Music review from
Submitted by Mark Sullivan
Sound Installations
9-Beet Stretch
From Scandinavian sound artist Leif Inge comes a transcendent soundscape made out of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. By stretching the recording to 24 hours with no distortion or pitch shifting (achieved through high-quality granulation), the piece is fundamentally changed from a goal-oriented tonal work with a dramatic narrative to a slowly-evolving sonic environment more closely resembling micropolyphonic works of Ligeti or post-minimalist pieces by John Luther Adams and R. Murray Schafer.
The source recording is from Naxos, conducted by Béla Drahos with the Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia and Chorus. The work can be heard streaming 24-hours a day—click here to download the internet radio station link (open in iTunes or VLC Media Player).
The Met Museum: Janet Cardiff’s “Forty Part Motet”
The Forty Part Motet (2001), a sound installation by Janet Cardiff (Canadian, born 1957), was the first presentation of contemporary art at The Cloisters. Regarded as the artist’s masterwork, and consisting of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel, the fourteen-minute work, with a three-minute spoken interlude, continuously played an eleven-minute reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui (1556?/1573?) by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585). Spem in alium, which translates as “In No Other Is My Hope,” is perhaps Tallis’s most famous composition. Visitors were encouraged to walk among the loudspeakers and hear the individual unaccompanied voices—bass, baritone, alto, tenor, and child soprano—one part per speaker—as well as the polyphonic choral effect of the combined singers in an immersive experience. The Forty Part Motet is most often presented in a neutral gallery setting, but in this case the setting was the Cloisters’ Fuentidueña Chapel, which features the late twelfth-century apse from the church of San Martín at Fuentidueña, near Segovia, Spain, on permanent loan from the Spanish Government. Set within a churchlike gallery space, and with superb acoustics, it has for more than fifty years proved a fine venue for concerts of early music.
Of the work, Cardiff says,
“While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space. I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis. You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/janet-cardiff
The Getty: “A New York Soundtrack for a New York Painting”
Mural, 1943, Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956). Oil on canvas, 8’ ¼” x 19’ 10”. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1959.6 Reproduced with permission from The University of Iowa
“[W]e’re using the Getty Center’s late summer hours to explore the connections between music and the visual arts. Having such a vibrant painting like Pollock’s Mural on view gives us an especially wonderful opportunity to understand how music and art operate as artistic mediums in relation to each other.”
Tree Growth Rings Translated to Music
Artist Bartholomäus Traubeck says of this work, titled Years “[a] tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently. This record features seven recordings from different Austrian trees. They were generated on the Years installation in Vienna, January 2012.”
Does this constitute creative composition, or merely programming?
What would happen if the music were transcribed to traditional notation for live players?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it sing this song?
Space Replay
Space Replay by Francesco Tacchini
Here is a really interesting sound installation that illustrates one of the many fascinating uses for the Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform (which you may recall Carlos Mello used for a project last year).
“[Space replay is a] hovering object that explores and manipulates transitional public spaces with particular acoustic properties. By constantly recording and replaying these ambient sounds, the hovering sphere produces a delayed echo of human activity.”
Music at Mt. Parnassus 