Boring Like A Drill.

A while back On An Overgrown Path reproduced this image:

The image was made by the German photographer Alexander Lauterwasser, by transferring sound waves produced by music into water, and photographing the results using reflected light. In this case, the music was a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen (sadly, there’s no information on which piece was used to create this image).

Pliable’s post compares and contrasts this image to those created by other sounds: how similar it is to the mantra Om, and how different it is to, say, Pierre Boulez‘s music. He also notes the similarity of many of the images to mandalas.

The first similarity that struck me was the resemblence to many of Stockhausen’s musical diagrams, particularly in his later music, with their use of spirals and concentric orbits. The latter half of his life was devoted to marking the cyclical aspects of time: years, seasons, months, days, and finally, hours.

These preoccupations are probably most clearly heard in his late piece Cosmic Pulses and subsequent works, each of which were designated “hours” in a 24-piece cycle titled Klang. Stockhausen’s summary diagram of Cosmic Pulses is reproduced on its CD cover, below left.

On the right is the cover for another recording from the Klang cycle, Natürliche Dauern. Cyclical and spiral patterns are a recurring feature on his CD designs. As well as a piece called Mantra, he wrote another called Spiral. He also drew his CV in the form of a Fibonacci spiral, his list of compositions growing and expanding ever outwards.

I’d really like to know which of Stockhausen’s sounds produced that image.

Beats me why Redundens 4 comes out all messed up in The Listening Room. It works fine on the player on my NetNewMusic page so if you want to hear it properly you can go there.

In the meantime, I’ve added Redundens 7 to The Listening Room, and it sounds perfectly fine. It’s very similar to Redundens 4, but then all the Redundens pieces strive to be as alike as possible.

The series of works collectively titled Redundens was begun in 2001. All the pieces take Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11 as their starting point: only the top line in Schoenberg’s pieces is retained as an unaccompanied melody (or as a list of pitch classes if you’re more technically-minded.) Each set of pieces uses a different method of encoding this melody; by pitch, register, timbre, duration, dynamics, or other means.

Redundens 4 arranges this melody for solo piano, with all variations in rhythm and articulation removed, always making the smallest possible leap from one note to the next.

– Why are you listening to Latin music?
– Why not?
– You don’t listen to Latin music.
– I am now.
– You never listen to Latin music!
– Don’t you like it?
– It’s fine.
– So what’s the problem?
– You, you never listen to Latin music! Why do they keep shouting “cumbia”?
– I dunno, so I’m just assuming it’s Spanish for “blues explosion”.

(Last time on top of the pile.)

To save you the hassle of downloading music you know nothing about, I’ve stayed up all night figuring out how to get every single piece of my music on this website collected in one convenient location, playable as streaming audio. So far, there are over 50 mp3s to choose from.

You’ll need a Flash player in your browser for this to work. It probably needs a few bugs to be worked out and some extra functions added, but it seems to do the job for now. Drop me a line if it’s giving you grief.

Please Mister Please has also been given the jukebox treatment.

The series of works collectively titled Redundens was begun in 2001. All the pieces take Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11 as their starting point: only the top line in Schoenberg’s pieces is retained as an unaccompanied melody (or as a list of pitch classes if you’re more technically-minded.) Each set of pieces uses a different method of encoding this melody; by pitch, register, timbre, duration, dynamics, or other means.

Redundens 1k retains for each pitch class in the melody the same register and duration throughout the piece, as determined by the nature of their initial appearances in the original. This new melody is then arranged for solo flute by transposing each note up one or two octaves to fit into the instrument’s range. Dyads are replaced by the actual pitch-class occurring in the original sequence.

There was a battle of loud, irridescent shirts on stage during the Saturday evening Xenakis concert at the Barbican – quite possibly to match the music. Pianist Rolf Hind played Mists again, this time in a shiny green shirt, instead of the shiny red shirt last time I saw him play. Not to be outdone, Christian Lindberg trotted on stage in a shiny red shirt of his own, but much tighter, covered with Chinese symbols, and unbuttoned to reveal a silver medallion as well. Game: Lindberg.

