musicworks

97 spring 2007

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Musicworks Issue 97 - Spring 2007 FEATURE ARTICLES

Rick Sacks: The dance of contemporary percussion
By Anne Bourne

Article Summary: Rick Sacks is a contemporary percussionist whose movements within his intricately designed set-ups of metal, wood, and skins have been described as a dance. With extensive experience as an interpreter of contemporary music, he reconciles elaborate numerical structure with the freedom of intuition. His sound is one of warmth and mathematical precision, with a texture provided by ingenious dexterity. Sacks’ interface with technology and theatre expands his work to many genres that stem from his love of contemporary chamber music. Originally from New York state, he chose to make Toronto his home, after remarkable friendships formed with composers Christopher Butterfield and Linda C. Smith. His compositions present a complex sound world of depth and passion. Sacks is releasing Ten Planets, a CD of contemporary percussion solos on Artifact.

Peter Mettler: Filmmaking as composing, the camera as musical instrument
By Joel McConvey

Article Summary: Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler has often described his work as musical, and compared his working process to that of the musician. It makes sense: his globetrotting explorations of ecstasy, energy, and transcendence deal with transcending borders to discover the divine ways in which cultures and systems overlap. His early experiments with the piano led him to a love of improvisation, which he has continually incorporated into his traditional film work, culminating in his massive 2002 picture, Gambling, Gods and LSD. Now, as he skirts the frontier of live visual mixing—a medium in which sound and image are inextricably intertwined and improvisation reigns—he is evolving even further into the quintessential artist-as-medium, and forging a new bond between the visible worlds of the filmmaker and the fluid mystery of music.

O+A: Sound art duo reshapes the urban soundscape
By Kay Burns

Article Summary: Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) have been developing collaborative outdoor sound installations since 1987. Their work alludes to the common oversight of urban planners and architects regarding the acoustic environment of city plazas, structures, and freeways. Rather than simply override or mask the noise of urban settings with something fundamentally different, Odland and Auinger have created a means of reinventing the cacophony of traffic, machinery, crowds, and other local sounds into harmonics played back in real time. The harmonics are created using a series of large tuning tubes that the pair developed, along with specially designed and constructed speakers for the sites. This article looks at three of their works, located in New York, Massachusetts, and Rome. Through these works, O+A concurrently question and provide insight into issues of acoustic ecology and sonic attributes of urban experience.

Finnbogi Pétursson: Icelandic installation artist sculpts space and time with sound
By Donald Brackett

Article Summary: Some visual artists appear to invite us to participate in an aesthetic experience far more involved and compelling than a mere viewing experience. Finnbogi Pétursson permits us to engage in an extended reverie, a suspended state in which time, the real and actual subject of his works, stands still long enough for us to witness its true dimensions. His installations visualize sound, and use it as a tool for exploring the concepts of space and of time. In this feature article, Toronto art and music critic Donald Brackett discusses Pétursson’s work and declares it to be a concrete contradiction of Marcel Duchamp’s declaration that “One can look at seeing, one cannot listen to hearing.”

COMMENTARY

The Canada Council at fifty
By Gayle Young

Article Summary: The Canada Council for the Arts has provided funding to composers, musicians, and other artists for fifty years, supporting the growth of both individual artists and the infrastructure by which their work is made accessible to the public and to one another. Music arises from the aural imaginations of both creators and listeners in interaction with the physical realities of acoustics and perception, and at the same time, it stimulates the imagination, freeing us to observe the world around us. In a field such as new music and sound arts, commercial viability cannot be a realistic goal. Social and personal values take priority, and in this sense the community of artists has flourished. The musical world of the twenty-first century is characterized by diversity and plurality, simultaneity and integration, and our history of public funding has prepared Canadian artists to participate fully in this context.

A few words about Jim Tenney
By Larry Polansky

Article Summary:  “A Few Words About Jim Tenney” is a probing evaluation of the artistic, intellectual, and cosmological vision of the late James Tenney, who is proclaimed in this article to be the most important and brilliant composer–theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. The author, Larry Polansky, himself a composer, theorist, and teacher, a former student of Tenney and one of his close friends, contends that, after Cage, no other composer so elegantly and beautifully integrated ideas and music as did Tenney. And, he asserts, no one else’s work, as a whole, is as profound, experimental, wide-ranging, accomplished, or revolutionary. Larry Polansky wrote this piece shortly after James Tenney’s death, specifically for A Companion to Slug, the e-mail newsletter of Frog Peak Music (A Composer’ Collective), where the article first appeared.

