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Pogus 21032
Roger Reynolds
Process & Passion
Kokoro (1992)
Buried deep in Kokoro, about 2/3rds of the way through, is the originating section from which the rest of the musical material emanates (via a radically transformative strategy). The eighth of twelve sections, entitled ghostly, evanescent, elastic, it is the most mercurial and elusive of the composition and forms a paradoxical pun—the heart of the piece is asserted as the lightest, feathery shadow, in a set heavy with the implications of exploring the Japanese word “kokoro” (a complex of meanings around “heart”, “spirit”, etc.).
One of the most rigorous interpretive challenges presented by Kokoro is defined in a performance note: “an ideal performance would involve the assumption of an entirely new psychological stance for each of the parts”; this should already give an idea of the range of expressivity in Kokoro. However much one is physiologically prepared, the elusive part about making this audible is that it is a projection never fixed in time or space: it is an attitude towards an opportunity that must find itself in the moment. The preparation for these moments can be intricately directed, but the end result, the end posture, is never found until that specific moment.
A profound part of my performance and playing approach is informed by the Alexander Technique, a system of directive approaches to posture and body use in general, developed by the early twentieth century Australian actor, Frederick Alexander. One of its basic principles is analogous to the situation just described in Kokoro: posture is a constant leading into position, and the “position” is always refound at every occasion. Though very practical, the Alexander Technique draws implications about the intersection of thought, action and interpretation in an endless cascade of possibility and potentiality; as in all authentically useful systems of thought, the technique is grounded in the visceral and the most real.
On a poetic level, Kokoro explores an intersection of thought, action and interpretation via the deconstruction of the word “kokoro”. To quote Daisetsu Suzuki, “‘Kokoro’ is a very comprehensive term. It first of all means the physical ‘heart’, and then the true ‘heart’ (connotative and emotional), ‘mind’ (intellectual), ‘soul’ (in the sense of an animating principle), and ‘spirit’ (metaphysical)” (from Zen and Japanese Culture). Roger Reynolds goes on to say, in a program note to the violin solo: “this delicious prolixity of implication was irresistible.”
I hazard a guess that part of the irresistibility was the opportunity to convert such transcendent concepts into the visceral, and create a vivid manifestation of the spiritualist conceptualizing surrounding “kokoro”. In my mind this is underlined by the additional sections that evoke related images—”a tenuous trembling” (section 5), “a traversal of sighs” (section 7), and “luminous murmurs” (section 9) among them—and draw the outer world deeper into the experience.
The qualities with which the “kokoro” concepts are realized in the composition again have a great deal to do directly with the performance experience: in learning the piece, as with each performance of it, the action is always one of opening to what it may become, not replication of what it has been, whether from the page, or given a previous performance. Perhaps this a quality we should find in all the repertoire we present, but it is in Roger Reynolds’ Kokoro that this ambition is, rarely, unambiguously essential to the “show”.
—Mark Menzies
Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward… (1989)
...lifts the player away from the intricacy of adept fingers which trigger the sound towards a higher plane: reaching for the skies, the heavens, the planets, the next universe with a “glowing” signal. Or such is the conception of the poet James Merrill (black sheep son of the banking family that gave its name to Merrill Lynch) as adapted by Roger Reynolds to create a composition transcending the localized, inward-facing aspect of much of our intricate new literature. With an obsession unbroken by spontaneity, the music presents a breathing, a wave-like offering of sounds, a pre-programmed shape, with inexorable clock-ticking as a dominant force. The pattern is simple: 1 2 3 breathe. 1 2 3 breathe. Three times three character divisions subdivide the total composition, presenting affective variations on the relentless pattern. 1 2 3 listen. 1 2 3 listen. The nine sections of Focus… (unsubdivided on the CDs)—clearly heard in that they change rhythmic and articulative means with decisive force—are: Floating. Vigorous, Articulate, but Restrained. Tranquil. Dramatic. Mercurial. Urgently. Antic. Playful (leggiero). Glowing.
Each section is characterized by meter and tempo change, as well as a new metrical subdivision and number of subdivisions which characterize the actual pattern. Playful, for example, is in 2/4 at a tempo of 46 beats per minute, but subdivided into quintuplet eighths to determine the ongoing rhythmic pattern, so it takes four full measures for the pattern to land on the first beat of the bar again. This arrangement is typical of the dislocation throughout the composition, where the feeling is constantly one of slight misalignment, of running counter to the world’s clock, of tilting the head askew so that the sensation is altered, of listening to another universe observable only at an angle of a few degrees from normal.
