Tag: technology

Data-Driven DJ Brian Foo: Statistics That Sing

Posted on July 22, 2015 by - Conversations, Spotlight

In January 2015, multimedia artist and web developer Brian Foo posted the first track in his year-long Data-Driven DJ project, an endeavor billed as a series of “experiments” rather than compositions that combine “data, algorithms, and borrowed sounds.” His working method allows him to mix areas he is at home in—namely computer science and data analysis—with a skill he hopes to learn: how to make music.

For his initial outing, Foo used census data to chart the rise and fall of median income levels along a subway line in New York City. He also selected samples from the work of resident musicians. He then wrote a computer program that combined those two elements to produce his final (after many iterations—more on that in a bit) sonic representation of the information. It sounds like this:

If you know the work of Steve Reich, it is impossible not to draw an immediate sonic connection here—and that is in some sense very much part of the point. Foo used a carefully selected palette of raw materials to conjure a fuller mental image of what, on the page, is rather a drier set of facts and figures. And he approached this challenge by using elements that he felt authentically connected to the given subject matter. Reich’s New York Counterpoint and the technique of phase shifting also spoke to Foo’s interest in exploring his own understanding of musical concepts while developing the listener’s emotional investment in the matter at hand.

“You’re never really told how to feel when you look at a chart, even though it may have to do with something that is very human like income inequality or climate change,” Foo explains. “It ends up being just information that you don’t really internalize or contemplate. So I wanted to figure out how to take something like a chart but curate an experience in which you’d feel a certain way while listening to the song.”

He also wants to take advantage of another aspect of music: its ability to grab your ears and not let go. “You don’t really think about a chart all day after you see it, but with music, it kind of repeats. So if I could embed information into the music, then those topics and issues would circulate in somebody’s head.”

So far he has applied his data-driven approach to music making to an engagingly diverse selection of topics: seizures, smog, romantic attraction. For one track, he developed a complex methodology to analyze the relationship between painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock through samples of their work. The next month, he was tracing the movement of refugees over the course of four decades. Despite his desire to curate an experience for his listeners, his subject matter has also forced him to confront some interesting questions about the relationships between sound and emotional manipulation: Should the music sound “better” when passing through rich neighborhoods in his presentation of income? Should the sounds be uncomfortable during the active period of seizure? Where is the line between representation and judgment?

Foo says he’s had the most aesthetic luck with data that follows a curve, thereby supporting a climax and resolution within the track. His process also involves a certain element of ongoing surprise as he combines sounds and iterates the track over and over (and over) again until its parameters have been tweaked to the point that it meets his sonic desires. But he won’t artificially manipulate the results to improve only a certain section, requiring instead that the full track must remain true to the data from start to finish. Yet tweaking at the level of the algorithm changes the entire song, so it can be a frustrating process of trial and error to land on the final result. “I’m like a mad scientist just trying to mix different things together until something happens,” Foo admits. “So it’s almost a brute force process where I just iterate hundreds, if not thousands of times, until it sounds good.”

If you’re curious at this point precisely how these data sets end up being represented by sound, well, the details are only a click away. Core to Foo’s project is complete transparency when it comes to process. His tools and methods are meticulously logged on the project website for each individual piece, and if visitors find a way to expand, modify, or improve on his process he hopes to hear from them. This fits comfortably with Foo’s larger philosophical tenets concerning making art more accessible and inter-personal. He even offers fans the option to pre-order the eventual album by trading sounds with him or promoting the project in lieu of cash payment.

Foo suspects that he invests one to four hours every day into making each month’s track, and, contrary to expectation, his working process is actually lengthening—likely attributable to the increasing complexity of each sonic experiment as he acquires new skills and experience.

And that is his preferred way of learning, he concedes. “I try to not learn correctly. I basically try to avoid learning the right way for the longest period of time as I can because I think there’s this unique point in time when you’re learning that you don’t really know what the limitations are. When you don’t know the right way of doing things yet, you don’t really know where the ceiling is, and I wanted to see how far I could get just with the things that I already knew.”

Digital to Analog: The Needle and Thread Running Through Technology

Posted on June 24, 2015 by - Analysis, Articles

Daphne Oram making hand-drawn inputs to the Oramics apparatus. (Via.)

Daphne Oram making hand-drawn inputs to the Oramics apparatus. (Via.)

This is a picture of Daphne Oram, demonstrating the technology she invented: Oramics. Oram (1925-2003) learned electronics as a studio engineer at the BBC in the 1940s. She composed the first all-electronic score broadcast by the BBC—in 1957, for a production of Jean Giradoux’s Amphitryon 38—and, a year later, co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A year after that, dismayed at the BBC’s lack of enthusiasm for her work (which may be sensed in the fact that the Workshop was not allowed to use the word “music” in its name), she struck out on her own and began to develop Oramics.

Oram’s conception was a radical union of audio and visual. It was a synthesizer, but one in which the input was hand-drawn patterns on strips of 35mm film. The strips of film rolled past photoelectric sensors, and the resulting currents were converted to sound. The avant-garde possibilities of sound-on-film had been explored previously—by Oskar Fischinger, for example, or Arseny Avraamov and his Soviet counterparts (the latter well-chronicled in Andrey Smirnov’s essential study Sound in Z)—but Oramics was more ambitious, more innovative. Oram’s machine ran up to ten strips of film at once, controlling not only pitch, but amplitude, waveform, and various filters. Sound-wise, it was miles ahead of the voltage-controlled analog synthesizers of the time.

HB Oram 2This is a picture of my daughter playing with the Oramics app, an iOS-based simulation. It was released in 2011, to coincide with a special exhibition at London’s Science Museum. Oram’s original apparatus was on display—now behind glass, no longer functional. Oram had stopped working on Oramics in the 1990s, after suffering a pair of strokes; by then, the advance of electronic music had left her and her machine behind. To consider why is to, perhaps, get close to something about the nature of technology, our relationship with it, how decisions about it in one place and time shape attitudes in another place and time.

Fair warning: this article is going to take the scenic route getting to its destination—more suite than sonata. But that I should feel compelled to give such a warning is not irrelevant. Because the real question is why some things are at the center, and why some things are peripheral, and how those things get to where they are. And a good starting point for answering that question is another technology: clothes.

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The Great Masculine Renunciation, M division.

The Great Masculine Renunciation, M division.

One of the great geologic-level events in the history of fashion was first named by the British psychoanalyst J. C. Flugel in his 1930 book The Psychology of Clothes. The event was, as Flugel put it, “the sudden reduction of male sartorial decorativeness which took place at the end of the eighteenth century”:

[M]en gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women, and there by making their own tailoring the most austere and ascetic of the arts. Sartorially, this event has surely the right to be considered as ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation.’ Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful.

Flugel attributed the Great Masculine Renunciation to the spread of democratic ideals in the wake of the French Revolution: with all men now theoretically equal, male fashion converged on a kind of universal neutrality. In other words, according to Flugel, the more utilitarian style of fashion spread outward from the middle class, mirroring the rise of middle-class economic power.

Flugel was, perhaps, too optimistic. David Kuchta, in his book The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850, traces the origins of the Great Masculine Renunciation much further back, to the 1666 introduction of the three-piece suit by Charles II. Sobriety in dress was first a symbol of masculine, aristocratic propriety. Only later would the style be adopted by the middle class, in order to criticize aristocratic wealth and assert their own political power; in turn, the upper class would re-embrace the style in their own defense. Both sides, at the same time, accused the other of being insufficiently modest in their dress, of embodying not masculinity and prudence, but effeminacy and indulgence.

And note: it is entirely a parley between middle- and upper-class men. Kuchta concludes:

The great masculine renunciation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was thus less the triumph of middle-class culture; rather, it was the result of middle-class men’s appropriation of an earlier aristocratic culture, of aristocratic men’s appropriation of radical critiques of aristocracy, and of a combined attempt by aristocratic and middle-class men to exclude working-class men and all women from the increasingly shared institutions of power. (emphasis added)

What really solidified the Great Masculine Renunciation was the great geologic-level event in the history of technology: the Industrial Revolution. What was once a symbol of judiciously wielded privilege now became a symbol of efficiency, of diligence, of devotion to productivity. The uniform of economic and political power could also signify a complete congruence of work and life. Anthropologist David Graeber, in a recent article, put it this way:

[T]he generic quality of formal male clothing, whether donned by factory owners or functionaries, makes some sense. These uniforms define powerful men as active, productive, and potent, and at the same time define them as glyphs of power—disembodied abstractions.

Dress for the cog in the machine you want to be.

A couple of months ago, I was at the annual Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard University, which featured the International Contemporary Ensemble, for which the group opted for outfits that, while realized in individual ways, still hewed close to standard new-music-ensemble dress. In fact, the few nods in the direction of rebellion—some bright leggings here, some gold-studded boots there, ICE founder Claire Chase’s metallic silver jacket—mostly just reinforced how closely the performers still orbited the standard all-black contemporary music uniform.

I’m not sure exactly when it became standard (a day of hunting through a few decades of archived newspaper reviews yielded precious little record of what performers were wearing—something, I realize, that might very well be symptomatic of what this article is discussing), but that all-black uniform has held sway for at least thirty years, which is not insignificant. Concert dress had long since conformed to the ideals of the Great Masculine Renunciation, so it makes sense that avant-garde concert dress would go even further in realizing those ideals: more stark, more neutral, more sober. And 20th-century avant-garde music, to an unprecedented extent, was a process-based movement—serialism to minimalism and everything in between—so one might expect its interpreters to take their fashion cues from the similarly streamlined and orderly world of the factory and the assembly line. But there’s something else going on with that parade of all-black, I think, and it is a bit of fallout from technological advance. And advance isn’t really the right word, in this case. We think of technological innovation as always being expansive, opening up possibilities and dimensions. But technological innovation also contracts dimensions. And the shadow of one of those contractions survives in all those black clothes.

