[Saturday @ 11:00am – 12:30, Room 4]
Noah Kahrs
“Oscillators’ Affordances in Ryoji Ikeda’s and Maryanne Amacher’s Compositional Theories”
Abstract
In the twentieth century, music shifted away from traditional instruments and towards circuitry (Iverson 2018; Wittje 2016). As electronic instruments spread globally (Novak 2013; Veal 2007), they brought certain lines of theoretical experimentation with them. To that end, I argue that electronic oscillators, by representing pitch in terms of frequency, propagated older theories of tone combination. Tone generators, by taking highly precise frequencies as input, encourage theories of frequency subtraction: tones with frequencies f and g can combine in the air, an ear, or a loudspeaker to create acoustical beating or combination tones with frequency |f−g| (Turner 1977). Despite this theory’s older origins in Tartini and Helmholtz (Barbieri 2020; Steege 2012), electronic oscillators encouraged more precise testing and use in electronic music (Gordon 2022; Iverson 2018).
Compositions by Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda and American composer Maryanne Amacher foreground frequency subtraction’s compositional possibilities as made possible by high-precision synthesizers. In Amacher’s 1999 “Chorale,” listeners’ ears produce frequencies calculated to produce a C major bassline. If the oscillators were off by even 4 Hz, the bassline would go a quarter-tone out of tune. The high synthesized pitches do not come from the bassline’s harmonic series; this dissociation materializes her distancing of her electronic materials from missing fundamentals and their tonal norms (Cimini 2022; Cimini and Dietz 2020). In Ryoji Ikeda’s 2000 matrix, integer-frequency sine tones generate polyrhythms within a 60bpm meter. The slightest imprecision in the oscillators would push these pulses out of phase, rendering them unworkable as meters. My analysis presents the piece’s sinusoids and resulting beat frequencies, demonstrating Ikeda’s reliance on rhythmic prototypes (Collis 2017).
Although Ikeda and Amacher had no overlap in their training or professional words, the similarity of their approaches nonetheless follows broader postwar flows of electronic music’s instruments, albums, and concepts between the US and Japan (Cohen 2022; Manabe 2009; Nakai 2020; Novak 2013). Electronic oscillators, in their seeming simplicity and foregrounding of frequency, implicitly suggest a return to basic acoustical laws and the music theories therein, and their precision affords using those equations towards musical ends.
Biography
Noah Kahrs is a PhD Student in Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Composing (with) Theories of Acoustics and Pitch Perception after 1950,” reconsiders the relationship of compositional and scientific theories by examining to experimental music’s use of acoustics, the longstanding practice of compositions opening with unisons, and the role of statistics in pieces of long duration. He previously received an MA in Music Composition from the Eastman School and a BA in Music and Mathematics from the University of Chicago. He has published on Sofia Gubaidulina and Maryanne Amacher in Music Theory Online, on Hans Abrahamsen in Tempo, and on chord spacing in Ohio State’s music cognition conference proceedings.
Nathan Cobb
“Becoming Machine Becoming Human: Unstable Interfaces in Kaija Saariaho’s Amers (1992)”
Abstract
In an article from 1993, Kaija Saariaho explains that computer software functions in her compositional practice as a way of freeing herself “from the constraints of the universe of traditional instruments, while using instrumental experience to structure the discovery of new territories” (Saariaho 2013, 156). This formulation suggests a porous, albeit mutually restricting, relationship between acoustic and electronic means of sound production. In this paper, I build on Alexander Galloway’s theorization of the interface as “a process or active threshold mediating between two states” (2012, 23) to show how Saariaho exploits the “unstable” interfaces between composer, computer, and performer as a means of generating compositional material for her cello concerto, Amers (1992). Drawing on sketch material, source code, and software documentation preserved in the Paul Sacher Archive, I focus on the technical and hermeneutic significance of two specific points of interface instability in Saariaho’s compositional process.
