composition uses dissonances, crushing sound / noise, a mixture of real and artificial sounds, enhancing the rapid flow (impetuously natural) of the word, not linearly, but punctuated by tremors, convulsions, breathing, gurgling, delirious soundscapes, and sudden appearances.

Patrizia Mattioli is a musician, composer and performer, based in Parma, Italy. She is a previous winner of IRCAM’s international electroacoustic music competition.








+ Paul McGuire - Seafarer Overwrought and esoteric waves of noise against the din of silence. Deteriorated sound-samples of things already heard, already passed. Isolation and memory. Paul McGuire is an Irish composer based in London.

+ Paul McGuire - Seafarer

Overwrought and esoteric waves of noise against the din of silence.

Deteriorated sound-samples of things already heard, already passed.

Isolation and memory.

Paul McGuire is an Irish composer based in London.


+ Luca Nasciuti - Morpheus “By falling asleep I fall inside myself… to where I am no longer separated by the world… I pass that line of distinction to slip entirely into the innermost and outermost part of myself.” Jean-Luc Nancy, quoted from his book The Fall of Sleep, on the fall within oneself when we sleep. Nancy’s views on sleep, particularly the fall, are one inspiration for this work, Morpheus. The title of the composition itself refers to Nancy’s analogy of sleep through the mythical Greek god Morpheus, son of Hypnos, who can don the shape of humans: “Morpheus transforms the pure matter of sleep into form. He gives shape and flight to the shapeless and to the fall. His metamorphosis contains the very mystery of sleep: the outline of a fluidity, the look, sign, and gesture of evanescence with the charm and virtue of presence”. Metamorphosis and donning both function as compositional strategies in this work: sounds from the environment are convolved with a single note plucked on the cymbala, allowing noise to masquerade as tone. The interplay of internal and external experiences in the world, and our perception of them, are crucial to Nancy’s ideas on sleep, and this interplay strongly influences not only the concept behind this piece and what it aims to refer to, but also the sound palette used. Sounds from the outside world (the sound of traffic, sirens, birds, as captured in the bedroom) are manipulated and organised amongst the sounds of my own nocturnal sleep-activity (sighs, movements, mutters) - sleep reflects our innermost and outermost selves, and in turn, Morpheus embraces the nocturnal environment in its inner (myself) and outer (the world surrounding me) representation. From outside to inside referential sounds mark the space of sleep it is narrated. But soundmarks are also used to portray the passing of time. The journey from night to day, from dark-night to light-morning is marked by respectively the sound of night-traffic in the street, my own sound while asleep, and the sound of birds early in the morning to mark both the awakening and the end of the journey/composition. Luca Nasciuti is a composer based in London. His work spans from installations to video and performance art. His second release, Vanishing Point, will be out on Somehow Recordings in July 2012. Morpheus was written in late 2011 at the Electronic Music Studios, Goldsmiths University of London, as an 8.1 channel surround piece. Photo courtesy of Giacomo Bandini

+ Luca Nasciuti - Morpheus

“By falling asleep I fall inside myself… to where I am no longer separated by the world… I pass that line of distinction to slip entirely into the innermost and outermost part of myself.”

Jean-Luc Nancy, quoted from his book The Fall of Sleep, on the fall within oneself when we sleep. Nancy’s views on sleep, particularly the fall, are one inspiration for this work, Morpheus.

The title of the composition itself refers to Nancy’s analogy of sleep through the mythical Greek god Morpheus, son of Hypnos, who can don the shape of humans: “Morpheus transforms the pure matter of sleep into form. He gives shape and flight to the shapeless and to the fall. His metamorphosis contains the very mystery of sleep: the outline of a fluidity, the look, sign, and gesture of evanescence with the charm and virtue of presence”.

Metamorphosis and donning both function as compositional strategies in this work: sounds from the environment are convolved with a single note plucked on the cymbala, allowing noise to masquerade as tone.

The interplay of internal and external experiences in the world, and our perception of them, are crucial to Nancy’s ideas on sleep, and this interplay strongly influences not only the concept behind this piece and what it aims to refer to, but also the sound palette used.

Sounds from the outside world (the sound of traffic, sirens, birds, as captured in the bedroom) are manipulated and organised amongst the sounds of my own nocturnal sleep-activity (sighs, movements, mutters) - sleep reflects our innermost and outermost selves, and in turn, Morpheus embraces the nocturnal environment in its inner (myself) and outer (the world surrounding me) representation. From outside to inside referential sounds mark the space of sleep it is narrated. But soundmarks are also used to portray the passing of time. The journey from night to day, from dark-night to light-morning is marked by respectively the sound of night-traffic in the street, my own sound while asleep, and the sound of birds early in the morning to mark both the awakening and the end of the journey/composition.

