Digressions of the Third Man

On 102nd & Amsterdam

2011-01-19T06:56:00.000-08:00

The string trio 102nd & Amsterdam is dedicated to by father, Raymond Boyce; this was the first of many New York addresses for him. My father’s stories of growing up in New York in the 40’s and 50’s cemented in my mind the idea of New York as The City, an idea strengthened by my own relocations and peregrinations. My father is a wonderful, if diffuse, storyteller, with many narrative elements being developed, abandoned, rediscovered and sometimes corrected; while writing this piece, I thought often of his kaleidoscopic rhetoric, not merely episodic, and yet open and unbounded.

The work is discursive in at least two ways. It is discursive in the same sense that all music is;– the work is emplaced within a network of practices and repertoires and it achieves significance not through any inherent and essential content, but rather through dialogue with its historical-æsthetic context. In this particular instance, the terrain of signification encompasses the personal and familial archeology described above, but for most listeners, the primary axis of actorialization and meaning making will be the technical roots of the work in texturalism, the mainline chamber strings repertoire, and post-serial Modernism in general.

It is at this technical level that the second discursive mode becomes perceivable. "102nd & Amsterdam" foregrounds the interactive character of performance, a concept of the work as conversation. The piece is not an object, but an exchange of roles, attention, instrumental color and motivic material;– these transaction that in themselves do not bear import, but by their being afford opportunities for music making. This model is manifest in the works shifts (from highly imitative counterpoint with its egalitarian organization of entrances and continuance to the marked soliloquies and features which highlight each performer in turn. The framework of exchanges and partnerships shift as voices emerge, participate in, and leave a conversation devoid of semantic content but not of significance.

This discursive focus on counterpoint and polyphony is presented not merely as a model, or a static representation of a conversation but as a experience in the moment of performance. The score is structured using numerous 'open pulse' textures in which the temporal placement of entrances, the duration of passages, and the alignment of events are renegotiated in each performance by the performers in real-time. The practical negotiations of collective music-making, present in all performances, here move to center stage, making the living dialogue amongst the musicians visible and audible.

The openness of the score also provides some intimation of a third discursive mode operative in the work;– given the degree of freedom the printed score allows, the relationship between the composer and performer is opened up to examination and transformation. The work, or rather the series of instantiations of musical practice which we find convenient to call this work, is produced not by the inspired scribbling of an autonomous individual composer, but through the collective, varied, occasionally contradictory, always fascinating tychastic actions of a collection of individuals, individuals capable of action and possessing agency. A collection, it should be added, that can easily and should always be understood as encompassing the audience. –DB

Etude on F. 113, Torino J.II.9 ('Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit')

2010-03-16T05:43:00.000-07:00

This etude is a study in that the ballade, 'Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit,' (F. 113 of Torino J.II.9) serves as a source for the pitch and rhythmic material, but also in that it is a study in the project of adoption, in the thorough engagement with the exquisite foreignness of the past. The text recounts the tale of Pygmalion the sculptor, averse to women, whose consuming love for his own statue leads to the intercession of Aphrodite, and the statue's transformation from idealized female form to flesh and life. The Cypriot source of the Torino codex places the character of Pygmalion in an intriguing political and historical frame, as Pygmalion is most often presented as a king of Cyprus– the situation of Nicosia as a crusader state on the interface between Christendom and Islam draws intriguing connection between political and socio-cultural transformation of the island of Cyprus, the biophysical transformation of the statue, and psychological and emotional transformation of Pygmalion himself. In this etude, the original musical work is sometimes presented relatively directly, sometimes refracted through the compositional concerns of the early 21st century– the relationship between derived work and the original metaphorically mapping both the loss and accrual of significance through time as well as the sculptural working of the titular artist-king.

To compose is always to speak with the dead, but further, it is to dance with them, to embrace the past as immediate, even if it is remote. F. 113 is transported in time, gaining and loosing distinct fidelities. It is the same as it ever was, and yet it is as it has never been. Stone is carved and wears; clay is spun and shatters – A friend suggests that the first time around, we worked in clay and stone, and this time we work in light, light fixed and transfixed in copper and glass, sand that was once the beach of Pygmalion's Cyprus, of Lusignan Nicosia. For music in this age of light, the invitation to dance must come from us – the dead await and welcome, but only come when called – they have learned not to speak first. If our aspiration is a sublime recapitulation we will always be disappointed. Our dialogue with history is always precisely that, a dialogue, a conversation which moves both partners to places unplanned. Like Pygmalion, the transformation is double– the statue comes to life, but Pygmalion's relations to others are also transformed. We transform what we adopt, and are transformed in the process. The difficulty is loving the source, the transformed and the process, to adopt and not to merely borrow.

Or, perhaps more simply, imagine this: a reed brushes against a potter's wheel in the kingdom of Nicosia in the early part of the 15th century, its vibrations translating the sound waves of musicians in the next room into grooves and valley on the surface of a rotating pot. Half a millennium later another miracle, more technical perhaps, allows the reconstitution of those patterns into sound. Tonight we hear such a doubly miraculous retransmission, not with the flaws and degradations of an imperfect recording, but with the amendments of history and all its generative imperfections.