Lindberg’s trombone playing was equally flashy during Xenakis’ late concerto for the instrument, Troorkh. The long, swooping glissandi, sudden leaps in register, and repeated excursions into the highest range of the instrument make this a fiendishly difficult piece for the soloist; something well telegraphed by Lindberg as he jogged on the spot, nodded his head and hummed along with the orchestra to psych himself up between phrases. The orchestra sounded good but remained in the background through most of the piece, though this may have appeared so due as much to the soloist’s antics (and tight-fitting clothes) as the solo itself.

A much stronger work was the earlier orchestral work Antikthon, who roiling mass of conflicting textures was employed as a statement in itself, instead of providing support to a solo. It’s incredible to think the heaving, protean force of this music was conceived as a ballet.

The evening also included a rare performance the Anastenaria trilogy. The final section, Metastasis, is famous as Xenakis’ Opus One, all but completely obscuring the seldom-heard preceding sections. I thought the programme notes’ comparisonsof the first two pieces to Carl Orff and Bartok were a bit silly, until I heard the music. Metastasis is another thing entirely, compared even to Xenakis’ previous music, let alone any other.

To complement the Xenakis, the rest of the Barbican was given over to organised chaos for the day. Thousands of small children were running around doing various activities, making craft projects that spread debris throughout the building, and generally creating pandemonium. For some reason, a late-night knitting circle was set up immediately outside the concert hall. It was annoying to come straight out of the hall with Antikthon still ringing in your ears only to be instantly confronted by a Latin American folk band serenading the punters (and the knitters) at the bar.

It was also annoying that there was a late night gig by Haswell and Hecker using Xenakis’s UPIC system, but it hadn’t been advertised anywhere in the rest of the promotional materials, and it started at midnight, two hours after the last Xenakis gig. Anyway, I’d seen ’em so I went home to bed.

Don’t take your severely hungover girlfriend to an early afternoon concert of percussion music by Iannis Xenakis.

The series of works collectively titled Redundens was begun in 2001. All the pieces take Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11 as their starting point: only the top line in Schoenberg’s pieces is retained as an unaccompanied melody (or as a list of pitch classes if you’re more technically-minded.) Each set of pieces uses a different method of encoding this melody; by pitch, register, timbre, duration, dynamics, or other means.

Redundens 6j takes the sequence of notes as a melody without regard to rhythm, duration, or register. The melody is then split between two voices within a common octave, alternating from one note to the next. The second voice is shifted one beat back to produce intervals. Unisons are doubled two octaves lower, and played at half duration. For solo piano.

Kyle Gann has reluctantly closed down his PostClassic Radio internet station. It’s a pity: over the past few years it’s been a superb way to hear hundreds of pieces of great music by composers who don’t fit into the standard pigeonholes of “modern classical” or whatever you want to call that stuff.

I can’t blame him. It’s not as if he doesn’t have other things to do besides update and maintain that service; and there’s no way I’d spend hundreds of dollars each year on letting everyone hear other people’s music.

Besides, over PostClassic Radio’s five years of existence a number of other internet resources have arisen (and some have fallen again). Although it will be missed, there are more ways today than when it started, of exploring a wider range of music, by hook or by crook. Even when a corporate behemoth crushes a technological innovation that gives people what they want, an alternative soon emerges. Goodbye Muxtape, hello Seeqpod – or whatever becomes next week’s vehicle of choice for sharing music. The situation will remain in flux but still active, as long as we can access the means of distribution.

This 50-year-old LP of Pierre Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zeitmasse* is just one example of many Vinyl Age recordings of the post-war avant garde I’ve been enjoying lately. This guy conveys some of the thrill in hearing performances made of music when it is still brand new and something of an unknown quantity (when this record was released, both of these pieces had been completed only the previous year**.)

That’s not all, though. These old recordings have a starkness to them, a thinness of sound which emphasise just how unfamiliar the music was to a contemporary audience. Modern recordings too often have a sweetness and softness to them that is appealing at first, but eventually sounds bland.