The placid opening of the instrument, for that is how it feels as the composition offers open strings and ringing harmonics in the Floating section, is quickly modulated with warmth on the stopped notes, with singular crescendos and hairpins, even a dramatic “surging” portamento to draw momentary attention to the surface texture. It suggests quickly the restless perturbations that are to come. The second section travels rapidly afield, with each pitch in the carefully designed row quickly touched—I dig in slightly to assert my presence—before all manner of trills, tremolos, timbral alterations distort the placid surface. Extremes of dynamic, from niente to fff, extremes of pitch, trills across strings, wide trills which get narrower and the reverse, trills which change speed, rapid motion with the bow from the fingerboard to the bridge and back—it is as if the opening were not nearly assertive enough, and now I must splash water everywhere in an attempt to project the instrument’s self. Tranquil immediately thereafter imposes itself, moving more slowly, but with a fiendishly difficult balancing of stopped notes and harmonics, each note in the chord with a separate dynamic contour, as the sound becomes gently shaded and unexpected sonorities emerge (presaging the sonic importance of the six-note chords which are the signposts of the duo!).
Like a modern look at a Baroque solo suite combined with a set of classical variations, Focus considers the instrument, its melodic and figurative linearity and its double stop potential, and provides a neatly wrapped package of “views” of the rhythmic pattern and a tone row that does much to unify the linear identity of gestures. Passages with doublestops alternate with flying finger-slurred miniatures where fleeting recognition of the opening, signal gestures offers an impelling force that drives to the final simplicity of the closing section: pure again, single notes with occasional vestigial flickering, open strings and harmonics, some warmth from stopped notes, but overall a nearly headlong pace which shows that there is no room for relaxation even in the final glowing moments of the inconclusive search that the composition represents.
—Hugh Livingston
Process and Passion (2002)
Process and Passion began, as indicated elsewhere in these notes, as a gesture of gratitude and recognition to Hugh Livingston and Mark Menzies, whose musical gifts and whose searching intelligence I had come to know while they were at UCSD. Without retracing unnecessarily what is said elsewhere about the sources of this work’s inspiration (the magnificent imaginings of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and its search for what became the foundations of Western concepts of justice), there are other aspects of the work to comment on.
It has ten sections of irregular length (mirrored in the index numbers on the CDs). They begin as a portrayal of the distance between the moderations of due process and the frenetic excursions of passion. The cello is—and this echoes the sense of spiritual exercise which characterizes Focus a beam…—the reasonable participant. The first and third sections (particularly the latter which does not have the responsibilities that the first does to imply all that will follow) display this perspective in its most unperturbed state. The second section introduces the violin’s characteristic intensity as the purveyor of passion. (It is the voice of The Furies.) The score summons it to “abandon” and later to “improbable intensity”. The sometimes strident slashings of the violin are here juxtaposed against an almost literal “clocking” provided by the cello, which throughout much of the piece is given characteristic behaviors that recur time after time in strictly regular periodicities (in this first instance, individual or groups of marcato strokes). The unique poise and spacious lyricism of the third section provokes another outburst in the fourth where the cello sometimes joins with its less reasonable partner. But following upon the joint intensity of the fourth section’s opening, a quite unexpected new proposal emerges, presaging cooperation: a brief passage of pure, measured, ringing, natural harmonics. The fifth section continues the string of alternative perspectives by returning to the expressive lines of the third, but now accompanied by a restless murmuring in the violin.
What is beginning to emerge is the possibility for, if not negotiation, then at least some measure of accommodation between the initially contrasted musical views. There is an awareness on the part of the two wary participants that there might be metaphoric spaces in which they could cohabit. By the seventh section, the glow of the alternating harmonics casts a new light over the direction of the piece. There are other proposals, some regressions, and “missed opportunities”, but, by the last section, both the unbridled soarings and hackings of the violin, and also the measured and moderate contributions of the cello have merged into a middle ground that allows for small individual excursions, but has settled on the necessity of cooperative ideas that literally require two voices, two wills, now fated to find common ground.
