BODYMUSIC
“ Bodymusic, a witty, imaginative new piece presented by the Argento Chamber Ensemble during a Composer Portrait concert at the Miller Theater on Friday evening. The piece was always clever and often rich. Still, Mr. Currier’s technical achievement here did not eclipse the craft and refinement he showed in two earlier pieces." -New York Times |
Program Note From the incessant chatter of teens, office workers and instruments alike, to the laughter evoked by a trumpet exploring extended techniques, or the feeling of uneasy hypochondria caused by hearing one's own heartbeat in the dark, from the sneeze that spreads throughout an ensemble of instruments, to the articulation of language, or of pillow talk after sex, Bodymusic explores the intimate connection between our physical selves and the often ephemeral, disembodied world of music. Combining a large chamber ensemble with prerecorded samples of everything from hiccups to speech, from walking to singing, Bodymusic examines how music ultimately comes from the body, but also how the body can be coordinated, enlivened, calmed and focused by music. The seed for the piece was planted when I was living in Berlin at the American Academy in 2005. I heard a performance of a work by Dieter Schnebel. The work, Maulwerke, was a full evening piece for several singers who produced inhalations, exhalations, and phoneme-like sounds made by the tongue, throat and breath: the component parts of language production, but never language itself. I was struck by how engaging this was and now, some years later, decided to explore some parallel ideas in Bodymusic. My palette of sounds is wider the Schnebel's, incorporating internal body sounds such as a heartbeat, sounds of bodies in contact with other objects such when we run or bath, sounds stemming from emotional states such as yelling and laughing, and actual words and speech. Since my time in Berlin I've written several pieces that include pre-recorded samples based on natural sounds. This interests me for two reasons: one, the aesthetic or musical appeal of the sound itself, for example the beauty of the sound of water or of intensity of glass breaking; but also because all natural sounds carry with them meanings and associations that can interact with purely musical discourse. The outside world, with all it's associations, meanings, emotions, implications, is brought into dialogue with the more abstract world of musical rhetoric. In Bodymusic this is not the whole wide world, but the more-close-to-home world of our own bodies. The instrumental material of the third movement of Bodymusic is one thing, but this same music following the sound of a sneeze, as it does, becomes something very different. In combining music with natural sounds, it would be hard not to evoke at times the sound design in cinema and this is something that, rather than trying to avoid, I'm interested in engaging with. In film, more often than not, it is a marriage of convenience, where the the emotional underpinning of the score must by necessity intersect with natural sounds of the narrative. I'm intrigued by the idea of taking such a ubiquitous, but typically subliminal interaction and shinning a spotlight on it. Divorced from the narrative structure one is free to explore the more aesthetic and sonority driven side of such relationships. The first and last movements of Bodymusic - some of the only sections that use sounds not specifically made by the body - are examples of the most overt references to such a filmic sensibility. In Doorways, we hear several times the sound of footsteps reaching a doorway, unlocking and opening it to reveal a different sound world in each - a sort of auditory Bluebeard's Castle. In Nightbath, the last movement, the music unfolds surrounded entirely by gentle splashes of water, and the breath and single sigh of the person whose intimate world we enter briefly. The samples of Bodymusic are taken from diverse sources, mostly online. The majority from sites that offer royalty free samples, used primarily for film. After that, there's an assortment of other sources from international internet radio, to academic linguistic sites, several single notes from a Berio recording, a looped fragmented of a single note of Josquin, and the "text-to-speech" option on my Mac computer, where in movement twelve, Worldplay, I found "her" inert-but-sexy voice just what I was looking for. Bodymusic is divided into sixteen movements. In each movement the instrumental ensemble interacts with a different sample set as the movement titles generally suggest: Doorways, Gossip, Sneeze, Humiliation, Hiccups, Very Quiet, After Sex, Phonemes, Running, Babel, Crowds, Wordplay, Sleep, Solo Voice, Chorus, Nightbath. The work was commissioned by Miller Theater. It is approximately 39 minutes long. |
Scoring
1.1.1.1-1.1.1-perc-pft-strings-digital keyboard
This work requires additional technological components and/or amplification. .
Territory
This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes for the world.
World Premiere
3/5/2010 Miller Theatre, New York, NY
Argento Chamber Ensemble
1.1.1.1-1.1.1-perc-pft-strings-digital keyboard
This work requires additional technological components and/or amplification. .
Territory
This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes for the world.
World Premiere
3/5/2010 Miller Theatre, New York, NY
Argento Chamber Ensemble