The end of the project was approaching; I thought I could give one more twist into the research and come out with one musical study incorporating some slight new advance. I didn’t want to end the project just looking back, and warmed up with the intense effort of the last periods, the head flourishing with new possibilities and ideas, anything seemed to be at the tip of the fingers. But indeed, that ideal plan would have meant new software development, tests, experiments… For different reasons this combined effort at different levels was beyond my possibilities during this last phase and when I realized it was in practice too much, I decided to drop the idea of a new step forward and save the idea of producing a new piece which would be, so to speak, out of the research.
The interesting thing is that by being out of the research it is just as well a part of it. Research like art tends to profit from all circumstances and opportunities to make everything with which it has to deal an integral part of it. The idea of making a piece with no particular element to consider, free to use or deviate from the ideas developed during the project, was an interesting subject in itself.
This quotation, from the program note for its premiere, represents quite faithfully the spirit and the circumstances surrounding its production. Fantasyon matter and colourwas done almost against all reasonable considerations and, indeed, became a tour-de-force to end it up in time for its premiere. The project was ending, actually officially finished by the time of its birth, and the available working time at the Ligeti Hall became more and more scarce. There were, on the other hand, no measurements of Fantasy's setup to build a virtual model with which to approach a sensual experience outside of the hall. In a way it became some kind of transition back into real life: into inner listening, abstract thinking and some leaning on simplified ad hoc models at different venues.
Unfortunately, for these same reasons, the visual and aural documentation I can here present is rather limited. As already explained elsewhere, making photographs of the speaker-configurations at the Ligeti Hall is a problematic task, demanding different strategies to show some perspective or other; an aural representation, on the other hand, would absolutely imply a virtual model of the setup, which, as mentioned, I did not have. Both these questions require ‘leisure’ time in the hall to work them out. We are left hence almost exclusively with the power of words, and through these I will try to transmit those aspects of the piece and its composition which may be more relevant for the documentation of this project.
Fantasy was finished and, as far as I am concerned, it has been an important rounding up contribution to the project, not the least because of this ‘out-of-the-project’ quality, with its implied distance and its vocation to look afresh from the basis of what had been achieved, even if there could not yet exist a fully overviewing perspective.
Fantasy uses all fixed speakers at the Ligeti Hall plus four additional ones standing on the floor in the middle of the room –exactly those that can be seen in the first photograph– and two large subwoofers. I had been designing and polishing this speaker-setup already for some time. Somehow it was more abstract and defying than had been the previous ones, less functionally oriented but very interesting and full of possibilities. I think this setup was attracting me so strongly that it became one of the main reasons to keep on with the idea of making one more last piece. The main idea, as expected, was to build a network of related places –potential 2d/3d containers defined through speakers at the boundaries– but as open as possible, so that different place-configurations could be designed from the given positions. In Figure 2 you may see most speakers (the sky is fully used, but I have not represented each single element of it) including a sketch, serving as algorithm, of the placement of the seats for the audience.
Much more interesting than this second figure might be the next one, Figure 3, where there are already represented, as dotted lines of different colours, connection lines depicting boundaries of potential places. Perhaps it might be somewhat confusing on first instance, because I tried to represent in some cases several possibilities using same speakers, but it has been a fundamental inspirational device during the composition. By using colours I was trying to add another level of information on potential relationships between structures. In this diagram, the four black circles in the middle represent the floor speakers shown in the first photograph, while the double set of four red circles, on each side of the hall, represent a structure analogous to the ‘Rosaces’ mentioned in the description of Topoi –a thick slice of sound alongside the wall. The diagram lacks any information of heights and orientations of the speakers, so, by itself, it is probably more a personal tool, but I hope it may open a small window of understanding about the ideas behind.
This is not the first time that I have used an schematic diagram as a tool to watch while letting the mind flow away, actually as a springboard to fly above, based on it, but through it and beyond it. Usually it has been rather a time and logic block diagram –something representing the structure of relationships of a piece or a part of it– but in the case of Fantasy it this setup representation became the main one (although there have also been also those other types of diagrams). It should not be surprising, however, to learn that a diagram of relationships in space did become a main inspirational tool for this piece: I was indeed trying to approach music from a ‘plastic’ perspective: lines, surfaces, bodies, colours, textures and movements in space.
One other important underlying activity in the preparation for the composition was the reading and re-reading of texts and essays from artists coming from the visual domain. A fundamental one becoming "Punkt und Linie zu Fläche", that wonderful essay of Wassily Kandinsky. The purpose being not to draw parallelisms, an almost impossible task, but to get immersed and inspired by the rigor and understanding of a (superb) ‘plastic’ mind. Indeed, with Fantasy I was trying to push myself into the position to make a leap. I had in my hands the knowledge and techniques I had developed during the project, I had that immense space of potential relationships as a multidimensional canvas, it was the moment to draw, paint, knead and sculpt.