There is another component to the whole not yet mentioned. I have portrayed the interactions of materials and protagonists as though they were, themselves, without context. But nothing is.
The most powerful new resource to have emerged for composers in recent decades is to be found in the power of computation. Natural musical sound can be recorded and manipulated in the digital domain in such ways that the realms of memory, anticipation, and the surreal extension of the familiar can be evoked with previously unimagined subtlety and power. I have mentioned the role of the alternating natural harmonics as the first indicator of the potential value of cooperative interaction. This behavior was recorded before the work was fully composed, as one of the “images” mentioned elsewhere in these notes. The regularity of its magical realm was then reprocessed within a “matrix” (Peter Otto’s term) which generates forms of irregular replication and distribution that can summon up an auditory “hall of mirrors”. At six places in the score, then, one feels a new, atmospheric influence come onstage. Usually it arises almost imperceptibly out of a feature of the current instrumental music. These computer passages cast their own spells, both on the listener and upon the two primary voices that are circling one another, seeking accommodation. But in the last section, the computer part, having entered modestly, grows to an almost shocking level of dynamic intensity and registral depth. Clearly, the metaphoric “environment” at this moment is issuing its own irresistible command.
I write about my duo here in metaphoric terms. Naturally, there is more than inference and mood behind the scenes, but I doubt that this—or any—work’s merits can be asserted or established on the basis of objective data: proportions, intervallic allegiances, rhythmic and other temporal patternings. It is hoped that the binaurally encoded disc included in this set will suggest to the solitary listener, in the comforts of his or her own headphones, how powerfully a choreographing of musical lines and gestures can dimensionalize musical experience. This realm and its satisfactions are only now coming into reach.
—Roger Reynolds
Commentary:
Mark Menzies:
This is a recording that explores the “extra”-ordinary potential of the CD not only as a carrier of traditionally recorded instrumental sound, but also offering a different view through binaural encoding of the same materials spatialized.
First you are presented with two solo compositions—Kokoro and Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward…—and the duo Process and Passion, in an acoustic recording, albeit with each instrument deliberately confined to one side of the stereo field. Then all three pieces are presented with extravagant sound processing, using spatialization concepts and binaural encoding, revealing unsuspected depths and energies within the sound of each of the pieces’ ideas and unfolding. I would like to draw a parallel with the process of learning to play a composition in collaboration with its (living!) composer: you first learn to articulate the notes and their rhythms and other qualities, and then you go to “the source” to find revealed the particular way that the piece has the capacity to go beyond its notes and rhythms. That process of collaboration, something Hugh and I had the pleasure of pursuing with Roger Reynolds in its own capricious schedule over three years, was a process of asking questions: questions about where we could go with the potentials presented by the qualities of the music, on both a purely physical level and on spiritual planes. The program notes for this recording continue in this spirit of questioning—as a way of finding out what it was that we could project outwards. What follows are dialogues the three of us had over email as we were preparing this recording for release.
Mark Menzies:
“Architectures of sound”—meaning how things sound—form the shape of the compositions’ emotional traversal. For the two solo pieces, this is a relatively simple idea: Kokoro (the violin solo) has twelve sections that are in every way timbrally/sonically/articulatively unique from one another. Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward… (the cello solo) provides an organic unfolding, nevertheless revealing the dynamic potential of its basic material development—contrast grows out of the unfolding. But the duo Process and Passion draws further complexity to this world, partly by being a stated collage of the two solo pieces’ worlds, but also by having an outside, visceral—even scary—narrative gravitational pull. Poetic text excerpts are drawn from your explorations of the Oresteia, but they are left out of the final score. Once they had served their stimulative purpose to spur creation, was it that their net effect on composing the sound and gestural world of the duo caused the pieces to go beyond their programmatic and evocative meaning? How important is it for us as participants in this composition to consider its narrative source?
