Pousseur on film

A few years ago, Belgian composer Henri Pousseur donated all of his papers to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland. For his fourth trip to deliver his archives, he was accompanied by filmmakers Guy-Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohlé. The resulting documentary, Hommage au Sauvage, was released on DVD by Sub Rosa's video branch, OME. Most of the film is Pousseur seated in the back seat with the camera fixed in the same position, talking about various topics from the history and theory of the avant-garde to his views on aesthetics and the open work. Most of the chat relates to his music, although he also recounts a few personal moments of special significance. There are some sequences filmed at the Sacher Foundation, going over some of his papers with the archivists. What comes across most vividly in this 52-minute film is Pousseur's engaging personality and his incisive attitude.

Four interludes present his music directly. Two of them use selections from his electronic works Scambi and Trois Visages de Liège with a succession of images. There's a longer section of Pousseur rehearsing a very short string quartet (Piccolo Ricercare, about 2.5 minutes long) and its performance by the Quotour Musiques Nouvelles. At the time of filming, this was Pousseur's most recent work, and the rehearsel fragments illuminate the melodic aspects of the piece that were so important to him, but often easily lost in the abstractions and the angles.

I've written before about Pousseur's approach to open works, and the filmmakers get some interesting discussion about one particular problem, how to make an open work for more than one musician. One of Pousseur's solutions was the piece Les Ephémérides d'Icare 2, a 1970 work for unspecified soloists and ensemble. For the fourth musical interlude, he goes over a few pages from the score, then provides commentary from the old LP recording (unfortunately not reissued on CD).

The DVD, which is available as a purchase from the usual suspects or as a rental from Netflix, comes in both NTSC and PAL formats (on each side of the disc) and unfortunately has no extras. Archival footage of his musical theater would have been most welcome, or a moderately restored version of the ensemble work Les Ephémérides d'Icare 2 together with its score. In any event, another nice addition to the Pousseur legacy from Sub Rosa.

Outside the inside piano

My instrument, the piano, with its twelve equally tempered notes per octave, has a critical historical role in the foundation of the underlying harmony and melody of most music that we hear today. So I take special notice of artists who use the piano to undermine these lofty aims, a challenging task that generally relies on the performer moving away from the keyboard and exploring the inside of the piano. With the advent of electronics and amplification, it is possible to distort significantly the familiar piano sounds and attain non-pitched noise on the instrument. The exemplar here is David Tudor's 1967 recording of Cage's Variations II using the inside of the piano and contact microphones. Perhaps because tradition is so hard to break, or because the keyboard repertoire for piano has so many masterpieces, few musicians have deviated and truly rethought the instrument and its possibilities.

One such musician, who now works entirely inside the piano, is Andrea Neumann. Based in Berlin, Neumann has been working this unusual perspective for over a decade, devoting herself enough to commission a special instrument without keyboard, dampers or pedals, reducing the instrument to the frame, strings and soundboard. Unfortunately I can't find a picture of her modified piano, but on nearly every recording the mixing desk gets equal billing, so it probably has a fair amount of circuitry built in. She participated in a flurry of improvisational group outings at the beginning of the decade but has been largely absent from the EAI recordings in the past few years, despite numerous live appearances at festivals around Europe. Recently Absinth Records released her second solo effort, a numbered edition of a single piece, Pappelallee 5 (the name of her studio).

Pappelallee 5 is a natural extension of Neumann's only other solo, a mini-CD entitled Innenklavier released in 2002. Innenklavier (Inside Piano) has three pieces that explore the instrument's range, from single plucked notes with varying degrees of feedback to rolling scrapes that fill the audio spectrum with unpitched noise. The second piece in particular directs noisy rasps and crackles to different channels, alternating with stretches of digital silence. The silence/noise dichotomy of course goes back to Cage as well, but Pappelallee 5 extends Innenklavier 2 by using room ambience, ordinarily a flavor of silence, as a defining compositional element. Neumann's studio is in a house mostly occupied by musicians, so room ambience includes audible traces of her neighbors at practice. Room ambience changes independently of Neumann's inside piano, providing a secret depth best appreciated on headphones where one's own room ambience can be minimized.

The crux, however, is Neumann's gestures on the inside piano, which bring focus to multiple levels of background. Sometimes subtle and sometimes extending into wild, dramatic squalls in crystalline relief, they contrast sharply with the muffled appearance of the conventional instruments. Guitar, flute, trumpet and acoustic piano all pass through, a melodic counterpoint to Neumann's electronics that sets the piano's tonal and melodic history traditions outside and down the hall. Placement in the mix adds significant levels of complexity, audible splices adding richness and texture. Neumann plays with audio artifacts that most engineers try to discard, and in so doing has created a dazzling piece of contemporary musique concrète.

Pappelallee 5 comes in an oversize gatefold package and includes a statement from the artist. It is available from ErstDist or directly from absinthRecords, and is limited to 300 copies.

Primal elements

The July issue of furthernoise.org has my review of an audio-visual album entitled Elements by the Melbourne-based sound artist Abre Ojos.

Goodbye, Dani....

With great sadness for the missed opportunities but immense appreciation for her serene and peaceful music, I note that Danielle Baquet-Long of the duo Celer passed away yesterday.

How long is your sentence?

From a call for submissions:

If your work is accepted, we will then request a three-sentence bio…. We prefer your bio sentences to be more Hemingway than Foster Wallace when considering length.

Hat tip: TuScene.

