Introduction
My title - Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging - relates to a tendency I find in myself. I'm continually foraging into the deep past in efforts toward mapping meanings into an imagined future. Cathartically, It's a kind of "unburying" of the subconscious. A Jungian way of being in the world, and what we might call a process of individuation. Moving between conscious and subconscious, wakefulness or dreaming, we hover within liminalities. Having been consumed by these states, I find myself slowly emerging. How does one communicate a soundtrack to these experiences? (Journal entry, May 2022)
This "foraging into the deep past in efforts toward mapping meanings into an imagined future" relates to an organismic - rather than mechanistic - existential orientation which grounds my being in the world. I take inspiration from the process and time-focused philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson as well as Physicist David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate order.
For me, an organismic or holistic world outlook psycho-scientifically views the cosmos as an interconnected web of probabilistic ecologies where actors within their entangled non-linear space-time environments are granted orders and degrees of conscious or cognitive capacity.
Although beyond the scope of this paper, It would feel dishonest to my philosophy and creative practice not to provide a mere footnote to this pervading sense of holistic existential grounding. Within a Jungian individuation paradigm - where creative process can be linked to non-ego or something more collective -my agency transforms and finds greater meaning within expanded empirical and metaphysical paradigms. Our world needs to re-emphasize organismic paradigms in order to make progress in areas such as cultural diversity and inclusion, environmental ecology, as well as a more unified theory of our surrounding cosmos.
Unburying, From Liminals, Emerging
This artistic research project - spanning the period of 2020-2022 - stems from the curiosity of moving beyond the fixed pitches of western tuning (12 edo) and into a continuum of extended sound possibilities.
Can an acoustic grand piano be sonically and conceptually reimagined so as to re-negotiate its core axiomatic assumptions around tuning and timbre? why should the piano continue to be so accustomed to only one tuning system? In contrast, how can “pure sounds” (ratios found in the harmonic series) co-exist with ethnically diverse microtonal tuning constellations?
Dialoging with a newly invented tuning system, what emergent properties might we find when magnetic piano preparations are used to evoke specific timbral effects from Balinese Gamelan and Indian Karnatik music? Collectively, how can this expanded notion of “piano” merge with spatialization to facilitate embodied experiences for audiences? How might a process-oriented Jungian-inspired dream work communicate itself so as to distill and coalesce a fertile musical landscape?
My research has branched outwards from the nucleus of a microtonal prepared piano. In the process I’ve created my own tuning system, the Justly-Intonated Sedeng-Pelog. Using this tuning I’ve contextualized the microtonal prepared piano for three settings which has resulted in three album-length recordings.
Postcards of Nostalgia: microtonal prepared piano and sound design (ILK Music)
Unburying, From Liminals, Emerging: microtonal prepared piano, saxophone trio and percussion (ILK Music)
Juniper Fuse Ensemble: Nagual | two microtonal prepared piano, two percussion and soprano saxophone (KAIROS)
To the degree to which any of these questions may find meaning, I’d like to urge the listener/reader to rely on his/her ears beyond a mere conceptual assessment. In this sense the finished musical recordings or live performances speak louder than any written text.
***You can listen to all three works HERE or on the streaming platform of your choice.