One of the most sweeping changes wrought by audio recording and broadcasting technology was that, for the first time ever, music was no longer, by necessity, a visual as well as an aural experience. Music had always been only heard in live performance—which meant the listener was there, looking as well as hearing. (Even exceptions—Vivaldi’s female choristers singing behind a screen or Wagner’s enclosed pit orchestra or the like—were more like unusual variations of the visual context.) But with recordings and radio, the visual portion of musical performance disappeared. All one had was the sound. The technology decoupled eye and ear.

It is, actually, akin to the Great Masculine Renunciation. The process is the same: reduce a given media—and remember, as Marshall McLuhan was fond of pointing out, clothes are just as much a form of media as any other—to its discrete components, isolate what is essential, streamline it into its most basic, direct form, cast away everything else. In this case, you have two media changing in tandem: concert dress evolved toward this extreme neutrality in order to better mimic the non-visual experience of music that recordings and radio increasingly made the norm. You could even argue that the music itself started to amplify this evolution, ever more focused on sound, how the sound is organized and produced, techniques and presentation styles following the sonic impetus toward abstraction. It echoed the favored toolbox—scientific, industrial, political—for making sense of what was turning out to be a very complicated world: divide and conquer.

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Pythagoras; woodcut from the Wellcome Library, London.

Pythagoras; woodcut from the Wellcome Library, London.

The purest expression of philosophical allegiance to the sound-only experience was and is acousmatic music. The term was invented by Pierre Schaeffer, the French musique concrète pioneer, to describe the experience of hearing musique concrète, or any other sonic experience in which the source of the sound was hidden. The goal of acousmatic experience was to stop thinking about how the sound was produced and start noticing the sound itself, qualities and textures that might be elided or ignored in an audio-and-visual presentation. Schaeffer likened it to Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher, supposedly lecturing from behind a veil in order to focus his students’ attention on the substance of his teachings. Thus, Schaeffer insisted, the modern technology of electronic sound reproduction was simply a recreation of ancient experience: “[B]etween the experience of Pythagoras and our experiences of radio and recordings, the differences separating direct listening (through a curtain) and indirect listening (through a speaker) in the end become negligible.”

Does it change the nature of Schaeffer’s thesis to note that the Pythagorean veil probably didn’t exist? The earliest references to it come long after Pythagoras’s time and make the veil more allegorical than real—an exclusionary implication, dividing Pythagoras’s followers into those who really got what he was teaching and those who didn’t. (Brian Kane has unraveled the Pythagorean veil—and much else—in his book Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice.) Then again, Schaeffer’s real, acknowledged philosophical reference point wasn’t Pythagoras. It was the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenology is not an easily summarized thing, but at its core is the act of examining what exactly we perceive in order to bring to light ways we organize and narrate our perceptions. One of the better descriptions of the phenomenological process was given by Husserl’s disciple Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception:

It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity…. Not because we reject the certainties of common sense and a natural attitude to things — they are, on the contrary, the constant theme of philosophy—but because, being the presupposed basis of any thought, they are taken for granted, and go unnoticed, and because in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to suspend for a moment our recognition of them…. [Phenomenological] reflection… slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice[.]

It’s easy to see how Schaeffer’s acousmatic idea transfers this process into the realm of sound, veiling the relationship between a sound and its production in order to reveal how much of the sound’s nature gets lost in our compulsion to categorize it.

Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? But beneath that bright, objective surface is a nest of problems that can reiterate the sorts of presuppositions that phenomenology is meant to exorcise. Feminist interpretations of phenomenology, for instance, face the difficulty of Husserl’s idea of intersubjectivity, the assumption that other people will perceive and classify the objective world in much the same way I will. As it turns out, the “I” in that sentence is not incidental. As scholar Alia Al-Saji has written:

The consciousness that results is not only an empty, pure ego, it is also a universalized (masculine) consciousness that has been produced by the exclusion of (feminine) body, and hence implicitly relies on the elision of sexual difference. The phenomenological method’s claim to “neutrality” thus appears rooted in a form of double forgetfulness that serves to normalize, and validate, the standpoint of the phenomenological observer.

Johanna Oksala, similarly, acknowledges the suspicion “that the master’s tools could ever dismantle the master’s house.”

This might seem far away from the actual experience of music. But the thing to keep in mind is that to make some definition of the “actual experience” of music is, almost always, to make a claim of neutrality—to privilege one aspect of music (usually the sensual and aesthetic sense of timbre and rhythm and syntax) over another (usually the ramifications of the societal conditions under which the music is created or performed). And it runs into the same problem: who decides what’s essential? Every single categorical division I’ve been talking about—plain and fancy, sound and vision, parts and whole, past and present, musical and extra-musical—is similarly implicated. We call some kinds of dress sensible and some ostentatious because long-dead men (and only men) were locked in competition for who would be in and out of favor, and broadcast their convictions via the media of clothes. We analytically divide every human activity into component parts because the mechanical demands of industrial development got us in the habit. We separate aspects of musical performance by sense because a particular form of technology first did it for us, decades ago. We make divisions along lines that we never laid down.

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From Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972).

From Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972).

Daphne Oram was temperamentally disinclined to make such divisions. Her work on Oramics turned into something resembling a new-age quest, a search for enlightenment at the boundaries of technology.  In 1972, Oram published a short book called An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics. It is, on the one hand, a chatty, primer-like overview of basic ideas of sound synthesis and electronic music, but one that, at every possible opportunity, analogizes and anthropomorphizes its subject on the grandest possible scale:

In every human being there will surely be, as we have said, tremendous chords of wavepatterns ‘sounding out their notes.’ Do we control them by the formants we build up… by tuned circuits which amplify or filter? Are we forever developing our regions of resonance so that our individual consciousness will rise into being—so that we can assert our individuality? In this way does the tumult of existence resolve itself into a final personal waveshape, the embodiment of all one’s own interpretations of the art of living?

What emerges over the course of the book is that Oramics was conceptually inseparable from Oram’s critique of technology itself—but that technology could, indeed, dismantle and rebuild its own house.

If the machines, which replace the human interpreters, are incapable of conveying those aspects of life which we consider the most human, then… the machines will thwart the communication of this humanity. But need machines be so inhuman? Could we so devise a machine that, in the programming of it, all those factors which are deemed to be the most ‘human,’ could be clearly represented?

Her positive answer was the development of Oramics. Her vision of technology was—to put it as she might—one of additive, not subtractive, synthesis.

Oram ended up on the margins of the perceived mainstream of innovation, even as she pursued her uniquely holistic conception of technology. One can speculate as to why. She was too far ahead of her time for the BBC, and, perhaps, too far out of time for the electronic music community at large. Her machine was never finished. (“It is still evolving all the time,” she wrote, “for one lifetime is certainly not long enough to build it and explore all its potential.”) She had an all-or-nothing attitude—toward her work, her employers, her colleagues. She could be exacting, stubborn, single-minded, and other adjectives that would probably sound somewhat less pejorative if she had been a man.

But Oram also never got her due because she was singular, in a way that all the technocracies that make up society, explicit and implicit, couldn’t quite encompass or process. (“My machine does not really fit into any category,” she admitted.) For all her technological prowess, Oram was the opposite of what gets assigned technological value. She was integral. She was non-repeatable. She was non-modular. She was indivisible.

In the first article in this series, I wrote:

I’ve found that one really fascinating question to ask myself while listening to music that utilizes technology—old technology, new technology, high technology, low technology—is this: What’s being hidden? What’s being effaced? What’s being pushed to the foreground, and what’s being pushed to the background?

Oram is a reminder that it’s not just what gets pushed to the background. It’s also who.

Advice from Strangers: The Craft of Community

Posted on May 21, 2015 by - Columns

symphony hall

Illustration by Anouk Moulliet

Advice from Strangers explores shared challenges in the industries of new music and technology. This column is third in the series.

It is 10 p.m. Five hundred ticket-holders file into the concert hall to hear exciting contemporary works. They await the opening notes, they hear the performance. They are enthusiastic. They clap. They file out. They go home, check the mail, pay the babysitter, turn on the TV.

I am one of them. I have just recycled my program notes, kicked off my shoes. I am posting photos from the concert on Instagram.

Is this audience my community? Is it anyone’s community?

I don’t know.

What I do know, with relative confidence, is that an audience is not necessarily a community. And that goes for all kinds of audiences: the million-strong user base of a popular website, consumers of a chef’s fine cuisine, a Twitter following, a political following, the readers of this blog.

Community vs. group

Community requires connection. Without interpersonal relationships, a community is just a group.

Community requires generosity. Without an element of giving, it is hard to imagine members being invested in the collective and future well-being of the group.

Community requires space. Without a place (virtual, physical) in which people can connect and contribute, it will be much more difficult for these things to take place.

In tech, as in music, groups have their place. But it is community that brings our creations to life and extends them far beyond what we are capable of on our own. Communities champion our efforts to new and dissenting audiences, make our work more meaningful through their experiences, and expose new truths about our work to ourselves, so that we can do more and better and different

The reverse is also true: our creations bring communities to life, by connecting like-minded people and providing them with a space in which to safely explore their interests and passions.

So: How do we get from group to community? If an audience is not a community, how do we go about turning it into one?

Music-makers and techies are constantly crafting communities. Here’s how we do it.

Nurture connections

“A successful concert of my music isn’t just about the music,” says composer and performer Dean Rosenthal. “It’s about generating interest in each other and the traditions we inherit. It’s important for me as composer to create an environment that is conducive to connecting a community in the context of the concert. I do that by writing music that (hopefully) speaks to my audience on an emotional level, and by explaining a little bit about it: where it comes from, what inspires it, maybe even how it’s composed, and lastly why I chose to write it.”

“For digital products, the times when I’ve seen community work well are when the product itself was useful for the community,” says Kiesha Garrison, senior business development manager at Microsoft. “The people who were fans of the product became a support group for each other and came to rely on each other.”

The key here was that the focus wasn’t on engaging with their brand or with their content. This company started with the fact that there were going to be certain topics that the members of its community were all going to find meaningful–topics for like-minded people to discuss among themselves.

“It never felt like business,” says Garrison. “It felt valuable to have additional perspectives from people who were doing something I was doing. So many like-minded people to tap into at one time.”