Roger Reynolds:
In recent years, I have been working on The Red Act Project. I became interested in the idea of “extreme or inexplicable knowledge” as a result of thinking about novelist Kenzaburo Oe’s son, Hikari. His serious developmental limitations did not prevent him from exercising a musical voice. He has produced a number of small, Satie-like works, responding to his experience with his world through music, not language. This led me to thinking about seers such as Cassandra and about artists, of course. Eventually, I buried myself in three Greek tragedies, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Trojan Women, and Agamemnon, compiling a text that follows the tale of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra through to its bloody end, including Cassandra’s part in this tragic saga. Myth is a powerful source of generalized knowledge for our time, when so little with deeper resonances is shared in common by large numbers of people. And it was not only the power of the story itself. I responded viscerally to the language that Euripides and Aeschylus used (as recast by the masterful translators Richmond Lattimore and Charles Walker). Of course, language is both a collection of words and a strategy for how to employ them to shape the geometry of ideas.
When we began to talk about the present project, the two solo works were already in hand, and you and Hugh had both played them extensively. I thought it would be an appropriate gesture to compose something small as an intersection, with the two performers working interactively. And, as our plans were evolving, I was offered a commission from the Why Note? Festival in Dijon. I decided to use this opportunity to write a much more ambitious work. You say that Process and Passion was “a stated collage”, but that both over- and under-states the relationship between it and the two solos. I knew that I wanted to create something that would work effectively as a nexus, an intertwining of the worlds and implications of both the solos. But this would require more than a montage. I wanted it to be a new work with its own aspirations. I spent time listening to how you play Kokoro and how Hugh plays Focus. As a part of this process, I thought about the sorts of assertions that each piece makes and wondered how I could draw on them without borrowing so directly as to cause the new work to be too evidently indebted.
One necessary consideration was, of course, pitch resource. I used the rows, the harmonic worlds, upon which the two prior pieces had been based. Beyond that there was the variously assertive, unpredictable nature of Kokoro (Its character reflects its commissioner’s, Irvine Arditti.), and the meditative underpinnings of Focus... (which similarly recalls the nature of its dedicatee, Rohan de Saram). It seemed important to find a way to concentrate and sharpen these distinctions, and then, through the course of the new work, to ameliorate the differences (In a way, leading the performers into an atmosphere of mutual reflection and support.). I don’t remember how I came to the idea of looking at the last of the three plays that make up the Oresteia, but I did, and found there the interplay between the implacable anger of the Furies and the efforts of other protagonists in The Eumenides to redirect this anger and enlist their energies to constructive ends. Aeschylus was, of course, interested in the issue of justice in this trio of plays, how to lead the Greeks away from the formerly endless cycles of violence and retribution.
I looked at this text for a long while, edited it down to a few pages that carried the essence of the interplay between the immoderate passion of the Furies and the arguments Aeschylus advances for a new and just process of addressing wrongs. I found that there were a number of words that recurred as formative “images” in the translated text. And, in line with the dual nature of the work, I tried to pair these words (fall/rise, evil/love, and so on). As the distillation continued, and plans for the new work began to ripen, I realized that it was not the story as such that was at the center of things for me, but rather the intersection of two forces: passion and process. So, while the story and its distillation into a kind of poetic abridgement was the source of the duo, the text was no longer the story by the time I had finished with it, and, in fact, would make little sense to anyone not already immersed in my triad of plays (The Red Act). This is all a bit strange: the text was essential to the shaping of the piece, but—as with scaffolding that might be required in the development of a building—once the structure is complete, the scaffolding can be taken away. I decided to leave a few phrases in the score at first, but, to be honest, I am not sure I will leave them in the printed version.
Menzies:
Both Hugh and I can attest to one particular quality of working with you in this recording and it signals something many would perhaps find unexpected in a composer as formidably in control of all components of creative artistic endeavor as you are. It has to do with sound and how it is shaped and nuanced at the most fundamental level. Working with you has been an exploration of what an interpretation might be rather than striving for a fixed result you have imagined in your head. None of the pieces are easy to play, but then again our repertoire includes music with much more complicated rhythmic layerings, scarier traversals of intricate leaps and bounds, and pieces that ask for greater stamina whether louder or softer. The thing about your music, though, is that it has challenged us to find that ineffable spirit of persuasiveness “in the moment”—places of tonal accomplishment unfixed in space or memory, only measured in context of the unfolding event. This is actually the virtuosity that asks for a lifetime of enjoyment and enrichment from the score that demands it. But as a composer of notes it must be strange enjoyment indeed—in a sense you never “hear” the piece until long after the joy and engagement of composing (eventually inscribing notes on a page) has concluded—and then again, necessarily, each performance must have a uniqueness, not always advantageous to the ongoing exposure of the piece! This leads me to wonder if in fact what you are composing is not actually imagined sound at all, but something that is also ineffable, spiritual, and undocumentably persuasive?
