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- Hedelin, Fredrik, 1965-, et al.
(författare)
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Components of Passage
- 2019
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Music for solo instrument and electronics creates a special challenge in the concrete and vivid character of the live performer versus the abstract and fixed character of the speakers with their invisible electrical signals. Composers have tried to bring the two worlds together by creating fields of contact between them; Kontakte by Stockhausen is a prime example of how timbral and gestural similarities connect the acoustic and electronic sound material.Developments in the field of live electronics have made it possible to fuse the two worlds by using microphones and motion sensors together with machine learning and gesture recognition. New connections are created as the electronic sounds may be triggered by the motions of the musician and similarly the electronic part may be able to listen and react to its surrounding.In plateau eleven in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about how the movements, colours and calls of the bowerbirds forms an assemblage of heterogeneous components that together constitute a machinic statement. They also describe how matters of expression emerge from such components and give an example of how leaves of grass with the Australian grass finches become a component for passages between assemblages. Similarly one may regard music for acoustic instruments together with electronic sounds as a special assemblage of enunciation. By utilising the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of heterogeneous components, rhizomatic connections, and machinic assemblage, one may reconsider the relation between the instrumental and electronic parts as a question of connections between components and passages between assemblages, rather than similarities and interactions between two worlds.In the piece Passage we have used a clarinet with a motion sensor integrated into the bell of the instrument with the purpose of investigating the artistic possibilities of such an approach. The motion sensor is in that way not an addition to the instrument, that is, it is not a mechanism to control or observe the music from the outside but rather turns the clarinet itself - just like the stem of grass with the Australian grass finches - to a component for passage between different musical assemblages within the general instrument and electronics assemblage. The movement patterns of the instrument, the motion component, thus becomes an important part of the musical assemblage.This is done mainly by (i) making the clarinet movements detach from the instrumental execution, meaning that the motion component becomes a separated entity with its own specific set of expressions, (ii) letting the motion component establish connections with both instrumental and electronic components, (iii) making the motion component detach from the musical assemblage (i.e. musical structure) and establish itself into another assemblage. In that way a motion component can act as a component for passage between the instrument and the electronics, meaning that an additional dimension of contact between the two worlds may arise. This dimension is not a contact through timbral or gestural interconnection, nor through interplay in terms of action-reaction, but through the motion component’s ability to act as passages between the two worlds.
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