Aleph…Zain

Aleph…Zain is a series of musical and multi-media works involving indeterminate form, as a context for both determinate and indeterminate sound. Each work begins with a six-page score; each score page contains compositional material linked to the other pages by choice operations: performers design a pathway through the pages which, in each instance of performer choice, dynamically impacts the content of the work’s immediate future. Some works involve site-specific content or found texts, which are to be re-determined (if only slightly) for each new performance.  

Taken together the compositional and performance processes in “Aleph…Zain” uniquely combine the study of rhythm perception with traditions of algorithmic and aleatoric music. The notion of “algorithm” invoked here builds on established techniques of John Cage, Tony Conrad, and Roger Reynolds, but this is the first such practice informed by psychological principles of memory and attention, or by philosophical concepts of “difference.”

 Writing for New York’s Franklin Furnace Collective, Harry Spiller described experiences of works in the Aleph…Zain series as “often akin to illusion, with one perception being traded for another: what seems at first ambivalent and complex yields suddenly to an unexpected impression that a simplicity of purpose has been present all along.”

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Takes to the Stage is both the first composition in the series (commissioned by cellist Franklin Cox), and a video with animation. Both are attempts to address and resist experiences of rhythm and form that develop in contemporary commercial spaces. The video (DVD, forthcoming from Kunaki) documents performances at UC Santa Cruz and at Columbia University.

The work for cello is situated in and around a concert of diverse music, somewhere in the middle of which a cellist is allowed to play Carson’s solo interlude. The interlude takes its sonic content by sampling the surrounding repertoire: some sounds echoing prior works, others anticipating works to be played later on the program. Rhythms of other works are referenced within larger rhythms of the interlude; their roles seem to repeat and switch. Musical surfaces are thus connected, broken, and connected again, in a slow, formal, unfolding of the classical recital stage.

The video articulates these sonic unfoldings with patterns of animation. Animated elements (hand-drawn line art, painted photography, and manipulated film stills) are distributed through the work, associating curt imagery with the cellist’s sampling references across the concert program. The visual associations are dynamic, first developing one pairing of image and sound, and then a contrary one, engendering the possibility of narrative memory involving both continuity and distortion.

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Commissioned by acclaimed San Francisco-based percussionist Chris Froh, A is for Azimuth and Arnica extends the “Aleph…Zain” principle with found texts and found objects. Five recordings of the work—by Froh, emerging New York percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, and Geneva-prize winner Aiyun Huang of McGill University, are the core of a my new CD “Music for Percussion” from Albany Records (December 2010).  (Also see video recordings and excerpts of the varied interpretations on this site.)

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Finally, two forthcoming works, Menagerie, and  N is for Never and Napete, are set for premiers respectively in Colorado Springs, Colorado (December 10, 2010) and San Diego, California (January 22, 2010).

Menagerie is a concerto for trumpet with a chamber orchestra of 10-20 instruments and a soli of flute and baritone saxophone, commissioned by Glen Whitehead. The work divides players between contrasting (and simultaneous) approaches to a chorale-like texture, in which one approach is sotto voce, and the other alternates between heterophony (playing variously a little ahead and behind the time of the piece, with ornamentation) and a kind of Klangfarbenmelodie in which variance of timbre and noise supersede melodic fluctuation in pitch. The result is a flow of energy through a progression of harmony, in which a sense of clarity about harmonic movement ebbs (and flows) toward other kinds of clarity: musicians collectively improvised decisions about ornamentation, timing, timbre, and other aspects of the acoustic environment.

N is for Never and Napete is a companion piece and sequel to A is for Azimuth…, a trio of percussionists and pianists, moving between one prepared piano and two sets of drums and found metallic objects. Its San Diego premier in January 2011 will feature the composer performing with Chris Froh and Aiyun Huang.