Innova 120

Innova 120

The Art of the Virtual Rhythmicon

With Sonic Circuits XI

Works made mostly using the online instrument created by Nick Didkovsky for <musicmavericks.org> after an idea by Henry Cowell and Leon Theremin

1. Janek Schaefer All Bombing is Terrorism* 12:00

2. Annie Gosfield A Sideways Glance from an Electric Eye* 7:35

3. Philip Blackburn Henry and Mimi at the Y 4:34

4. Jeff Feddersen This Time I Want Them All* 5:48

5. Matthew Burtner Spectral for 0* 4:42

6. Matthew Burtner Spectral for 60* 4:27

7. Viv Corringham Eggcup, Teapot, Rhythmicon* 6:15

8. Mark Eden Cremation Science° 5:33

9. Robert Normandeau Chorus° 13:57

The Rhythmicon was a musical keyboard instrument built in 1931 by Leon Theremin at the request of composer/theorist Henry Cowell. Each key of the Rhythmicon played a repeated tone, proportional in pitch and rhythm to the overtone series (the second key played twice as high and twice as fast as the first key. The third key played three times higher and repeated three times faster then the first key, etc.)

The Virtual Rhythmicon was commissioned in 2003 by American Public Media for its Peabody-Award-winning Web- and radio series American Mavericks <musicmavericks.org>. The online version extends the functionality of Cowell’s design and uses digital technology rather than rotating optical discs. Users can compose their own works and post them online here:

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/rhythmicon/index.html

For this CD the Sonic Circuits festival commissioned several composers to make works in which the instrument features prominently. These works are complemented by two others chosen for the Festival’s final year of presentations. Thanks to the Jerome Foundation for their support of these commissions and of the Sonic Circuits Festival over the years.

-PB

The Virtual Rhythmicon was designed and programmed in Java Music Specification Language and JSyn by Nick Didkovsky, email: didkovn@mail.rockefeller.edu

Nick would like to thank Preston Wright for the invitation to work on this project, and Phil Burk for the many insightful discussions, supporting software, and of course JSyn. Nick would also like to thank the following beta testers who helped with bug reports and creative suggestions: David Birchfield, Philip Blackburn, Phil Burk, James Forrest, Kevin Norton, Chris Pepper, Larry Polansky, John Roulat, and Peter Selmayr.

The Schaeffer, Burtner, Fedderson, Corringham and Gosfield works were commissioned for Sonic Circuits with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.

Janek Schaefer

All bombing is terrorism is one of the most peaceful tracks I have made... the opposite of war. I made it using the Rhythmicon routed into five loop/pitch pedals that I have been collecting for a few years, my favourite DOD DFX94. I call this instrument ‘The Lexicon’ as it’s basically a variation of the Rhythmicon technique. I’ve been waiting to plug them all together for a long time.”

Janek Schaefer was born in England to Polish and Canadian parents in 1970. While studying architecture at the Royal College of Art [RCA annual prize], he recorded the fragmented noises of a sound activated dictaphone travelling overnight through the Post Office. That work, titled Recorded Delivery [1995] was made for the ‘Self Storage’ exhibition [Time Out critics' choice] with one time postman Brian Eno and Artangel. Since then the multiple aspects of sound became his focus, resulting in many releases, installations, soundtracks for exhibitions, and concerts using his self-built/invented record players with electroacoustic collage. The ‘Tri-phonic Turntable’ [1997] is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the ‘World’s Most Versatile Record Player’. He has performed, lectured and exhibited widely throughout Europe [Sonar, Tate Modern, ICA], USA/Canada, [The Walker, XI, Mutek, Princeton], Japan, and Australia [Sydney Opera House].

Audioh.com

Annie Gosfield

Working on the Virtual Rhythmicon was both addictive and challenging. It was only after I finished the piece that I discovered that my Airport card was defective. I wound up writing a piece that developed slowly, because the on-line Rhythmicon could not react quickly to my key commands, which in the end reinforced my fondness for the unpredictable qualities of broken instruments. The piece shifts between pure overtones and detuned sounds generated from sustained sawtooth and triangle waves, inspired in part by a review that compared the original Rhythmicon to a reed organ. I snuck in some recordings of cellist Joan Jeanrenaud’s harmonic sweeps, introducing a human element that mingles with the machine. The title, A Sideways Glance from an Electric Eye refers to the photoelectric cell used in the original Rhythmicon. Thanks Joan, Philip, Nick, and Henry.

Hailed as “a star of the downtown scene” by the New Yorker, Annie Gosfield divides her time between composing for others and performing on piano and sampler with her own ensemble. She uses traditional notation, improvisation, and extended techniques to create a sound world that eliminates the boundaries between music and noise. In addition to writing chamber music, she has composed a site-specific work for a factory in Germany, collaborated on installations, composed music for dance, and created a video for an imaginary orchestra of destroyed instruments. She has released three CD’s on the Tzadik label, and her work has been performed at Warsaw Autumn, the Bang on a Can Marathon, Wien Modern, Spoleto Festival, Company Week, the Venice Biennale, the Festival of Radical Jewish Culture and the Next Wave Festival.