Find a juicy juxtaposition

There are people who compartmentalize their friend circles: work, personal, and family do not intermix. I am not one of those people. Intersections are fertile ground for connections. They attract a curious and multifaceted crowd.

“The community organizer is masterful at maneuvering the intersection, the edge where two systems come together,” says Ashara Ekundayo, co-founder and chief creative officer of ImpactHub Oakland. “They could be two ecosystems, two ways of thinking. They could be opposites, juxtaposed. The point is to look at the unique juiciness that exists at the intersection. Where the shore hits the ocean, there’s that cool little line with all the sea crabs and the shells… or where the road meets the forest, there’s all the stuff on the sides: trash, money, watches, all the stuff that comes out of the forest. It’s cool! So think: What are the two most odd things I can try to put together? And not only that: who wants to come and listen to it? Who is it appealing to?”

Who indeed? Enter the audience, ye flotsam and jetsam.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CHECKLIST
1. Does your community have a space to convene and converse? Open a Twitter or Instagram account and share content your target community will be interested in. It doesn’t have to be about you or your work; it does have to be relevant to the community.

2. Are you encouraging connection and conversation within the community? Introduce two like-minded people in your community who don’t know each other. Suggest coffee or a collaboration.

3. How are you serving the community? Think about what your community needs and brainstorm a few ways to help provide it.

Try audience-centered design

“Try opening your next performance by saying, ‘I made this for you.’ How does that change your connection with the audience?” writes mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen in her exploration of the performer-audience relationship.

Composers and performers are in a unique position to impact directly, and in real time, how an audience relates to their work. Even the simplest acknowledgement of the audience at the start of a concert is an acknowledgement of coexistence.

In tech, we don’t often get to physically stand alongside our products as they go forth into the world–but when we design interfaces in a way that considers our users’ needs, it sends a similar message: I made this for you.

Human-centered design is the idea that we can design a system to support its users’ existing beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors rather than requiring them to adapt to the system. It’s a key principle in user-interface design, where the goal is to create user-friendly experiences for people with a wide range of abilities and limitations. Designers try to take into consideration that any given encounter with the software might be a person’s first or fiftieth.

New music, it seems at first glance, would strive to do just the opposite! Atonal. No obvious rhythm. Difficult to relate to. Devoid of context. Not. User. Friendly.

“Truly new music is intentionally subverting the mainstream voice,” says Adam Fong, co-founder of the Center for New Music (C4NM) in San Francisco. “It’s contrarian by nature: ‘There’s a new thing I’m going to create, and it’s going to be different.’”

And yet, or perhaps because of that fact, our contemporary composers are asking themselves: What does the audience need in order to have a meaningful experience?

“Ultimately, we all connect to music on a personal level and the listener has their own response that an artist has nothing to do with, aside from providing the music,” says Rosenthal. “I write the music I want to hear that isn’t being written, and that inspiration helps me bring enthusiasm to the concerts. But the music has to connect in way that could go well beyond me.”

“I think about writing music that engages and interests people,” says one Seattle composer. “If there is already an audience for that ensemble, then I think about writing in a way appropriate for that audience. Or perhaps the performer or ensemble and I think together about what kind of event or context we want to create. I wouldn’t write something simply because I think it is what an audience wants to hear, but I always try to write something that is both true to what I want, and that I think would be interesting to the expected audience.”

Composers are in the lucky position of considering at least two audiences: the one that will hear his or her work, and the one that will perform it.

“Under the best of circumstances, you’re composing for a person,” says composer Daniel Felsenfeld. “When I write a piece for a musician, I put names in the score, not roles–because I believe in writing not just to people’s strengths but also to their frailties.”

At the risk of over-composering this section, I’ll share one more voice, because I find the emphasis on collaboration so very inspiring:

“I’ve found that openly acknowledging the role performers and audience members play in the formulation of a musical work’s meaning helps to develop an engaged and cohesive community,” says composer Garrett Schumann. “Composers, as members of a community, depend on the cooperation of performers and listeners to achieve their ultimate goal of creating meaningful music. If composers remind themselves that they (most often) need someone else to play their music and (always) need someone else to listen to their music in order for it have meaning, then they will not act as if creating meaningful art is a singular endeavor.”

Give of yourself

New music folks revel in service.

“I’m in a constant state of trying to build community around new music,” says Ihnen. “I do it by trying to serve the new music community and the life and culture of a city with my performance.”

“Do service,” says Felsenfeld. “Start concerts, plan events, beg collaborations, reach out to people.”

Felsenfeld does all of these things. His work as a composer is a long sequence of collaborations; he organizes and curates concerts and has co-founded the New Music Gathering.

Felsenfeld and his colleagues brought the three-day conference into being this year when they realized they had no place to formally get together with their community and talk about pressing matters. They designed a framework that would support more than just networking, by establishing clear rules to guide their planning.

“We wanted to keep our roles in it pure. We are volunteers; we have none of our music played. We weren’t there to shill on behalf of our own work, nor will we be in subsequent years. There was no commerce, nothing to buy, no pressure to sell. And there were no built-in competitions–you could not show up and lose something… In short, the only thing we stand to gain from the entire show is the community we build.”

We can build new communities, and we can strengthen existing ones. The San Francisco new music community existed before the Center for New Music did. Fong and his colleagues saw potential in the community, and set out to help it become more efficient, grow better artistically by its own judgment, and tackle its own problems so it could be healthy and vibrant.

Whither service in tech?

Despite how deeply community-oriented many technologies are, and despite the fact that companies often sponsor community service programs for their employees, “service” is not a word that comes up when I ask tech colleagues about their experiences in community-building. I doubt it’s a matter of personality; they are upstanding and conscientious people, even altruistic at heart, and not just in it for the money.

The fact is that there is service in the tech industry, whether it’s volunteering for a civic coding project, providing space for community gatherings after hours, building software to help with disaster recovery, or just running a neighborhood website. I wonder why we don’t see these contributions as service.

Offer a vision of what is possible

“To create a more positive and connected future for our communities, we must be willing to trade their problems for their possibilities,” writes Peter Block in Communities.

Communities are future-oriented. If we want to build strong communities where members serve generously, we must help each other discover what it is we each have to offer–and what we can become–and then enable that to happen.

“Young people do what they see,” says Ekundayo. “If you look like them, then you being there–and them seeing you–activates something in them. When you see another human do something you thought wasn’t possible, you say: ‘Oh, this is possible!’ Imagine what would happen if you took the next step and told them, ‘After I’m done with my performance, you can meet me backstage and I will teach you for an hour.’ Maybe you teach one person, maybe you teach a group of people. What happens if you commit to spending not one but five hours with them, one hour a week for the next five weeks?”

She pauses. “What happens if you go over to a music school and teach there?”

“It’s a community-support effort–introducing singer friends to new repertoire that may suit them, or helping each other out with particularly tricky phrases,” says Soprano Hillary LaBonte. “I try to be as good a representative of new music to my colleagues as I am to non-musicians.”

So many things are available to us that don’t seem accessible until someone shows us they’re possible.

Show up

Be present in the community you are building–as a member of it, not an outsider.

“We are interrelated and interconnected,” says Ekundayo. “Every human being on this planet. Being engaged in your community means showing up for it, and you have to acknowledge that we’re connected. If you think you’re different, you can’t show up.”

Not only is being present the best way to be alert to the changing needs of the community, but it’s a powerful form of support. There’s nothing like showing up at someone’s performance to make it clear that what they’re doing matters to you.

“We support each other by re-posting projects on social media, spreading the buzz, generally spreading the love,” says a flutist friend. “And when I have time, I am usually at my friends’ gigs. I like to keep updated with what people are doing, and face time is very important to the new music community. It not only helps sustain my personal presence in the community, but it also helps sustain the community.”

Service is integral to community. Investing time and skills keeps us accountable for and invested in the wellbeing of the collective. The members of an engaged community care so much about the thread that connects them that they are willing and glad to give of their time and energy to participate and keep it all going.

Design purposeful spaces

“Communities are built of purposeful action,” says Fong. “Are you creating a space for learning, or for interacting? Is it a one-way discourse, or more of a round table?”

According to Block, every room we occupy serves as a metaphor for the larger community that we want to create. Our task is to rearrange the room to meet our intention to build relatedness, accountability, and commitment. A concert space, Facebook feed, Meetup gathering–the way these spaces are set up, who is in the room with us, and even how we know them–this is all configured by someone.

As a builder of community, you get to choose who you want in the room–and how you intend to use the space will inform that decision. Consider who you’re trying to serve and what their needs are. Then design virtual or physical spaces to meet those needs.

At the most operational and practical level, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together? – Peter Block, Community

The Center for New Music is designed for casual interaction in a single room of shared space, so artists can talk and be creative together. By day it’s a coworking space; at night it transforms into an event venue.

The model seems to be working: even during grant season, a time of high stress and competition, the co-working space sees members working together on applications supportively and collaboratively.

“The most effective way of building community is to give people a space where they can try new things, experiment, and be fairly well-insulated from financial and critical pressures,” says Fong. “That allows them to do creative work primarily for themselves, their friends, and people who care about the music. We serve as host and matchmaker, connecting musicians, ensembles, institutions and resources; then we let the art grow organically from there.”

Composer Judah Adashi writes passionately about the importance of designing concert spaces for communal experience.

“Turning a performance into an inviting, communal experience goes beyond the concert itself,” he says, and as artistic director of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series he is in the perfect role to carefully craft that experience. Each show in the series opens with a pre-concert conversation and is followed by a wine reception. The event continues with an after-party at a local cafe–where they play a bonus “track.”

“It’s not an afterthought,” says Adashi. “It’s part of the plan.”

Equal access

“Being a community builder is being someone who is hopefully committed to illuminating and cultivating opportunities for equity in the group,” says Ekundayo. “Provide access in as many ways as possible.”

When we go to a lecture or concert, our purpose is to listen to an exceptional work–and the rooms that host those one-way conversations are designed to optimize the listening experience, with the audience facing the presenter.

