Composers have always taken each others’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no composing. But now the big music companies would want us to believe that this is somehow wrong. It is, certainly, wrong to profit from the work of others without making any contribution oneself, but there are many uses of existing music that do make new, meaningful contributions. For this reason, I’ve taken an interest in quotation, collage, and related techniques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influenced me while at the same time exposing the false idea that creativity comes out of nothingness. So here I am, cards on the table, showing everyone the music I was thinking of when working on this piece—by quoting that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Others. I wanted to write a piece that was reflective and sombre, and I wanted to make it a collage of the work of others. This was a particular challenge, because I have found collage better suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and sombre; quotations tend to lose their character when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this reason, I had to approach this piece differently than in my previous work, transforming the material in more extreme ways for the sake of musical expression. In Elegy of Others, therefore, the quotations are not always immediately recognizable, though they do come to the surface periodically. Nevertheless, almost every note in Elegy of Others is quoted, with few exceptions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

1. The Four Seasons, “Drunkards Asleep”, Antonio Vivaldi, 1723
2. “The Girl from Ipanema”, Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1962
3. “Everybody Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
4. “Dazed and Confused”, Led Zeppelin, 1968
5. Die schöne Müllerin, “Des Müllers Blumen”, Franz Schubert, 1823
]]> http://aarongervais.com/music/elegy-of-others/feed/ 0 http://aarongervais.com/music/love-in-the-time-of-connectivity/ http://aarongervais.com/music/love-in-the-time-of-connectivity/#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:05:05 +0000 Aaron Gervais http://aarongervais.com/wp/?p=411 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.

]]> http://aarongervais.com/music/love-in-the-time-of-connectivity/feed/ 0 http://aarongervais.com/music/culture-no-3/ http://aarongervais.com/music/culture-no-3/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2006 01:19:23 +0000 Aaron Gervais http://aarongervais.com/wp/?p=352 Cul­ture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that modern pop­u­lar cul­ture can inform West­ern art music. More specif­i­cally, Cul­ture no.3 is involved in explor­ing the inter­re­la­tion between the vis­ceral ele­ments of pop­u­lar music and timbre. By vis­ceral ele­ments, I mean, for exam­ple, the sense of motion, the force­ful­ness of the artic­u­la­tions, or the char­ac­ter of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The tra­di­tional pitch resources of the pop­u­lar sphere have required that vis­cer­al­ity and timbre play a greater role in defin­ing pop­u­lar genres (and sub­se­quently in deter­min­ing what we find inter­est­ing within them) than is seen in the major­ity of West­ern art music. Cul­ture no.3, with a greater empha­sis on timbre and vis­cer­al­ity and a sub­se­quently lesser empha­sis on other aspects of the musi­cal whole, uses the resources of the West­ern ensem­ble to fea­ture this aspect of pop­u­lar music.
]]> http://aarongervais.com/music/culture-no-3/feed/ 0 http://aarongervais.com/music/shortlong/ http://aarongervais.com/music/shortlong/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2005 08:51:43 +0000 Aaron Gervais http://aarongervais.com/wp/?p=432 Two years’ dis­tance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, orginally called Quar­tet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two move­ments and reflect the kinds of artic­u­la­tions and phras­ing that I employed.
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