Hegel, Ventricular Singing, & the Serpent

Hegelian Dialectic Diagram

Change is a spiral, not a circle. This hypothesis is the fourth and final supposition of the Hegelian Dialectic as formalized by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and it is an astonishingly profound notion. In brief, the dialectic is a continuous series of alternations between thesis and antithesis that come to form a synthesis after which the process repeats. This kind of change is not an unwavering straight line nor is it a pendulum with a static equilibrium position, but rather a combination of the two producing a spiral or corkscrew trajectory. This is a notion Nietzsche articulated brilliantly in the following aphorism that remarks on the dialectic’s effect on the progression of societies: 


What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good— the atavism of a more ancient ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, Part 4, #149

Ningizzida depicted in the center

One of the most prominent examples of what Nietzsche calls “an untimely echo” is the cultural symbolism of the serpent. The serpent in our modern time has a negative connotation, having been that mischievous agent in the Garden of Eden that precipitated mankind’s exile from paradise. It is an animal that has been anthropomorphized to embody deceit and even evil. However, serpents in more earlier human societies, like the Sumerian and ancient Egyptian civilizations, regarded the serpent in a decidedly positive light. The cobra has long been the patron and protector of Egypt and the Sumerian god Ningizzida, whose name means “lord of the tree of life.”*

I convey this concept in my piece Aphorism IV: ...an untimely echo... for flute and playback. The flute’s primary musical material occurs at the opening and closing of the piece. These sections are starkly contextualized and contrasted by the accompaniment provided by the playback. The first playback accompaniment is purely electronic and sparse, while the final playback accompaniment consists of seven pre-recorded flutes that create a warm, thick atmosphere. The intervening middle sections serve as the transition between the two primary musical sections. The playback of these transitional sections gradually moves from densely electronic textures to more organic and acoustic sounds. The playback for the final transitional section is comprised solely of my own vocalizations. One of the vocalization techniques I utilized in the piece was ventricular singing, also known as throat singing. I began by singing a pedal tone and then activated my ventricular folds to create high wavering pitches over the initial pedal tone, a trick that I learned as a teenager when I first began exploring my voice sonically. A sample of this technique as it appears in the piece can be heard below.

ventricular singing by APJacksonic

The premiere performance of Aphorism IV: ...an untimely echo... will be featured on The Equilibrium Concert Series' Salon Concert on September 9, 2011.


*Anecdotally, there is another connection between the Abrahamic Garden of Eden and the Sumerian civilaztion, the word Eden has its origin in the Sumerian word Edin which means plain.

The Art of Collaboration in Vancouver

I recently took part in the 2011 Art Song Lab in Vancouver hosted by The Vancouver International Song Institute and The Canadian Music Centre. I was one of 12 composers paired with 13 poets who gathered with the sole aim of collaborating on original art songs. We convened for roughly a week of intense rehearsals and panel discussions culminating in a night of world premieres realized by tremendously talented singers and pianists.


I was fortunate enough to be paired with a fantastic American writer currently residing in Vienna, Gretl Satorious. When I received Gretl's poetry roughly a month prior to the Art Song Lab I was immediately struck by the inherent musicality in the text. The poem, I Grew Up South of Here. And West., is a wonderfully executed series of reflections on Gretl's childhood growing up on a desert landscape in California. The poem's exploration of memory is a topic that I have already explored a great deal musically and I was all too happy to mine again.

Alison & Natalie performing our piece

I was also fortunate enough to work with two very talented musicians, pianist Alison d’Amato and contralto Natalie Burdeny. Natalie, in fact, courageously stepped in having less than a day with the music after our originally assigned singer became very ill. Amongst the four of us, rehearsals, though clearly condensed and with a great deal of musical ground to cover, went amazingly well.

Aside from the close collaborations amongst poet, composer, and musicians, there was ample time to get to know the music and poetry of the other composer-poet teams. It was incredibly worthwhile, especially in a contemporary time in which specialization and artistic isolation are the norm, to have such an open and pluralistic gathering of writers and performers freely engaging one another. It was a week in which I feel very honored to have taken part.

