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COMPOSING WITH PROCESS: PERSPECTIVES ON GENERATIVE AND SYSTEMS MUSIC #5.1 Duration

Curated by Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore. Narrated by Connie Treanor.

The fifth episode in the series continues to explore the idea of time in music practice, particularly in relation to duration. The show looks at how music is measured in terms of both micro and macroscopic intervals: through granular synthesis, where sound is constructed from microscopic sonic 'grains', to extended works whose duration is measured not in minutes and seconds, but years. Bringing together ideas and theories of the engineer Denis Gabor and composers Iannis Xenakis and Curtis Roads, this episode examines early tape and computer music works using granular and pulsar synthesis. The show closes with a focus on two recent treatments of time in music: by the German artist Hanne Darboven and media producer Terre Thaemlitz.

FONS AUDIO

Kristin Oppenheim (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1959) lives and works in New York. She uses her own melancholy and mysterious voice as a means to dramatise the exhibition space and stage the poetic relationships between sound, personal memory and collective experience. Kristin Oppenheim takes fragments of popular songs or poems that she has written or found and sings them repeating them in a loop that almost functions as a mantra. In 'Hey Joe' (1996), the artist recites the first line of the homonymous track that Jim Hendrix made famous in 1962, which talks about a man who has murdered his wife and plans to run away to Mexico to escape a jail sentence. The verse that Oppenheim recites goes like this: «Hey Joe, where're you going with that gun in your hand?» The repetition of this question and the fragility of the voice that speaks it plunge the spectator into a haunting atmosphere in which the sense of danger and vulnerability rises in crescendo. At the same time, the artist places two spotlights in the ceiling that project beams of light onto the floor of the empty room.

Rita McBride's (USA, 1969) works explore the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and installation. She focuses on seemingly secondary urban elements and takes them out of their context, changing their scale, their materials and their relationship to the surrounding space. Parking lots, bleachers, pipes, HVAC units, water towers and awnings are just some of the targets of McBride's metaphorical transformations. After an initial moment of recognition and familiarity, viewers who confront her works go through an alienation phase that forces them to rethink their relationship to the actual exhibition event, and to question the meaning that we usually attribute to spaces and materials. Her use of materials such us raffia, Venetian glass, Carrara marble, bronze and canvas in connection with ordinary urban elements shows the inherent contradictions between mass production and craftsmanship, between high and low culture. The architecture of modernity, industrial design and minimalist sculpture are three fundamental influences that we can trace through her work, and which McBride tackles with an analytical, critical spirit that is not without irony.

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