Two-way conversations are more likely to emerge around a round table. When we’re on an equal plane, our expectations shift: we expect everyone to bring contributions, behave constructively, and treat each other like peers.

The performance space at the C4NM is one long, narrow room. There’s no raised platform; audience and performer are literally on the same level. “It’s hard for the audience to not interact with the performer!” exclaims Fong. And this overcomes barriers.

What happens when composer, performer, and listener interact as equals?

“I am frequently stunned by what the people who play my pieces are able to reveal about my music’s meaning,” says Garrett Schumann. “I profit unquestionably from the things performers bring to my music, which I cannot imagine. I also learn a great deal from what my listeners find in, ascribe to, and take away from my music… these interactions represent the kind of basic community all art requires.”

The digital amplifier

Being physically present isn’t something people can do all the time.

“People’s lives are increasingly full of things they want to do, and even in a thriving, successful community, getting everyone to show up at any given event is just as difficult as always. So we’re looking into what it would mean to build an online community,” says Fong of the C4NM.

The thing about online communication is its accessibility. Public conversations can be seen by anyone. Archived conversations live on forever. There is vast potential for amplification.

“Successful bands are emphasizing digital communications, perhaps even more so than emphasizing people showing up at concerts,” says Fong. “In San Francisco, there’s been a greater acceptance that your work may only be heard in digital form. People generally accept now that the accelerated success–the snowball effect–is going to happen in the digital space and not in person.”

Digital exposure also provides communities with a visible heartbeat.

“People are attracted to communities with activity. Make that activity happen!” says Michael Snoyman, director of engineering at software development company FP Complete. Create public forums for discussion on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora, and IRC. Be a resource: put industry-relevant information on your website, and cross reference it regularly. Create group mailing lists–and strive to keep those conversations addressed to the collective.

Luckily, we don’t have to choose between physical spaces and digital spaces. Both industries regularly augment meaningful face-to-face encounters with digital ones, creating vast, rich, and exciting spaces that encompass all that both have to offer.

A computer science graduate student at UMass Amherst recently told me how she used the momentum of an in-person encounter to build a community in the digital realm. While in Vienna for a conference, she gathered a small group interested in a specific (but unrelated) research area, and then created a mailing list for that topic. A week later, 30 people had joined the list–and she hadn’t yet tapped into her entire network of researchers.

Musicians regularly use social media to share snippets of rehearsals and other behind-the-scenes videos, welcoming listeners into the preparation process. Audiences connect–as communities!–on these channels, anticipation builds, and suddenly the performance is extended in both time and space.

It is our privilege, as community-builders, to think about which conversations we want to take place, who should be in the room for those conversations, and what tools they will need to make these interactions meaningful and productive. The success of our communities hinges on how effectively the spaces we craft–physical or digital–support that intent.

*
Writing about community for a community is an odd thing, not only because you, reader, are already part of a thriving community (it’s how we found each other), but because the writing itself is an act of community-building. It connects people and ideas in service of our collective well-being, and hopefully creates a space for continued conversation within and between our two communities.

At the heart of it, the point of community is to connect with our fellow humans in a meaningful way.

“Meet for coffee. Get to know one another on a real (and not just a professional ‘what can you do for me?’) level,” urges Felsenfeld. “You don’t just get to show up with your good ideas and foist–you get conversations going, and that is the path to making things better.”

Next week: trust.

Advice from Strangers: In Pursuit of Growth

Posted on May 14, 2015 by - Columns

green water color forest

Illustration by Anouk Moulliet

Advice from Strangers explores shared challenges in the industries of new music and technology. This column is second in the series.

A recent conference of new music professionals devoted a workshop to the subject of creative growth. Participants toiled. There were groans of frustration and murmurs of revelation. Digital devices were set aside, notecards scribbled upon, thoughts shared. Forty-five minutes were dedicated to the development of strategies for relevant, positive, reflective growth. In those minutes, hearty seeds were planted that will share their yield for a long time to come.

In tech, where I’ve worked for the past decade, we are charged with innovating, iterating, and disrupting. We invent software, undermine old industries, create needs. We make new things all the time, even as we aim to better those that already exist. And yet, I wonder: is there a mismatch between this mandate and the method in which we’re growing creatively as individuals?

Skill-based learning vs. creative growth

Even though as an industry we champion the cause of innovation, as individuals, the practical day-to-day goal is to become more functionally proficient. So when we say we grow, we mean we continually build an arsenal of skills, enabling us to increase the efficiency and robustness of software, scale technological infrastructure, and support a growing business.

But most of us are in tech because we want to do cool new things, create new stuff, explore. Isn’t it important for us to grow that side of ourselves—the creative side—as well? If our ability to encourage disruption is so important, how do we open ourselves up to and equip ourselves for opportunities to do new and different rather than incrementally better and faster at the same thing? We must learn to expose ourselves to new processes of innovation and new interpretations that can bring us out of a local maximum toward a radically better solution.

The new music community offers us a model of rigorous self-examination, a thorough and ongoing exploration of the processes leading to creative innovation. The tech community favors a skills-based approach to growth. The strategies overlap, even as the applications differ. Here are the top growth strategies of 35 colleagues from the industries of new music and tech.

 

Growth strategies

 

Accept growth as a constant

It may seem obvious, but let’s start with this: there is always something more to learn in our ever-expanding universe of experience. If we don’t acknowledge this, we ride blindly past opportunities to grow.

“The first step to my growing is accepting the fact that growth is a constant in my life,” says freelance composer Garrett Schumann. “Over the last few years, believing this has led me to invent new challenges that force me to grow as a composer and member of the new music community… I designed my dissertation to force myself out of my compositional comfort zone. It is my most ambitious vocal work to date, and the process of creating it helped strengthen my confidence in setting text and writing for voice.”

Liz Cohen, director of marketing at a crowd-funding platform for start-ups, agrees. “I am open with myself about the fact that there is tons of room for me to grow. For everyone to grow. So I listen to people around me—the people who are ‘green’ and the people who have supposedly been doing this for decades.”

Getting comfortable with growth—having the willingness to tell someone, yourself even, “there’s something important that I don’t know”—opens the door to personal development. The rest is tactics.

Physical spaces, mental spaces

“I believe in space. You need to have a space associated with learning and creating,” says Vinitha Watson, executive director of ZooLabs. (More on ZooLabs later.) She mentions a “mind palace,” and I immediately picture a richly decorated temple for my thoughts. I’m not far off: the idea is to set aside a physical place for growth—a specific room at home, a favorite cafe. Routinely associate the space with creative or learning activities, and soon that atmosphere will envelop you whenever you enter.

Another approach is to find points in your daily routine that combine well with growth tasks, like a commute or quiet moment in the morning.

“I start my day just absorbing new information, catching up on blogs across life and work,” says Orlena Yeung, a product and marketing executive. “Setting aside this time helps me warm up for the day as well.”

Create and welcome challenges

One way to stretch our creative muscles is to reach for the fringe of what we know, find the edge of what we’re comfortable with—and hover there before moving even further along.

“I seek out opportunities that will push me way outside my comfort zone,” says mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen. “I focus on projects that make me light up. Then I always ask, ‘How can I make this happen?’ Sometimes they’re my ideas and sometimes they’re other people’s dreams and ideas. I just know that I want to see those ideas through to fruition, and I will learn whatever I need to along the way.”

“Take risks,” says technology consultant Jack Kustanowitz. “The nature of technology is that everyone is always learning, so the best way to grow is to take on projects that are just outside your comfort zone. I’m not advocating a professional poet agreeing to design a banking system, but if you are a technology expert and you have an opportunity to work in an area that is 50% stuff you’ve done before and 50% things you’ll have to learn, grab the opportunity, even if it means some late nights and unbilled time.”

Kiesha Garrison, a senior business development manager at Microsoft, creates thought challenges by looking at tough problems in her industry—and ignoring their existing solutions. “I look up the unsolvables to stimulate thinking. I want to know, ‘Why is this the issue?’ rather than the answer, so I can try to think about a new answer.”

The tricky thing about taking on new challenges is making them count. After all, time and resources are limited.

“I like to grow and learn, but struggle with translating that into things I can point to and say: ‘This is what I did,’” says Carole Snyder, a developer at Microsoft.

The key: actively digest what you learn, apply it, and share it with others.

One programmer mentioned that he writes about his findings on a blog and takes on speaking engagements to compile and process his learnings. In a similar vein, Garrett Schumann took on a blogging project that led him to listen to and report on the music of 150 of the composers and songwriters who follow him on Twitter.

I asked ZooLabs’ Watson to weigh in on the question of productive learning. ZooLabs is a start-up music accelerator that is invested in the intersection of creativity, craft, and commercial viability. Residents spend two weeks on-site in a program steeped in experiential learning. They quickly consume new material, learn its direct applications, jump back into their reality, and then come back with questions.

“If your goal is to learn a good skill, learn it, then do it,” she says. “Get away from the reading of it and actually apply what you’ve learned. It’s like cooking. You look at a recipe, you know what you want to accomplish, and you’re using someone else’s guide to do that. And then you do it! You’re in the kitchen, you go back and forth between the recipe and cooking.”

Keep in mind that learning can be productive even without producing something tangible. Simply switching contexts can be refreshing, reducing cynicism and burn-out. (Note: heavy terminology ahead. You will not be quizzed on it.)

“Two areas interesting me greatly right now are digital currency and just-intonation music,” says John Reale, director of solutions architecture at a healthcare startup. “The former has me immersed in blockchain trustless verification concepts, and the latter is exposing me to scala and microtonal sound card programming. I’m not sure how much conceptual inspiration I take from these fields back to my primary, but they certainly help [keep] me from getting burned out, so I can continue to grow in fairly traditional ways without getting sick of it.”

Learning can be a high-risk activity, sometimes without financial or otherwise tangible benefits. But choosing to take on difficult challenges—and then cementing those learnings by putting them into practice—will make them meaningful.

Question yourself

Ask yourself hard, meaningful, complicated questions, and do it often.

