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Javier Alvarez
To cite this article: Javier Alvarez (1989) Rhythm as motion discovered, Contemporary Music
Review, 3:1, 203-231, DOI: 10.1080/07494468900640141
"Rhythm as motion discovered" is divided into three parts that discuss some of the author's
current compositional ideas. The first part has two themes: firstly, the relation between
language and material and the privileged position of the electroacoustic composer in his
dealings with musical material as a sonic craftsman. Secondly, that meaning in musical
language is in fact a 'discovery" of satisfactory relations between the motion of musical
structures and physical human experience and suggests that by 'discovering' this relation
the listener engaged in the apprehension of musical form. The second part of this paper
describes how the author's compositional work has stemmed from the perspective of
rhythm proposing that rhythmic structures are perhaps the strongest and most crucial
references in music. Concepts such as repetition, rhythmic objects, and their transformation
in the context of recent works (namely Caracteristicasand Temazcal)are analysed. In the third
and final section musical time, structure and rhythmic objects are discussed in terms of the
techniques and procedures described previously and in the context of the work Papalotl.
Finally, it is proposed that motion can be thought of as a rhythm of rhythms, and that by
shaping motion in the aural experience the composer can in fact articulate musical time and
form in a way that has a poetic meaning to the listener.
S i n c e m y first i n c u r s i o n i n t o t h e f i e l d of e l e c t r o a c o u s t i c m u s i c , I h a v e b e e n
t h r i l l e d to d i s c o v e r i n t h e m e t h o d o f w o r k i m m e n s e s i m i l a r i t i e s w i t h
O r i g a m i , t h e J a p a n e s e a r t of p a p e r f o l d i n g w h i c h I h a v e b e e n p r a c t i c i n g
n o w for n e a r l y f i f t e e n y e a r s . T h i s s i m i l a r i t y is r e l e v a n t to m y w o r k : h e r e I
h a v e t w o a c t i v i t i e s in w h i c h l a n g u a g e a n d m a t e r i a l s a r e m a g i c a l l y b o u n d
t o g e t h e r , w h e r e i n v e n t i o n is experienced as it is being produced, a n d
l a n g u a g e u n f o l d s as it is invented. A s s o m e o n e w h o is h i g h l y s u s p i c i o u s o f
recipes, I have found working in electroacoustics and with computers a
l i b e r a t i n g e x p e r i e n c e i n m y m u s i c a l e x p l o r a t i o n s . N o d o u b t , all s o r t s o f
203
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in regards to how this kind of material can be developed (see Figure 7). In
each section, the complexity of the strands is thereafter left to the player
and result from his reactions to the motions suggested to him by the
pulses on tape. This is ~esthetically very attractive to me, in two senses.
Firstly, in that the performer must, by the very nature of the work, engage
in active listening, and almost dance in order to pull the piece together.
Secondly, this simple approach breaks away from the concept of the tape
as a straight-jacket: in Temazcal it is possible to interpret freely the
suggested material, but, even under these apparently loose conditions,
synchronisation points invariably remain extremely accurate while the
response to the material on tape remains seemingly personal.
inaccurate) memories of what has passed, and in this sense there can never be a
clear cut "recapitulation" "
(Wishart, 1985 p. 23).
I have always felt that to invent music is to a great extent to invent some
kind of living organism. In inventing music, the composer is also creating
a temporal entity which reflects in the listener. Just as pulse is a reflection
of repetition, so is musical time a poetic reflection of an objective musical
sonic experience. In fact, one could say that musical time if the life-span of
such an invention. In this sense, the clearer the referential framework of a
piece of music received by the listener, the fuller will be his apprehension
of its musical time. Although the composer cannot control h o w the
listener will react and modify his perception, he is in a position to alter the
flow of referential 'clues' presented to the listener and by that token
modify the listener's engagement in the discovery of musical meaning.
This, I believe, is crucial in articulating structure in musical discourse.
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More to the point, however, in Papalotl I have used nearly two hundred
rhythmic objects (see Figure 11 for a typical example) which are used as
the building blocks for the piano and the computer parts. These have
been combined and added to construct larger strands of music. The piano
part consists mainly of chords playing the patterns. As far as these are
concerned, their transformation results mainly from simple operations.
