Incorporate

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This wiki page serves as a multimedia research documentation for the piece Incorporate by Chris Lortie and attempts to analyze its compositional rhetoric. Incorporate was written in early 2018 (premiered March 10, 2018) for a subset of Ensemble Proton consisting of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. The piece makes use of very minimal electronics that are entirely fixed and non-interactive. Although the premiere of Incorporate made use of a fifth performer (designated as the “Operator”) as well as theatrical staging and costuming, these elements will not be reviewed here. The piece is largely improvisatory and makes use of audio score(s) as the primary means of composer-performer communication. A supplementary written PDF is provided as a verbal reiteration of contents from the audio score(s).


Audio Scores and Affordances

The piece was inspired by my research with Charlie Sdraulig into the various affordances and limitations of the audio score format. An audio score can be defined as a score which employs sound as the primary means of communication between composer and performer. As opposed to conventionally-noted written scores, audio scores represent information and instructions within the same domain as the performed product (Sdraulig and Lortie, 2018).

Many of the arguments in that paper, and some of the arguments in this documentation, are posited within the context of affordance theory. Affordances can be defined as “the potential actions made possible by an object or environment to a given individual,” a concept that implies a mutually-influencing, transactional relation between actor and object (Gibson, 1979. p. 172). A material format alone does not wholly determine the action possibilities it affords; composers and performers (i.e. the actors in this context), as well as audio scores (i.e. the object), are themselves situated and dynamically shaped within wider networks and histories of cultural practice. These practices mediate and constrain potential relations: for instance, the act of deploying a sound recording as if it were a score suggests a translation of prior scoring practices across media; equally, functioning as a score is just one of the many potential use cases afforded by sound recordings. Nevertheless, at this particular intersection of cultural practice and material format, audio scores representing information and instructions in sound afford some distinct and different possibilities to composers and performers when compared to scores which deploy some form of symbolic visual representation of sound or sound-producing movement. Incorporate was conceived as an applied study of these affordances, along with an exploration of possible new applications for this medium.

 case studies referenced in Charlie Sdraulig and Chris Lortie, An Investigation of Affordances and Limitations in Recent Audio Scores, 2018
 - Cassandra Miller — Guide
 - Carola Bauckholt — Zugvögel
 - Louis d’Heudieres — Laughter Studies 1-3
 - Carolyn Chen — Adagio
 - Laura Stanic — Open Air Bach

The Sdraulig/Lortie paper surveyed a collection of recent audio scores primarily associated with experimental art music as case studies. Among these, we identified two primary sub-categories associated with the temporal relations composed between performer and audio score: reactive and rehearsed. On the one hand, performers primarily react to the audio score during performance; on the other, the audio score shapes the performers’ interpretations in rehearsal, well before public performance. In practice, these two categories may be combined, weighted, and hybridized to varying degrees. After this research, I became interested in this hybridized deployment of the audio score object and sought to create a piece which features several layers — or modes — of audio scores simultaneously.


The Four Modes of Audio Score in Incorporate

The symphony has five movements, rather than the four typical of symphonies of the Classical era. Beethoven wrote a programmatic title at the beginning of each movement:

German title Translation Tempo marking Key
I. Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside Allegro ma non troppo F major
II. Szene am Bach Scene by the brook Andante molto mosso BTemplate:Music major
III. Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute Merry gathering of country folk Allegro F major
IV. Gewitter, Sturm Thunder. Storm Allegro F minor
V. Hirtengesang. Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm Shepherd's song. Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm Allegretto F major

The third movement ends on an imperfect cadence that leads straight into the fourth. The fourth movement leads straight into the fifth without a pause. A performance of the work lasts about 40 minutes.

I. Allegro ma non troppo

Template:Listen The symphony begins with a placid and cheerful movement depicting the composer's feelings as he arrives in the country. The movement, in [[2/4 time|Template:Music meter]], is in sonata form, and its motifs are extensively developed. At several points, Beethoven builds up orchestral texture by multiple repetitions of very short motifs. Yvonne Frindle commented that "the infinite repetition of pattern in nature [is] conveyed through rhythmic cells, its immensity through sustained pure harmonies."<ref>Program notes for the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra</ref>

II. Andante molto mosso

Template:Listen The second movement is another sonata-form movement, this time in Template:Music and in the key of BTemplate:Music major, the subdominant of the main key of the work. It begins with the strings playing a motif that clearly imitates flowing water. The cello section is divided, with just two players playing the flowing-water notes on muted instruments, and the remaining cellos playing mostly pizzicato notes together with the double basses.

Toward the end is a cadenza for woodwind instruments that imitates bird calls. Beethoven helpfully identified the bird species in the score: nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (two clarinets).
File:B6-2 Birds.jpg
Cadenza of bird calls in second movement; bird species are noted in German.

III. Allegro

Template:Listen The third movement is a scherzo in [[3/4 time|Template:Music time]], which depicts country folk dancing and reveling. It is in F major, returning to the main key of the symphony. The movement is an altered version of the usual form for scherzi, in that the trio appears twice rather than just once, and the third appearance of the scherzo theme is truncated. Perhaps to accommodate this rather spacious arrangement, Beethoven did not mark the usual internal repeats of the scherzo and the trio. Theodor Adorno identifies this scherzo as the model for the scherzos by Anton Bruckner.<ref>Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1998): 111. "The Scherzo is, no doubt, the model for Bruckner's scherzi. ... The caricatured dance with the famous syncopation is practically as independent of the Scherzo itself as a trio, and is also in the same key. The movement is self-contained like a suite of three dances."</ref>

The final return of the theme conveys a riotous atmosphere with a faster tempo. The movement ends abruptly, leading without a pause into the fourth movement.

IV. Allegro

Template:Listen The fourth movement, in F minor, depicts a violent thunderstorm with painstaking realism, building from just a few drops of rain to a great climax with thunder, lightning, high winds, and sheets of rain. The storm eventually passes, with an occasional peal of thunder still heard in the distance. There is a seamless transition into the final movement. This movement parallels Mozart's procedure in his String Quintet in G minor K. 516 of 1787, which likewise prefaces a serene final movement with a long, emotionally stormy introduction.<ref>The parallel is noted by Rosen (1997:402), who suggests that the Sixth Symphony be regarded as fundamentally a four-movement work, the storm music serving an extended introduction to the finale.</ref>

V. Allegretto

Template:ListenThe finale, which is in F major, is in [[6/8 time|Template:Music time]]. The movement is in sonata rondo form, meaning that the main theme appears in the tonic key at the beginning of the development as well as the exposition and the recapitulation. Like many classical finales, this movement emphasizes a symmetrical eight-bar theme, in this case representing the shepherds' song of thanksgiving.

The coda starts quietly and gradually builds to an ecstatic culmination for the full orchestra (minus "storm instruments") with the first violins playing very rapid triplet tremolo on a high F. There follows a fervent passage suggestive of prayer, marked by Beethoven pianissimo, sotto voce; most conductors slow the tempo for this passage. After a brief period of afterglow, the work ends with two emphatic F-major chords.

In film

The symphony was used in the 1940 animated film Fantasia, albeit with alterations in the length of the piece made by conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Excerpts from the first movement were featured in the death scene in the 1973 sci-fi film Soylent Green.

Notes

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References

External links

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Template:Beethoven symphonies Template:Disney's Fantasia

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