March 1998<\/p>\n
I started writing the imaginary pieces in 1998.
\nThey are a long-reach outcome of a debate I had
\nwith John Cage the final time I consulted with him
\nin Evanston (in 1992) when I performed
\nEuropera5 with Yvar Mikhashoff. At the time one
\nof our students asked John the (transparent)
\nquestion: what is music? And John responded (after
\nthe well-versed theatrical pause and the small
\nwinning smile) it must have something to do with sound.
\nI (erroneously) postulated that he meant that it
\nmust have something to do with physical sound. And I
\ninterrogated him about illusory timbres. Sounds
\nthat I detect when I conceive of them. These are
\ncompositions that are actualized in my mind, and
\nhave no province in the material sphere. This led
\nme to an abundance of investigations with
\nutterances that evoke sounds and time.
\nConsequently I comprehended that the recollection
\nof music does not tackle continuance, as it seems to
\nbe perceived in the physical realm. It shrivels time
\ntowards an individual instant. For example when a
\nperson pronounces the words \u201cBach Goldberg\u2019s
\nVariations\u201d I respond with a clear acoustical
\nmemory, a sound in my mind, which is an
\nencapsulation of the whole piece with the passage
\nof time embedded in it. It is not just the label of the
\nname of the piece, but an allusion that embraces
\ntime and the music\u2019s advancement in it. I attempted
\nshaping such moments in my music, individual
\ninstants that were designed to elicit the
\ncontinuousness of time. Recent pieces present an
\neffort to invent a composition that in each and
\nevery moment depicts its whole.
\nThis year I adopted a changed route, fabricating
\npieces that transpire only in the audience\u2019s mind.
\nThey have no physical attributes. Each has
\ndisparate explicit directions of how it should be
\npresented: some are executed while other music is
\nbeing played and others in silence. A piece is
\ninvariably performed by providing every member
\nof the audience with a reproduction of the score, to
\nbe read in silence without an origination of any
\nphysical sounds.
\nWhen writing these pieces I unraveled new
\nthings; about time propelling backwards (it is not
\nsymmetrical to the motion forward), and about the
\nperceived and determined beauty of sounds, and
\nmost of all about our agreements as audience
\nmembers about what it is that we listened to.<\/p>\n
A new Description \u2010 Feb 15, 2009.<\/p>\n
The interest in text pieces came about from two directions. I started writing text scores
\nfor improvisation ensembles in 1988 when working on Nautilus a collaboration of live
\ndance\/video\/music at SF State University. These pieces use texts to convey instructions
\nto musicians, and are made of language taken from the traditional discourse of westernculture
\nmusicians. The most useful feature that came out of this
\npieces\/process\/research was that I found out that I could specify time in the score in a
\nnon\u2010linear way. For example consider the instruction \u201cstart by playing this melody and
\ncontinue improvising on it on and off for the next few minutes, when you are not
\nimprovising you may whistle a tune or dance a jig\u201d (this is not a quote from a specific
\npiece but a useful example.) In this example the discourse is one of western\u2010musicians \u2010
\n\u201cmelody, improvising, tune, jig\u201d are all words that have specific meanings in this
\ndiscourse. But Time, in this example, is flexible, i.e. the composer doesn\u2019t know how
\nlong this section of the piece would be (\u201cfew minutes,\u201d) and also non\u2010linear. The text
\ndescribes the action for the full length of the section (\u201con and off for a few minutes,\u201d)
\nand then goes back in time to fill, with new sounds or actions, the holes that were left in
\ntime.
\nThe second direction, which led me to a new and different type of text pieces, is based
\non a response that John Cage made in one of our classes at Northwestern University to
\nthe question \u201cwhat is music?\u201d To which he responded, \u201cit must have something to do
\nwith sound.\u201d It took me several years to ponder this statement, and discover that what
\nmade me uncomfortable about it was my interpretation that sound is a literal physical
\nentity, but the other aspect of \u201csound\u201d the imaginary one, the one we can recalled in
\nour mind without any physical sensation, I treated as a separate entity. This started a
\nprocess of compositional activity that I group under the heading \u201cimaginary pieces.\u201d The
\nlistener in her\/his mind without any physical sensation creates these pieces. The
\ndiscourse here uses the English language within its normal day\u2010today use, and,
\nimportantly, within the bounds of western culture. So images like \u201cthe beeping sound of
\na life support system\u201d are used to evoke a sound, which, it is assumed, is familiar to any
\nTV watching western culture based audience and is quite precise in its sound contents.
\nAnd when the image \u201ca flute like pretty melody,\u201d is used, it is intended to evoke a less
\ndetermined sound but one that we, participants in Western Culture, know many things
\nabout its sound contour. Composing in the mind of the audience entails, I believe,
\ndescribing the sounds in words, so the choice of language and the determination of its
\ncultural context are imperative. And, obviously, this encourages the translations of the
\ntext to the language of the local of the performance. Since I believe that most
\nperformances of the pieces happen on\u2010line, English seemed to be the most appropriate
\nand relevant choice.
\nThe term \u201cdiscourse\u201d, rather then \u201cperformance practice,\u201d is chosen because
\n\u201cDiscourse\u201d within our academic\/artistic discourse clearly identifies cultural context and
\nsocial structures as components of the discussion; on the other hand, the term
\n\u201cperformance practice\u201d is placed within musicians\u2019 discourse and seems to make these
\ntwo distinctions blurry. \u201cPerformance Practice\u201d refers to a body of knowledge that a
\nmusician performing a piece uses, \u201cDiscourse\u201d encompasses both that discussion and
\nalso the body of knowledge that the audience employs when it listens to a piece of
\nmusic or is involved in the performance of music.