Play it again

Imagine any piece of music that you love immensely. A piece that you’ve listened to so many times that, if it were not for iTunes, you would be unable to enumerate how many times you have even heard it. A piece you love so dearly that you might even own multiple recordings of various interpretations of the piece. Think of the subtle or even not so subtle differences of those interpretations and how they inform your personal impression of the work. Now imagine that all your knowledge and personal history of that piece were erased, and you were forced to revert back to a state of having only heard the piece once. How would your relationship with that piece change? What moments would sound just as clearly the first time as they did the 23rd time? What nuances to which you had become so enamored with around the 41st listen would fail to even draw your attention upon the first hearing? Would the piece even be so dear to you at all on that first hearing?

This scenario of listening to a piece only once is unfortunately the norm for most concert goers of contemporary classical music. A great deal of emphasis is placed on premieres and then those works are shelved. Is it any wonder that our contemporary music scene is lacking in repertoire? Perversely, in a time in which there are more living composers than there have ever been, our contemporary repertoire is decidedly scarce. 

This uniquely contemporary predicament is one of the many reasons why myself and 3 other Boston area composers formed The Fifth Floor Collective. Aside from premiering new works, we designate a select few pieces per season to reprise, giving our audience the chance to hear fantastic new music twice. By presenting these reprise performances we are giving our audience a small window in which they can develop a relationship with specific pieces of new music. Given time to digest or even re-contextualize these works, we believe that an audience’s appreciation of a work can only be enhanced. Indeed, it is the sole process by which a piece of music makes the transition from a momentary entertainment in a long succession of others to a piece of music that comes to be an indispensable part of our own deeply personal narratives.

The final concert of The Fifth Floor Collective’s 2010-2011 Season, Season in Review, is at 7:00 pm on May 20, 2011.

For more information visit:

www.fifthfloorcollective.com

Coppice

On March 26th I had the pleasure of attending a performance of a Chicago-based duo called Coppice at the Fleisenberg Floft. The duo performed an impressively enthralling set. Just as equally impressive as the duo's performance was how the sounds themselves were produced. Coppice shares a single table slab on which Noé Cuéllar plays his shruti box with a minimal array of preparations, plastic tubing, a metal funnel, and the like, while Joseph Kramer manipulates a sampler and a boom box with the aid of 2 walkie talkies. The duo shares a single directional mic, through which Kramer further manipulates the sound produced by himself and his compatriot as well as manipulating the room noise itself. It is a delicate collaboration that takes on a nearly meditative quality as the duo takes turns initiating musical events and reacting to one another. 

The set was comprised of just 3 pieces, Seam, The Flavor of Missing Mortar, and Mild Grey Lustre. The common thread of the set was a balance of highly structured and varied musical material with a loose and improvisational presentation, with undeniably distinct sections being unspooled at the duo's discretion and whim. The pitch material generated from Cuéllar was sublimely colored, employing slow oscillating melodic lines, tone clusters, and even the delicate sound of air passing through the shruti box's bellows. Kramer produced a hypnotic array of color as well, gesticulating the walkie talkies over the boom box to produce otherworldly tone colors. It is easy to become engrossed in their performance and lose any sense of time.  

The standout piece, The Flavor of Missing Mortar, is a perfectly structured work for the duo, with a meticulously paced crescendo that culminates in an astonishingly loud and thick dynamic climax. In the piece Coppice weaves a well-conceived musical narrative with a strikingly alien grammar. The piece is undeniably mesmerizing.

For more information about Coppice visit:

http://www.futurevessel.com/coppice/

You are missing here.

As I write this I am in the midst of cleaning up the score for a recently completed work for solo cello, titled You are missing here. Of all the instruments for which I have an affinity, the cello is the one dearest to me, as it has been my primary instrument since the age of 11. Had I not broken my arm in high school, which lead to the suggestion of my orchestra director that I should pursue composition, I would have probably continued on my path toward becoming a professional orchestral player. But, having broken my arm in two places, playing the cello was never quite the same. Though I managed to continue to perform after my arm healed I never regained the level of comfortability I once had on the instrument. A prospect that at the time was heartbreaking.