This perspective has confronted me with many curious, interesting and even new compositional problems. Beyond the questions of how to achieve this or that colour, this or that textural perception or degree of bodily presence, the most interesting, at times perplexing, came from articulation and combination of such elements. Problems akin to those of polyphony, objects that would not let others breath through, nuances that would disappear or that, conversely, would dominate the whole constitution, mixes that would not merge. This was a clear confirmation that the plastic sound object is a compositional question above all, as we had assumed in our proposal.
Approaching the idea of colour and even that of tactile texture, either dynamically or statically, is a relatively easy question as long as we deal with points, lines or surfaces –music, one way or other, has done that for long–, but as soon as we enter into the realm of a bodily perception we are compelled into the world of fluids, more or less ‘solid’ perhaps, but fluids nonetheless. Time makes its presence very strongly the moment the focus is set in the direction of a three-dimensionality.
The most intricate and challenging question, demanding further reflection and imagination, is that of the interaction and the relationships with time. Our visual perception has an implicit time dimension, but our aural perception is always explicitly in time. The conception and construction of a musico-plastical form is, I believe, the main question. Fantasy, however, is not an essay, at most one more link in the chain of research statements, but it is a musical piece and as such closes itself in a certain universe, proposing some answers and opening even more questions.
In the composition of Fantasy there have also been all the offspring of inner listening, fantasies and conceptions, living in our inside, being memorized, analyzed and set aside, evolving and being transformed in that process of recall, transformation and oblivion; dreams that carry the force of their need to become and stubbornly impose themselves. Sometimes they are almost nothing, sensations, colours, haptic textures, sometimes mechanisms, structures, while at times they can even be full processes.
One of these, arising rather early in my imagination, became finally a musical reality that can be heard almost at the beginning of the piece. The realization of this section became a non-trivial but enjoyable effort, and we might as well lean on it to get an insight into some interesting compositional questions.
‘A multi-coloured set of sound objects moving independently at an enormous speed from one place to another in the hall, then suddenly freezing in some position to start anew in another frenzy motion passage'. A perception of space, almost physical, unheard before.
This alternating cycle of movement/stop repeats itself, subtly evolving until faintly vanishing immersed in the genesis of a new musical idea. Let us remind that the ‘image’ came in first not as a statement but as inner listening, so its realization became a process of analysis, formalization and synthesis, which, almost at the same time, got transformed and was developed molded by broader formal requirements. It is both a statement and a transition from one place in the piece to another.
Having in mind the placement of the audience in the Hall, it becomes clear that for different zones, auditors have different distance relationships to the speakers, so there has to be a perfect balance in the display across the Hall. On the other hand, to avoid creating a feeling of pulse or rhythm, there must be a careful control design both at the global level as at the level of each individual element in the definition of the trajectories. Distance is time in the realm of sound.
A set of colourful objects moving at high speed will convey a dual perception of a whole and its parts. The balance is fragile, but it is exactly this dual perception of whole/parts of movement and space that brings it into a plastic perception. You have to be able to distinguish them, but you will not be able to follow any of them individually, otherwise the spell is broken. A global perception, therefore, but in order to feel the speed you need to perceive their individuality through the movement. A perfect balance again, but this time of characterization of the different elements is then paramount.
Then, there is these movements, which we could view as trajectories from one place to another, let us call these vertices, and where the traverse along the segments would be very short due to the high speed of movement. The most critical aspect is that the listener has to feel the existence of these segments, otherwise it would not be more than a texture of impulses. So again we must rely on special spatial techniques to convey to perception the sensation of movement from one place to another at such speed making perceivable the trajectory. Much care has to be taken also, with the way the objects ‘bounce’ in the vertices so that their perceptual strength matches that of the in-between passages.
Freezing a sound object in space, on the other hand, is not just simply stopping its movement completely (in this context), that would mean a dramatic perceptual change even at the level of the object itself. Again, it is simply transmitting the impression of a stop though still keeping some movement. What I did was adding a slight ‘spatial’ modulation around a certain position in the space. This is not really heard as such but rather as a tremolo, but the image gets diffused in space and with changing characteristics, becoming at the same time, therefore, static and dynamic.
I had hence at my disposal the colour nuance of the different objects, their dynamics, the length of each period of the cycle (movement/stop), the speed of movement, the speed and amplitude of ‘stop’-modulation and its main position, the distribution of speakers on which the movement was taking place plus some other secondary parameters. It was with these elements that I could carefully play, varying them so as to build a process and a form.
An electroacoustic-music composition for 111 speakers in a precisely designed setup. The piece, dedicated to Robert Höldrich, is written as a software score running in real-time under a particular software environment (ScoreReader) in the Supercollider platform. Its premiere took place at the ‘Ein MusiCoSlisches Opfer’ concert-event held at the Mumuth Haus für Musik Graz on November 8th, 2013.