Augustus Arnone — Journal

Here’s a recording of myself playing a segment from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Spiral, for soloist (on any instrument or combination of instruments) and shortwave receiver. This is a live performance that took place on February 24, 2012 at the Issue Project Room, in Brooklyn. The staff at IPR are a truly dedicated and heroic group of people, I was faced with the very serious problem that shortwave reception in the space was non-existent, likely due to the marble interior and far remove from windows or even outer walls. These people went to a great deal of trouble to procure enough extension cords and couplers that I could mount my external antenna more than 150 feet from where I was performing, against the outer entrance, they did so without the slightest complaint or attempt to dissuade, and for that I am very grateful and appreciative. The reception was still fairly sparse, cities are apparently put off too much electrical activity which interferes with clarity of reception, but at any rate the performance was saved.

The actual composition of Spiral consists of a series of signs indicating transformations of parameters such as duration, intensity, register, or segmentation. The performer is presenting with the task of modeling as closely as possible the receptions over shortwave, and subsequently transforming these events according to very rigorously conceived specifications. It is a tremendously structured work, with intricately conceived patterns of increase and decrease in major musical parameters, yet the actual content to fit into the structure is left open to whatever the radio happens to be offering at the time of performance. Perhaps no other work so closely demonstrates Marshall McLuhan’s most famous dictum “The Medium Is The Message,” or in other words  the primary impact of a particular type of media is not the specific content or subject matter that this medium  carries but rather the scale and patterns of association and differentiation that the medium itself introduces, irregardless of the content.

This is a piece I plan to continue to study and perform and over the summer will likely post a series of further realization of the work, including the use of subtractive synthesizers, so check back soon!

Stockhausen - Spiral Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s a recording I did in my studio of Beethoven’s Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme in E Flat Major, Op. 35, nicknamed the “Eroica Variations.” This is a piece I struggled mightily with when I first learned it. I put it down for some years but it always bothered me what a hard time it gave me, so I took the chance to have another stab at it. This was another of my “one-take” recordings. I had become very interested in trying to produce a decent recording in a single take, thus treading the line between the spontaneity and danger of performance with the attention to detail and polish that an archival recording compels.

Beethoven, "Eroica Variations" Opus 35 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s a video from a live performance, Collide-O-Scope Music at the Atlas Center for Performing Arts in DC. Augustus Arnone, piano with live video improvisation by Charles Woodman. The performance took place on March 11, 2011

Xenakis Mists Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s a recording of me playing Iannis Xenakis’s Mists(1980) for solo piano. This performance took place on a Collide-O-Scope Music concert at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington DC, the performance was part of  the Intersections Festival.

Iannis Xenakis – Mists by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Iannis Xenakis - Mists Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here is a recording of Dual(1980) by Milton Babbitt. This is a live performance by Augustus Arnone(pno) and Christopher Gross(vcl) which took place on October 3, 2010, at Christ and St. Stephens Church in New York City. It was presented as part of the Collide-O-Scope Music series.

For some reason the player is way the heck down at the bottom of the page, just find the play button.

Dual by Milton Babbitt Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dual by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

John Cage’s Etudes Australes reflects to a remarkable degree exactly how entrenched in the ideas of Marshall McLuhan he had become, and the profusion of aesthetic directions that opened up to him as a result. Cage had used spatial notation as early as the Music of Changes set, though in that work the spatial notation perhaps serves more as a convenience to avoid overly laborious layers of relational tuplets. In reality, the MOC never really escapes the relation of all durational values to a single uniform temporal metric, though numerous simultaneous bits of music are overlaid which relate to that metric in contradictory ways. At any rate, the use of unstemmed, spatially represented attacks and durations became a truly standout innovation in his work, even among such a staggering and ceaseless flood of innovations, and persisted all the way to his late chamber works.

By doing away with the presence of a single uniform and continuous temporal metric, Cage was in all likelihood seeking out exactly the kind of sacralized perceptual orientation, and what the psychedelic generation might celebrate as expanded consciousness, that Marshall Mcluhan wrote had been suppressed by the invention of the mechanical clock. As always, reinforcing his claims that modern electrical man is ever becoming more psychically attuned to habits characteristic of tribal man, rather than industrial/mechanical man, Mcluhan theorized that the mechanical clock had the effect of relating all phenomenon to repeatable, uniform units. Whereas tribal man experienced time as the durations between a plethora of often unrelated events, mechanical man learned to relate all events to a single ‘tempo,’ as it were. And as Cage dismissed the very notion of a tempo, along with it necessarily went the division of the music into salient, discrete units. This is another departure from the earlier Music of Changes.

If one is able to imagine the host of perceptual/aesthetic consequences that go along with the dismissal of a unifying metric, and if one is able to similarly dismiss the completely unrelatable bias that artists obligatorily represent autocratic, privately-expressive viewpoints, than one can celebrate Cage for being the tuned-in psychonautical expeditionary that he was. Moreover, in Etudes Australes the dismissal of a unifying centrist orientation goes far beyond merely the temporal aspect. Cage, in a late interview with Joan Rettalack, expressed his preference during the early decades of his career towards all notes existing in their own dynamic strata, in other words not related to a common unifying dynamic orientation. The Etudes don’t contain a single dynamic marking, but if one understands the principle of non-centrist art than one will automatically situate each note on different levels. And even if one doesn’t understand that principle, and insists on remaining a simpering, obsequious servant to notions of authority and artistic legitimacy, thoroughly un-Cagelike as it is, one can at least soothe the paranoia about doing something wrong because Cage himself recommended that particular kind of performance practice – as he put it, “this way each note is at its own center.” Though if one is leaning on authority that way, that person is caught in a center-to-margins relationship with whoever he thinks is supposed to be some kind of authoritative viewpoint, that person should really be playing more industrial-oriented music anyway.

Now, the replacement of center-to-margins relationships with the simultaneous inter-referential neural network of differentiated information is in fact the very crux of Marshall McLuhan’s life’s work, and I would argue of Cage’s as well.

Here are the remaining three Etudes, completing the set.

Etudes Australes Book I by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Etude VI [ 4:20 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Etude VII [ 5:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Etude VIII [ 4:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here are some recordings I made of John Cage’s Etudes Australes Book I, July of 2010. I’ll be playing the complete set at the Collide-O-Scope Music season opener Sunday, October 3, 2010 @3PM, Christ and St. Stephen’s Church, 120 W69 St. New York, NY

Etudes Australes Book I by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Etude I [ 4:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Etude II [ 4:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Etude III [ 4:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Etude IV [ 4:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Etude V [ 4:48 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s a recording of me improvising into Edmund Campion’s Natural Selection live at a Collide-O-Scope Music Concert, April 26, 2010, at Roulette Concert Space in New York City. This was a collaboration with Collide-O-Scope co-director Stephen Gorbos, who supplied additional live electronics. The film is an excerpt from the 1965 classic experimental short film “The Psychedelic Experience.” The film version is on Youtube, the mp3 is streamable and downloadable below.

Natural Selection by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Natural Selection [ 4:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s a live recording of books I and II of John Cage’s epic Music of Changes. The recording is from a Collide-O-Scope Music Concert, April 26, 2010 at Roulette Concert Space in New York City.

Music Of Changes by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Music of Changes Books I and II [ 28:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download