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.
Music composition and performance, Image software: James Rouvelle
Video: Lili Maya
We think of the imagery as dynamic Asterisms(a group of stars that form an observable pattern other than the official 88 constellations). Asterisms may be part of an official constellation. An interesting topic, no?
Music composition and performance, initial image/software: James Rouvelle Video: Lili Maya
James wrote some software that generates static images from keyboard interaction that he thought worked with the music. Lili worked with the software to generate images that she used/edited as she composed the video.
This music is derived from a 10 note scale inspired by the work of Ervin 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.