On my Concerto Grosso

2009-01-25T14:32:00.000-08:00

"The Concerto Grosso continues and expands an inquiry into the nature of musical time which has been on going in my work for several years. In particular I am interested in exploring how musicians negotiate and re-negotiate the basic building blocks of rhythm: pulse, beat, meter and tempo. The notation of the work gives the performers and conductor many choices in the timing of passages, the alignment of events, and the order of phrases. Performers are thus involved in musical decision making generally more associated with composition than performance. This open approach to notation has no generally agreed upon label. It has variously been termed indeterminate (a bit inelegant and imprecise), open (which carries associations from the literary studies and art theory that are not germane), and aleatory (which emphasizes chance without speaking to the ways in which order in the work comes into being). Given these difficulties, I suggest the use of the term 'tychism' as a somewhat antique but highly appropriate term. Tychism is a concept developed by C.S. Peirce to describe the emergence order from chance events. It was appropriated into the first debates around Darwinian evolution, but in its original form the usage was much more general and ontological, a way of understanding the universe at fundamental levels. Peirce's friend and colleague William James perhaps articulated his friend's idea more succinctly, calling tychism "Peirce's suggestion [that] order results from chance-coming."

"In this work in particular, I am interested in how groups of musicians work in consort to bring musical time into being. Drawing on the historical models of the concerto grosso, the work delineates several distinct groupings of performers– the concertino (the collection of soloists), the ripieno (the supporting string ensemble) and the conductor (the point of interface for these groupings). In the first movement, the soloists are presented in turn, playing rhythmically active material against (generally) open and un-pulsed music in the strings. Through much of this movement, there is no shared pulse at all, with the soloists and ripieno moving freely with rough alignment managed by the conductor directly, rather than pulse. In the second movement, a stronger sense of meter emerges, though often the concertino and ripieno do not agree on a core pulse and often run parallel, producing blurry textures which snap back into focus when the two ensembles move back into agreement.

Note on 'Occurrences'

2008-12-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

A Recording of Occurrence II

A Recording of Occurrence III

A score of the work, with a User's Manual, can be found here:
Occurrences Score

The Occurrences, like much of my music, asks performers and audiences to interrogate the conditions of the production of musical time, the nature of the basic building blocks of rhythm: pulse, meter, beat. My music could be described as 'indeterminate,' a rather inelegant term of our art, a negative definition which has the positive attribute of calling attention to the fact that that not all elements of a given work (ie: the tradition 'composerly' features like notes, and the rhythmic disposition of the notes) are as fixed as one generally finds in concert music. Some of these features will be left open to the decisions of musicians in the moment of performance. 'Open' would seem a more attractive term, though its use in literary theory would emphasize the impact of these structures on the 'meaning' of the work, which is not really the focus of the techniques. Similarly, aleatory, used most often to describe the works of Cage, brings in the notion of chance and emphasizes a lack of human agency, when the gesture of the technics are actually exactly the opposite, a surfeit of agency. 'Improvisation', though it captures the character of real time decision making, tends to minimized the channelling of decision-making through very precise and detailed techniques of notation.Given the difficulties with terms (aleatory, improvisation, etc), all fine terms already doing good work in the musical discourse, I suggest the use of the term 'tychism' as a somewhat antique but highly appropriate term. Tychism is a concept developed by C.S. Peirce to describe the emergence order from chance events. It was appropriated into the first debates around Darwinian evolution but it in its original form the usage was much more general and ontological, a way of understanding the universe at fundamental levels. Peirce's friend and colleague William James perhaps articulated his friends idea more succinctly, calling tychism "Peirce's suggestion [that] order results from chance-coming." It should be noted that my point in calling for the usage of this term is not to imply that my work requires a new language for description, but rather that there is a tychastic element to all musical expressions, and that the development of a language to describe them is of use.Occurrences presents the performer with numerous choices in the sequence, repetition and duration of various melodic fragments or 'strophes.' The work is a mobile form in the classic sense– according to rules laid out in the score, the performer chooses the sequence of much of the material, and the duration of specific passages. In several instances material maybe be skipped altogether; in Occurrence III, almost 50% of the notated music will not sound in any particular performance. Within set parameters, the performer shapes the formal and rhetorical organization of the piece at a fundamental level.The Occurrences are also conceptualized as dispersed structures, appearing on a program interspersed among other works. As such, they occupy a space between our categories of ‘movements’ and ‘works.’ All Occurrences share material (in the sense of motivic, intervalic and rhythmic content) and employ similar strategies of notation and organization, and yet are distinct in affect and character. In this work, the traditional role of the composer as provider of order and sequence is transferred in part to the performer, and the composer is more involved in the management of possible successions, and the issues of consistency and discontinuity which open forms present.Occurrences is dedicated to Miranda Cuckson, who commissioned the work.