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Contemporary Music Review

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The metaphysics of live electronics

Jonathan Harvey
Published online: 20 Aug 2009.

To cite this article: Jonathan Harvey (1999) The metaphysics of live electronics, Contemporary Music Review, 18:3, 79-82,
DOI: 10.1080/07494469900640351

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494469900640351

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 ContemporaryMusic Review
1999, Vol.18, Part 3, pp. 79-82
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The Metaphysics of Live Electronics

JonathanHarvey
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The article revolves around the question of performance in live electronic works. After put-
ting the problem in perspective by raising several esthetical and musical issues, the author
goes on by illustrating some of these preocupations through a number of recent pieces.

KEY WORDS: Performance, Interpretation, Electronic liveness, Electronic instrument,

Invisible presence, Physical presence.

Last night I dreamt I could fly. I even held fragments of ce'fling in m y

hand to prove overwhelmingly to people it was possible, in fact easy, to
defy the laws of physics. Then I awoke; and reluctantantly saw I could
convince no-one. This dream comes to me often. Perhaps it was caused on
this occasion by the fact that the evening before I had watched a TV pro-
gramme on Robert Jahn, formerly Dean of Engineering at Princeton,
putting forward 'incontrovertible evidence' for the influence of mind
over matter. He was forced to resign his position and is shunned by many
of his colleagues, some of w h o m spoke on the programme.
My recurrent dream is often triggered by such things. An alternative
version is that during the day I have an experience carrying a strong
sense of the mystical or numinous or even magical, and this provokes the
dream during the night. Hying seems to be a symbol for another reality
about which in some obscure part of me I am totally convinced, but
which is extremely difficult to convey to others. Almost more important
than the "face of flying is that as I wake I invariably undergo a shock at
the precise moment I realise that what seemed so dearly true is 'actually'
not true at all. It is probably because I feel very unhappy keeping these
vivid metaphysical experiences to myself alone that I am driven to com-
municate, to compose, and even more specifically, that I turn to electron-
ics as a medium. They are the desperate peace-broker on the battlefield

79
 80 JonathanHarvey

where the rational self and the would-be supressed experiencer of a for-
bidden other reality fight it out.
But if this is true, might it not be true of music as a whole, and non-real-
time as much as live electronics? Why focus on live electronics particularly?
Is not all composing an attempt to resolve conflicts between contradictory
realities of the mind?
Certainly the aesthetic question is bigger than live electronics: but for
me, live electronics is the most powerful tool in the dialectical process
which I shall try to describe.
With electronics it is common to make sounds that have no, or only
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vestigial, traces of human instrumental performance. No person can be

envisaged blowing, hitting or scraping anything. They are often sounds
of mysterious provenance. With live electronics, when electronics are per-
formed in realtime like instruments and combined with instruments (or,
of course voices), two worlds are brought together in a theatre of transform-
ations. No-one listening knows exactly what is instrumental and what
is electronic any more. Legerdemain deceives the audience as in a magic
show. When they lack their connection to the familiar instrumental world
electronics can be inadmissably alien, other, inhuman, dismissable (like
the notion of flying in a rational world). When electronics are seamlessly
connected to the physical, solid instrumental world an expansion of the
admissable takes place, and the 'mad' world is made to belong.
In m y live electronic works there are several degrees of liveness. Some
sounds are created for an electronic instrument which, once set up, can be
fluently moved around in just as a cellist creates sounds live within the
parameters of the cello. The parameters will be more or less compositor-
ially determined: the sounds are 'note-like" objects n limited but playable
in complex configurations. At the other extreme there are sounds that are
considerably more fixed; they are usually longer in duration, may be
more like a 'passage' than a 'note'; creations at a higher level of struc-
ture, molecular rather than atomic. These have typically taken many days
or weeks of studio work to perfect. If they are beyond a certain length
they begin to correspond to the non-realtime notion of 'tape', with its
connotations of performer slavery. In between these two extremes there is
every imaginable degree of liveness, every level of fixity. Because of all
these sounds" presentation through the same loudspeakers, their prolifer-
ation and often simultaneity, the listener has little chance of knowing
where instrumentality stops and where fixed object-like 'tape' music
starts.
Only with great familiarity will it become clearer that whereas some
sounds are fluid and spontaneously change from performance to per-
formance, others remain the same. And yet the duality too is fascinating: I
have found that one hears the fixed sounds in a new way in different
 The Metaphysics of Live Electronics 81