I first consider the idiosyncratic parametric requirements of the MOSAIC program for sound synthesis, which required composers to encode the quantitative physical characteristics of resonant bodies, excitation sources, and modes of attack. While Saariaho describes the program as being estranged from her intuitive “compositional and instrumental experience” (2013, 173), this tension ultimately leads her to conceive of instrumental sound from a novel perspective that is less constrained by the physical limitations of acoustic instruments and performers. I then show how Saariaho uses rhythmic interpolations generated for electronic realization in the FORMES program and adapts them in “freer form” for human performers––a process that reflects the divergent instrumental affordances of synthetic and acoustic sound production. These two points of instability––between composer and computer in the first case and between computer and performer in the second––reveal what Galloway calls the “generative friction” of the interface (2012, 31): a poesis of translation in which human instrumental practices are formatted into computer-readable code and then back again. In this sense, the dynamism of Amers is founded less on the tension between soloist and orchestra, as one might expect of a concerto, and more on humans, machines, and the interface between them.
Biography
Nathan Cobb is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation research draws on archival materials housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation to trace the developing compositional style of Kaija Saariaho from the late-1970s into the mid-1990s. He has presented at regional, national, and international music conferences, where his papers reflect the diversity of his research interests, including folk and electronic dance music, topic theory, post-tonal theory pedagogy, and philosophical approaches to music theory. Nathan also has a forthcoming article in Perspectives of New Music that employs Deleuzian philosophical concepts in an analysis of a piece by Michaël Levinas and a forthcoming article in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung that considers the influence of post-serialism on Saariaho’s early work, Sah den Vögeln.
Mingyeon Son
“Recontextualization of Korean Woman Composers’ Traditional Instruments in the Global Era: With a Focus on Unsuk Chin and Jin Hi Kim”
Abstract
This presentation deals with the recontextualization of traditional Korean instruments by female Korean composers in the twenty-first century. As Korean composers gain international recognition, they are increasingly incorporating cultural heritage into their music while considering questions of cultural identity (Utz, 2021). However, many Korean compositions featuring traditional instruments tend to strip them of their original cultural context, leading to what can be called “recontextualization.” This study focuses on two compositions by Korean woman composers living in Germany and the United States: Unsuk Chin (b. 1961)’s Šu für Sheng und Orchester (2009/2010), and Jin Hi Kim (b. 1957)’s Ghost Komungobot (2018).
Each composer was educated in Western music and Korean traditional music and went to study abroad in Germany and the United States. The study argues that their use of non-Western instruments and musical representations goes beyond cultural symbols. In Šu, Chin pays attention to the unique sonic potential of the sheng, such as its internal timbre and pitch system. By abstracting the traditional sound and recontextualizing it with European cosmopolitan music, she creates a third sound that complicates cultural origins. In Ghost Komungobot, Kim electronically recontextualizes the original sound of the geomungo to experiment with new sounds. As a geomungo player, Kim also incorporates improvisational techniques and multimedia design into her performance, building an interaction between electronic and virtual robotic instruments.
Both works explore the diverse possibilities of non-Western instruments in contemporary music without attributing them to traditional idioms or cultural contexts inherent in musical instruments. This denies the delineation of specific national framework according to the composer’s origin, race, gender, and cultural background, expanding communication with a global audience based on local voices that have been silenced. Ultimately this study unveils the Asian identity of Korean musical works in the global era, overcoming nationalist and colonialist perspectives.
Biography
Mingyeong Son, as the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard University Department of Music. She received her Ph.D. in Musicology from Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea in 2021 with her dissertation “Western Composers’ Encounter with Korean Traditional Music: With a Focus on Compositional Aspects and Musical Aesthetics in the Global Era.” She holds a Master’s degree in Musicology from Northwestern University and a Bachelor’s degree from SNU. Mingyeong’s research interest lies in 20th and 21st-century contemporary music, global intercultural dialogues in Korean contemporary music, and Western composers’ reception of East Asian music and its musical aesthetics. She has recently published her article about Unsuk Chin’s music and her aesthetics in the Journal of Asian Music (2022), and John Zorn’s music in postmodern America (The Journal of Korean National Research Center for the Arts, 2022).