{"id":188,"date":"2012-10-21T22:52:43","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T04:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/?p=188"},"modified":"2012-10-24T10:25:02","modified_gmt":"2012-10-24T16:25:02","slug":"sound-space-and-symmetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/2012\/10\/21\/sound-space-and-symmetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound, Space and Symmetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"80<\/a><\/p>\n

Have you ever been in a concert where the pieces are played twice? Have you ever been in a museum which galleries have been turned into performance stages? Have you ever listened to the sound of 80 trombones arranged across two floors? Today’s concert at the Blanton Museum<\/a>, entitled “Space and Symmetry” was such a wonderful experience in spatial music and an experiment in the organization of program. The audience was encouraged to wander the museum galleries in the search of the performers who were playing their pieces sometimes simultaneously allowing the sounds to mix and overlap between the halls. Hence, we had a lot of agency in selecting the pieces of music we could hear. Furthermore, the order of the program was organized symmetrically and each piece was played twice in relation to a central axes (3:00 o’clock). I found it very pleasant to have the opportunity to hear twice the performance of my favorite pieces even if I had to miss others.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"trombones<\/a><\/p>\n

The interpretation of Henry Brant’s Orbits by a group of 80 trombonists, one organ (in reality a a nord synthesizer with two amplifiers), and one mezzo soprano, was impressive. Rarely one has the opportunity to listen to the sound of that many trombones at the same time, in the same space, distributed in lines across the first and the second floors of the museum atrium. I loved how the sound traveled up and down as in a sort of domino effect that was visually represented by the movement of the trombonists. The first performance I stayed only in the first floor, in the center of the atrium, very close to the organist and his two amplifiers. The second one I decided to move around the space and stayed for a while in the stairs, near to the conductor, and then in the second floor behind the mezzo-soprano and the trombones. I enjoyed very much walking in the second floor along the lines of trombonists as they were also allowing the sound to move left to right as part of an orbit that was completed by the trombonists that were on the first floor. When I was in the middle of the stairs, I recorded a video with my phone-camera that captures a little bit of the beauty of the massive sound (it is a pity that I didn’t have a sound recorder that could capture more frequencies – the low frequencies were certainly moving). In the video I tried to follow the movement of the sound with the lens so one can appreciate a little bit of how the spatialization functioned.<\/p>\n

Video of Orbits (excerpt) at the Blanton Museum:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Nathan Williams did an impressive performance of Stockhausen’s In Freundschaft, a piece for clarinet that I have never heard before but that totally enchanted me. The clarinet has always fascinated me as an instrument. I have always associated its sound with visual music by some strange reason that I don’t understand. It is as if I had an inclination to experience synesthesia while I listen to the sound of the clarinet (e.g. Raymond Scott’s pieces such as Powerhouse<\/a>, or Lucho Bermudez’ Fiesta de Negritos<\/a> performances trigger visualizations in my mind). In this particular Stockhausen’s piece, such kind of experience was complemented by the several movements and gestures that Williams did while performing. He moved his body and the clarinet in many directions, always standing still and sustaining his instrument as if it were a drawing pencil, or even better a painting brush. When he played low notes he bended himself while when he played high frequencies he put the instrument towards the sky as the following image reveals:<\/p>\n

\"clarinetista<\/a><\/p>\n

Although I couldn’t stop imagining the kind of animation that could be made from these playful piece, I also thought that the clarinetist was performing as a stylized animated cartoon, in a very sophisticated way that reminded me of the modernist animation made by the UPA <\/a>in the 1960s. Whenever I had time to create an animation I would love to try to make one using In Freundschaft as the music. So much rhythm and movement has this piece that even the performer turns into a kind of virtuoso cartoon character. Bellow is a little video I recorded the second time I listened to the performance:<\/p>\n

Video of In Freundschaft (excerpt) performed by Nathan Williams:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Finally, I have to mention a third piece that I actually loved, even if I could just listened one time, Stockhausen’s\u00a0 Zyklus performed by Adam Bedell.<\/p>\n

\"zyklus<\/a><\/p>\n

I enjoyed very much the kind of tension and force that this piece has and the way that was delivered in the performance. The set up of the different percussion instruments allowed the audience to appreciate the diverse origin of the sounds. While listening to the performance I wondered the kind of score that such a piece could have. I was intrigued by the randomness of the patterns that I listened and by the placement of silence. I thought that such a score must be quite unconventional and imagined that perhaps it could resemble the ones made by John Cage for his percussion pieces. After the concert, I run some queries on the web and found out some interesting images from the Stockhausen score. In fact, Zyklus score it is quite unique an innovative. Because it does’t have a set starting point, it reflect the form of\u00a0 the piece, allowing the performer to chose the direction in which he\/her needs to play, going in a kind of spiral bound.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

“Space and Symmetry” concert at the Blanton Museum was such an\u00a0 inspiring and unique experience. Hearing performances twice is very powerful. Having the opportunity to walk through galleries, in search of the performances, and being able to move in space while the pieces are played, enriches the experience of contemporary music. This concert has encouraging me to start playing music again and to try to create music scores that reflect spatial and time relationships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever been in a concert where the pieces are played twice? Have you ever been in a museum which galleries have been turned into performance stages? Have you ever listened to the sound of 80 trombones arranged across two floors? Today’s concert at the Blanton Museum, entitled “Space and Symmetry” was such a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[349,736,37,747,85,348,347,346],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-concert","tag-music","tag-performance","tag-sound","tag-space","tag-spatial","tag-spatialization","tag-symmetry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}