Denis Smalley: Impacts intérieurs: liner notes

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Impacts intérieurs

Denis Smalley

Impacts intérieurs

empreintes DIGITALes | IMED 0409 | 2004

Reissue from IMED 9209.

CD 25.00 CA$ [?]

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Interior Impacts, the disc

by Denis Smalley |imed_0409-0001|

An important distinguishing feature of the five works on this compact disc is the relationship between gesture and texture. Musical gesture, derived from our experience of physical gesture, is concerned with the tendency for sound-shapes to move towards or away from goals in the musical structure; it is concerned with growth, temporal evolution, sense of forward direction, the impact of events, dramatic surface. Texture, however, is more about interior activity, the patterns inside sounds, about encouraging the ear to contemplate inner details; it is often more about standing still and observing the behaviours of sounds rather than pressing onwards through time. Gesture can be textured, and textures can be formed from gestures — the interplay and balance between them lie at the heart of our experiences in musical time.

Denis Smalley, Norwich (UK) [ix-92]


The Primacy of the Ear

by Jonty Harrison |imed_0409-0002|

The starting point is always the sound — the individual sound in all its uniqueness. The details of its internal structure, of its spectral and temporal evolution reveal its potential and hint at what might be. The sensitive ear draws in and evolves other sounds with related potential — the dynamics of structure are unleashed, from micro-structure through to whole pieces.

What distinguishes the work of Denis Smalley from that of many other composers who would recognize the experience just described is—quite apart from the exquisite nature of the sounds themselves — the sureness of touch, the unerring sense of timing, the ‘rightness’ of the size, shape and placing of every gesture.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Denis Smalley is a composer who works exclusively in the electroacoustic medium, which permits a more complete control of the final sonic event, of the aural experience of the listener. The works for instrument and tape do not contradict the essentially acousmatic nature of Smalley’s work. Though in one sense (conceptually?) so distant from what is normally considered instrumentally ‘idiomatic,’ they somehow (perceptually?) epitomize aspects of the clarinet or the piano, elucidating a less immediately obvious, but nonetheless present and essential morphology of the individual instrument, transformed into the underlying structural logic of the whole work. Here too the individual sound event is the impulse for phrases, sentences and paragraphs; even whole works are sometimes linked by common (and tiny) morphological seeds: Gradual and Pentes; Pneuma and Darkness After Time’s Colours; Tides, Clarinet Threads and Wind Chimes; Piano Nets and Valley Flow.

The sensitive ear interacts with sound, constantly experimenting, probing, assessing. What is ‘right’ is what works for the ear and for the perceptual/intellectual mechanism of interaction we call listening. Listen…

Jonty Harrison, Birmingham (UK) [viii-92]


Sound morphology and the articulation of structure in electroacoustic music: Audio excerpts from Wind Chimes

by John Young |imed_0409-0004|

Sound excerpts from Wind Chimes (1987) by Denis Smalley for the article Sound morphology and the articulation of structure in electroacoustic music by John Young, Organised Sound — An International Journal of Music and Technology, 9:1, April 2004.

1. 00:17 - 00:35 (mp3) — 2. 05:00 - 05:40 (mp3) — 3. 07:09 - 07:33 (mp3) — 4. 09:28 - 10:38 (mp3)

 

Denis Smalley: Impacts intérieurs: liner notes

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Prices are in Canadian dollars — 1.00 CA$ ~ 0.98 US$ ~ 0.62 € ~ 0.49 £ ~ 1.01 AU$ ~ 104.74 ¥ — and include handling, shipping and applicable taxes.


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