Luca Nasciuti is a composer based in London. His work spans from installations to video and performance art.

His second release, Vanishing Point, will be out on Somehow Recordings in July 2012.

Morpheus was written in late 2011 at the Electronic Music Studios, Goldsmiths University of London, as an 8.1 channel surround piece.

Photo courtesy of Giacomo Bandini


+ Lachlan Skipworth - Dark Nebulae Dark nebulae are vast clouds of atomic dust found in the far reaches of outer space, their density blocking even light from passing through. This piece evokes the physical sensation of these colossal masses as they drift about, slowly twisting, stretching and colliding with each other. To do this, each saxophone plays almost exclusively multiphonics, whereby using an unconventional fingering, a thick and complex chord of several pitches at the same time is created. From eerie glowing consonances to grating dissonances, these multiphonics are layered and overlapped throughout the piece. Through the interplay between chords, one can hear wisps of translucent cloud strands, shrouded shapes moving imperceptibly, and surges of impenetrable blackness lachlanskipworth.wordpress.com australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/skipworth-lachlan

+ Lachlan Skipworth - Dark Nebulae

Dark nebulae are vast clouds of atomic dust found in the far reaches of outer space, their density blocking even light from passing through. This piece evokes the physical sensation of these colossal masses as they drift about, slowly twisting, stretching and colliding with each other.

To do this, each saxophone plays almost exclusively multiphonics, whereby using an unconventional fingering, a thick and complex chord of several pitches at the same time is created. From eerie glowing consonances to grating dissonances, these multiphonics are layered and overlapped throughout the piece. Through the interplay between chords, one can hear wisps of translucent cloud strands, shrouded shapes moving imperceptibly, and surges of impenetrable blackness

lachlanskipworth.wordpress.com
australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/skipworth-lachlan


+ Social Drift - Social Drift I started time-stretching noise to try to get my head around some of Theodor Adorno’s concepts on music. Time-stretching changes one aspect of noise - what it sounds like - while leaving other aspects that are essential to it, the same – its rhythmic, pitch and harmonic content. According to Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises, a fizz is no different to a ffiizzzz when categorising noise - although timbre is not just harmonic content, it is rhythmic, pitch and harmonic content that define a noise. The Art of Noises further invites musicians “to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones” – and time-stretching shouldn’t, ideally, alter pitch, rhythm or harmonics. My time-stretching noise was an experiment in trying to get to grips with a passage in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music: “From dance it [the sonata] received a patterned unity, the intention of achieving the whole; from song it received the opposing, negative impulse in turn producing the whole by its own rigor. In maintaining the identity of the composition in principle - through the tempo”. Time-stretching noise should create difference, but also an essential sameness, through a process that changes what gives the recording its holistic nature, tempo. It seems that’s what made Schoenberg’s music progressive: “Adorno put forward the general categories of sameness and difference as being the most fundamental to a theory of form… They are always mediated through the totality of the work’s structure” (David Roberts’ Art and Enlightenment). “…the generation of identity and difference… [extended] to the sonata form as a whole… is further developed by Schoenberg, who thereby… can lay claim to the heritage of classic bourgeois music” (Max Paddison’s Adrono’s Aesthetics of Music). However, to be noise the recording must be meaningless. Adorno writes in the Dialectic of Loneliness: “The musical language is polarized into extremes: on the one hand, into gestures of shock - almost bodily convulsions - and on the other, into the brittle mobility of a person paralyzed by anxiety… the musical ‘mediation’ which their school had previously intensified to an undreamt of degree, is destroyed by this polarization, and its destruction has taken with it the distinction of theme and development, the steadiness of the harmonic flow, and the unbroken melodic line as well.” I hope that a similar polarization destroys any traditional meaning to noise. By decreasing the tempo the dynamic quality of noise is freed from dependence on the wit or skill of traditional methods, like how Schoenberg was able to make dissonances sonorous in their own right. Was the “anxiety” of Schoenberg’s radical innovations based on an aversion to previous taste? Without wit, what can noise really do or say? In this piece, Social Drift, after editing out any noise that did not evoke anxiety, I overwrote that with simple edits, in case the absence of meaningful aesthetic processes is content in a more general sense - something “going on”. Finally I erased all but one short looped section, destroying any intro, conclusion or development that erases anything more general “going on”, similar to the Harsh Noise Wall approach. The editing out of parts is not an aesthetic process: isn’t that the whole point of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry? Time-stretching itself is not meaningful; to quote Russolo: “noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity”. So the use of time-stretching cannot make what would otherwise be noise, music. However, meaningless noise cannot be mimetic. So, with a final time-stretch I try to make it appear as being music; another way of defining noise - not as an absence of meaning, or referencing Russolo, but sound production that is easily recognized - like the protrusion of time-stretching here. As already mentioned, time-stretching does not make music, but it nonetheless orders the meaningless noise; an enigmatic kind of musicality. It cannot make any material more musical so it is not objectively so; but in an inessential way order has been created, like how cloud formations can appear to be people playing. Adorno says all art is enigmatic. To solve its meaning involves narrow-mindedness, so that the interpretation of the whole is not legitimatized but is nevertheless true - as if our interpretations were not some final essential fact about the object: “If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears… understanding in the highest sense - a solution of the enigma that at the same time maintains the enigma - depends on the spitualization of art” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory). Music only relates to other works enigmatically, and enigmatically being art music is enough for mimesis; so noise need only be enigmatically [not really] art music to have truth content. In acousmatic listening we bracket how it was made and what we listen for grounds what is bracketed. If time-stretching has truth content, then because all the recording is left stretched, that is grounded as a quality of the whole of the recording, which is how art should be encountered according to Adorno. soundcloud.com/timestretched_noise