These include the following: a) simple addition b) addition of a cell to half
of its preceding one c) alternation of these two procedures d) repetition of
the above and e) prolations (see Figure 12). Whilst the basic time unit
(MM #/~= 528) nearly always remains constant, the pulses implied by the
known medieval principle of talea and color. By the additional operations
on the rhythmic patterns, new talea are generated, and out of their
varying relation with the actual pitches in the piano part, pulse points are
made to emerge at harmonically significant points. Chord sequences are
also subjected to the processes of addition described above for the
rhythmic cells, so both the talea and the color are changing incessantly
throughout the work. Furthermore, pulse variation is achieved by
rhythmic modulation applied to the resultant color, while the resultant
talea are left unaltered.
The computer part of Papalotl was built of note type sounds from the
inside resonances of a piano which were sampled on a Fairlight Computer
Music Instrument Series II. Because the samples were short, repetition
became the basic procedure to extend them into full-bodied objects. The
choice of material, however, was not haphazard: through it the computer
becomes a sort of disembodied piano which, in spite of its abstracted
presence, retains a perceptual link with the listener. The relation between
this material and the piano's was further elaborated by using the same
patterns in both parts to determine their transformations. (ie. rate of
repetitions, movements of the filter, length of resonances, speed of the
attack, etc.). In the computer part, all the control parameters, induding
phasing, echoes and reverberation were entirely programmed
maintaining the same pattern shapes but activated at much higher
speeds, in frequencies usually related to the main harmonic centre of the
piano part at that particular moment. So for instance, when the piano part
is centered at around a c# region, the note objects and/or control
parameters were activated to repeat and resonate at harmonic frequencies
of 17.32Hz (c#0), 25.96Hz (g#0); 30.87Hz (b0) or 34.65Hz (c#1), etc.
Again, as in Caracteristicas, periodic repetition in the piano part was
paired with harmonic frequencies and aperiodic repetition with
inharmonic frequencies operating the control files and rates of repetition
of the sampled sounds. In spite of the fact that the piano and computer
parts are constantly being juxtaposed, this pairing up gives the work a
coherent resonance, and shapes the movement in both parts in a
characteristic way. Also, by this means, the piano provides the upper
partials of the entire spectral composition of the work, while the tape part
constantly touches upon fundamentals.
Finally in Papalotl, my most important goal was to compose a work
Rhythm as motion discovered 229
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Notes
1. This statement obviously implies the adoption of an aesthetic position. There is
a large amount of music produced today which assumes that structure is only
elucidated at the pre-compositional stage. This article assumes that structure
is mainly apprehended in the sonic experience. For further discussion of this
point see Simon Emmerson's The Relation of Language to Materials in The
Language of Electroacoustic Music. ed. S. Emmerson. London 1986. MacMillan
Press. pp. 17-40.
2. I am questioning here the abstracted notion of rhythm in terms of durations,
abstracted from (timbral and dynamic) shape: "Pitch and duration seem to me
to form the basis of a compositional dialectic, while intensity and timbre
belong to secondary categories". Pierre Boulez in Boulez on Music Today. Trans.
S. Bradshaw and R. Rodney Bennett. London 1971, Faber and Faber. p. 37.
3. The limitations of notation vis-/l-vis the multi-layered experience of music is far
more pronounced than this argument indicates. For a detailed discussion of
this matter see Trevor Wishart's Beyond the Pitch~DurationParadigm in On Sonic
Art. York 1985. pp 7-27.
4. For a detailed account of the morphology of sound objects see Denis Smalley's
Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes in The Language of Electroacoustic
Music. Ed. S. Emmerson, London 1986, MacMillan Press. pp. 61-97.
5. See, for instance, recent writings such as Richard Parncutt's The Perception of
Rhythm as motion discovered 231
Pulse in Musical Rhythm in Action and Perception in Rhythm and Music, ed. A.
Gabrielsson. Sweden 1987. The Royal Swedish Academy of Music, No. 55. pp.
127-137 and Stephen McAdams' Music: a science of the Mind? in Contemporary
Music Review, vol 2. London 1987. Harwood Academic Publishers.
References