Rodrigo Sigal / Steve Yépez / Various Contemporary Composers

[05-05-06]

Encuentros, organized by DePaul Music School professor Juan Campoverde, is now in its second year and has expanded to two full nights featuring contemporary music by Latino composers. The first night focused on multimedia works interspersed with electro-acoustic pieces. Rodrigo Sigal was the only composer present at the event and took on the responsibility of running the show, segueing between pieces and controlling the levels of the eight speakers that surrounded the audience. The live diffusion was not as impressive as it seemed at first, though; there were only two channels of audio being output from the computer, each going to four of the speakers, and Sigal could only control the spatialization of those two channels, not introduce new sounds to the audience live. The technological side of the evening felt further compromised by Sigal’s use of the free version of QuickTime. As the pieces were played off of his computer, the top bar as well as the icon bar was visible.

The first piece of the night, which ran independently of the supplied program, was "Snout" by Ricardo Giraldo. The multimedia piece used quick, almost stop-motion edits of close-up shots of a dog as well as video of the ocean as its primary visual sources while the primary sound source appeared to be strictly canine. The fast edits of the video were matched by the audio portion, which featured a pointillistic collage of dog growls, snuffs, and other sounds. Of the two most traveled categories for this kind of work, ominous and ambient, "Snout" fell into the more ominous camp, particularly in the climatic portion of the piece, which was denoted by sharper sounds and strobe-like images of the dog’s teeth. The images were treated with a filter that increased the contrast and made the white fangs stand out against the darker background. The focus moved back to the treated shots of waves crashing, and the piece ended.

At this point Sigal segued into a tape piece by Alejandro Viño called "The World We Know." This piece seemed much more in the pop realm than most of the audience seemed to expect. As I listened to the metallic clanks, drill sounds, a baby crying, and, I am 90% certain of this, an "Unh!," I was reminded of the cheesy, proto-techno type tracks a friend of mine used to do in high school. Viño’s work was decidedly more professional, but the feeling of dressed-up pop music shone through the composer’s stated purpose of exploring the clichés and traditions associated with rap and hip hop. That’s not to say it was not enjoyable or lacking in complexity, either. The drum and bass breakbeats would at times begin to play over each other, creating polyrhythms and the thought in my head that this is what John Cage’s aleatoric "Imaginary Landscape No. 4" would sound like if it were performed in Chicago on a Saturday night. The eight speakers worked quite well for this piece, though more for the depth and life they added as their outputs phased and added a slight delay effect to the listeners’ ears, not for the diffusion. The piece ended as it had begun; the layers began to fall away, and the steady, beating pulse that had sustained throughout disappeared, leaving what once again sounded like a sparse collection of unrelated clanks and bangs.

The second video piece of the night was Dennis Miller’s "Vis a Vis." A change from "Snout," "Vis a Vis" was ambient with its primary video source unintelligible, though I’d venture to guess it may have been either video test patterns of simply abstract images run through video filters. Similarly, the audio portion of the piece seemed either electronically created through FM synthesis or possibly a combination of that and some vocal sounds. Possibly the result of antiquated equipment (the program notes mentioned that Latin American countries rarely have up-to-date technology for this kind of work) or a lack of creativity on the composer’s part, the piece seemed little more than a reworking of John Chowning’s revolutionary "Stria" set to abstract video that was obviously processed using recognizable video filters. Compared to Giraldo’s "Snout" and even Viño’s pop-sounding tape piece, "Vis a Vis" came across as amateur-ish. The only sense of form was given by the introduction of a gray area to the sea of floating, spinning, undulating colors that sustained through the piece.

The next piece that left a mark on me was one of Sigal’s tape pieces, "Mambo a la Braque." This piece was entirely based on samples of others, centered on a mambo by Damaso Perez Prado. Every two bars the mambo would pause for a break and a quick burst from a symphony, and then it would return to the mambo. The samples built in layers with piano sounds, baritone saxophone, and percussion all playing over, around, and in between each other, their layers differentiated by their individual fidelities, ambience, and equalization. I spoke to Sigal the next night about this piece to gain a greater understanding of his intent. Taking the idea of quotation within a piece to an extreme, Sigal wanted to use clips of different musical styles as a way to expand the meaning of his work. Quoting, or in this case, using samples of different styles, drew certain ideas from the audience about what they knew of that style. By layering these samples/styles/ideas in a surrealist juxtaposition, Sigal hopes to challenge their conceptions of what would be considered well-understood forms in other circumstances.

After almost an hour of multimedia and tape pieces, the audience was ready for a step in the live direction and was awarded with a piece for flute and tape by Sigal called "Sonic Farfalla," performed by DePaul student Steve Yépez. The piece made use of several extended techniques, most notably flutter tongue as well as key clicks and whisper tones. The piece once again included a drum and bass portions that faded in, unrelated to the flute part and layered over each other, creating a three-part polyrhythm. The tape also had a very present flute part on it. Some of the parts were reversed and used percussively, but other parts were of an unprocessed flute, and toward the end the sound of a muted trumpet could be heard coming out of the speakers. I generally have a prejudice against pieces for mixed media since my feeling is that tape is static and therefore can’t truly interact with a performer, but I do understand that certain sounds can only be achieved in a studio setting and cannot be created live. Following that logic, unprocessed instruments have no place on tape in a mixed media piece. Listening to the piece, I also began to question the compositional process that Sigal had spoken of earlier, beginning with the acoustic portion first and then writing the electro-acoustic part as accompaniment, as this piece’s tape part was far more interesting and Sigal amplified it over the live flute.

The final piece of the night was "Blink," another multimedia piece with the video done by Ricardo Giraldo and music done by Rodrigo Sigal. Once again falling into the ominous realm of multimedia works, this piece began with reversed sounds and FM synthesizer tones playing, accompanied by black and white video of the inside of an abandoned building. The immediate feel was that of a low budget horror film along the lines of The Blair Witch Project or Saw. The piece developed into more than that, though, as the video switched to color and the exterior of the building was shown followed by several other buildings in similar disrepair. Samples of a classical aria and trumpet piece drifted through like the memory of better times as the less obviously assembled sounds continued. The video eventually went to black as the trumpet piece came to the forefront and cadenced with ambient sounds floating around and eventually fading away. I later found out that this piece is somewhat political, reflecting Giraldo’s disillusion with the civil conflict in his native Columbia, focusing on the long-term destruction it has caused.

Overall, the night was an interesting experience of work that far outshined the student multimedia performance held at DePaul a few weeks earlier. Still, an amateurish feel lingered through the performance, mainly due to the conspicuous presence of the computer’s tool bar and the overbearing hip hop and drum and bass influences in several of the pieces. Multimedia works are in the process of fighting an uphill battle to claim legitimacy in the many parts of the classical music world, and when a performance put on at a university-level music school that is run by composers with PhD’s still comes across like this, legitimacy is not gained. Performances, practices and other precedents need to be established for the presentation of works like this, as the works themselves are relatively free of classical structures. The first night of Encuentros was presented in a way that felt like a slipshod classical performance, and it did not work. People did not know whether or not to applaud between works, especially in the sometimes long pauses. In most cases there were not performers and the composers were not present, so who would the applause be directed towards? If works are going to break with classical styles as much as these video and tapes pieces did, then their presentations need to break with classical practices as well. Otherwise, isn’t it only half new? Still, there was a second night to resolve these questions, and I eagerly looked forward to it.

| LIVE BLOG | HOME | SUBSCRIBE | SHARE |