The remarkable composer Christopher Cerrone has posted excerpts from LiminalHighway, his recent work for flute and electronics premiered by Tim Munro (formerly of eighth blackbird fame).
I had the privilege of writing the notes for this and the other works Tim programmed on his New York solo debut concert last fall at Miller Theatre. From my piece on LiminalHighway:
The issue of resonance and how it relates to the process of memory is a central preoccupation in much of Cerrone’s music. As the winner of the 2015 Samuel Barber Rome Prize, he spent his year in the Eternal City exploring the intersections between music, architecture, and acoustics, building an installation in a stairwell in the American Academy…
Morton Subotnick, who at 80 looks as eager as ever to experiment with his Buchla and laptop, rolled into town recently to perform a decades-spanning program at Seattle’s Town Hall. Joining him onstage was Berlin-based video artist Lillevan. The two have been collaborating on several projects in recent years, and both are obviously so well attuned to each other’s aesthetic that they can improvise with pre-existing material. It all added up to a blissed-out gesamtkunstwerk for synth geeks and video art aficionados.
The concert’s official title – “From Silver Apples of the Moon to A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur IV: LUCY” – refers to the main sources for the prerecorded music Subotnick used to build the performance in tandem with Lillevan’s abstract imagery of fluid and fractal-like shapes in restless transformation. Subotnick describes his current process:
For each season of performances I create a new hybrid Ableton-Buchla “instrument” loaded with prepared samples from all my previous works and performances and new patches that will allow me to modify the samples while performing brand new sound gestures created especially for the new season. The work always has the same title, “From Silver Apples of the Moon to a Sky of Cloudless Sulphur IV: LUCY.” The “IV: LUCY” refers to the season number and the name given to the newest materials.
Subotnick and Lillevan in action
Subotnick’s gently processed whisperings and vocalizations – sent whirling about the surround-sound arrangement of speakers – launched this voyage of about an hour or so. Of course the act of musical performance itself tends to override ordinary clock time, to make it seem simultaneously speeded-up and in slow motion. But in this case, time seemed to become unmoored as if we were in a gravity-less environment.
The early atonalists used to worry about how to structure a piece without the old familiar signposts. Subotnick’s large-scale excursions can echo the craggy, mountainous landscapes of a Romantic tone poem, no matter how “alien” the sounds. Inevitably I found myself turning to metaphors, both from the natural world – that ubiquitous “watery” sound of electronics – and from acoustic instruments, imagining a troop of pizzing strings here, bleating woodwinds there.
Lillevan
Berlioz’s opium dreams, the psychedelic trips of the ’60s: why is it this intensely focused sense of isolation, of utter aloneness, much more than any Dionysian, “orgiastic” frenzy, that they so strikingly share? Above all I’m fascinated by Subotnick’s “art of transition” and his ability to steer toward heaving climaxes, only to dial the mood down within a short span, like a turntablist working the dance crowd – even though we were all passive listeners.
Just before the performance, Subotnick recollected how exciting it was to be a young composer in the late ’50s, when the introduction of the commercial transistor seemed to point the way toward a new utopian paradigm: music that could be made and performed by everyone, not limited to “the 1%” who had the training for classical music-making. Yet for all its influence on popular culture, and for all the revolutionary changes in daily life this technology has enabled, the type of electronic composition Subotnick pioneered still inhabits a rarefied world of its own.
Megan Abbott's new novel follows two women with a troubled past who meet again, working in the lab of a powerful scientist. It's a slow-burning story whose final explosion is a true surprise.
A new HBO documentary explores great work — and complicated private life — of the late actor and comedian. Critic David Bianculli says Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind is best when it gets serious.
"What we conjured up ... was that we weren't going to try and be this constructed ideal of femininity," Albertine says of her band's approach. She recently released a memoir, To Throw Away Unopened.
The memorial honors the nine worshippers murdered by a white supremacist at the church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015. It is designed by the architect behind the Sept. 11 memorial in New York City.
An anthropologist takes a deep dive into the history of gathering, raising and eating insects, and why in America and Europe, they're unlikely to become a mainstream food option anytime soon.
Robin Williams is the subject of a new HBO documentary called Come Inside My Mind. Using clips and interviews, it documents his unusual process and his complicated life.
Sacha Baron Cohen likes to dress up and try to get people to say dumb things, and in one case in his new Showtime series, he finds success. But other times, the show falls flat.
The severity of the enormous reduction in bee numbers over the past decade is at the heart of a new book by conservation biologist Thor Hanson, whose appreciation for the pollinators shines through.
Abbott's new thriller Give Me Your Hand is set partly in a scientific lab studying a severe form of PMS — she says she's fascinated by "this sort of idea that the female body is monstrous."
The son of Pakistani immigrants in the U.K., Mahtab Hussain was often taunted: "Go home." One day he did just that to see what his life might have been like if his parents had not left.
