CCRMA Winter Concert (February 1998)

CCRMA Computer Music

The Music of Rick Taube and Paul Lansky

Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music & Acoustics (CCRMA) will present a concert featuring music by Rick Taube and Paul Lansky at 8 p.m. Thursday, February 5th, in Campbell Recital Hall (Braun Music Center, Stanford University)

For information, call the Music Department at (415) 723-3811.

Program

Two Pieces for Disklavier

I. Zugie-Woogie
II. Amazing Grace

for disklavier

 Zugie-Woogie (1996)
Zugie-Woogie takes as its theme a weekly train trip I made between Karlsuhe and Essen while I was a visiting lecturer at the electronic music studio at the Hochschule ftr Musik in 1995. (Zug is the German word for train and Zugie rhymes with boogie.) My journey began at 6:02 am and took four hours each direction. The first leg from Karlsruhe to Mainz was a frantic affair, filled with the jerky bustle of commuters and caffinated chatter. But at Mainz the train emptied out and the journey took on a completely different rhythm. Starting just north of the city the tracks hug the Rhine all the way to Bonn and provide for one of the most beautiful vistas in all of Germany. For about an hour and a half the train swooped around sharp river bends, each new turn revealed a different castle, ancient village and vine-covered hillside. The steep valley walls also magnified and focused the ambient sounds from crossing signals, car horns and passing trains so that the entire experience had a vibrant intensity to it. I switched trains in Kuln and then headed eastward on another commuter run across the busy Ruhrgebiet into Essen. Despite the demands of a long day (eight hours journey and five hours teaching) this trip became one of the most memorable experiences of my years in Europe. What I enjoyed most about the journey was its fanciful mixture of irregular regularity, the simultaneous unfolding of the expected with the surprising; the sounds of chattering people, banging doors, warning signals, horns, passing trains, and beneath it all the persistence of the wheels.

Amazing Grace (1995)
Amazing Grace is an algorithmic fantasy based on the American folk song of the same name. The fantasy involves a processes of becoming, in which certain melodic and rhythmic contours in the folk song serve as gravitational centers for the composition to coalesce around, like a dust cloud spiraling inward to form a star. Amazing Grace begins in a mode and texture very distant from the folk melody. As the composition unfolds the original tune gradually exerts more and more influence over the music. Short melodic motives and rhythmic figures first appear and are followed by progressively longer gestures and melodic contours. The process continues until the point of maximum influence, at which time the fantasy has congealed into homorhythmic texture whose melodic content is completely determined by the folk song. Amazing Grace was commissioned for the opening ceremony of the Multimedial III Festival in Karlsruhe Germany, where it received its world premiere in 1995.

The two pieces are played without pause between them.

Technical Notes
Two Pieces for Disklavier makes extensive use of shape and stochastic based compositional techniques. It was composed using Common Music, a composition environment developed by the composer while he worked at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechonogie, in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Heinrich Taube is an assistant professor of music composition and director of CAMIL at the University of Illinois. He received his B.A and M.A. in music composition from Stanford University where he studied with John Chowning. He received his Ph.D. in music composition from The University of Iowa where he studied under D. Martin Jenni and William Hibbard. Active as a composer, researcher and music software designer, Taube has held senior positions in both business and academia. Prior to his current position, Taube was head of software design at the Institut für Musik und Akustik, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. While at ZKM he developed Common Music, a software environment for music composition in use at many electronic music centers and universities around the world. In 1996 Common Music won 1st Prize at the 1er Concours International de Logiciels Musicaux in Bourges, France. Taube has been active in electro-acoustic composition since his undergraduate studies at Stanford. In 1987 he was awarded a Rockefeller grant for composition at CCRMA. His string quartet and tape piece Wilderness of Mirrors won first prize at the Santa Cruz string quartet competition and his tape piece Tremens won honorable mention at Bourge. His algorithmic composition Gloriette for John Cage has been released on several CDs. He has published numerous articles on issues related to music composition and technology, and was appointed Associate Editor of the New Music Research journal in 1993.

Things She Carried (1995)

for stereo tape

 You're standing in front of Vermeer's painting, The Letter. Looking through a doorway, you see a woman holding a lute. She has just been handed a letter by another woman. Viewing the scene this way gives you the feeling of eavesdropping as you wrap your mind around the painting, building a story in which you contemplate the contents of the letter, the circumstances of the women, their expressions, surroundings, concerns. All you have to go on is a rich list of details provided by the painting. Ultimately, however, what resonates is not the story you build, but rather your engagement with the painting as you do so. You could invent a different story each time, and it wouldn't matter. What does matter is the way the painting creates a vibrating moment--the consequence of some things that might have happened--and the way you, the viewer, experience the painting through that imagined moment.

Taking a similar position, Things She Carried is a musical portrait of a woman, drawn in a series of eight movements. We learn a lot about her: what she carried in her purse, what she noticed, remembered, read, knew, felt, and liked. A large number of facts and ideas are provided with which to thread together an image of this woman, but little is explicitly stated. While in The Letter, line, color, light and shadow are used to guide our imagined journey, in Things She Carried, timbre, pitch, harmony and rhythm help shape our perceptions. (And, just as there are some for whom Vermeer's painting is primarily a study in color and shape, perhaps these eight movements will provide some similar substance to those for whom words are mere pretexts for song and sound.)

Five of the eight movements have texts, two are songs without words, and the fifth movement is an interlude. We learn about the contents of her pocket book in the first movement, Things She Carried. A purse is personal and private, and we are, in a sense, eavesdropping as we browse through its contents. The second movement, Things She Noticed, presents a series of pairs--associations between things that she made in various circumstances. The oppositions themselves tell us a lot about her world, her experiences, and the way she felt about things. Wish in the Dark, the third movement is a fake pop song that she probably liked. The fourth movement, Things She Remembered, enumerates a number of things that stuck in her mind over the years. Some of the memories are trivial while others are connected with important events. Things She Read, the sixth movement, has the resonance of a detective story: tension, drama, anxiety, mystery, but no plot. We inevitably color our perceptions of the woman with the implied experiences of the heroine of this fractured story. The seventh movement, Everybody Heard, another wordless song, has a feeling of supplication that may reflect something about her state of mind. Finally, Things She Knew, the eighth movement, concerns itself with her accumulated knowledge and experience: the way she knew things, from the trivial to the profound. It tells us a lot about how she threaded her way through the world.

Hannah MacKay (Lansky) was trained as an actress and studied with Lee Strasberg. She has worked in film, television and radio, and is the voice in a number of Paul Lansky's pieces. In recent years she has been studying and teaching classical languages.

Paul Lansky, composer, is also Professor of Music at Princeton University. His main concern for the past twenty-five years has been to find ways to get computers to help tell us musically interesting things about the world around us.

Listening Suggestions
The text is provided here for reference only. It is best not to follow it when listening, Some of the text settings are intentionally unintelligible and it really doesn't matter that you understand all the words.

Technical Notes
The piece was created during 1995-96, using NeXT and Silicon Graphics computers. The voice in all the text movements is that of Hannah MacKay, and in the two songs, the composer. Apologies and acknowledgements are due: Laurie Anderson, Louis Andriessen, Harold Arlen, Raymond Chandler, Vladimir Nabokov, Steve Mackey, Tim O'Brian.

1) Things she carried
Things she carried:
2) Things she noticed
Things she noticed:
4) Things she remembered
Things she remembered:
She remembered the usual things most people do:
6) Things she read
8) Things she knew
Things she knew:
©1997 CCRMA, Stanford University. All Rights Reserved.
Created and mantained by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, nando@ccrma.stanford.edu