coLABoratory: Lab 5 - Du Yun: Before the Lab

My piece, Slow Portraits, is very different now from the initial proposal I made to ACO’s coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe program. 

Portraits in Dramatic Time

In summer 2011, I made a sound design for visual artist David Michalek’s Portraits in Dramatic Time. It is a video installation that used ultra-high-speed, high-definition cameras to record several well-known theater and film performers in a scene. In other words, the visual sequences were not digitally altered. The project slows the frames to display each emotion in larger-than-life detail as it is projected onto a screen that’s 85 feet wide and 45 feet high. The work was presented as part of Lincoln Center Festival, utilizing the facade of the David H. Koch Theater as a media canvas. In the beginning I wanted to use three different shorts out of 45 shorts from Michalek’s Portraits in Dramatic Time.

But after the first workshop, I aborted the idea. After talking to David, we decided to use two different sets of the shorts. It was also because this is not "scoring for films." I did not want to create music scene by scene, jumping from each flashcards. 

Portraits in Dramatic Time was shot using ultra-high speed, high-definition cameras. The performers were given roughly 10x10 feet of space to work within. The cameras were fixed, and the live action was recorded for duration of 10-15 seconds depending on the scene. Within these constraints, dramatic narratives were condensed down to an essence.

Each scene-sequence of drama was crafted to provide a physical metaphor for an emotional condition. This was created through various means—determinants (the problem, plot, theme, or context of the characters and their circumstances), consequences (deliberate manifestations of feeling as gestures and expressions), moods (induced in the character and filling the scene), and involuntary emotions (internal emotional states).

First is the Chinese Kunqu opera performer, Qian Yi; the other is the quintessential New York theater artist, Ruth Malaczech (of Mabou Mines.) These two performers cannot be more different in terms of cultural background and performing practices. And yet upon close look, one might find the gestures each depicted are remarkably familiar, the trajectory of each of their executions are outlandishly echoing each other.

Their beginning gestures:

 

Their throwing gestures:

 

Their respective expanding gestures:
  

As the piece goes along, my interest takes another shift. I become further interested in detailing the movement within a similar gestures and each of them embodies an underlying burst. It’s as if finding and locating a miniature painting. Looking at the forms and lines, and to see how the gestures each form and align and take a shift and turn.

Without these workshops and working closely with the musicians, I could not have another chance of redoing and reshaping my ideas and outlooks. It is almost subversive in today’s culture to write with a media that is created in analogue and with no digital alteration. Even though the outcome looks very nuanced and otherworldly and at once with an inherent ultimate poeticism.

This is perhaps what it investigates: when we slow down, we see a lot of nuances that’s never seen before our eyes. And when we hear many lines composed together and moving tantalizingly in their own many similar and yet slightly different mellismas, the listening involvement becomes more of a temptation. The creator the performers the narrative and the scenery have become seductress, to lure the audience into another world.

In the end, I do think that the process is less important --- whether or not it was digital-altered or analogue representation. But the ending result of what we are willing to see and what we are willing to hear to listen is what I am interested in exploring. And I do believe this is an artist’s responsibility --- to unveil another layer of a reality through the world around us.

coLABoratory: Lab 5 - Dan Visconti: Before the Lab

Feathers by Simon Tarr

It's taken a lot of composing/thinking/video editing/soldering/rewiring, but Simon and I are just about ready for Zankel this week! It’s such a treat to work on such a wild piece, one that we never would have been able to bring to life under the constraints of a typical orchestra schedule—but at the same time, all those possibilities create *lots* of things that can go wrong, and plenty of brilliant ideas crash and burn for want of an adapter plug. So we’re checking our I’s and crossing our t’s so that we can hopefully spend all of the time in rehearsal experimenting with cool sounds rather than trying to get X device to power on!