“Force yourself to constantly question how you are doing things,” says a software engineer at Google, a creative problem-solver I worked with for several years. Soprano Hillary LaBonte agrees: “Self-assessment is key to continuous progress—not only measuring where you stand in the current music industry, but against your past self as an artist. It’s important to take stock of yourself, and align to (or counter) the changes of your field with your own artistic ambitions.”

Finding the right questions is hard, and having a process for that helps. Composer Aaron Siegel suggests starting with a goal. Here’s his method:

  1. Think of a goal you have for the next year. (It could be writing a new type of composition, learning a coding language, implementing a new feature, or reaching a different audience.)
  2. Reframe the goal as a question.
  3. Ask yourself:

+ Is this question too easy to answer? (Hint: a good question is not easy to answer.)
+ Does it lead to other questions?
+ Do you care about the question? Does answering it matter?
+ Does it have poetry—other deeper implications or relevancies?

When you’re satisfied with your question, try keeping it in mind as you go about your day. You’ll be surprised how relevant—and informative—your experiences become.

Skill-based learning requires a forcing function

I have 27 open browser tabs. My own biggest growth challenge is finding time to sit down and learn specific things. Wandering, exploring in the world—these are my brain candy, they come naturally. But when I put skill-learning tasks on my calendar, they get…overlooked.

What to do? For each learning task, Watson suggests a project-oriented approach: define a start time, an end time, and milestones for success along the way. Completing those will give a nice little dopamine dump that’s associated with advancing.

If setting milestones doesn’t work, try collaborating on the task. Being accountable to a friend or client provides a forcing function—like a gym trainer—that keeps the pressure on until the task is done. Just ask any ensemble musician preparing for a concert.

Still, you don’t have to learn every day.

“Give yourself room to breathe,” says violinist and computer science professor Sheila Oh. “Being driven makes you want to plan—but not all learning is planned. If you schedule too much of your time, you can miss out on unplanned opportunities to grow.”

Purple water color mountains

Illustration by Anouk Moulliet

Wander far afield

“I’m a firm believer that becoming the best artist means becoming the best person I can be, and that includes participating as a citizen of the world, with interests that extend outside my immediate circles,” says LaBonte.

There is indeed a special kind of critical growth that is possible when we position ourselves to experience something that differs vastly from our status quo. This experience is important because it provides new and unexpected context for old ideas, breaks down familiar ways of thinking, and helps us discover and feel empathy for new audiences. So how do we go about expanding our horizons?

“Make sure you’re talking—actually having a conversation—with a very diverse group of people,” says Garrison. “Talk to people who do not all mirror you in some way, or mirror each other.”

Composers should become “rabid consumers of multiple art forms,” says Daniel Felsenfeld, composer and co-founder of the New Music Gathering, an annual conference dedicated to the performance, production, promotion, support and creation of new concert music. “We should go to artist colonies to speak to people who do things differently, to collaborate with those people, to figure out how and why they do what they do. And of course we should listen to everything, not just for professional reasons but for personal reasons. We should know the canon inside out (which, yes, is impossible) and we should always be proudly peeking into its dark corners. And we should not be content with ‘scenes’ but should strive to expand the cast of characters with whom we do our business.”

In other words: get out there and explore all of the things. There is much to learn from being around people who do not share our values and interests, beyond the echo chambers of our niche conferences, office spaces, and artist colonies.

Learning is distracting, and that’s okay

“I’m always finding new things. My struggle is focusing and getting things done,” says Gil Reich, an engineering and product lead who is a veteran of several start-ups.

It’s not all his fault. Remember my 27 browser tabs? Watson says the elusive focal point might just be the nature of how technology is designed. You go to your phone for one thing, and end up doing something else.

It’s also the nature of learning. Curiosity leads to curiosity, and that’s exactly what it should do—and not just in the arts.

“Learning with an expansive amount of time and no goals is great,” says Watson. “It allows you to go off into space and dream, which I think is definitely necessary. It’s like floating, daydreaming. There’s some benefit to letting your mind wander through a forest of information. If that’s your goal, that’s fine.”

If that’s your goal.

“Learning is serving a function, and wandering serves a function. Wandering through information is not a bad thing, but it might be frustrating if someone has different goals,” she cautions.

*
Friends: growth is a skill, to be learned and honed. Our colleagues’ strategies, be they creative or skill-based, apply across the spectrum of our growth needs, across and beyond the reach of our own industries. Go forth and pursue growth, whether it be within your community or farther afield. Ask probing questions. Take on challenges you’re not entirely comfortable with. Wander to the far reaches of your comfort zone. Enjoy.

Next week: community.

Advice from Strangers: The Best of Two Worlds

Posted on May 7, 2015 by - Columns

Tech and new music chat

Illustration by Anouk Moulliet

“How can we better ourselves?” asked composer Aaron Siegel of a small but hushed crowd of new music composers and performers at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in January. “The hardest thing for smart self-starters to do is to look for unknown things. It’s easier to do what we know.”

And oh, it is easy to continue on a known path, especially one that works! But creativity suffers, innovation suffers.

Clearly, in order to keep improving at our trade, we need to probe that which is unknown to us. How do we do that? How do we figure out what we don’t know, in order to learn about it?

Some context: I’m neither a composer nor a musician. My background is in software product management, information architecture, search technology, and user-centered design. I run a small community calendar for classical concerts in Seattle. It’s mostly orchestral stuff.

It began awkwardly for me, this gathering of the new music community. The conservatory’s halls swelled with a sea of music-makers immersed in hug-frenzied joy and familiarity, while I sat—alone, music-less, hug-less—at an otherwise empty cafeteria table.

New music, it turned out, was not what I had thought. Had I made a mistake, going so far afield from orchestral music? Would spending time on a tangent be a good use of my already limited resources?

Oh, blessed people. The table wasn’t empty for even five minutes, and for the next three days, I listened to composers and musicians talk about the challenges they were facing in growth, collaboration, decision-making, documentation, community-building, brand identity, making a living, bridging resource gaps—challenges that sounded a lot like those I’ve faced with my teams in startups and small technology companies.

Despite the fact that new music was outside my comfort zone, or perhaps because of it, the gathering lifted the floodgates on a burst of creative thought.

New music—raw, creative, and largely uncharted—may be eliciting questions we’ve long forgotten how to ask in other, more established industries. What if we technologists could be as rigorous about reinventing our creative processes as we are about reinventing software? And what if some of our time-tested best practices could be of use to new music makers, as they pave the way for new explorations of sound and performance?

Curious, I approached colleagues in both communities whose work I respect and asked for their insights on subjects that arose during the gathering. How do we build an engaged community? What is the secret to balancing privacy with collaboration? How do we make good decisions for and as a group? How do we get that community to trust us? How do we fill gaps when resources are low? How do we put dinner on the table? And, of course, how do we better ourselves?

Tl;dr: techies and music-makers have a lot in common, and on occasion, our approaches diverge in some really interesting ways. Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore familiar and new paths together, and see what we can learn from each other.

Are you ready? Next week, we cross the streams.

***

Shaya Lyon

Shaya Lyon is founder and director of the Live Music Project, a community calendar for classical and contemporary music in Seattle that supports community music by connecting audiences with accessible musical experiences. Passionate about organizing information, and the collaborative creative processes that make it possible, her many hats have included product manager, UX designer, news editor, photographer and creator of fine Rice Krispy treats.

Digital to Analog: Plug and Play

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - Articles, Commentary

The Boston Daily Globe surveys the frozen scene, March 13, 1888.

The Boston Daily Globe surveys the frozen scene, March 13, 1888.

Our latest blizzard in these parts hit New England while I was out of town for a wedding. The result was a lot of time on the phone: arranging new flights, arranging extended hotel reservations, and (having arrived back in Boston to a non-functioning car) arranging a tow through a somewhat overextended AAA. Did I mention the roof? The roof started leaking; start calling roofers.

What this means is that my wife and I have listened to a lot of telephone hold music over this past month: Muzak, soft rock, the allegedly calming strains of the most mainstream classical-lite repertoire imaginable. And it made me think of something that might be worth writing down, which is this: right now, in 2015, when technology is more amazing than it’s ever been, when what we call a “telephone” is, for most of us, actually a pocket-sized computer of sufficient power and capability that, twenty years ago, it would have been considered in the realm of science fiction—in spite of all this, telephone hold music is still defiantly and even hilariously low fidelity. It is still rendered back to the ear in the most tinny possible timbre.

Oddly, and surprisingly, that just might say something fairly deep and intricate about the history of music.

* * *

There’s one common feature to the way music has been made and experienced over the past century or so, a feature that cuts across genre and style, a feature so ubiquitous we don’t really have to think about it anymore. And it came into music by way of the telephone. It’s this:

Phone Plug

This is, of course, a quarter-inch phone plug. It’s what’s at the end of most patch cords. If you’ve ever worked with an electric guitar, or bass, or keyboard, or a modular synthesizer, or a mixing board—and so on—you’ve used this plug. If you’ve ever listened to music through headphones, you’ve used it as well—or its smaller, eighth-inch sibling. It’s a linchpin of amplification, recording—any musical activity that uses electricity.

It’s actually older than you might think—it’s certainly older than I thought it was. The familiar form of it dates from at least 1880: that’s when Charles E. Scribner applied for a patent for a “certain new and useful Improvement in Spring-Jack Switches” that included a diagram of a plug nearly identical to the one still used today.

Scribner PT489570 figure

The idea, though, goes back at least another couple of decades, to “plug-switches”: a metal contact and a metal spring—completing an electric circuit—and a metal wedge that one could insert between the two. Plug-switches came into common use with telegraphy; Scribner adapted them into the plug-and-jack arrays of telephone switchboards. (The etymology here preserves some technological history: the first telephone switchboards were just that, boards of manual switches that had to be flipped one by one; Scribner’s first try at a suitable plug-switch looked like a jack-knife, which is why we still call the connection a jack.)

