#saariselka

Composers who treat sound as material.

How do we feel sound? Besides shaping the emotional realm, composers can approach the materiality of sound itself in a lot of different ways. From recorded objects or musique concréte, instruments extended through technology, architecture and spatial installations, conceptual art, or the physics of sound and tuning.

Éliane Radigue—Occam Ocean Volume 2 (Chuck)

My first encounters with Éliane Radigue’s electronic music inspired me many years ago to dive deeply into electronics, modular synthesis, and the potential of long-duration sounds. When you enter her sonic world, sounds that may seem on the surface to be static reveal continuous change and movement. When I learned that she had shifted into composing for acoustic instruments I had a hard time imagining how her aesthetic would translate. Then I heard cellist Charles Curtis perform Radigue’s piece for solo cello, Naldjorlak, and it suddenly made sense. Sounds I had never heard before came out of his instrument, as if the inherent instability and alive-ness of the wood and strings had been called out of dormancy.

Pauline Oliveros (Marielle)—“A Woman Sees How the World Goes with No Eyes” / “A Love Song”

Chuck and I were both at Mills College studying with Pauline Oliveros at different times. Personally her embodiment of sound, her broad definition of “composition” helped me release a lot of baggage around my traditional conservatory training and what it meant to be a composer (it doesn’t mean you need to write notes on a page!). She was a pioneer and an activist, always pushing boundaries and comfort.

Catherine Christer Hennix—“The Well-tuned Marimba” (Chuck)

My interest in just intonation—methods of tuning that are based on the mathematics of natural harmonics rather than the equal steps of Western tuning—led me to Hennix. Of all the minimalists of her generation, Hennix may be the most mathematical in approach (she has taught mathematics and computer science at MIT and SUNY) but her music for re-tuned, electrified instruments has an organic and chaotic quality.

Morton Feldman—“Palais de Mari” (Marielle)

What if a composition exists on its own, as its own entity, with its own shape, in its own dimension, until you perform or listen to it? Our action itself pulls the compositional form of the work into this time and space, into our experience.

Arvo Pärt—Fratres for Eight Cellos (Chuck)