Speaking of scratchy old records…. The Cramps have always been a band I intellectually admired but not subjectively liked. Lux Interior’s recent death has spurred WFMU into hosting on their website the complete set (so far) of Lux and Ivy’s Favorites: fan-compiled CDs of songs mentioned by Lux and Ivy in their various interviews. Liking random collections of old records as much as I do, this plethora of pop, soul, blues, and novelty records from the 50s and 60s has made my week – and given me a better-sounding copy of The Five Blobs’ “The Blob”.

* Or Zeitmasze. Stockhausen seems to have changed his mind later about how to spell it.

** And now they are old. And yet…

Which is slower, more tedious, more frustrating? Going through a piece of music in a computer program, modifying it note by note? Or writing a script to modify the whole thing automatically, inevitably having to subject the whole thing to trial and error, running it numerous times before you’ve fixed all the stupid syntax errors and made it do what you wanted it to do, then checking the modified work to make sure there are no mistakes?

Brown is an influential but overlooked composer, who’s guaranteed at least a footnote in history for his association with John Cage and his radical experiments in music notation. He’s one of those composers you might hear about a lot, without ever actually hearing them.

The Earle Brown Music Foundation has thoughtfully been uploading sound files of a number of his compositions, in addition to program notes and samples of his manuscripts, so now you can hear them for yourself. Available Forms I is a concise introduction to his open form style, Module I and Module II (performed simultaneously) are a contrasting study in austerity.

His status as The Originator served as much to constrict his reputation as it did to celebrate it. I’ve only got into his stuff since his death, and discovered that not only did he rock hard, he was an out-and-out loon with a boundless capacity to surprise. The Probe has put up a nifty little selection of eclectic cuts as a tribute.

Muzak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

After a failed merger with one of its major creditors, the “sensory branding” company DMX last year, the firm which began life as Wired Radio Inc in the 1930s has been teetering on the brink of financial collapse.

There’s a history of the company at The Independent as well:

Visit the headquarters of Muzak Holdings LLC, the spiritual home of Muzak, and you will hear its eponymous product in every room, pumped in from the giant Well database containing 2.6 million tracks. Every room, that is, except for the elevator…. Employees of Muzak say the absence of sound in the company’s own lifts is maintained for “deeply felt symbolic reasons”.

Like Dick Without A Hole, The Cure For Headaches was made at about the same time, and adopts the same types of source material: 1980s Adelaide talk radio and beloved TV stars.

In this piece, an intruder has disrupted the cosy little world of Adelaide chit-chat. The traditional Sunday night religious program was always a slightly tense affair, with a scarcity of earnest callers and, thanks to a reliance on importing extra content from wherever they could find it, the chance for lunacy to spring up either side of the microphone.

Much of the imported material came from the USA (of course), in the forms of both pre-recorded material and real-life talking from evangelists who had been flown in, usually by the Paradise Assembly of God (Paradise being the name of the suburb in north-east Adelaide). The regular host, a soft-spoken pastor in one of the more wishy-washy Protestant sects which thrived in that city, never seemed fully at ease with the fire-and-brimstone Yanks who confronted him from across the studio console.

The Cure For Headaches originally set an edited speech by one of these Americans to a slightly bemused host, against a backdrop sampled from a record sung by sometime Adelaide media titan Ernie Sigley. The juxtaposition of the two had always seemed a little arbitrary, so recently I began to think of possible ways to re-set the speech, without success… until Microsoft released Songsmith.

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

The full glory of Songsmith can be appreciated in this promotional video, made by Microsoft.

It was quickly discovered that Sonsgmith has the power to add new, improved accompaniments to pre-existing songs too. This seemed like the ideal software to try out on my evangelical friend. Unfortunately, Songsmith doesn’t have a randomise function, but it does load up a different default genre every time the program starts, so deciding on the new music for the piece was a breeze. I think it’s worked, don’t you?