A study for an in-progress project with organist Alexander Meszler. The sound is made with Kyma and a Buchla Easel.
Kyma features some very powerful Hidden Markov Model (HMM/Pattern Generation) functions that I’ve been studying and are a part of this project.
This project is a continuation of our performative works.
An aspect of our live performing is, of course, rehearsing. We usually discuss our process publicly by describing how we work together to coordinate different sections of sound/music/image, and then improvise our way into and out of these moments as we play. Another component of our work are visual scores that we create – typically very early in the development of the project. These scores aren’t in any specific language, nor do they use a set of predefined symbols. They are unique to each piece. We realized we’ve never spoken publicly about this part of our work before.
These scores, hypothetically, can be realized in various media and potentially by other artists.
Maya+Rouvelle performance from December 2023 at the Montauk Club in Brooklyn, NY.
Lili developed a modular projection surface for this project.
Both the video and sound were created with the room and it’s ambience in mind, similarly to the way we made our previous work for the Crypt at the Church of the Intercession in Manhattan (a flower grew out of the ocean).
We’ll continue to explore and evolve this site conditioned/improvised form in future projects.
“…the first thing to say is that the in-front-of-me dimension does not exist as such, since immediately below me there opens the void, which then becomes the sea which then becomes the horizon which then becomes the sky…” Calvino
We have an upcoming performance on Saturday, December 2, 7:30pm @ The Montauk Club in Prospect Heights Brooklyn.
**The Montauk Club is private. If you’d like to see the show please contact us and we’ll put you on the guest list.The club has a restaurant and bar, for additional information go here.
Indeterminacy Society /Stanzi Vaubel Artistic Director, presents: it happens like this Lili Maya, Video Installation James Rouvelle, Electronic Music w/ Special Guest on Cello
As the other works in this series (Soundcloud for audio , for additional videos click on the video of this movement above ), the music is derived from a 10 note scale (a “Dekany”) inspired by the work of Erv Wilson.
Charles Jones (1910-1997), was a composer and violinist. He taught me composition/counterpoint/harmony/orchestration. He was a wonderful teacher, and, to me, a medievalist.
He set William Langland’s Piers Plowman to music. Piers Plowman is a late 14th-century allegorical poem in a sequence of 22 dream-visions that Langland termed ‘passus’ [‘step’ in Latin]. In these visions, the narrator, Will, meets a series of allegorical characters.
Charles had a small study in his home in Manhattan (he lived there with his family in an actual house with a white picket fence in front) that we would often visit after lessons. He had a wonderful library and collection of art and artifacts that he loved to draw connections between.
He had many students over the years and it seems a lot of us felt that Charles had an uncanny ability to maintain a deep memory of our individual works, influences and thoughts – making us each feel our own efforts were dream-visions somehow simultaneously for us as individuals yet authentically conjoined with his.
This music and imagery reminds me of time with Charles.
Music composition and performance: James Rouvelle
Video: Maya+Rouvelle
As the other works in this series (Soundcloud, for videos click on the video of this movement above ), the music is derived from a 10 note scale (a “Dekany”) inspired by the work of Erv Wilson.
These videos were presented on the BBC/Tectonics website between May 8 and June 7, 2021.
From the Festival catalogue: For Tectonics 2021, Close Scrape debuts “Cutout [6×6]”, a modular piece structured as a constellation of six semi-independent movements that can be performed or listened to in any order. Well-suited to the task at hand, Close Scrape snips fragmentary excerpts of live performance and obsolete recordings, isolates them from their original connections, and – in punctuated transmissions – stitches them together with tailor-made sources of obscure origin. The piece is governed by the guiding idea that music can function as a living artifact, intermediating between channelled worlds and audience receptions.
The online incarnation of “Cutout (6×6)”, streamed from May 8 to June 7, 2021 on the BBC/Tectonics website, includes new video art commissioned for the festival by Maya + Rouvelle, a collaboration between Lili Maya and James Rouvelle that began in 2009 in New York.