These ciruit-bent instruments are a real kick in part because of their utter unpredictability, but that same quality flies in the face of orchestra standards. For the next workshop, we need to be conscious of the inevitable challenges this will create as well as bringing out the happy accidents that will make the piece sound very different than a traditional, rigidly-controlled composition.

Dan Visconti

Our first priority of this last workshop is to verify that our setup works, after which time Simon will continue to focus on the video and make sure that it is getting enough audio input to make for enough motion (his video is reacting to audio input). The musical side of Glitchscape is not difficult, but as a large amount of the piece involves reacting and improvisatory elements it will require a slow “working through” every couple bars. It is important to work through the piece slowly as much of the interest will come from how we work out different events, so a slow trip through the entire piece is a must. After this has been worked out, we can focus on running the piece continuously.  

coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe - Troy Herion: New York City Symphony Trailer

Check out the trailer for Troy Herion's newest visual composition, New York: A City Symphony, premiering next Friday at Carnegie Hall as part of the coLABoratory: Playing It UNsafe project.

coLABoratory: Lab 5 - Ray Lustig: Before the Lab

Ray Lustig

The latest of the workshops for Latency Canons was the first time I brought musical material that I knew would actually be going into the piece.  For the previous two workshops, I'd come with only fragments of music for testing out the dynamics of playing with delay under various scenarios (a conductor in New York conducting players in England, vice versa, no one conducting and the players just following each other by sound, or by sight only, etc. etc.).  And I actually ended up using none of that early fragmentary material in the final score.

But those early workshops were essential in helping me to figure out what kinds of material would work well, for showing me what scenarios of the imitative setup were likely to yield interesting results (or even be practically possible), and helping me get to the heart of what it was I wanted to do with this idea.

Gildas Quartet

Latency Canons is in some ways a concerto for string quartet, but the onstage string quartet is replicated in three other places (the furthest of which is the Gildas Quartet in Manchester England) that will all be in communication via GoogleHangouts.  The latency (delay) of the internet connection will hopefully allow the remote quartets to create a halo of resonance and reverberation around the onstage players' music.  This unstable and multipart echo made me think of a ritualistic recitation, as congregants chanting in a strange cathedral that wraps around the world all the way to Manchester England.

Dan Lame

The piece opens with only the onstage quartet playing.  Then the offstage quartets join in imitation.  The orchestra joins with its own imitations, and the piece becomes a conversation between the orchestra and the "canonists" of the four quartets.  Eventually conductor George Manahan passes the baton to conductor Dane Lam on the other side of the Atlantic.

 

The piece ends with the onstage players gradually dropping away, until only the offstage players are left playing.  The music that started on Zankel Hall's stage has drifted out into the world.

coLABoratory: Lab 4 - Judith Sainte Croix: After the Lab

Judith Sainte Croix

At the 4th workshop of Vision V the entire Sonora Trio was present, Oren Fader on electric guitar, Andrew Bolotowsky on Native American Flute and composer Judith Sainte Croix on 88-key synthesizer.

The orchestra played with live synthesizer realizing the soundscapes we have been creating over the workshops.

Judith Sainte Croix

One of the experiments for this workshop was to try out the audience participation aspect of the piece. A group of students from Frank Sinatra High School in Queens was present and helped out with this. One of the issues being tested was the ease of teaching this part to the audience before a performance. I taught them their part in under 2 min. The conductor rehearsed them for less then a minute and they performed with the orchestra following their cues.

We tried running the digital images on the three large sections of the piece and decided to create more images - 10 in all - one for each of the subsections:

I.  Toward Liberation - Reaching, Extreme Mystery, Essence, Soarings;

II.  SunShadow - Wind Opens the Trees, Thunderbirds, Portal of Roots & Joy  

III.  Inner Space - Lucid, Breezes, Diamonds in the Grass

Each of the subsections will divulge the experience of the contemporary individual; seeking to capture an animating life force. The orchestral music forms alliances within and across instrumental family groups articulating the behavior of the fabric of humanity as the composition unrolls its aural story.