Reynolds:
Important matters, these. I have come to see the extraordinary attention paid by many composers to the control of timbric nuance as counterproductive. Either the intent is to render structural in the makeup of the music aspects of sound that do not lend themselves to this kind of perceptual precision, or, on the other hand, the attempt is to anticipate and pre-empt the expressive adjustment of the sound stream in performance. In effect, the composer overrides what is, I believe, and justly so, an historical privilege, a dimensionality of the performance act that should remain in the hands of the performers.
But your question gets at something beyond this. I mentioned, in my answer above, the idea of “images”. This is an important concern for me these days. In the past, as, for example, in Kokoro, where all other material in the piece stems from the pppp 8th section, I have normally written out very detailed and precisely crafted thematic materials from which the remainder of the work’s music is drawn. Although I tried, of course, to make such materials evocative and varied musically, their primary influence on the remainder of the piece was in terms of a web of the objective musical relationships that they embodied (motives, interval successions, rhythmic normatives, and so on). Recently, and particularly in Process and Passion, I have started to work from more general origins whose aim is principally to evoke a mood or musical space, rather than to be relationally rigorous. It is, in a way, as though I were also “performing” as I compose. And my larger goal now would be to have a sufficiently strong and varied set of musical images in each work so that the entire body of its music would consist of a flexible weave of these fundamental images. The emphasis, in other words, would be more a consistent attention to expressive evocation than relying upon an objective construction of abstract musical relationships as the basis of the music. So, if I do my work well, I give the performer a set of tasks that invites his holistic investment. It is not, I think, that I do not hear my music before it is rehearsed or performed (because I am still very rigorous about shaping the framework within which the music is to happen). Rather, it is that what I try to “hear” while composing includes a range of interpretative approaches all of which, hopefully, address the underlying impact that I want the work to accrue as it is performed.
Hugh Livingston:
Pursuing this thread from my own perspective, the dichotomy that predominates in the identity of Roger’s music for me is the careful selection of method, of refining the technical approach to sound generation, to create a tailored sound with intense rhyming identifiability, yet one that, contradictorily, has never been uttered before.
By rhyming, I mean that Roger asks for a unity of gesture throughout a passage, so that one crescendo is shaped like the other, bursting forward at the climactic end, one harmonic rings like another, whether the open string or the fifth partial, even where limitations of physics and material and instrument oppose such unity. The interpreter has to find a rhyming intensity inside the sound, even where two separate pitches on separate strings do not allow the exact identity requested. The composer’s vision quite literally creates assonance and alliteration on the local level.
Reynolds:
The idea of “auditory vision” is interesting, in part, because it is singular not only to a composerly imagination (by which, apparently, is meant an imagination more concerned with auditory results and the uniform contribution to a larger ideal that a collection of sounds can produce), but also from one such imagination to another. Whereas one composer “hears” primarily in relation to pitch content, another may be concentrated on timbre, on the micro-variation of sounds, while a third is in thrall to the aggregate gestural impact of what a composite texture asserts. There seems no end to the variability of perspectives. What counts in the end, of course, is whether the performers can see/hear the possibilities inherent in the composer’s (perhaps wildly impractical) proposal.
And, by the way, “rhyming” is a wonderfully apt term for getting at this subject, having, as it does, so many metaphoric branches.
Livingston:
The duo seeks to maintain a constant momentum by creating the described internal rhymes in quickly alternating dovetailings—not melodic lines but Reynoldsian threads—where an insistent sound shape articulates itself to assert the momentary, out-of-balance forces that create the intertwining textures. The solo cello composition has such obvious localized, internal rhyme, that there is a different force at play over its whole duration, where the individual sounds are given shape by the gentle variation which characterizes the progression of the composition.
Returning to the flip side of the dichotomous sonic “image” conception: by never uttered before, I mean that Roger asks for a uniqueness of gesture throughout a passage, so that one crescendo is shaped like none ever played before in any other musical context, bursting forward at the climactic end, one harmonic rings like no other, with a chosen approach created for that moment. A sforzando, a tremolo, a sul ponticello sound, even a crescendo; none of these are known techniques that a player has developed after decades of involvement with Western practice, but new ones appropriate to the occasion created in consort with the composer as sophisticated variations on a previously known technique.