The key part of the modern phone plug is the ring of insulation between the tip and the sleeve. It’s what lets both signal and ground flow through a single plug—the tip conducts the signal, the sleeve conducts the ground. (Add more rings of insulation and more interspersed metal rings and the plug can carry more conductors. A stereo plug, for instance, adds an extra ring between the tip and the sleeve.) The insulation—the gap—keeps everything separated, preventing short circuits, ensuring the flow of current.

The signal fidelity of the phone plug is pretty robust. But the drive behind the development of the phone plug wasn’t signal fidelity; it was efficiency. The phone plug—and the spring-jack—let more telephone connection points be packed into a smaller space, and let switchboard operators make (and break) those connections with a single physical gesture. And it let those connections be made again and again and again. The connection embodied in the phone plug, is, in fact, at odds with the communicative connection of music. A connection made with a phone plug is reliable; a connection made via music is not.

* * *

"Hello! Telephones provide communication." From Gaston Serpette's "La demoiselle du téléphone," 1891.

“Hello! We are calling and giving the gift of communication.” From Gaston Serpette’s “La demoiselle du téléphone” (1891).

There have always been and always will be composers who adopt technology as a subject matter head on. Gabrieli. Berlioz. Stockhausen. Tristan Perich has put the physical nature of computer technology front and center; Mikel Rouse has turned our 24/7 interaction with media technology into opera. It’s a rich, rich area of exploration.

But I find it most interesting when technology turns up in the music of composers who aren’t necessarily thought of as being particularly technologically minded, at least thematically speaking. Consider three examples, one older, two more recent:

Francis Poulenc’s 1958 La voix humaine, to a libretto by Jean Cocteau, is perhaps the most famous operatic telephone call in the repertoire, a one-woman tour de force presenting a love affair’s entire history and dissolution through a single, one-sided, technologically mediated (and, occasionally, sabotaged) conversation. Nico Muhly’s 2011 opera Two Boys (libretto by Craig Lucas) might be its descendent, a traditionally operatic tale of obsession and violence that instead swirls through the internet. Gabriel Kahane’s Craigslistlieder, a 2006 song cycle setting texts drawn from online personal ads, is precisely breezy, miniatures that capture something of the fleeting yet permanently preserved nature of online interactions.

In La voix humaine, Poulenc displays all his usual hallmarks of musical surrealism: the abrupt shifts, the use of pop music tropes to produce immediate but sometimes alienatingly oblique emotional beats, the cold comfort of standard progressions. The music of the internet in Two Boys is—at a slight but fascinating stylistic variance to the rest of the opera—the driving, rhythmically tiled common-tone harmony shifts of second-wave minimalism, ingeniously yoked to another style, plainchant: online rituals of communication as reenactments of perennial patterns. Craigslistlieder goes back further, to the aphoristic expressiveness of Romantic-era song, leveraging its touchstones of yearning and loneliness.

In other words, all three composers are not inventing new styles to illustrate their given technological connectivities, but adapting an older style that best encompasses what it is about each technology that they want to highlight. The interesting thing is that all those older styles can be heard as having their own, divergent technological antecedents. The technological precursor of Poulenc’s style was cinema, with its ability to disjoint space and time through framing and montage. (Poulenc and Cocteau’s transference of that disjointedness to their subject is casually echoed in the fact that the quintessential surrealist party game—the Exquisite Corpse—would be refracted into the more prosaic game of Telephone.) Both plainchant and minimalism have musical technologies in their genomes: notation for the former, recording and studio techniques in the latter. And Romanticism? I’ve always thought of Romanticism as reflecting the technology of the letter and the democratization of postal services: self-expression and the expressive fragment united into a potent, concentrated compound. All three works, then, as different from each other as they are, do for technology what classical music has always done: reinterpret the new in terms of the old, make the connection with the tradition.

This new/old relationship between music and technology has been around for a long time, often to the point that today we don’t even hear it anymore. Those Romantic letters, for instance: in Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge’s new book on Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, he makes a compelling point about the lied “Die Post,” of how the jaunty horn calls implied in the piano part could, in Schubert’s time, have been heard as deeply ironic, the Romantic nostalgia traditionally attached to the sound of the horn here signaling the arrival of a disruptive new connective technology—the horse-drawn mail coach.

The paradox is that, at the same time, it’s the failure to connect that has been the characteristic expressive trope of classical music, from the entreaties of troubadours to the Byronic suffering-in-isolation of the Romantic era (epitomized by Winterreise) to the alienation of modernism. In La voix humaine, the signal is constantly being dropped or interrupted. The connections in Two Boys explain everything and nothing—the drama is in misunderstanding, not understanding. (The fact that the opera’s audience stand-in character, the police investigator Anne Strawson, is not more fluent or perceptive about the internet—something that came in for criticism in reviews of the piece—is actually one of the most operatic things about it, channeling an entire lineage of figures who can’t complete or decipher a communicative connection.) The ads Kahane set for his cycle are, literally, “Missed Connections.” This is the history of opera—all the way back to Orpheus, a signal acquired, then lost.

Not just opera: it is the history of music, forever communicating—what, exactly? But forever communicating, nonetheless, even as the message gets hopelessly lost in the translation to music. And it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Music keeps a ring of insulation between eloquence and meaning. It’s what keeps the current, the power, flowing. It’s what makes the connection so immediate.

* * *

Advertisement ca. 1899 (via the Library of Congress).

Advertisement ca. 1899 (via the Library of Congress).

“I Can Hear You,” the penultimate track on They Might Be Giants’ 1996 album Factory Showroom, was recorded on a wax cylinder, in the same manner that such recordings would have been made in the late 1800s. (The recording was made on a visit to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey.) Song and technology combine into a crafty joke:

http://youtu.be/IZIUAhGbCcM

Like all the other music I’ve been discussing, the song is about communication technology—but, in this case, it’s a tribute to every such technology that privileged efficiency over fidelity. Sure, drive-through intercom systems have terrible sound quality, but they get the job done.

Telephone hold music is where this calculus between efficiency and fidelity breaks down: you can’t stop listening to how bad the reproduction is. But, then again, it gets the job done. The hold music for AAA of Southern New England, for instance, was a series of Mozart piano concerti—which I easily recognized, even though the piano sounded like an underwater glockenspiel, even though the strings groaned in and out of the mix like a squeaky hinge, even though the bass was practically non-existent.

It was, in other words, privileging structure and syntax over color and sensuality—or, at least, substituting a version of color and sensuality that was an awful lot more circumscribed and compressed than normal. Which, it turns out, is still a perfectly valid musical experience. I’ll be honest: I kind of got into it. I started to appreciate its weird, alien pings and pops. I started to hear just how little signal information you need to establish baselines for harmonic tension and resolution. I started wondering how you might go about writing a piece that would emulate these exact sounds and qualities. And I realized: people already have.

A fairly wide swath of the history of recorded and broadcasted music was limited to something approaching a hold-music level of fidelity. Wax cylinders; acoustic recordings; early 78s; primitive radio—to our ears, they sound impoverished. But to contemporary ears (judging from contemporary accounts), they sounded amazing. And no wonder: the quantum leap from a completely ephemeral art form to one that could be fixed and reproduced ad infinitum is something we can’t really comprehend. What did it matter that the sound was brittle, stark, pointillistic?

Maybe a lot—because, around the same time, musical styles in those places where recordings and radio played began a turn toward brittle, stark, and pointillistic. Jazz, with its cranked, intricately syncopated drive, its characteristic rhythm-section foundation plucked, hammered, and struck. Neoclassicism, Romantic stock boiled back down to lean harmonies, bracing clarity, and bone-dry wit. Serialism, structure and syntax schematized into the spotlight, pitch and rhythm as points on a grid. It’s almost as if musicians listened to those early recordings and began to hear music from another angle, one stripped of sonic plushness but alive with the give-and-take of musical grammar, and realized that such give-and-take in itself could be a playground for expression.

Which means that another obsolete technology gets preserved in the repertoire and the toolbox: a style to be channeled, or adapted, or rejected, but holding at its core the substance of a long-ago technological advance, alongside Schubert’s postal delivery, Poulenc’s telephone, and—in future times—Muhly and Kahane’s internet. We don’t think we’re writing and playing and hearing an archeology of technology, but we are.

Digital to Analog: Poems and Histories

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - Field Reports, Headlines

[Richard Monckton] Milnes brought [Thomas] Carlyle to the railway, and showed him the departing train. Carlyle looked at it and then said, “These are our poems, Milnes.” Milnes ought to have answered, “Aye, and our histories, Carlyle.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

At the height of the Iraq War, the United States Department of Defense spent over three billion dollars a year to neutralize technology I carry in my pocket. That was, at one time, the annual budget for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), formed in 2006 as a clearinghouse for Pentagon and private contractor efforts to jam the electronic signals that were being used to trigger the IEDs that were causing the majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. (And JIEDDO represented only a portion of the expense.) One of the more common sources of such signals were, and remain, cell phones. A couple of wires, some explosive material, some screws or other bits of metal, and my phone—or yours—can be made into a shrapnel-filled bomb.

***

Piano

I’m going to guess that improvised explosive devices were not on Andrew Pekler’s mind when he conceived his 2013 installation The Prepaid Piano. Pekler—a USSR-born, California-raised, Berlin-residing electronic-music polymath—put five mobile phones, each set to vibrate, directly on the strings of a grand piano, in five different places. Audience members were then free to call any of the phones, either from their own phones or from phones provided in the hall; contact microphones on the piano’s soundboard then passed the vibrations over to a modular synthesizer, which looped and altered the sounds, the loops changing with the proliferation of incoming calls, while more direct interventions—knocking the case, plucking the strings—provided their own cycles of punctuation.

As documented on the 2014 LP The Prepaid Piano & Replayed (co-released by the UK-based Entr’acte and the Italy-based Senufo Editions), the result is more extremely sophisticated lark (in the John-Cage-as-trickster-sensei spirit of the punning title) than ripped-from-the-headlines commentary. The amplified sounds crackle, pop, and metallically purr; the synthesis ropes it all into a loping grind. It’s engagingly textured, fun, maybe a little melancholy in its slow-rolling machinery, but still a long way from any evocation of the more violent technologies that rend the world on a daily basis. But consider the elements of The Prepaid Piano: cell phones, wires, screws, electricity.

