Ouroboros

I wrote about transcribing some of Takemitsu's string quartet last summer.  Directly out of that exercise came Ouroboros.

SoundBox '08

Tonight.

Rhetoric, long-listening

My teacher, Tony Brandt, talks a little bit about 'rhetorical reinforcement;' that is, the alignment of phrasal, harmonic, rhythmic effects to articulate a single rhetoric. Otherwise, the discussion of rhetoric was entirely missing from my music education. This strikes me as bizarre, since it is the feature that most contributes to music making 'sense.'

It certainly trumps harmonic language. I've been noticing an illusion lately. Maybe some of you can corroborate. I am hearing more and more serial music as tonal. I'm using the term loosely; I suppose I mean that it sounds harmonically conceived. I hear the harmony align with rhetoric of a phrase. I hear the harmony working as harmony. This effect is particularly strong at the ends of phrases, when the final chord can really linger in my ear -- it often sounds like a perfect chord for closure, and I cannot believe it was chosen out of serial necessity. I think, surely Webern cheated here.

[This is what I think is happening. First, I've been working on my listening. I'm too focused on details, and teasing out intervals, and I miss the long phrase. So I've been practicing long-listening -- don't get hung up on details, be more patient. Listen for the rhetoric. And as I let the rhetoric have more influence over what I'm hearing, it is casting harmonic detail in its own shape. If the rhetoric of a phrase creates convincing closure, the harmony I hear is one of convincing closure.]

And it certainly trumps motivic unity. How many pieces have you heard that were supposedly motivically watertight but were impossible to follow? And then compare that type of piece with these:

Brad got me hooked on Boulez, Notations for Orchestra. I don't know enough about how they're made; maybe they're working motivically too, but I can't hear them that way yet. For now they are rhetoric alone, and it is absolutely enough.

And our resident quartet, the Jasper, played Ligeti's Metamorphosis Nocturnes last week. There's a piece where the motivic consistency has a fantastic effect -- but it is reinforced by an absolutely direct and clear rhetoric.

Who is talking about this?

Endgame Study

This was my major project last fall. The big idea is this: musical styles are separate from each other only politically. Formally -- in terms of the structure and preoccupation of their rules -- they are neighbors in a continuous space. It is possible, then, to move smoothly between them. This piece, for example, modulates one rule: it gradually and systematically restricts possibilities, while concurrently restricting range-space. At times, the result resembles familiar styles, but it also traverses the space between them, of which much is beautiful.

Listen here.

0/1

Around Hear

Ethan Frederick Greene is putting together a concert in Mandell park (at Richmond). I have two pieces on the program -- two duets for violin and bassoon and a round, sung to a dance by the wonderful Kate Halpern. Come and bring a blanket.

Conway Organ

I'm working on a max instrument based on Conway's Game of Life. Here's a first improvisation. Its also my youtube debut.

24 Hours of Ferneyhough

A time-lapse video of someone listening to the complete recordings of Brian Ferneyhough. The comments on YouTube are hilarious -- even someone else listening to this music makes people mad.

Me, I can get mad looking at a score. But the result is surprisingly listenable. You can almost always tell where you've come from and where you're going, at least in the short term. It's music for microscope ears. And, lo! A serenade!

Which isn't to say that 24 hours of it wouldn't change you.

Hysterical up

The Oracle Hysterical is back online. Thanks for waiting --

Hysterical down

The OH is not available for the moment being. Either Archive.org is having a problem or the files have been removed (?) -- I'm looking into alternate places to put them. Hang tight.

Hystericals

Brad and I are excited that Alex Ross mentioned our EP in his Book tour diary 3. Thanks Alex! I'm looking forward to reading his book -- as soon as school lets out and I can get on with my education.

The Oracle Hysterical

Brad Balliett and Elliot Cole present

The Oracle Hysterical

00. Chaos [that which is rightly called God, for in chaos all things are possible]
01.01 Disclaimer
01.02 The Madness Fragments pt. 1
01.03 The Madness Fragments pt. 2
01.04 [Gloss]
02. Satz: Scherzo
03.01 [ ]
03.02 Satz: Feierlich
04. The Fogbow


Contact us at theoraclehysterical at gmail.com

Andrei Khrjanovsky - Armoire

YouTube - Andrei Khrjanovsky - Armoire



I'm on a Schnittke rampage and have come across a handful of beautiful cartoons he scored. Isn't this wonderful?

Sampling

I've been working for most of the last year on a record with a friend. It's hip-hop if hip-hop is an abstract machine, an operation -- sampling, collage, the grid. We've done just what everyone else has done -- performed that operation to the music we love, and shaped it around his fantastic lyrics. I talk about it like its a silly just-for-fun project, but I'm secretly as proud and excited about it as can be.

I like working with samples because they never quite fit. When I'm writing music at the page, its easy to make a phrase fit the meter, peak where it should, interact harmonically the way I want etc. It's extra trouble not to. Working with samples is the opposite. They never behave exactly like I want them to, and so they demand solutions that stretch me. My job isn't to Express Myself; it is to make compromises, compute optima, lots of slight-of-hand. I like that much better.

It's of course naive of me to say writing at the page is easy. But it's only hard (and only good) insofar as I work with the same attitude: first, freely welcome irreconcilable elements, and then struggle for an acceptable solution. Irreconcilables are the bootstraps by which we transcend.