Schizo Psycho is based entirely on material from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. A 40-second clip of the movie plays repeatedly, with the ensemble providing different “personalities” on each repetition. All material is taken from the original score, but it is transformed in some way to create very different musical textures. Thus, I use some of the characteristic symptoms of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders as guiding principles in the arrangement of the musical material, creating both a play on words and a musical structure for the composition.
Tag: percussion
Credit for the idea of a Halo ballet goes to Gregory Oh, who commissioned the piece and arranged for me to work with choreographer Julia Aplin. To complement the unusual dance environment of the piece, I chose an unusual musical environment that is equally a hybrid of instrumental traditions, both classical and rock. The material of the piece develops a single harmonic and melodic progression, which moves from extremely slow and legato to extremely fast and frenetic. Through this diverse vocabulary, I hope to give the choreographer a range of expressions to work with, allowing her to demonstrate the full potential of the robotic Halo characters to function as dancers.
Performance VideoGregory Oh and Toca Loca première my new piece, Halo Ballet (Bipolar Disorder NOS) on the X AVANT Festival’s all-dance programme. Halo Ballet is a piece for live performers (piano, keyboard, percussion, harp or guitar) and electronic dancers, performed in real time within the Halo videogame environment.
The programme also includes works by John Oswald and Georges Aperghis.
197 John Street (map)
Toronto, Canada
Love in the Time of Connectivity is a collage. In fact, even the title is a collage: I took the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and combined it with a reference to the culture of Internet file sharing. I have been interested in collage and the reappropriation of material for some time, because as the saying goes, good artists borrow but great artists steal. Collage is the most honest way to honour that principle, and I spent most of 2008 working in this direction.
Collage, as well as related ideas such as sampling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few unifying forces driving artistic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMixter, these ideas have been responsible for renewing amateur art on a mass scale, for challenging the standards of creativity, for expanding musical taste, and even for influencing legal precedent.
For the first time in history, we are drowning in art. There is too much music of the highest artistic quality for anyone to ever hope to experience. So how can artists contribute to culture in a situation like this? I think collage is an important part of the answer, and the proof is in the attitudes of those who grew up with the Internet. For many of them, art is not something simply to be experienced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.
While composing Love in the Time of Connectivity, I gave myself some restrictions in order to inspire creativity. For example, I decided to try to present all quotations in as recognizable a form as possible. I did not allow myself to transpose fragments from their original tonalities, and I did not allow myself to compose my own new material to bridge together the quotations—every note is borrowed. I also made tempo an integral part of the musical development, and I tried to make grammatical sense of all the text fragments I combined. Finally, every quote relates to the others in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obviously) musical sounds.
This is the middle piece in my Culture series, which is an exploration of the effects that today’s cultural context has on making our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail message—certainly among the more recent of literary genres. It attracted me because it is composed entirely of monosyllabic words, with no repetition; a kind of heterogeneous stream that strikes me as contemporary.
The middle section of the piece is indeterminate or open: the performers decide how the musical materials will be presented. This is also something that I take from the Culture theme, because the multiplicity of possibilities, endless variegation, and the impossibility of finding “right” answers seem to me important cultural problems today.
Recycled 80s Live is a collage of small fragments of ‘80s pop songs, recomposed and recontextualized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always borrowed material from one another, but copyright is increasingly being abused to prevent borrowing. This situation is a threat to culture and creativity in general and it deserves to receive attention.
Copyright has always had two roles, to protect the rights of the creator, but more broadly, to encourage creativity. Without copyright, artists would never be properly rewarded for their work and art would not get made. But without fair dealing provisions (or fair use in the U.S.), copyright law strangles creativity by making artworks inaccessible.
Over the past 100 years, corporate interests have increasingly tried to restrict or remove fair dealing from copyright. Copyright in 1900 was only 14 years long and had to be officially requested. This meant that artists at the time could draw on a huge store of relatively fresh material in their work, leading to the explosion of creativity that marked the birth of Hollywood, the avant-garde, jazz, and more. Now copyright is automatic, can last over 150 years, and legitimate works that use fair dealing are frequently attacked in court by corporate interests. This trend has only accelerated with the rise of digital music technology and file sharing.
For this reason, Recycled 80s Live draws entirely from material still under copyright, without permission. This can be done under fair dealing as long as the new work creates new artistic value and does not take away from the market for the originals. I designed Recycled 80s Live to respect these boundaries, working within the tradition of mash-up artists such as John Oswald or Girl Talk, but with live musicians. My message, to adapt an old adage, is that your right to swing your copyright ends where my music begins.
Only a small part of music is actually about sound. The majority of music-making has to do with social interactions more than anything else. Music fulfills certain functions (usually pre-determined) within certain social situations, or serves as a replacement for various social functions when we use it in private. Therefore, music can be said to be a community-normed phenomenon: what makes music music are the people who find a use for it, usually by listening.
On top of that, the most useful (or best) pieces of music are generally those for which there is the most consensus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth symphony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of people agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of people have found those two pieces of music useful for certain social functions.
Anyway, these were some of the thoughts running through my head while writing this piece, and they influenced my choice and usage of musical materials.
Jackhammer Lullaby is an arrangement of Community-Normed, which was commissioned by the Continuum Ensemble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increasingly interested in presenting pieces in multiple versions and combinations. Jackhammer Lullaby, with a few changes, is also the middle movement of Community-Normed. I’ve also written a third version, for a chamber music conference in Vermont in July 2009, with different instrumentation and adapted for amateur performers.
Why multiple versions? Because music today is multiple. Everyone is exposed to music from multiple cultures all the time, from multiple time periods, and in multiple versions. DJs remix pop songs, which are available in numerous versions, and do mash-ups that intertwine multiple tracks in the space of a few seconds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in history, drowning in more music than anyone knows what to do with. For this reason, creating multiple versions is an important project of mine.
Musically, Jackhammer Lullaby presents a humorous musical setting of trying to fall asleep with construction going on outside the window.
This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve different languages. It travels from west to east geographically across the world. The languages were chosen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that language to teach me how to say shit. I did, however, attempt to keep a somewhat even spacing between geographical areas, although a completely even distribution would have been, of course, impossible to realize.
Five Reflective Fragments is based on a sequence of very brief text fragments extracted from a much longer poetic work, entitled I Lost Everything by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and without overlap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the beginning of a musical gesture, and always by the performer who is playing the gesture. Each unit is also repeated multiple times.
I have decided on this approach in order to distance the text from any fixed narrative. The music instead provides a space for these language objects to be observed in, and in which the listener can choose to create or not create his or her own narrative. Presented in this monolithic manner and detached from the contextualization of language prepositions, Five Reflective Fragments sets up the opportunity for a kind of mythological reaction to develop around the preconceptions of the listener. The word-units combine with the music to create hints, but hopefully hints that will take each listener in a different direction.


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