[va]: Cultures électroniques 20: Prix Trivium et Magisterium 2007: track detail

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Cultures électroniques 20: Prix Trivium et Magisterium 2007
2xCD not in catalogue

1. Roger Doyle: The Ninth Set (2006-07) 20m05s ldc_278082-83-1.1 | 20924

• Sector 1 • Sector 2 • Sector 3 • Sector 4 • Sector 5

Composer: Roger Doyle

Premiere: June 1, 2008, Synthèse 2008, Maison de la Culture (Bourges, Cher, France)

1a. Roger Doyle: The Ninth Set: Sector 4 (2006-07) 14m28s ldc_278082-83-1.1a | 24297

Composer: Roger Doyle

1b. Roger Doyle: The Ninth Set: Sector 5 (2006-07) 5m45s ldc_278082-83-1.1b | 24298

Composer: Roger Doyle

2. Roger Doyle: Rapid Eye Movements (1978-80) 14m24s ldc_278082-83-1.2 | 17532

Composer: Roger Doyle

Human beings experience two types of sleep, which are categorised by the eye movements associated with them: REM (Rapid Eye Movement or dream sleep) and non-REM. In REM sleep, beneath the eyelids, the eyes move around just as if their owner were wide awake and watching something. The piece is constructed in eleven seamless sections, which I called: Mix 1 (overture), Beach 1, Mix 2 (at 6'49), Beach 2, Edit 1 (at 11'55), Edit 2 (this is where I placed the track split to break up the 30 minutes), Voice improvisation, Mix 3 (related to Mix 2), Bedroom 1, Mix 4 (which arrives back to the end of Beach 1), Bedroom 2. Also, woven into the piece are dozens of aural deja vu moments, where sounds heard before re-appear in different contexts.

Rapid Eye Movements was awarded a First Mention at the 1981 Bourges competition, France.

3. Antonino Chiaramonte: Riflessiono 10m19s ldc_278082-83-1.3 | 24276

Composer: Antonino Chiaramonte

4. Krzysztof Wolek: Mobile Variations 8m23s ldc_278082-83-1.4 | 24277

Composer: Krzysztof Wolek

5. Jonty Harrison: Klang (1982) 8m59s ldc_278082-83-1.5 | 13799

• Introduction • Development 1 • Development 2 • Development 3 • Development 4 • Coda

Composer: Jonty Harrison

Commission: MAFILM

Premiere: 1982, University of Birmingham (Birmingham, England, UK)

The title (‘Klang’ is the German for ‘sound’) reflects the onomatopoeic nature of the family of sounds providing the raw material for the piece — sharp, metallic attacks with interesting resonances rich in harmonics. The real starting point for Klang was the discovery (in Denis Smalley’s kitchen!) of two earthenware casseroles, the sounds of which were recorded in the Electroacoustic Music Studio of the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) during the summer of 1981. Material of two kinds was recorded — attack/resonance sounds made by tapping the lids on or in the bowls, and continuous rolling sounds made by running the lids around the insides of the bowls. Different pitches resulted from the various combinations of lids and bowls, and different qualities of resonance emerged according to the attack position. The microphones were placed very close to the bowls to maximize the movement within the stereophonic image. Other related material, accumulated over the previous three or four years, was also used. This included both real-world sounds, such as cow-bells, metal rods and aluminum bars, and electronically generated sounds, both analog and digital. The final impetus to compose the piece came in June 1981 when I was invited by János Décsenyi to work in the Electronic Music Studio of Magyar Rádió in Budapest. As studio time would be limited I was advised to take a certain amount of taped material with me; the two weeks prior to the visit were therefore spent in preliminary work in the Electroacoustic Music Studio of The University of Birmingham. Much of the opening two sections of the piece were composed before going to Hungary.

Although continuous, Klang falls into six short, fairly clearly defined sections: Introduction; Development 1: duet; Development 2: interruption of duet and increase in complexity towards the first climax; Development 3: relatively static section; Development 4: proliferation of material from Development 3 into glissando structures, build-up to the second (main) climax; and slow release to the final Coda.

The listener can trace the development of the material from raw statements of casserole sounds in the Introduction, through more complex, highly transformed events in the four sections, back to the opening sound-world in the Coda. The most obvious transformation technique is mixing, using multiple but only slightly transposed versions of simple sounds. Besides mixing and transposition with tape recorders and a harmonizer, the main modifications were achieved by filtering and, most important of all, montage. This last technique is the principal means of controlling the timing and rhythmic articulation of the material and its organisation into phrases (which may be a single line or a mix of many layers, edited together into the desired sequence).