Reynolds:
This, too, is a strange aspect of the interface between one who imagines a thing and another who must make it manifest. It has never occurred to me to ask why it seems so unchallengeably clear in my auditory imagination, once I begin to work with a performer on a piece, exactly how a passage, even a single part of a note needs to sound. I’ve mentioned in various interviews how one can almost think of “composing” as the process of removing everything that is wrong until nothing feels inappropriate any longer. This process, for me, is not complete with the set of relationships and the large-scale architecture that I mark down in a score. It continues relentlessly during rehearsals. The music needs to be a certain way if I am involved in its realization, and the amount of detail that one would have to put in a score in order to reach for an ultimate precision in this regard would be extraordinarily unattractive to the performer, I would think. I remember particularly the difficulty in explaining exactly how the “striving” glissando on the first page of Focus… was supposed to sound.
Menzies:
I want to ask you about the spatially-processed versions of the three pieces. In a way antipodean to the current heavy use of technology for architectural sound production in the hip-hop genre, your approach is global and “stretching” of the source music’s potential, rather than being an abutment of vertiginous contrasts (not to say both approaches are not often unexpected and astonishing). You have been involved in utilizing the DVD medium and surround-sound for some time now—there is for example a recording of Watershed (for percussion and real-time computer spatialization) out on Mode Records that has already staked a claim on this technology’s capacities. Over a century ago, when the idea of recording sound first appeared, many became convinced that this technology would ruin the performance tradition so seemingly important to the cultural health of our performing arts. It proved, rather, to be a boon to this tradition, albeit in unexpected ways. I fully expect the DVD culture to interact with our existing musical performance culture in the same way, though ruefully one wonders how to provide, live, an experience comparable to the excitements one gets from the processed, multi-channel spatialization in recordings such as we have provided as part of this set.
Reynolds:
I have made many works over the years, both large- and small-scale, that center upon live instrumental performance, but which also include electroacoustic sounds. A major quality of such sounds—now inevitably accomplished with computers—is their ability to evoke a choreographic sonic movement in space. The use of spatialization is clearly a very rich frontier. Position, patterns of motion, are clear and vivid characteristics of our experience with sound in everyday life. Yet this fundamental and moving aspect of sonic experience has played almost no part in the music produced in the Western tradition, or any other, for that matter. From my earliest compositions, especially in the 1962 music theater work, The Emperor of Ice Cream (in which the singers constantly reform their positions on stage in order to alter the impact of their vocalizations), space has been a consideration. I think of music as, in part, a gestural medium, so in this recording spatial design has been encompassed in its presentation.
As I worked with Peter Otto’s Designer software to shape the spatial aspects of the computer sounds, I began to realize that the essential expressive attribute of spatial location was—in a sense that I had not consciously recognized until recently—a part of everything I did musically. Whether technology is involved in the music I am writing or not, I tend to feel, I tend to project—in the phrases I am crafting—a spatial dimension, an inertial envelope. So it occurred to me that I might look at music I had already composed, especially single-line works, and reshape it, extending its expressive compass by devising for it a spatial calligraphy. I conceived a repertoire of spatial motives, a way of thinking about sound movement for the solo violin and solo cello works (but different in each). The effect of position evolves slowly from the beginning, coming by the end of the piece to be a central feature of the musical experience. My approach was to guide the listener into an awareness of and a sensitivity to the effect of mobile sound. I used changes in position, alterations in the nature of the space (dry and near, distant and reverberant, and so on), just as attributes such as dynamic shading or shifts in timbre or vibrato have traditionally been used—as an attribute with which one empathizes, identifying more directly and completely, as a result, with the essential journeys of the materials.
These new experiences are, indeed, impossible to realize by means of live musicians alone, and yet, they are integrally dependent upon the shaping of instrumental sounds. The use that I make of spatialization is based fundamentally upon the identity of the musical phrases I have written as performed. Spatial manipulations can be as elemental, as natural (or un-natural) as the patterns of movement of a dancer’s arms or legs. For my part, I try to craft sound movement directly and tightly to the shaping force of the performer’s realizations. So this new dimension amplifies what the performer is already doing. It is not superimposed as an abstract or arbitrary “effect”, but is wedded to the performer’s actions. There is little that occurs in the binaural fields that can be heard in this release that could not be done in live performance. I have done a number of works with real-time computer spatialization, and expect to do this more in the future. The live performer remains at the center of the experience.