Anniegosfield.com

Philip Blackburn

In the 1920s Santa Barbara composer Mildred Couper (“Mimi”) followed up on Charles Ives’s use of two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart by writing a series of pieces for that medium. (During that period she was also known as the Fairy Godmother of Harry Partch’s Chromatic Organ, later to become his Chromelodeon.) She had the misfortune to present one of her major works, Xanadu, (innova 589) with herself and Malcolm Thurburn at the pianos in the very same New Music Society Concert that Henry Cowell and Leon Theremin unveiled their Rhythmicon. Henry and Mimi at the Y is a tribute to that event on May 15, 1932 at the San Francisco YWCA (a brand new Oriental-inspired building, suitable to the evening’s Chinoiserie). Perhaps this is what could be heard in the locker room during the afternoon rehearsal going on nearby.

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied there as a Choral Scholar at Clare College. He earned his Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Iowa where he studied with Kenneth Gaburo and began work on publishing the Harry Partch archives. Blackburn’s book, Enclosure Three, won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He has been the Senior Program Director for the American Composers Forum since 1991 and continues to compose, build sound-sculptures, perform, and write about things like Partch, Vietnamese music, and the use of sound in public art. He runs the innova record label and the Sonic Circuits International Festival of Music and Art. He received a 2003 Bush Artist Fellowship to begin building a sound park in Belize and is currently creating music for the traveling science museum exhibit, Wild Music.

Philipblackburn.com

Jeff Feddersen

My composition is inspired by Cowell’s 1925 piece, The Banshee, where spectral, ethereal sounds were created by essentially hacking the piano - by opening it and manipulating its inner workings. I was interested in the ways in which the Virtual Rhythmicon could be pushed to turn rhythms into timbres, and pushed further still until glitches and breaks surfaced in the sound. Aside from Cowell’s voice, all sounds in the composition were created this way.

I had interested myself a great deal in the playing of different rhythms at the same time... I composed wildly and feverishly... six to the measure counted in five...eight, nine in the bass and seven in the middle and six on top... and so on every measure changes... and this all sounds very quiet and serene until you try to play it... in other words I was inventing a new musical sound... sometimes people were disappointed in the results of this; they said “didn’t anybody ever tell you that you select tones for a chord, you don’t just use all the tones at once for a chord, you select them.” I often do select tones — I often do — but this time I want them all.

Jeff Feddersen is an artist, musician, and engineer interested in new musical instruments and sustainable energy. His current work-in-progress, EarthSpeaker, is a solar-powered acoustic installation for free103point9’s Wave Farm in Acra, New York, developed under an artist’s residency at Eyebeam Atelier and with support from the Brooklyn eco-technology design hub Habana Outpost. He has developed several new means of musical expression, including robotic sonic sculptures, real-time composition software, multi-modal digital input devices, and amplified acoustic instruments such as the Silverfish and Double Harmonics Guitar. Venues where he has exhibited or performed his work include the Lincoln Center, the Chelsea Art Museum, the Soho Apple Store, UC Irvine’s Beall Media Arts Center, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. He has taught electronics, sustainable energy, and digital audio at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he was also a Resident Researcher, and recently finished a stint with the NASA flight hardware developer Honeybee Robotics.

Thanks to the following for permission to reproduce the excerpts of Cowell’s recorded voice: Charles Amirkhanian of Other Minds

<radiOM.org>, Richard Teitelbaum of the Henry Cowell Estate, and WBAI, the radio program’s originator.

fddrsn.net

Matthew Burtner

The Spectral for n pieces are machine lullabies for people I love. I composed Spectral for 60 and Spectral for 0 for my parents’ 60th birthday and for my son’s birth respectively. Both pieces utilize mathematically-organized sine tones and chaotically assembled colored noise materials. The pieces partake of both pure order and pure disorder, employing computer-generated procedures and sounds. By situating the music at these two extremes, I create a musical void in between, a place of repose for the imagination of the listener.

Sine wave spectral-rhythmic materials generated by the Cowell/Theremin/Didkovsky Rhythmicon, combine with the noise-chaotic materials generated by my own algorithmic noise generator, nWinds. Spectral for 0 utilizes small sets of phased tempo ratios that reference a sub-audible frequency, evoking an impossible zero frequency at zero rhythm. At the same time, the high interlocked chirping phase sets search for infinity through micro-rhythmic division. This texture is formed of three groups of ten voices, each voice offset by 1/100 pulse, and the three groups in a macro tempo ratio of 9:10:11.

Spectral for 60 utilizes a polyrhythmic system derived from whole number divisors of 60: 1:2:3:4:5:6:10:12:15:20:30:60. The corresponding pitch of these 12 voices is a multiple of the fundamental frequency (in this case 89Hz or 101.2Hz), and this multiplier is equal to its relative tempo. Thus the pitch of “1” equals 1 times the fundamental, “2” equals two times the fundamental, “3”, three, and so on. “60” is then 60 times higher than the original pitch and 60 times faster.

