Chamber music of Morton Subotnick
[Friday, May 12, 2006, Coolidge Auditorium,
Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress]
Got to hear/see Until Spring Revisited, a work of surround
sound and projected images performed on laptops. The
beginnings of the piece date way back to the developments
of what became the Buchl Synthesizer at the San Francisco
Tape Music Center in the '60s. An updating of Until Spring
(1976) (which then was given to the limitations of the analog
synthesizer), it contains some samples from the original
work, but most of the sounds, though similar to the original,
were newly created. The sounds were loaded into a software
environment using the application, Isadora. The sound materials
were organized into blocks or "scenes," each containing an
array of related material. The ordering of these scenes can
be changed at any time and the performance of the sound
materials within the scenes were rehearsed, but the work is
always in a state of perpetual evolution.
On the stage two laptops were performed by Miguel Frasconi,
a composer/performer who's worked with Cage, Eno, Hassell,
and James Tenney, and who's worked in the Fluxus and Dada
movements, and Subotnick. The technique included the playing
of keys on the keyboards and mouse movements and vocalizing
into four microphones. The sound traveled through the auditorium
space through six speakers and a sub-woofer. The third performer
was Sue Constabile, a light artist. She performed the visual
component of the evening by manipulating handmade and found
objects-- papers, fabrics, drawings, watercolors-- captured in
real time by a video camera and projected onto a screen at the
read of the stage. Textures, surfaces, shapes, bits of texts
and lighting danced across the screen in dark, moody ways.
Her work seems to inherit equally from the kinetic languages
of Stan Brakhage's abstractions, as well as Nicolas Schoffer's
lumodynamic sculptures.
Taken all together, the evening was full, and seemed to be--
if not totally new (for that listen to Mandarin Movie, Condemek,
Damian Catera, Robert Ashley, Joan Labarbara)--an ample (and
amplified!) summation of where Subotnick's been and where
he's going.
Gerald Schwartz
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