Pousseur and open electroacoustic music

Three months after his passing, post-war composer Henri Pousseur finally got an obituary in the English-language media. The article mentions in passing a new project devoted to the composer, the Scambi Project at Middlesex University in England. Run by John Dack, a specialist in musique concrète, the Scambi Project is collecting documents relating to Pousseur's open-form piece for tape. Composed and described by Pousseur in the late 1950s, Scambi was intended from its inception to be a mobile form, and Luciano Berio made a version as well as Pousseur's more available realization. Part of the goal of the Scambi Project is to enable new realizations, and the site includes three new versions from graduate students in the Sonic Arts program.

The documents are a treasure trove for Pousseur enthusiasts, and range from scholarly papers by project team members to interviews and transcribed lectures by Pousseur from the last decade or so. His keynote lecture from an Open Work symposiuim at Goldsmiths College not only discusses Scambi, but also his Eight Parabolic Etudes in some detail. This collection of eight long works produced in 1972 (released on four CDs, also available at emusic and iTunes) showcases the possibilities inherent in analog electronic music, and were later reworked by electronica artists Oval, Philip Jeck and Main for a live concert and subsequent CD release.

I've documented by own enthusiasm for Pousseur here on a couple of occasions, and the Scambi Project is a welcome addition to the available material. I still hope for a CD release of Pousseur's piano music, which he composed throughout his career and which would make a varied and interesting recital.

Plastic canons

One of the most thorough electronic music packages I've ever seen is the boxed set of "The Complete Tape Music of Dick Raaijmakers," which includes three CDs and a 200-page hardbound book of bi-lingual (English and Dutch) notes explaining the pieces. The pieces date from 1959 to 1996, and although a lot of analog electronic music sounds a bit dated, I find Raaijmakers' work not only listenable, but very prescient. In particular, I am fascinated by a series of five canons from the mid-1960s, all of which sound much more like static or noise than any of their contemporaries. The canons are artifacts from some fairly intense research that Raaijmakers performed on sound morphology. While the research and its results are explained reasonably well in the book accompanying the CDs, I stumbled across a publication Cahier M from the Orpheus Institute seminars in Belgium, where he goes into much more detail in a series of four lectures subtitled "A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound."

Raaijmakers had two major guiding lights for this research, the artist Piet Mondrian and the pioneering photographer Étienne-Jules Marey. In the 1880s, Marey developed a photographic gun that planted consecutive actions in a single image, which he used to show real-world actions, such as birds in flight and a man jumping off a chair. Forty years later, as a major theorist for the Dutch artistic movement Neo-Plasticism, Mondrian advocated an electronic music structured into sequences of primary tones (characteristically identified as red, yellow and blue) and non-tones (chromatic, atonal noises, black, grey and white), devoid of harmony or any sort of romantic characteristics. From Marey, Raaijmakers took the idea of presenting a single object from multiple perspectives. From Mondrian, he not only took the tonal concept, but Mondrian's spatialization of sound, not merely the horizontal and vertical but a diagonal approach. Raaijmakers wanted to construct pillars of sound that could be viewed from any angle and whose characteristics would change accordingly. Mondrian's work fits into a long history of mixing sonic, visual and architectural metaphors. The 1960s were a fertile time for spatialization as well — think of the work of Stockhausen and Xenakis from this period.

Of course, canonic procedures were nothing new to the 1960s, having a long history back before Bach. But Raaijmakers started from a single point of sound, so short that no specific pitch could be perceived. He strung multiple points together to create larger sound structures, which he then overlaid with each other at different time scales, creating larger and larger blocks. Despite the increased complexity and the archaic titles in Latin, any canonic procedures he uses are largely inaudible, and the raw material sounds like static. Taking inspiration from Mondrian's severe restrictions, Raaijmakers' canons sound like the absence of music. The closest sonic resemblance is the crunchy parts of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, harvesting the sound from old, decaying tapes. Raaijmakers's first canon serves as a model: spiky sonic aggregates alternating between two channels, without pitch, harmony or any discernable rhythm. Raaijmakers calls the second one a black-and-white copy of the first (it's a canon about printing, a copy of the first with reduced information). The third is accelerated, with the sounds overlaid to create timbral differences, but it is still an extremely restricted sound palette. The fourth is a subtraction canon, where increasingly large holes appear in the original material, again recalling Basinski. The fifth is based on an old LP of Edith Piaf, emphasizing the surface noise at the expense of the underlying sounds — it could easily pass for turntablist/looper Philip Jeck.

Starting from Mondrian's neo-plasticism, Raaijmakers ends up with a different view of sound than the moving horizontal and vertical waveforms that we see in most audio editors. Mondrian's sound had depth, a third dimension whose appearance (and audibility) altered depending on the perspective of the composer and/or listener. Repetition patterns which may appear orderly and periodic when viewed from one angle may be completely invisible or barely recogizable when perceived from elsewhere. The pattern may be altered, translated ("the shift of a given quality in a straight line with respect to other qualities"), until the pattern morphs into a new shape, a new pattern to be used for the next round of changes. Sound artist Ralf Wehowsky translated a single set of parameters for his album When Freezing Air Stings Like Ice, exemplifying Raaijmakers' deep morphological connections. Neoplasticism combined with Marey's superimpositions, and the resulting abstract, liquid forms anticipated Xenakis' architectural sound sketches and countless graphic scores.

Raaijmakers' work is available digitally, without the explanatory notes, from iTunes and emusic, but the book is a huge asset to understanding this pioneering work. Despite the collection's title, many of the more recent works are recordings of fairly theatrical productions, so enough is lost already without missing the explanations for the absent visuals.