+ Social Drift - Social Drift

I started time-stretching noise to try to get my head around some of Theodor Adorno’s concepts on music.

Time-stretching changes one aspect of noise - what it sounds like - while leaving other aspects that are essential to it, the same – its rhythmic, pitch and harmonic content. According to Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises, a fizz is no different to a ffiizzzz when categorising noise - although timbre is not just harmonic content, it is rhythmic, pitch and harmonic content that define a noise. The Art of Noises further invites musicians “to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones” – and time-stretching shouldn’t, ideally, alter pitch, rhythm or harmonics.

My time-stretching noise was an experiment in trying to get to grips with a passage in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music: “From dance it [the sonata] received a patterned unity, the intention of achieving the whole; from song it received the opposing, negative impulse in turn producing the whole by its own rigor. In maintaining the identity of the composition in principle - through the tempo”.

Time-stretching noise should create difference, but also an essential sameness, through a process that changes what gives the recording its holistic nature, tempo. It seems that’s what made Schoenberg’s music progressive: “Adorno put forward the general categories of sameness and difference as being the most fundamental to a theory of form… They are always mediated through the totality of the work’s structure” (David Roberts’ Art and Enlightenment). “…the generation of identity and difference… [extended] to the sonata form as a whole… is further developed by Schoenberg, who thereby… can lay claim to the heritage of classic bourgeois music” (Max Paddison’s Adrono’s Aesthetics of Music).

However, to be noise the recording must be meaningless. Adorno writes in the Dialectic of Loneliness:

“The musical language is polarized into extremes: on the one hand, into gestures of shock - almost bodily convulsions - and on the other, into the brittle mobility of a person paralyzed by anxiety… the musical ‘mediation’ which their school had previously intensified to an undreamt of degree, is destroyed by this polarization, and its destruction has taken with it the distinction of theme and development, the steadiness of the harmonic flow, and the unbroken melodic line as well.”

I hope that a similar polarization destroys any traditional meaning to noise. By decreasing the tempo the dynamic quality of noise is freed from dependence on the wit or skill of traditional methods, like how Schoenberg was able to make dissonances sonorous in their own right. Was the “anxiety” of Schoenberg’s radical innovations based on an aversion to previous taste?

Without wit, what can noise really do or say?

In this piece, Social Drift, after editing out any noise that did not evoke anxiety, I overwrote that with simple edits, in case the absence of meaningful aesthetic processes is content in a more general sense - something “going on”. Finally I erased all but one short looped section, destroying any intro, conclusion or development that erases anything more general “going on”, similar to the Harsh Noise Wall approach. The editing out of parts is not an aesthetic process: isn’t that the whole point of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry? Time-stretching itself is not meaningful; to quote Russolo: “noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity”. So the use of time-stretching cannot make what would otherwise be noise, music.

However, meaningless noise cannot be mimetic. So, with a final time-stretch I try to make it appear as being music; another way of defining noise - not as an absence of meaning, or referencing Russolo, but sound production that is easily recognized - like the protrusion of time-stretching here. As already mentioned, time-stretching does not make music, but it nonetheless orders the meaningless noise; an enigmatic kind of musicality. It cannot make any material more musical so it is not objectively so; but in an inessential way order has been created, like how cloud formations can appear to be people playing. Adorno says all art is enigmatic. To solve its meaning involves narrow-mindedness, so that the interpretation of the whole is not legitimatized but is nevertheless true - as if our interpretations were not some final essential fact about the object: “If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears… understanding in the highest sense - a solution of the enigma that at the same time maintains the enigma - depends on the spitualization of art” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory).