The trope of regarding technological advances—particularly those that enable or shape connections among people—as inherently insidious is so ingrained that it’s almost reflexive at this point. But all technology is both useful and dangerous, with human behavior tipping that balance to one side or another. Usefulness usually wins out: the more convenient a technology is, the more risk we’re liable to accept in adopting it. Cell phones embody that—they’re so useful that it’s hard to remember (or imagine) what life was like before they were prevalent; but, then again, they’re damaging enough that people inevitably wonder whether that previous life wasn’t, in fact, better.

Cell phone technology is particularly notable because the most crucial part of it—the cellular network itself—is completely unseen. You’d be hard-pressed to design a better allegory for the good/bad potential of technological advance than the cellular network. It is ubiquitous and invisible. It holds the potential for a connection to the world and a harsh, bloody severance from it. And it is everywhere, all around us, all the time.

* * *

On January 17, pianist Vicky Chow gave a recital at Northeastern University’s Fenway Center. Chow is best known as the pianist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and is a standing member of other new music groups as well. For this concert, though, most of the collaborators were virtual. Christopher Cerrone’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn, for instance, a 2010 meditation sparked by a long wait for a subway train, layered in a third rail of digital processing, the upper end of the keyboard triggering glitchy, distorted echoes over a gentle, subterranean meandering of parallel tenths. Hoyt-Shermerhorn was a Boston premiere, as was Steve Reich’s Piano Counterpoint, the 1973 ensemble piece Six Pianos re-arranged (by Vincent Corver) for a solo pianist playing along to four pre-recorded tracks; Chow’s snap-tight rhythm and technique, along with the timbre—brighter than the original—re-emphasized the music’s mechanical churn (as well as its sense of a very 1970s-NYC prescribed commotion, echoing of Stephen Sondheim’s “Another Hundred People” from Company as testament to the strength of that zeitgeist).

Ronald Bruce Smith’s Piano Book was a world premiere. Smith (a Northeastern professor) pulled out most of the traditional recipes for disguising the piano’s decay—trills, scales, Debussy-like flourishes, an entire section riffing on Baroque-style ornaments—and étude-like tricks for keeping more than two registers in play with only two hands. (Chow juggled it all with flair.) But amplification and processing were present here, too, electronically stretching the piano’s resonance and pedaled sustain into thick, soft clouds of sound. It struck me that all the technology was serving a purpose similar to that of the cellular network: it was making the piano more musically convenient, expanding its palette, increasing its capability, not just disguising its quirks but electronically eliminating them.

The finale, John Zorn’s 2014 Trilogy (another Boston premiere) seemed, at first, to cast all that aside. The collaborators here were human—bassist Trevor Roy Dunn and drummer Ian Ding—and the electronic mediation was limited to the sort of basic amplification one would use for the ensemble being evoked, a standard jazz trio. But Trilogy is trickier than it seems: Chow was playing from a fully through-composed part while Dunn and Ding improvised around her, an illusion of jazz, punctiliousness and freedom blurred together, almost imperceptibly. Zorn, it turns out, was playing with technologies, too, just much older ones: musical notation and improvisation, using the one to expand the other just as the other three works on the program were used processing and playback to expand on the piano’s possibilities.

One effect of it all was to render another, rather sophisticated piece of technology largely invisible—that is, the piano itself. Pianos are complex, ingenious, immensely satisfying pieces of engineering. So are all acoustic instruments, in their own ways—decades or, in some cases, centuries of incremental improvements yielding machines of remarkable and efficient expressivity. And yet, for the better part of a century, that development has largely been frozen. The piano Chow was playing was not appreciably different from one Rachmaninoff would have played. The persistent presence of old repertoire in classical music has enshrined acoustic instruments’ virtues and limitations as equally sacred.

I can appreciate the expressive potential of preserving an instrument’s seeming imperfections—the piano’s inability to sustain a tone much past a few seconds, for example, has probably fueled as much compositional creativity over the past two hundred years as any aesthetic revolution. But, then again, that preservation has been going on for the entirety of my musical life and much longer, so of course I would find a way to get used to it. Good and/or bad, it is one of the defining characteristics of classical music now. Part of that is classical music’s great boon and burden, the weight of history: to know that the great virtuosi of the past played essentially the same instruments that we do is a powerful connection. And I would guess that’s why the dominant use of electronics in more-or-less-classical new music in the 21st century is still in tandem with the old acoustic instruments. One technology is layered over with another: strata of innovations.

***

E177_front-1024x1024

The flip side of The Prepaid Piano & Replayed turns those layers into a palimpsest, effacing its acoustic, site-specific nature by way of Ableton Live’s audio-to-MIDI converter; the original recording, thus transformed, becomes a stream of instructions to a synthesizer. The virtual transfers enable Pekler to treat digital technology in the same, expressively-mine-the-imperfections way that generations of classical composers and performers have treated acoustic technology: the complex, noisy nature of The Prepaid Piano is, as Pekler admits, ideally designed to bring out the limitations of audio-to-MIDI. In a way, it highlights how much of the piece exists at the edge of so many less obvious musical technologies, especially those surrounding communication: composer to performer, performer to audience, audience to performer, and so forth. The Prepaid Piano & Replayed was issued as a limited edition of 300 vinyl copies—music designed around infinitely distributable wireless and digital means packaged into a rare and resolutely physical object.

For me, what Pekler’s project and Chow’s recital had in common was that they both prompted consideration of a particular feature of technology, musical technology in this case, but applicable to all technologies: the technology you notice is almost always, at the same time, pushing another technology into the unnoticed background. In that regard, technology isn’t entirely neutral, at least at first glance: the interface is always compressing the data, some information in sharper focus than other information. And I’ve found that one really fascinating question to ask myself while listening to music that utilizes technology—old technology, new technology, high technology, low technology—is this: what’s being hidden? What’s being effaced? What’s being pushed to the foreground, and what’s being pushed to the background?

In the coming months I want to explore some byways of how technology—cutting-edge or not—is being used in new music. Part of that story is already history; part of it is still, and always, being written. The quote at the top of this article, about poet Richard Monckton Milnes and historian Thomas Carlyle observing the trains, can be a bit of a guiding light. Emerson (who knew both Milnes and Carlyle) recorded it in his journals in 1842, when steam-powered rail travel was less than twenty years old. What was then Carlyle (and, in Emerson’s imagination, Milnes) offering a friendly reproach to get with the times now reads as an image of how technologies, as they become obsolete, can move entire systems of thought into a kind of limbo, passed by but still there. Humphrey Jennings, documentary filmmaker and general Renaissance man, included Emerson’s story in his extraordinary, unfinished, posthumously published anthology Pandæmonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. Jennings commented on the passage:

It was in this year 1842 that J. C. Doppler noticed the differing pitch of train whistles—advancing and retiring—and proposed, by analogy, the Doppler effect in the spectra of certain stars.

Sounds—and music, and technologies—come and go, but even their coming and going is its own kind of testimony.

New Music and Globalization 2: Networked Music

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - Columns

Interface for John Roach and Willy Whip’s <em>Simultaneous Translator</em>

Interface for John Roach and Willy Whip’s Simultaneous Translator

Globalization today is almost synonymous with the internet. The net has not only enabled globalization’s modern-day form, but also, in its early days at least, served as its ideological model: thanks to the network, the world would become one of universal access to culture and resources, flat hierarchies, and the smooth and unimpeded flow of information.

That ideology spilled over into the first experiments in net-art and net-music in the early 1990s. As musicians began to experiment with the net itself, however, it soon become apparent that these hopes were far from realized or, in some cases, actually unattainable. In this post, I want to take a look at how networked music has addressed those early ideals and come to terms with their shortcomings. The question of information flow has received the most attention, so I will focus on it first.
It didn’t take long before the ideal of unimpeded global communication ran up against the realities of bandwidth, buffering speeds, and browser capabilities.[1] Even setting these limitations aside for future solution, we can’t get around basic physics. As Álvaro Barbosa has calculated,[2] even if data were to travel at its maximum speed, the speed of light, across a perfect network with unlimited bandwidth, the delay between two opposite points on the globe would be at least 65 msec—or more than three times longer than what the human ear will perceive as simultaneous. This has a direct impact on music: acceptable synchronization between geographically remote performers, such as an orchestra might easily achieve on stage, is not possible. Because such synchronicity is a founding value of most “good” musical performances, it was soon clear that net music would have to build itself on new foundations.

Bill Duckworth's Cathedral in its first incarnation

Bill Duckworth’s Cathedral in its first incarnation

Latency—the unavoidable delay of a networked system—is now accepted by net musicians, and either worked around or incorporated as a feature of their art. The Japanese-American artist Atau Tanaka is among those who have given most thought to this. In works like NetOsc (1999), written for the Sensorband trio of himself, Edwin van der Heide, and Zbigniew Karkowski, he considers latency as the “acoustic resonance” of the net, analogous to the resonance of a cathedral. (The analogy inadvertently points to one of the first, and most acclaimed, works of net-music, William Duckworth’s Cathedral, launched in 1997.) John Roach and Willy Whip’s Simultaneous Translator (2007) uses live data about the lag of router-to-router transactions across the net to shape certain musical parameters. Of course, by the 1990s musical innovations in open form, free improvisation, aleatory, parametrical composition, acousmatic music, and so on were well enough bedded in for there to be no real need for dramatic innovations in musical form or technique. The battles that made networked music aesthetically possible, at least, had all been fought.

When it comes to considering the web as a flat, non-hierarchical landscape, an important early work is Randall Packer’s Telemusic #1 (2000), made in collaboration with Steve Bradley, Gregory Kuhn, and John Young. As Packer describes it, one of the principal concerns of Telemusic #1 was “dissolving the spatial and temporal constraints of the performance environment and transforming the World Wide Web into an unseen ensemble of audience participants.” Performance of the work takes place in two spaces simultaneously: the physical performing venue and cyberspace. Online participant-listeners could navigate a 3D Flash environment populated by bits of text. Clicking on a text would trigger an audio sample of those words, which would be processed live and projected or streamed back into the physical and virtual spaces. (In the physical space, these texts were spoken aloud.) Participant-listeners would then hear a composite of the activities of themselves and everyone else participating in the work. The idea was developed further in Telemusic #2 (2001). Here, each participant-listener’s IP address was used to create a unique sonic identifier, making it possible to hear the virtual space as a plurality of individuals, rather than an undefined homogeneity.