Like most pieces I write, You are missing here. is not simply drawn from a single impetus, but is a confluence of strands as the piece was conceived during a long period of time in which the person most dear to me, my fiancée, was absent for long stretches of time due to her own exciting artistic pursuits. In her absence, I found myself dusting off my cello and re-familiarizing myself with the instrument.  After brushing up on solo works that I had once played, works by Hindemith, Rachmaninov, and, of course, Bach, I began to view my time playing on the instrument from a creative guise. I started to communicate not just a feeling of solitary melancholy in her absence, but also capturing moments of joy and exhilaration that I wished to capture and share after the fact, like my trip to St. Petersburg that she unfortunately couldn’t join.

In effect, the piece became a deeply personal journal in which I was conveying a myriad of emotional states through the more visceral vantage of performer, rather than my more typically cerebral role of composer. In the absence of one partner, I became reacquainted with another and wrote a piece about— what else?... the absence of my other.

Boston to Са́нкт-Петербу́рг and back in 3’42

Inspired by E.E. Cummings' EIMI, I decided to keep my own audio journal of my trip to Russia. While traveling en route and through St. Petersburg I made a point of getting a field recording of nearly every location— everything from the orchestra tuning and performing, conversations with friends, and the ambient sounds of the streets, restaurants, airports, planes, and museums that I visited. I then narrowed my selection to 23 specific recordings that I intertwined and mixed.


EIMI два by APJackson

Give it a listen.

Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes...

Please excuse the respite. I have been diligently at work on that rarest of projects, writing music for hire. Namely incidental music for an upcoming production of Romeo & Juliet for Riverside Theatre Works in Hyde Park. This is not my first time writing music for the theatre, though it has been awhile. Of all of the artistic disciplines, I feel that the theatrical arts (straight plays, musical theatre, dance, and screen acting) most closely mirror the execution of art music*. Unlike literature or the visual arts, art music and theatre are innately collaborative in nature. A composer or playwright typically entrusts a performer with the successful execution of his/her creative labor; no doubt a relationship of immense intimacy in which both parties are incredibly vulnerable. And it is this reliance on a human intermediary to communicate one’s intentions to an audience that can be so exhilarating and vastly enriching.

Aside from this bond in artistic vulnerability and process, my love of theatre is owed to a more personal debt as it is tied to two women who are deeply important to me: my fiancée, who is herself a wonderfully talented actor, and my mother, whose edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare I so coveted as a boy that I took it to school to read during recess - and it is that very same edition that is still in my possession today.

On the creative side, composing for theatre is a challenge. A challenge because it calls upon the composer to temper his/her own artistic vision and subjugate it to the service of the theatre. In a strange inversion of the typical collaborative process, the composer becomes the intermediary, entrusted with executing the director’s vision. This inversion of collaboration is so intriguing. In the process of completing this recent project, I had met and corresponded with the director on numerous occasions as to how my music could best serve her conception of the show. Anything from simple descriptors to her own personalized playlist of music that she had been listening to when conceiving the production’s direction were not only welcome directives, but incredibly helpful in shaping the soundscape for the production’s scoring. For a rare instance, my musical imagination was at the behest of another’s instincts, allowing me to write music that I most certainly would have been unable to write otherwise. The result is a score that blends electronic and acoustic sounds (concertina and cello to be exact) and even straddles popular and art music genres - an opportunity that was certainly exhilarating and vastly enriching.

Riverside Theatre Works’ production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet will open on February 4th.

*Please excuse the use of this term, but it is the best categorical descriptor at my disposal to concisely define that to which I am referring.

For more information regarding this performance and the works of William Shakespeare visit:
http://www.riversidetheatreworks.org/
http://dreadpassion.blogspot.com/