Reflections on James Tenney
By Chiyoko Szlavnics

The Berlin-based Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics offers a personal memoir of her artistic and intellectual engagement with the late American composer James Tenney, telling why he was such an effective composition teacher for her. She discusses Tenney’s relationships to Edgard Varèse and John Cage, as well as his interest in ratios and the Just Intonation tuning system (which led to his development of such theories as that of harmonic space), in aleatoric forms, and in parametric graphs.

SONIC GEOGRAPHY

Kay Burns in the Yukon
Gayle Young at Bone Lake
 

CD CONTENTS

1 | Sparrows (2004) 11:24
by / par Rick Sacks
Performed by the / interprété par Evergreen Club Gamelan Ensemble, Blair Mackay, Director: Mark Duggan, Graham Hargrove, Paul Houle, Bill Parsons, Rick Sacks, Ryan Scott, Andrew Timar.

2 | Clicks (1996) 1:24
by / par Rick Sacks

3 | Sunday Ice Cream Sundae (2002) 5:04
by / par Rick Sacks
Performed by / interprété par Rick Sacks, percussion and electronics / percussion et électronique.

4 | Buoy (2005) 2:48
by / par Rick Sacks

5 | Certain Rhythms for Space (1985) 10:30
by / par Finnbogi Pétursson

6 | Live sound and image improvisation at RAI, Rome (excerpt/extrait) (2005) 13:15
by / par Fred Frith and Peter Mettler
Performed by Fred Frith, guitars and processing; and Peter Mettler, field recordings, additional sounds, image, and sound mixing.
Interprété par Fred Frith, guitares et traitement, Peter Mettler, enregistrements de terrain, sons additionnels, image et mixage sonore.

7 | NYC: Blue Moon 3 Tides (2004) (4:40)
by / par Sam Auigner and Bruce Odland (O+A)

8 | Mass MoCA: Harmonic Bridge (1998) (8:29)
by / par Sam Auigner and Bruce Odland (O+A)

9 | Rome: Traffic Mantra (1991) (5:13)
by / par Sam Auigner and Bruce Odland (O+A)

10 | Gradients of Detail (excerpt 1 / extrait 1) (2005) 5:18

11 | Gradients of Detail (excerpt 2 / extrait 2) (2005) 5:18
by / par Chiyoko Szlavnics
Performed by Quatuor Bozzini: Clemens Merkel and Nadia Francavilla, violin; Stéphanie Bozzini, viola; Isabelle Bozzini, violincello.
 Interprété par le Quatuor Bozzini : Clemens Merkel et Nadia Francavilla, violons; Stéphanie Bozzini, alto; Isabelle Bozzini, violoncelle.

REVIEWS

Events
Gayle Young on the James Tenney Festival in Valencia, California
Stefanos Tsigrimanis on the Ear to the Earth Festival in New York City
James Harley on the 13th Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium
Charlotte Scott on the free103point9 Radio Festival in Acra, NY
Stuart Broomer on the Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon
Mary Jane Leach on the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival in North Adams, MA
Charlotte Scott on Sound Travels in Toronto
John Oliver on soundaXis in Toronto
Ellen Waterman on Sound Symposium XIII in St. John’s, Newfoundland
David Cecchetto on Open Space Voice++ in Victoria, BC.

Recordings
Beck/Drenching/Pleasure on Discus
Mei Han and Paul Plimley. on Za Discs
Steve Lacy and Brion Gysin on HatHut
Mujician on Cuneiform
Evan Parker on Psi
Solonese Gamelan on Inedit
Jesse Stewart on C3R
Lois Svard on Innovera
Jozef van Wissem on BVHaast
Ross Bolleter on Emanem


Words
Ross Bolleter. The Well-Weathered Piano. (WARPS publications)
William Duckworth. Virtual Music: How the Web Got Wired for Sound. (Routledge)
Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, No. 6: Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. (l’Association pour l’étude de Marcel Duchamp)


Visions Of Sound
Sulo Kallas and Ivika Kivi