Etudes Australes Book I – nos. VI-VII
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.
Etudes Australes Book I nos. I-V
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.
Natural Selection at Collide-O-Scope
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.
Music of Changes
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.
Natural Selection, Edmund Campion
This is a clip I recorded playing into Edmund Campion’s Midi performance environment, Natural Selection. This has been a very exciting project for me, as like all classically trained players I’ve had only very minimal contact with improvisation, consisting of some degree of indeterminacy within certain scores. One hears now and then what may be called “free improvisation,” presented under the catch-all category of “new music.” I haven’t found such performances terribly stimulating, nor had any desire to dabble in it myself. To be honest, it’s an idea that seems to me based in rather sentimental notions about spontaneous musical inspiration. Natural Selection uses for its source material a matrix of all-combinatorial hexachord aggregates, gaining fluency requires significant rigorous and methodical practice of all the pitch cells as well as their permutations,inversions, and transpositions. About this project, the composer says the following:
NATURAL SELECTION (NAT-SEL) a real-time performance environment for computer and midi-equipped acoustic piano, 1996-present.
In Natural Selection, the musical syntax was conceived in parallel with the development of an ‘instrument’ comprised of a piano interfaced with a large interactive computer program running on a Macintosh computer with the Max programming environment. The software for the piece consists of a set of tools that can be configured to match changing performance situations. While all performances of Natural Selection exist within the same landscape of possibilities, each performance is unique and original. Nat-Sel is a meta-compositional environment that combines a new hybrid instrument (computer and piano) with that of a control structure. The environment is constrained but flexible and capable of expansion and evolution.
The original software was developed by Tom Mays with support from Richard Dudas. Later Edmund Campion became the primary developor with help from several graduate students including Jeremy Hunt.
In Natural Selection , every detail of the electro-acoustic surface is initiated from some action on the part of the pianist. The computer compares incoming note streams and chords to a pitch matrix which upon positive identification outputs an influence variable. The influence variable may or may not be used by the patch to generate a response. There is no linear or prepared score for Natural Selection . The computer and the composer follow one another in accordance with a fixed set of constraints that bind the actions of the two. In addition to pitch information, the computer also analyzes and is influenced by velocities, delta-times, key-splits, etc….
In performance, the pianist/composer is able to control all aspects of the patch by the use of harmonic ‘types’ or sets. Certain sets of pitches will enable and/or cancel certain effects. In this way, the hands of the composer/pianist never leave the performance instrument to initiate or trigger some response from the computer. In Natural Selection , the composer is free from the mediating responsibilities of coordinating with an ensemble, tape, or computer. Most importantly, he is liberated to interact with the computer’s response in an instantaneous fashion. This immediate feedback is highly generative and is a major source of inspiration for the entire work.
Natural Selection was commissioned by IRCAM in 1996.
Canonical Form (Complete Babbitt)
Canonical Form(1983), Milton Babbitt
Live Recording, June 10 2008
Merkin Concert Hall, NYC
Canonical Form is the longest of Babbitt’s piano works. It also has the unique feature of a recurring series of fermati, scattered throughout the piece, each notated with precise durational values.
Canonical Form by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Duet (Complete Babbitt)
Duet(1956), Milton Babbitt
Live Recording, June 10 2008
Merkin Concert Hall, NYC
How many 12-tone children’s pieces can you think of?
Duet by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
My Complements To Roger (Complete Babbitt)
My Complements To Roger(1978), Milton Babbitt
Live Recording, June 10 2008
Merkin Concert Hall, NYC
This piece has never before been made available in commercial recordings.
My Complements To Roger by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Lagniappe (Complete Babbitt)
Lagniappe(1985), Milton Babbitt
Live Recording, June 10 2008
Merkin Concert Hall, NYC
What does ‘Lagniappe’ mean, for those of you who like me thought this is a reference to some classical or literary character let’s give thanks for the speed and efficacy of Wikipedia for lending a hand in such matters. This is Babbitt revealing his roots in the South, though it undoubtedly refers to some technical feature of which I haven’t the faintest idea. Anyhow, the term itself… (From the mouth of Mark Twain no less!):
We picked up one excellent word — a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word — “lagniappe.” They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish — so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a “baker’s dozen.” It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop — or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know — he finishes the operation by saying — “Give me something for lagniappe.” The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor — I don’t know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans — and you say, “What, again? — no, I’ve had enough;” the other party says, “But just this one time more — this is for lagniappe.” When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady’s countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his “I beg pardon — no harm intended,” into the briefer form of “Oh, that’s for lagniappe.”
As for the piece, it contains the slowest tempo in all of MB’s piano music (Quarter=50), it also features the fastest (Quarter=150). I actually attained one of these tempos, you can surely guess which one. Jeez Milty, what were you thinking!
Lagniappe by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
3 Compositions For Piano (Complete Babbitt)
3 Compositions For Piano(1947), Milton Babbitt
Live Recording, June 10 2008
Merkin Concert Hall, NYC
This is Babbitt’s earliest published work for Piano. It is also the only piano work that contains linear/sequential dynamic markings such as crescendos and diminuendos. I believe their uncharacteristic appearance in this piece grows out of the uncharacteristically sectional nature of this work. In Understanding Media, among other works, Marshall Mcluhan extensively develops the connection between the maintenance of discrete formal units and rational, sequential logic — ie, the arrangement and connection of ideas along a linear continuum, what Mcluhan considers an extension of the visual/spatial faculty. This type of logic is generally antithetical to Babbitt’s music, which instead favors the simultaneous unfolding of myriad chains of relation and reccurrence. For this reason, such linear tempo directions such as accelerando and ritardando are likewise incompatible with the unfolding of musical ideas.
James Joyce also develops the idea of static fields vs. sequential arguments in Ulysses. See for example the opening paragraph of the Proteus episode — “Ineluctable modality of the visible….” Here Joyce (as Stephen) muses on the concepts of nacheindander and nebeneinander (from the writings of Lessing), and their connection to seeing and hearing – thus anticipating the fundamental premise of Mcluhan’s work by 60 years.
3 Compositions For Piano by Augustus Arnone is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.