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.
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.