[ix-00]

Klang was composed in 1982 in the Electronic Music Studio of Magyar Rádió and was premiered later that year at the University of Birmingham (UK). The piece was commissioned by MAFILM. It was awarded Second Prize in the Analogue Category of the 1983 Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Awards (France) and it was awarded a 1992 Euphonie d’or “as one of the twenty most significant works from two decades of the Bourges Awards.” Thanks to János Décsenyi. It has been performed and broadcast in many parts of the world, including at the 1984 ISCM World Music Days in Toronto (Canada). Klang has previously been released in 1984 on the UEA label (UEA 84099) and in 1996 on the NMC label (NMC D035).

Composer: John Young

Writers: John Young, Giosuè Carducci

Premiere: July 25, 2006, ConcertFM, Radio New Zealand (New Zealand)

… for my family

Ricordiamo Forlì (Let’s Remember Forlì) tells a family story. Since childhood I was very aware of the importance and emotional significance of these events for my parents. The central story is reserved for the last third of the piece. My parents (Alex and Tarcisia) met in a farmhouse at Malmissole in 1944 (today a small collection of houses in the outskirts of Forlì). She was evacuated there following Allied bombing of Forlì and he was an Allied soldier using the farmhouse as shelter. When my mother and her family moved back into Forlì after the city’s liberation, she and my father were able to continue seeing each other, since appalling weather meant that there was very little military advance in the winter of 1944-45. On one of those occasions my mother was to have visited her sister who had relocated with her children to a large apartment complex. Instead, however, she pleaded with her mother to be allowed to see ‘the New Zealand soldier’ and that day, at that time, the apartment block was bombed, killing two out of the three members of my family living there. The work as a whole aims to sketch a context around the providence of that single event.

The concept for this work grew out of my first visit to Forlì in 2002. It made a powerful impression on me, and many of the defining sounds and images of this environment gave me a strong sense of connection with remnants of the lived experience of my parents when they first knew each other in Forlì. This led me to search the archives of war correspondence reports held in New Zealand and in the UK for materials relating to the 1943-45 Italian Campaign and, more specifically, to events surrounding the presence of the New Zealand division in Romagna in 1944. I wanted to try and connect aspects of my direct experience of Forlì with the impressions made on me through my parents stories, their memories and interpretations of the events they endured, as well as to project, contextualise and ‘re-experience’ historical events through the use of war correspondence recordings and my father’s reminiscences. As well I wanted to amplify and dramatise the emotional web of the events that are described and suggested, through electroacoustic music derived from my own recordings made in Forlì and from the historical material. The resulting work is therefore part documentary, part radiophony and part electroacoustic drama.

Most of the contemporary referential materials in this work were recorded on three trips to Forlì, and are used to support key themes around the ambience and sense of location as experienced through sound. In particular, the bells of Forlì’s Duomo play a central role, both as a specific icon drawn from the town, but also for their more general symbolisms — a call to worship, sounds which define and express space and distance, sounds which express lament or jubilation. A further unifying musical device is the use of the ‘kiss’ theme from Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, presented on an out-of-tune upright piano. The theme is presented complete at various points in the work, but the notes are also reordered into a new thematic identity which seeps through much of the work.

A number of other supporting sound references are employed, for example weather (rain, thunder), bicycles, footsteps and record surface noise from the historical location recordings. These, along with the core sounds of bells, the piano and voices form a network of sounds that are transformed and interrelated using a wide range of processing methods, all of which are focused on the attempt to reveal and expand on the poetic potentials of the materials.

Two of the human themes of this work are death, particularly innocent victims of war, and hope. Whilst there are specific family incidents related in the interview with my father and in the narration — the bombing of my aunt’s apartment, and the earlier brutal death of one of my cousins, the strafing of civilians by fighter planes — war correspondence material was selected to amplify and contextualise these themes, such as the story of a farming family hiding in their cellar amidst a skirmish, and the procession of a small coffin recorded by war correspondent Douglas Willis en route to the 8th Army front in November 1944. Stories like this were selected from a large number of archival sound recordings made available to me by Radio New Zealand (through the New Zealand Sound Archives) and the BBC (through the Imperial War Museum Sound Archives). A further dimension to the theme of child death is provided by the reading by my mother of Giosuè Carducci’s poem Pianto Antico. This text has been memorised by many children in Italy over many years. My mother learned it at school in the 1930s and its raw sentiment drew me to find a place for it in the work. The text was offered by her in the manner of a spontaneously recalled memory in a recording made 25 years ago.