\nI found two very powerful tools in this discourse. The first is that it provided me with the
\nability to mix ugly sounds with beautiful ones without having the \u201cugliness\u201d become an
\nissue of discussion between the composer and the audience. If asked to imagine \u201cugly\u201d
\nsounds an audience member will choose a sound that is appropriately ugly for her\/him.
\nThe second tool is derived from the ability to choose words according to how they
\nsound and place them next to each other to create rhythmic patterns; this is obvious
\nand elementary in the discourse of poets. \u201cThis sound is tremendously slow,
\ntremendously slow,\u201d attempts to convey the sound by using the sound of the \u201cs\u201d and
\nmakes an effort to influence the rhythm by repeating the words. This, as in poetry, may
\nget lost in a translation, so the use of it is limited.
\nIn the imaginary pieces the audience is provided with a sheet of paper on which the text
\nis printed, and given a certain time to read the text and play the sound in their head.
\nThe notation and layout is important as it does imply certain musical elements. Size of
\nwords and the distance between them are, it is assume, translated into accents and
\nspaces in time in the imaginary music. There was a suggestion that I project the text one
\nline at a time, gaining more control of the time process, and the unfolding of the piece
\nin the mind. I may do a piece like that in the future (perhaps very soon,) but I found that
\nidea problematic for the older pieces, significantly because the flexibility of non\u2010linear
\ntime may be lost. For example a sentence such as \u201cearlier a melody sung by an old
\nfemale Arab voice started but it just now became noticeable,\u201d may lose the power it has
\nof moving backwards in time. If time is explicit as it is when the line appears in the
\nprojection in a pre\u2010specified moment, the conviction that we moved backwards in time
\nmay be lost. But, as I said, this new idea has my interest, and it does seem to solve one
\nproblem that the text pieces have: that descriptions of time of different durations are
\nread at equal duration. For example, \u201cthe low timbre becomes louder very slowly, \u201c and
\n\u201cthe high sound becomes softer very quickly,\u201d take the same amount of time to read,
\nbut should take different lengths of time to play in one\u2019s head.
\nAs I am writing this I am reading Oliver Sachs\u2019 book Musicophilia. It\u2019s a wonderful
\namazing book that summarizes the current research on how the brain processes music,
\nsound, and the memory of music. There is abundant evidence that the ability to imagine
\nmusic and sound is very common to all of us, and the ability to create new music in the
\nmind, one that is based on memories of music, is also common. My imaginary pieces, in
\nthis context, seem very obvious, and not at all radical or unusual.
\nThe imaginary pieces present an expression of another one of my interests, that of
\naudience\/performer\/composer interactions. For many years I\u2019ve struggled with the role
\nof the audience and their placement in the physical world of music representation, and
\nhow it influences the music itself. There are many different issues that arise in this
\ndiscussion. One of the firsts that comes to my mind is that of the traditional concert
\nsetting where the audience comprises of a trapped group of like\u2010minded individuals
\nattached to their seats for the duration of the music. In any live music concert the
\naudience is identified as a group of equal members, equal in that they are all there for
\nthe same reason \u2010 to listen to the music. This can be, and is, sometime translated to
\nmean that they are also going through an identical, and mutual experience, and that
\neveryone hears the music in the same way. This is the basis of, for example, music
\ncriticism, where the critic is responding to a performance, which it is assumed, all
\nattending heard in the same fashion. This is a notion that I reject, many times I came out
\nof a concert and while attempting to describe to my friends what it is I heard, I
\ndiscovered that they heard something else altogether. In the classical music world the
\nsituation are even more restrictive, the audience is placed in such a way (with the
\nlights are on,) which makes leaving the hall in the middle of a piece close to impossible.
\nObviously it is a choice that they made responsibly in advance, but can people not
\nchange their minds?
\nBut Perhaps the most significant question that arises, for me, as an aspect of the
\ntraditional placement of the audience, is that the sound we hear as musicians is so
\ndifferent to the one the audience hears. When one is on stage, for example in the
\norchestra, the choir, or next to a single pianist, the sound one hears is much richer (to
\nmy mind,) and all engulfing then any sound projected to the audience sitting in the
\nauditorium and hearing the music either directly or through audio speakers. How do you
\nget the audience to move among the performers, to feel free to move in and out of the
\nspace, and to get a sense that their experience is both individual and collective are
\nquestions that I tried to solve to varying success in different pieces (The Andy Warhol
\nDiaries, NU Piece, Cruising Prohibited When Lights Flashing) in the installations (the
\nSpeakers Suit, The Speakers Army Jacket, Attention Step,) and in the imaginary pieces. In
\nthe imaginary pieces the individual and private is expressed and emphasized, the
\naudience member is the performer. The total experience and the sounds created to
\nrepresent it are clearly individual, and it is the commonality of the experience that is
\nuncertain and may be discussed. The freedom of the choice of involvement with the
\npiece is held exclusively within the purgative of the listener\/performer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1998-2009, \u05d8\u05e7\u05e1\u05d8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5119"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5137,"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5119\/revisions\/5137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manofim.org\/harama\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}