Livingston:
Connecting back to the previous topic of realizing the composer’s possibilities of sound and gesture, the limitations of Western notation were very much part of the process as Roger and I worked together over several years on the clarity of written articulation—for the printed score to serve future generations of cellists, hoping to eliminate ambiguity and create a certainty of interpretation. It was a prized opportunity for both of us to consider these aspects of the composer/performer relationship, since composers rarely have a chance to reconsider their older music, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, nor do performers have the opportunity to address these reconsiderations from their own perspective. Yet the new edition of Focus a beam ... enabled precisely that interchange. There was of course compromise from both parties, as our tendency is to individually believe in certain traditional notations, while recognizing limitations in others. And to genuinely express the composer’s intentions, where a crescendo is not just a crescendo, but a new kind of blossoming sound that didn’t exist before, requires a balance which suggests the potential without overdoing the marginal notes.
Reynolds:
Serious editing of musical scores rarely happens these days. It has been another casualty of the increasing economic pressures felt by publishers everywhere. So I asked Hugh to edit the score of Focus…, and Mark to do the same with Kokoro. They are credited in the published editions by C.F. Peters Corporation.
Livingston:
When I first conceived of doing a project with Mark Menzies, it was my intention to encapsulate the considerable body of unique work we had developed while pursuing our doctorates at the University of California, San Diego, with many tours and concerts and recordings together. As this period came to an end, the desire to commemorate these musical experiences arose. Given that some time had elapsed since the initial documentary recordings of solo works by Brian Ferneyhough, Chinary Ung and Roger Reynolds, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to provide a summation of our excellently stimulating musical years in San Diego (playing under conductor Harvey Sollberger and working with these composers), with a recording project: “The Younger Generation Plays the Music of...” So perhaps this is the first disc in our series of coming together with a composer whom we know well and has offered us so much. When Roger spontaneously called me late one night to say he would like to create a composition for us, and particularly for us, he suggested it would quite literally be a nexus of our historical collaboration, intended primarily for this recording project.
A couple of years passed before we arrived in San Diego for the first of the recording sessions—it was a rather unusual experience to see the individual affective components separately (the source “images” mentioned elsewhere), to marshal the energy for his portrayal of “the Furies”, to find our somber and energetic and passionate and deliberate voices almost in an instant (the parts for our source-recording sessions had only arrived a day before!). Then something like six months elapsed before we revisited these materials, with their original threads now woven into a transformed tapestry, the composition, Process and Passion. Such intimacy with the procedure of arriving at a recorded document is rare for interpreters. And, of course, in time we would find that our original recorded materials had been used in the composer’s computer music studio to create yet another voice in the final mix, the computer part which leaves our individual instrumental voices as a permanent part of the texture of all future performances, our continuing souvenir of this long-developing project with Roger Reynolds.
As the recording date neared, with only a few preparatory rehearsals, I was perplexed to be in a situation where performances (good for working out the details, no?) did not proceed the permanent documentation of this work. Who, after all, would record a work without extensive performance first? But we solved the problems quickly and the composition came together at a level far different than we expected. Now I wonder: who would possibly perform such a difficult work without first getting to know it through the recording process? At the conclusion of the project, I said to Mark, “If we ever perform Process and Passion, we are ready. I’ll meet you on stage.”
Mark Menzies:
In the tradition of many period-instrument recordings (and program notes) providing a history of the instruments being played (after all they are the devices actually creating the sound!) it is appropriate, given that this production is so much about the sound, to acknowledge the makers of the instruments used to make this recording.
Mark Menzies’ violin was made by Los Angeles-based luthier Michael Fisher. It was constructed in 1999 on a Guarneri (del Jesu) model. Fisher, trained initially in Mittenwald, Germany, has also worked for Charles Beare (London), and in Los Angeles, with Hans Weisshaar before establishing his own shop in 1984. The violin reflects the qualities of its model: Guarneri violins are well-known for their ability to extend the tonal capacities of the moment and respond, seemingly, to just about anything asked of them. In this way, I could not imagine an instrument more suited to the kinds of expressive reaches this recording asks for; then again, performing older (and sometimes gentler!) music on this violin, reveals its capacity for utter sweetness and blendfulness as it is needed.
