« September 2004 | Main | November 2004 »
October 22, 2004
Gothenburg seminar
I participated in the ArtTech Sublime seminar yesterday arranged by the schools of performing arts at the Gothenburg University (follow this link for more information on ArtTech). I found visual artist Jan Kaila's presentation on his thesis from 2000 especially interesting. The format of his thesis was rather traditional, a series of works discussed in an accompaning text, but I was impressed with the depth of his work. He also made a statement about artistic research that I found useful:
There is a reason for all art - there is no such thing as art without a reason - and it is this reason that is the research.This may seem obvious, but in a time when the validity of artistic research as a phenomenon is debated as it is in Sweden right now, it is nice to hear somebody describe it as selfevidently as that.
It was also good to listen to Palle Dahlstedt whose thesis ‘Sounds Unheard of’ from last year, is in many ways related to my own work. As his thesis is done at Chalmers, and not within the Academy of Music, it is closer to a traditional scientific dissertation, a point stressed by himself at his presentation. Nevertheless it is an impressive piece of work, very skillfully carried through with an interesting historic review of similar techniques used in art.
On the night before this seminar Dr. Mika Hannula, principal of the Art Academy in Helsinki gave a lecture on method in artistic research. He gave a list of, according to his experience, ten important aspects of artistic research. I will not get in to the full list now (maybe in a later post...) but he stressed the importance of ‘contextualizing the self’. I find this very interesting because that is also the beginning of accepting the subjectivity of the research. By giving your work a honest perspective of your own background, your current position and your direction, you give the receiver a chance to understand the context in which the problem and the suggested solution has risen.
Finally I am intrigued by the amount of work that is going into this field at the moment. Let us hope that it doesn't end with locked positions and schisms but that it can lead us towards a higher understanding and let us create new knowledge.
Posted by henrikfr at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2004
Rhythms (2)
I did a few tests today with the rhythm charts that I have constructed. One with the patterns from chart 1 where the note durations and onsets where derived from the number of 32nd notes (32 on the chart equals a whole note). Then I tried using the patterns in chart 2 where I used fractions of a whole note (32 equals one 32nd note). In general the second method sounds more natural. For example, the red curve on the chart makes a natural accelerando and ritardando, but this method also results in much more complex notation (alternatively, a higher degree of quantization).
There is one idea that I have for the piece that I want to be a musical version of a person telling a story or arguing for a case, and as he gets more excited, raising his voice and speaking faster and less and less articulated (that would be something like the Gaussian curve in chart 2). The musical version of this is a clearly stated motif that gets mingled up in slightly modified versions of the same motif, rhythmically displaced, and ends in a chaotic flurry of tones.
For this idea I will try to use versions of the patterns in chart 2 for the durations and onsets of the notes of the motif and use one of the curves in chart 1 for the rhythmic displacements of the modified motifs.
Posted by henrikfr at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2004
Rhythms
I have not been posting for some time which is the result of not having had so much time for my work recently (I have been spending most of it together with my now 19 months old son...).
I am still working on the structure of the harp piece and I wanted to make a structural connection between the rhythms and the my tone series. I am now experimenting with using the same transformations that I use for the tone series for a serialized series of rhythms. It turned out to be quite useful for certain effects, such as speeding up and slowing down and complex, non-static polyrhythms.
However, it is quite obvious that rhythms do not translate well to serialization (as discovered by the serialists in Darmstadt fifty years ago). I will continue to work on this the next couple of days and see if I can find an angle to this that can work for this piece.
Posted by henrikfr at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2004
Structure of a composition
I mentioned in an earlier post that I have started reading Curtis Roads “microsound” [Roads, 2001]. The concepts in this book, however not entirely new to me, is starting to influence my work on the harp piece. For this composition I'm working with an extremely long tone row (750 notes) that has a fractal structure to it. From this I derived three permutations by treating it as a table and applying different functions to it (I will get in to the details of this in a future post - stay tuned...). From the figure (it's hard to see any details because of the small scale) it can be seen that all permutations except one retains its original shape to a large degree.
Now I have starting experimenting with making granular sounds using the same functions. Theoretically its very exciting to have the same functions governing the structure all the way from micro to macro scale.
Posted by henrikfr at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)