The work of Alaskan composer, saxophonist and sound artist, Matthew Burtner explores environmental systems (ecoacoustics), technological embodiment, and extended polyrhythmic and noise-based musical systems. His instrumental and computer music is widely played and he performs regularly with the metasaxophone, an augmented computer instrument of his own creation. He teaches composition and computer technologies at the University of Virginia where he is Associate Director of the VCCM Computer Music Center. He has two other releases on the innova label.

Burtner.net

Viv Corringham

“I played with tempo and frequency on the Virtual Rhythmicon and used everyday objects as resonators for my voice.”

Viv Corringham is a British musician and sound artist based in Minnesota who has worked internationally since the early 1980s. Articles about her have appeared in Organized Sound (UK), Musicworks (Canada), and Soundworks (Ireland). She received an MA Sonic Art with Distinction from Middlesex University, England, and has had awards from the English and Irish Arts Councils, Jazz Services, Millennium Funding, London Arts Board, Creative Partnerships and Awards For All. She is a 2006 McKnight Composer Fellow through the American Composers Forum. Her works have been heard in Britain on the BBC, Resonance FM Radio and Channel 4 TV, and in the US on WFMU, WMSE and MPR stations.

Mark Eden

Cremation Science deals with the dehumanizing aspect of information filtered through mass media. This philosophy finds its inspiration in the work of Andy Warhol, where Marilyn Monroe is as much a commodity as Campbell’s Soup. The piece’s absurdity stems from Franz Kafka’s dark comedic vision, while its structure owes a great deal to radio theater.

Mark Eden teaches in the Mass Communications department at St. Cloud State University. His pieces are composed of small pre-recorded samples manipulated through the Pro Tools sound engineering program.

This work is dedicated to Chris Mann.

Robert Normandeau

Chorus (2002)

To the victims of September 11th, 2001

Ouverture (Overture); Judaïsme (Judaism); Christianisme (Christianity); Islam (Islam); Confrontation (War); Douleur (Pain); Paix (Peace).

Chorus. Latin word for choir. Sing in chorus, to voice one’s agreement. To chorus.

The music is inspired by the subject of the theater play Nathan le Sage by G. E. Lessing written in 1779 which demonstrated the tolerance ideal of that century. The theater play (staged by Denis Marleau in Avignon, France, in 1997) is based on the Three Rings parable which describes a man who is about to die and has to make a difficult choice: who among his three sons will get the ring inherits from a long family tradition. In order not to have to make this choice, the father decides to make three rings out of the first, proof of his love for his sons. «If it is not given to the mankind to theoretically know which religion is the true one, everyone has the practical possibility, by his disinterested action in favor of the others, to prove the value of his faith and his aptitude to contribute to the happiness of humanity».

The sound material used in the work represents the typical sonorities of the three monotheist religions: the shofar for Judaism, the church bells for Christianity and the Islamic call to prayer. To these sounds are added the treated voices of two actors, Gregory Hlady and Évelyne Rompré, used in the music of the theater play Antigone by Sophocles (staged by Brigitte Haentjens in 2002 at Théâtre du Trident, Québec City).

Chorus was commissioned by Réseaux with the financial help of the Canada Council for the Arts. The piece was awarded the First Prize at the International Competition of Sacred Music in Freibourg (Switzerland) where it was premiered on July 13th, 2002. Chorus was also selected by the 2nd Métamorphoses International Competition (Brussels, Belgium) and was recorded on the 2002 edition compact disc of the competition. It is also recorded on the DVD Puzzles (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0575).

Work published by YMX Média (SOCAN)

Robert Normandeau: March 11, 1955 in Québec City (Canada). MMus (1988) and DMus (1992) in Composition from Université de Montréal. Founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. Founding member of Réseaux (1991), a concert society. Prize-winner of the Bourges, Fribourg, Luigi-Russolo, Musica Nova, Noroit-Léonce Petitot, Phonurgia-Nova, Stockholm and Ars Electronica (Golden Nica in 1996) international competitions. His work figures on many compact discs among them there are six solo discs: Lieux inouïs, Tangram, Figures, Clair de terre and the DVD Puzzles, published by empreintes DIGITALes and Sonars published by Rephlex (England). He was awarded two Opus Prizes from the Conseil québécois de la musique in 1999: «Composer of the Year» and «Record of the year in contemporary music» (Figures on empreintes DIGITALes label). He was awarded the Masque 2001 for Malina and the Masque 2005 for La cloche de verre, the best music composed for a theater play, given by the Académie québécoise du théâtre. He has been Professor of Electroacoustic Composition at Université de Montréal since 1999.

His work Le Renard et la Rose appears on Sonic Circuits V (innova 114)

Cremation Science and Chorus were curated selections from the Sonic Circuits XI Festival of Electronic Music and Art (soniccircuits.com)

Innova Director, design: Philip Blackburn

Operations: Chris Campbell

Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.