Music only relates to other works enigmatically, and enigmatically being art music is enough for mimesis; so noise need only be enigmatically [not really] art music to have truth content. In acousmatic listening we bracket how it was made and what we listen for grounds what is bracketed. If time-stretching has truth content, then because all the recording is left stretched, that is grounded as a quality of the whole of the recording, which is how art should be encountered according to Adorno.

soundcloud.com/timestretched_noise


+ Cooper Troxell - Jerry Maguire An old serialist once dreamt of a future in which everyone would sing the latest twelve-toner in the shower before the morning commute, a jumble of minor ninths and tritones buzzing about happily in their head. In this future, everyone loves traffic jams because of the unexpected permutations of car horns, squeaky brakes and frustrated yawps forming what those insensitive brutes of yesteryear would have called “dissonant harmonies.” The problem with this dream, of course, is that we live this future every day, for as long as there have been showers, there have been people filling them with melodies (or any vocal sounds) that fall comfortably outside of any recognized tonal system. And: as long as this continues, the work of music scholarship will never be finished. This piece came from those proverbial shower stalls. There are all sorts of disjunct melodies and strange harmonies contained in the sounds of speech, and they can be found with a persistent ear and some spectral analysis. We live in a cynical world. A cynical. World. And We work in a business of Tough. Competitors. I love you. You. Complete. Me. And I’m just— Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at hello. You had me at hello. Perhaps there’s a world in which these melodies derived from those words and those feelings can subsist on their own expressive power, freed from the burden of those hypermimetic crackle-whispers surrounded by tremulous silence, or simply, the annoyance of having had to have had anyone at “hello.” Jerry Maguire scenesoundcloud.com/cotroxell

+ Cooper Troxell - Jerry Maguire

An old serialist once dreamt of a future in which everyone would sing the latest twelve-toner in the shower before the morning commute, a jumble of minor ninths and tritones buzzing about happily in their head. In this future, everyone loves traffic jams because of the unexpected permutations of car horns, squeaky brakes and frustrated yawps forming what those insensitive brutes of yesteryear would have called “dissonant harmonies.”

The problem with this dream, of course, is that we live this future every day, for as long as there have been showers, there have been people filling them with melodies (or any vocal sounds) that fall comfortably outside of any recognized tonal system. And: as long as this continues, the work of music scholarship will never be finished.

This piece came from those proverbial shower stalls. There are all sorts of disjunct melodies and strange harmonies contained in the sounds of speech, and they can be found with a persistent ear and some spectral analysis.

We live in a cynical world.
A cynical. World.

And
We work in a business of
Tough. Competitors.

I love you.
You.
Complete. Me.
And I’m just—

Shut up. Just shut up.
You had me at hello.
You had me at hello.

Perhaps there’s a world in which these melodies derived from those words and those feelings can subsist on their own expressive power, freed from the burden of those hypermimetic crackle-whispers surrounded by tremulous silence, or simply, the annoyance of having had to have had anyone at “hello.”

Jerry Maguire scene
soundcloud.com/cotroxell


+ Marián Zavarský - Five 100-note Pieces I. Maths in memoriam Eight 12-tone clusters, followed by a 4-note chord at the end. II. I was in the fairyland Just a story…expressed in 100 notes.III. Prodrome When something unknown is coming… A pain of 33 notes, and a fear of 6. The pain decays, then…IV. Child’s game A child is playing… every two bars, with 10 notes, except with E and B. But in the second half, he finds them.V. Huygens and the others… There are hundreds of thousands of little planets, called minor planets, in our solar system above us. You wouldn’t believe how many of them consist of 7 letters in their names. That’s like seven tones in a scale. And there are three such scales in this piece, with 12 minor planets hidden inside – the alphabet coded against the tones of each scale, each planet name spelling out a different set of tones. Marián Zavarský is currently studying composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. Five 100-note pieces was performed live on 1st April 2011, during the Young Composers Exhibition in Bratislava, Slovakia. Juraj Tomka - violin, Monika Nagyová – piano

+ Marián Zavarský - Five 100-note Pieces

I. Maths in memoriam

Eight 12-tone clusters, followed by a 4-note chord at the end.

II. I was in the fairyland

Just a story…expressed in 100 notes.

III. Prodrome

When something unknown is coming…

A pain of 33 notes, and a fear of 6.

The pain decays, then…

IV. Child’s game

A child is playing… every two bars, with 10 notes, except with E and B. But in the second half, he finds them.

V. Huygens and the others…

There are hundreds of thousands of little planets, called minor planets, in our solar system above us. You wouldn’t believe how many of them consist of 7 letters in their names. That’s like seven tones in a scale. And there are three such scales in this piece, with 12 minor planets hidden inside – the alphabet coded against the tones of each scale, each planet name spelling out a different set of tones.

Marián Zavarský is currently studying composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Five 100-note pieces was performed live on 1st April 2011, during the Young Composers Exhibition in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Juraj Tomka - violin, Monika Nagyová – piano