While Ricordiamo Forlì is historical in nature, and centred around a very specific family event, it was my intention to try and relate the story in a way that would demonstrate its universality — by emphasising the intimacy of people and places and the actuality of the events. But it’s more than that. As a boy I would occasionally put on my father’s outsized old battle jacket and felt protected by its connection to the story told in Ricordiamo Forlì and to sacrifices that I felt sure would not have to be made again. If only that were true.

[x-07]

Ricordiamo Forlì was realized in 2005 in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and was premiered on July 25, 2006 on Radio New Zealand’s ConcertFM program. The recorded narrator is Franco Bianchini. The piece also includes material from a recorded interview with Alex Young made in January 2005. The 4th movement, Ancient Tear, incorporates the poem Pianto Antico by Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907); the recorded narrator is Tarcisia Young (née Fariselli). Thanks to the BBC and Radio New Zealand for permission to incorporate original war correspondence reports. The current version was finalized by Dominique Bassal, post-production, and John Young on November 15, 2007 in Montréal (Québec). Ricordiamo Forlì was awarded the 1st Prize (Programme Music) at the 34th Bourges International Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art Competition (France, 2007).

Ricordiamo Forlì was realized during a period of research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) with the additional support of: Radio New Zealand and the New Zealand Sound Archive, the BBC, the Imperial War Museum Sound and Film Archives, the Istituto per la storia della Resistenza e dell’età contemporanea della provincia di Forlì-Cesena, the clergy of the Forlì Duomo, Franco Bianchini, Paola Merli, Roger Smith, Kate Mead, Fiona Murray, Dmitris Moraitis, Rick Nance, Anne Marabini Young and, of course, Alex Young who shared his incredible story.

1a. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: In Piazza Aurelio Saffi (2005) 4m29s ldc_278082-83-2.1a | 23325

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1b. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Interlude 1 (2005) 1m52s ldc_278082-83-2.1b | 23326

Composer: John Young

1c. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Bitter Storm (2005) 4m05s ldc_278082-83-2.1c | 23327

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1d. Giosuè Carducci, John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Ancient Tear (2005) 3m47s ldc_278082-83-2.1d | 23328

Composer: John Young

Writer: Giosuè Carducci

Pianto Antico by Giosuè Carducci

L’albero a cui tendevi
la pargoletta mano,
il verde melograno
da’ bei vermigli fior,

nel muto orto solingo
rinverdì tutto or ora
e giugno lo ristora
di luce e di calor.

Tu fior de la mia pianta
percossa e inaridita,
tu de l’inutil vita
estremo unico fior,

sei ne la terra fredda,
sei ne la terra negra;
né il sol più ti rallegra
né ti risveglia amor.


Ancient Tear by Giosuè Carducci

The tree to which you stretched
your tiny hand,
the green pomegranate tree
with lovely vermilion flowers,

in the silent, empty garden
has just come back to green
and June revives it again
with light and warmth.

You flower of my plant,
battered and withered,
you, of my useless life
the last, the only flower,

you are in the cold earth,
you are in the black earth;
the sun cannot bring you joy
and love cannot reawaken you.

[English translation: Paola Merli]

The 4th movement, Ancient Tear, incorporates the poem Pianto Antico by Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907); the recorded narrator is Tarcisia Young (née Fariselli).

1e. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Winter (2005) 6m14s ldc_278082-83-2.1e | 23329

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1f. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Pippo (2005) 1m40s ldc_278082-83-2.1f | 23330

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1g. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: The Garden (2005) 1m32s ldc_278082-83-2.1g | 23331

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1h. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: A Little Italian Farm (2005) 3m00s ldc_278082-83-2.1h | 23332

Composer: John Young

1i. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Interlude 2 — Florence (2005) 1m48s ldc_278082-83-2.1i | 23333

Composer: John Young

1j. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Forlì — November 1944 (2005) 3m59s ldc_278082-83-2.1j | 23334

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1k. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Family Story (2005) 2m01s ldc_278082-83-2.1k | 23335

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1l. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Once in Malmissole (2005) 5m33s ldc_278082-83-2.1l | 23336

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

1m. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: The Bomb (2005) 10m29s ldc_278082-83-2.1m | 23337

Composer: John Young

1n. John Young: Ricordiamo Forlì: Epilogue (2005) 3m02s ldc_278082-83-2.1n | 23338

Composer: John Young

Writer: John Young

2. João Pedro Oliveira: Beyond (2006) 10m09s ldc_278082-83-2.2 | 24278

clarinet, cello, piano, and tape

[va]: Cultures électroniques 20: Prix Trivium et Magisterium 2007: track detail

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