The Maya + Rouvelle Cinematic 360 production of Christopher Trapani’s End Words, recorded by Ekmeles and re-mastered by Christopher for this production, is now available through Vimeo’s on-demand.
Our intention was to create an uncanny world where Trapani’s music, its poetry and our visuals are symbiotic. The passageway to this environment is nature, filtered through the lens of Trapani’s work; spiraling between the familiar and the dream-like.
from Christopher Trapani:
I’ve always been fascinated by the sestina: this archaic form, thirty-nine lines that spin out in an intricate spiral. Six-line stanzas, with six end words that repeat in a predetermined shape. Those patterns were begging for music.
So I started looking for poems to set to music, and bought an anthology of sestinas. “The Painter” was an old favorite, and the unusual shape of Anis Mojgani’s poem—the way he streamlines crisp, hallucinatory images and tender words— drew me into a propulsive yet nostalgic spiral…
Predictably, things began to spiral out of control when I started to imagine the music I’d devise for Ashbery’s words. “The Painter” turned into a sort of ur-sestina setting: I started with thirty-six lines of related natural harmonies, laid out in the shape
of a six-by-six grid. Then I shaped the harmonic progression as a spiral traced through that plane, drawing curved lines that wander though disjointed consonance—music laid out so that adjacent stanzas of the sestina share a repeated harmony over repeated end words.
Line numbers are embedded in the words as durations. Another grid shapes the map of shifting tempi—so the sestina has influenced all the piece’s parameters. The spiral’s hypnotic rigor invades all aspects of the music. With the singers, I prerecorded many lines,
syllables, and effects, for the electronics—lines to chop up and retune, and sometimes single words— to create collages of vocal sounds. The music for “They raised violins” started to take shape with “bones,” “string,” “petals”— each node in the spiral
set to a unique texture. And Ciara Shuttleworth’s “Sestina” was the perfect compact shape: just six one-syllable words whose meanings shift as the spiral unravels, lines that fray as the sestina thins to stark, still music.
Our intention was to create an uncanny world where Trapani’s music, its poetry and our visuals are symbiotic. The passageway to this environment is nature, filtered through the lens of Trapani’s work; spiraling between the familiar and the dream-like.
from Christopher Trapani:
I’ve always been fascinated by the sestina: this archaic form, thirty-nine lines that spin out in an intricate spiral. Six-line stanzas, with six end words that repeat in a predetermined shape. Those patterns were begging for music.
So I started looking for poems to set to music, and bought an anthology of sestinas. “The Painter” was an old favorite, and the unusual shape of Anis Mojgani’s poem—the way he streamlines crisp, hallucinatory images and tender words— drew me into a propulsive yet nostalgic spiral…
Predictably, things began to spiral out of control when I started to imagine the music I’d devise for Ashbery’s words. “The Painter” turned into a sort of ur-sestina setting: I started with thirty-six lines of related natural harmonies, laid out in the shape
of a six-by-six grid. Then I shaped the harmonic progression as a spiral traced through that plane, drawing curved lines that wander though disjointed consonance—music laid out so that adjacent stanzas of the sestina share a repeated harmony over repeated end words.
Line numbers are embedded in the words as durations. Another grid shapes the map of shifting tempi—so the sestina has influenced all the piece’s parameters. The spiral’s hypnotic rigor invades all aspects of the music. With the singers, I prerecorded many lines,
syllables, and effects, for the electronics—lines to chop up and retune, and sometimes single words— to create collages of vocal sounds. The music for “They raised violins” started to take shape with “bones,” “string,” “petals”— each node in the spiral
set to a unique texture. And Ciara Shuttleworth’s “Sestina” was the perfect compact shape: just six one-syllable words whose meanings shift as the spiral unravels, lines that fray as the sestina thins to stark, still music.
Raven Chacon’sAsdzaa Nádleehé & Yoolgai Asdzaa (2016) was the first piece in the maya+rouvelle live-stream project with Ekmeles that also included Karlheinz Stockhausen’s In the Sky I Am Walking (1972). The full performance and additional information/writing about the project can be found here.