performances because they are re-articulated by their shifting context, they

seem to change. (One can never put one's foot in the same fragment of
river twice). If performing styles change in 70 years time (and such works
are still around) it would be interesting to see h o w the 'unchanging" re-
corded passages work with and influence the new slant of interpretation.
Madonna of Winter and Spring (1986) is for full orchestra with 3
synthesisers, ring modulation, amplification of certain instruments,
octophonic live panning and reverberation which selects certain moments
and freezes them while the orchestra continues. The reverberation, for in-
stance, clearly takes in an instrumental datum and extends it in time in a
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way which is contradictory of the orchestral world, yet at one with it in

that there is no point at which reverb and orchestra could be prised apart.
Time is arrested, physically unplayable sound is heard (another world).
Near the end the conductor is requested to lose all sense of time, the time-
less world takes over, and the passage can last a very long 'time'. Elec-
tronics heal the suffering/rejoking instruments with their detachment
and expansiveness. They contain within themselves the traces of passion
yet forgive the crime. In m y piece the weariness of 'Winter' is deepened
to lifeless melancholia and death, the energy of 'Spring' is brightened to
the radiance of spiritual ethereality. The dangerous extremes can be
redemptively lived through in a transferred form.
This expansiveness is explicit in another work, From Silence (1988) for
soprano with a small group of instrumentalists including 3 electronic
keyboards. It starts from silence, with tape. For a long time the sound is
almost indistinguishable from silence (or hall ambience). Perhaps a con-
nection is made outside the frame of the piece. Not only are 'non-phys-
ical' (electronic) sounds connected with physical sounds, but on the other
side they are connected with the 'not-piece' world. This breaking of
bounds serves the oceanic meaning of the text, a Christian/Buddhist
mystical expression. The sense of inaudible, invisible presence within this
'zero-sound' is carried over into the live electronics; they bridge the span
from this on the one side into quasi-instrumental physicality at the other
extreme, connecting invisible presence with physical presence.
In the opera Inquest of Love (1992), a full opera with live electronics, the
same view of electronics as evocation or representation of another world
formed the starting point, the first idea from which the whole libretto,
drama and music emerged. (The opera was born from a sound which
engendered a drama). The second and final act is entirely set in another
world, a world after death. In such a world sound is present in the way
feeling is present in 'this' world. We live in it, are guided by it, manipu-
late it, build it. The idea of the opera came from m y work over twenty
years with electronic sound; it is a dramatisation of aspects of that type of
sound world.
 82 JonathanHarvey

Another recent work, One Evening (1993) for singers, instruments

including electronic ones and signal processing, is much concerned with
rhythmic cells. But the role of the electronics is not only to articulate these
rhythmic ideas but to join them seamlessly to a quite other world by
means of acceleration. The rhythms are accelerated several octaves higher
to the point where they become pure haze, a coloured static timbre. Sup-
porting the symbolism of the text, the world of dance (physical vocality
and instumentality) is integrated with the non-physical continuum of
meditation-consciousness: and vice-versa, in a kind of 'incarnation' where
the haze descends and reveals itself to be a complex rhythmic ostinato
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played by a sampled, then live, tabla.

'Tablas' of a sort also play a part in Advaya (1994) for cello, sampler
keyboard and electronics, some of which are projected from compact
disks. The cello plucks the A-440 harmonic with different types of pure or
nasal timbre in tabla-like rhythms: these are sampled and played also on
the keyboard. In fact the sampler plays only cello sounds, as do the CD
players. Hence the title Advaya: an old Buddhist term meaning "not two',
beyond duality (without denying duality's existence). The two performers
play one sound world: the performers and electronics are also one world.
As in One Evening the electronics range from gestural performance right
through to recorded sounds of several minutes, so the distinctions
between live and non-real time are again blurred. The passages that took
weeks of work to define and record are, however, the ones that develop
the ideas most, that expand out of the work the farthest, in other words
take the physical cello/keyboard duo ones sees on stage to another, physically
impossible world, a world metaphorically prior, in psychological terms,
to the rationalities of physics.

Sound examples

21. Advaya(1994) (Excerpt)

22. FromSilence(Excerpt)