Hugh Livingston
I play a cello made in Montiglio, near Torino, Italy in 1928. It bears both the labels of Hannibal Fagnola and his disciple Riccardo Genovese. The distinctive orange varnish is recognized widely as the hallmark of Fagnola. The instrument was the gift of Mrs. Helen Payne Wilshire Walsh. The instrument was previously set up for orchestral playing, but has modulated well into its role as an extremely present new music voice since I acquired it in 1993. It has a slightly oversized fingerboard and a low bridge to enable a particularly wide range of techniques such as my trademark hundred pizzicato techniques. I use a bow made by Jon Vanderhorst of Massachusetts which has a particularly strong stop-on-a-dime feel, ideal for the rapid changes of articulation needed for contemporary music. For efficiency I use a grip just below the balance point of the bow, not at the frog, and use movable rubber grips to alter the articulation. Having the bow well in hand also enables me to alter the tension of the hair with my second and third fingers.
Preliminary Sources: Hugh Livingston and Mark Menzies working with Roger Reynolds
Preliminary Source Recording: Josef Kucera / Source Editing and Processing: Roger Reynolds
Recording Engineer: Josef Kucera
All recordings in the UCSD Music Department’s Studio A
Editing and Mastering: Josef Kucera
Software environment for original, six-channel spatialization: Peter Otto’s Designer software
Spatialization concepts and realization: Roger Reynolds
Binaural encoding of all three works: Pei Xiang
Consultant on binaural recording: Durand Begault
Binaural encoding software: Tom Erbe’s SoundHack environment
Project funding: from the good offices of the UCSD Dean of Graduate Studies and Research and from The Dean of Arts and Humanities
Kokoro, Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward…, and
Process and Passion are published by C.F. Peters Corporation, New York.
A CD of the source recordings by Mr. Livingston and Mr. Menzies required
for performance is available through the publisher.
Roger Reynolds’ works are licensed by Broadcast Music Incorporated.
Cover Art: Karen Reynolds / Graphic elements from Roger Reynolds’ sketches courtesy of the Reynolds Trust and The Music Division of the Library of Congress
Studio A photographs by Melanie Sayer
Package design: Matt Schickele
Thanks for the Commissioning funds provided by the Why Note? Festival, Dijon (for Process and Passion), and to the British Arts Council and Irvine Arditti (for Kokoro).
Thanks to the Center for Research in Computing and The Arts, the Department of Music, and the UCSD Academic Senate Committee on Research for further assistance and support.
CD 1: stereophonic presentation
1-12 Kokoro
13 Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward...
14-23 Process and Passion
CD 2: binaural presentation
On this disc, the same three works have been given distinctive 6-channel spatialization. This sound choreography was then binaurally encoded by Pei Xiang so as to simulate the experience of the multi-channel versions.
This version must be listened to with stereo headphones. It is not suitable for speaker playback or radio broadcast.
Kokoro (1992)
Mark Menzies, violin
Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outwards ... (1989)
Hugh Livingston, cello
Process and Passion (2002)
Mark Menzies, violin; Hugh Livingston, cello
CD 1: stereophonic presentation
Kokoro
1 2:41
2 1:04
3 2:03
4 1:39
5 5:13
6 0:42
7 1:41
8 2:19
9 2:23
10 1:47
11 3:50
12 2:19
Focus a beam, emptied
of thinking, outward...
13 14:02
Process and Passion
14 2:40
15 5:22
16 1:43
17 2:38
18 3:20
19 0:20
20 1:40
21 1:21
22 2:03
23 2:24
total 65:24
CD 2: binaural presentation
This version must be listened to with stereo headphones. It is not suitable for speaker playback or radio broadcast.
Kokoro
1 2:41
2 1:04
3 2:03
4 1:39
5 5:13
6 0:42
7 1:41
8 2:19
9 2:23
10 1:47
11 3:50
12 2:19
Focus a beam, emptied
of thinking, outward...
13 14:02
Process and Passion
14 2:40
15 5:22
16 1:43
17 2:38
18 3:20
19 0:20
20 1:40
21 1:21
22 2:03
23 2:24
total 65:24
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