Packer's Telemusic pieces

Packer’s Telemusic pieces: Screenshot of texts on the ‘telematic condition’

In net-works like these (and these are just two, relatively early, examples among many), art becomes about constructing an environment that the user enters, rather than delivering a precisely conceived message.[3] Packer expresses his own vision of this future utopia as follows: “Innovations in multi-user gaming, chat rooms, teleconferencing, MUDS and so on, point to new opportunities for radically new compositional forms for the online experience, a form of music that is no longer dependent on the location of the audience member, or even the location of the performance space.”[4] This is analogous to the shift that took place in site-specific art over the same period, from the 1970s and ’80s to the 2000s, although in music’s case it was driven as much by technological expediency as political critique.

Packer’s vision is seductive, and it may well come to pass in some form. He is not alone in thinking it. (Although it is interesting that more than a decade on it hasn’t, in spite of the accelerating pace of technological change.) Yet his vision is built upon the principle of technological sophistication, and therefore privilege. This brings me to the final ideal that I listed at the start of this post: universal access. This has proved the hardest issue to resolve, and appears to have received the least attention, at least among those artists that I am aware of. The fact is that engaging in net art—whether as a participant or creator—requires certain privileges that remain far from universal: a good quality computer and high-speed internet connection (or access to a relatively well-appointed gallery where such a work may be installed), sufficient leisure time, and appropriate physical abilities to work whatever interface there may be.

It is no coincidence that despite the ideology of access, net art’s key developments remain centered around North American and European research institutes like CCRMA at Stanford and SARC in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Until net composers address this question, net music must surely remain an incomplete metaphor for contemporary globalization.

*

[1] Helen Thorington’s article “Breaking out: The trip back,” published in Contemporary Music Review, 24(6) (2005), pp. 445–58, gives an excellent survey of the early history of networked music. An indication of the technical challenges connected to networked music can gained by reading the publications of the SoundWIRE research group at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. See: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/soundwire/publications/.
[2] Á. Barbosa. “Displaced Soundscapes: A Survey of Network Systems for Music and Sonic Art Creation.” Leonardo Music Journal, 13 (2003), pp. 53–9.
[3] See Pierre Lévy. “The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace.” Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. R. Packer and K. Jordan (New York: Norton, 2001).
[4] Randall Packer. “Composing with Media: Zero in Time and Space.” Contemporary Music Review, 24(6) (2005), pp. 509–25, at p. 524.

Twelve Tidbits from 2011

Posted on May 20, 2014 by - Articles

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1. This charming video was created by our January 2011 cover profile composer Mikel Rouse. He made it completely on his iPhone!

2. Speaking of video, NewMusicBox began streaming HD video via Vimeo.

3. We featured violinists:

4. And violists:

5. And electric guitarists:

6. Oh, and we featured some composers, too.

7. Also in the technological advances department, Schott launched a new digital publishing platform.
8. In memoriam: We continue to treasure the memory and music of Milton Babbitt, as well as that of the much-loved Peter Lieberson.
9. 2011 seemed to be the year, at least in this space, that some of our bloggers really dove into discussions of self-promotion. I mean, very, very into it!
10. My personal favorite concert experience of 2011 was hearing Mantra perform Michael Gordon’s Timber.

11. And let’s talk about choice post-concert negative comments!
12. Last, but most definitely not least–the big merger between the American Music Center and Meet The Composer, creating New Music USA became official!
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Additional NewMusicBox @ 15 Posts

Keep Dallas Wired: The Dallas Opera Plugs Into Death and the Powers

Posted on February 25, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Hal Cazalet as Nicholas in Tod Machover's Death and the Powers

Hal Cazalet as Nicholas in Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers
Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

Tod Machover has a real knack for tapping into popular consciousness. While his background is as academically rigorous as it could possibly be, his compositional work, as well as his instrument and software design, leans in a direction that can certainly be described as approachable to a broad audience. It takes a certain sensibility to write music for the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell one week then for Prince and Penn and Teller the next [1], one that is flexible and responsive to a wide variety of audiences and performers. This was on display in the recent production of his Pulitzer-nominated opera Death and the Powers by The Dallas Opera—even before I took my seat. Shortly after entering the Winspear Opera House, I noticed a group of people crowding around a simple metal chair with several sensors arranged in a semicircle behind it and flanked by what appeared to be two outsized lightsabers. Acting as a sort of a theremin for the torso, patrons were invited to sit in the chair and shimmy to their hearts’ content while the chair responded to their movements. Used as the focal point of Machover’s Brain Opera and developed initially as part of the Media/Medium project with Penn and Teller, this shiny new version of the Sensor Chair was built by Machover and Elena Jessop specifically as a catalyst for the production. It was quite popular and served as a gentle introduction to the technology as soon as one entered the hall.

There are robots in Death and the Powers, a 90-minute, one-act opera, and they are called Operabots. Perhaps to accentuate the difference between them and the humans who eventually join them on stage, their design is decidedly un-anthropomorphic. Think R2-D2, not C3PO, with one slight nod to human form in the inverted triangle that could be taken for a head. Operating independently and scooting around at various points in the evening, a quartet of these guys sat quietly at center stage as the work began. When they came to life, they announced that they would be re-enacting a drama left to them by their human predecessors, and in doing so they hoped to gain a deeper understanding of human existence through an examination of the concept of death. Accompanying their introductory material (which was voiced in the most stock ’50s nasally, monotone, robot voice you could possibly imagine [2]) were stylized computer sounds which swirled around the audience and read initially a bit more like sound design than music. My first impression was that both the robot voices and the opening audio were a bit dated, but on reflection I think that the use of those “on the nose” sounds served really well to both separate the human from the robot and to set the stage in the clearest possible way for the sci-fi to come.

Robert Orth as Simon Powers - photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

Robert Orth as Simon Powers
Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

Robert Orth played the part of Simon Powers, a one percenter of the highest order who, as he is approaching the end of his life, has his consciousness downloaded into “The System,” a computer mainframe that will allow him to live forever. Joining him is his daughter Miranda, his third wife Evvy, and his protégé Nicholas, who as a child was rescued by Powers from an orphanage for disabled children. A set of strobe lights aimed at the audience masked the replacement of the robots with human counterparts, as three huge walls served as an ever-changing backdrop to the events. The walls were actually three-sided structures, each one able to rotate and move around to reveal what amounted to large video screens. The “screens” were actually made of dozens of vertical lights in an 8×20 grid which at times showed a variety of shifting patterns, but which were able to display a fine enough resolution to show faces, principally Powers once his transition to The System was made.

Orth’s portrayal of Powers was just thunderous; a stomping, garish, wonderfully obnoxious character who served as a perfect counterpoint to Joélle Harvey’s earnest Miranda. Once inside The System, his solo describing the transition was particularly compelling, though it’s a challenge to have that solo without the singer onstage. This was one of the instances in which Orth’s face does not materialize on the screen, so his work was really cut out for him. Running the gamut from bellowing bombast to a gentle nostalgia for his past, his performance here was even more impressive in that it occurred without his physical presence. Patricia Riley’s Evvy was engaging throughout, but never more so than in her duet with her disembodied husband. What begins as an innocent reminiscence about their first date develops into a full-fledged erotic encounter, one that Riley was able to communicate in every aspect of her performance without going full-Miley. Hal Cazalet’s Nicholas really came alive in the fifth scene while in the lab working with the robots. His retelling of Powers as his personal savior is passionate, as he notes that the prosthetic arm he has built is “post-organic,” a sort of preliminary version of Powers’ transformation. Powers financial standing is on par with many countries, and his exit from human affairs has left a tremendous void in the world. As such, all has gone to hell in a handbasket. A visit from the The Administration, The United Nations, and The United Way (played by Tom McNichols, David Kravitz, and Frank Kelley, respectively) provides comic relief, with Kelley’s piercing histrionics a wonderful foil to McNichols’s booming bass.
In a production with so many strong singers and performances, it was in the final scene where Harvey’s Miranda stole the show. Unable to follow Evvy into the world of The System, she is torn between her love for her father and her love of conventional human life. The 99 percent arrive as The Miseries, all of humanity living in a world turned upside down by the turmoil that occurred in the wake of Powers’s retreat from the world. Having escaped their grip, Miranda confronts Powers who continues to try to convince her that entering The System is the only option for the future of humanity. Miranda rejects this notion, repeating the word “Live, live, live!” as the orchestra ascends to a final climax.

Moody Foundation Chandelier extends from the ceiling of the Winspear Opera House. Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

Moody Foundation Chandelier extends from the ceiling of the Winspear Opera House.
Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

It’s not surprising that in a world where the line between human and robot is crossed, the music has a similar dichotomy. Nicole Paiement, artistic director of Opera Parallèle in San Francisco, returned to Dallas to lead her second TDO production, having done Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse in 2012. Paiement and the orchestra not only handled everything Machover’s score threw at them, but did it while being surrounded and occasionally overwhelmed by all manner of electronic audio. And that audio was not fully confined to the hall in Dallas. Simulcasts of opera productions are nothing new, but Machover and a team from the MIT Media Lab developed an iPhone app which allowed patrons at satellite sites to receive secondary audio and video content coincident with the performance in Dallas, as well as the ability to control the Moody Foundation Chandelier, a huge structure with dozens of plexiglass tubes that descend from and contract into the ceiling.

Interactive, robot, remote simulcast, lightsaber, iPhone, Sensor Chair: the word cloud for this piece has everything a 21st-century opera could ask for.
I, for one, welcome our Operabot overlords.

*


1. This may not be an accurate timeline.

2. Seriously, take a second and do a robot voice. That’s the one I heard.