Song as ancient knowledge

I like songs. I like their diversity, their concise, expressive clarity and the idea that the perfect marriage of music and text allows the possibility of lacking either. When someone gave me a guitar as a kid i hardly knew what to do with it until i discovered i could use it as a tool for songwriting. Now, having written hundreds of songs - some boring, some exciting, some good, some bad - i still have no idea what it is that gives a song its special magic charm, a charm that no other form of music has.

Would the magic disappear if I knew? Does cracking the code necessarily turn magic into bare facts? I don’t think so.

Sonnet 76 must be one of the simplest songs I ever wrote. It’s almost nothing, a mere whisp. Lending a plain and simple melody to Shakespeare’s text is all I did. No, even less: the text sort of dictated the melody to me.

Being the most humble little puzzle piece of a six part cycle called Shakespeare Assembly Kit (a composition of overlapping solo pieces for voice and guitar or lute) I never gave Sonnet 76 much thought, until Cecilia decided to use it in the Muziek als... cycle. Only now, the little song has come to life for me. Shakespeare’s (or should I say de Vere’s?) text is ambiguous and complex: in its insistence that his language will never change - and therefore grow out of date - because the poet’s love or friendship for someone will never change, the impossibility of remaining in an unchanging past, now for me conjures up the ugly truth more than anything: that we do change, that youth and love do wither away, that everything does decay and die. This implicit morbid danger is in the melody. I can hear it when Anat sings it. I must have put it there, but wasn’t aware.

More than any other piece of music, a song writes itself. Writing a string quartet is a many-faceted process where I am in control - or try to be. Writing a song is different: I let it happen. I surrender to the song. Songs, at least partly dictate their own rules and forms, whether they rely on conventions or ignore them. I write a song and something happens that comes from beyond me, it feels like tapping into some ancient knowledge. Trying to force the song elsewhere is possible, yes, but leaves me with a crippled song! Maybe that’s the difference between song and not-song. A song is in control. Not-song can be many things, but... well, it’s not a song is it?

Martijn Voorvelt

conveyor tape

by Flor Sgandurra

Luciana Arditto and me are working in Buenos Aires for January concerts in Holland: Muziek als tapes, vinyl and songs. See you!

muziek als licht

Muziek als licht- Joke Kegel.
Muziek en licht kunnen elkaar versterken, contrasteren en helpen ontwikkelen. De verstilling van licht is soms in contrast met het geluid van de muziek, of ze worden elkaars reflektie in hun gaande bewegingen. Het project muziek als licht gaf me de gelegenheid om muziek te schrijven bij de animatiefilm Mandala Boogie Woogie van Jorge Lumbreras. Als basis gebruikte ik een paar ideeën uit het carillonwerk Clouds of Sound I voor 47 klokken en bewerkte dat voor een twee oktaaf toy-grand-piano. Het werd een uitdaging om opnieuw een muzikaal universum te ontvouwen en een dialoog aan te gaan met de animatiefilm van Jorge Lumbreras.

Article about Muziek als licht - Brabants dagblad

A sound-theatre full of adventure

Toonzaal and SM’s join their forces in a new concert series in which art and modern music go together. “Life in times of limited money for the arts”

By Mark van der Voort

Extraordinary sounds in a campy living room, flickering light bulbs pulsating with the music. In a corner there’s an old television set alongside a radio and some cassette players. Contemporary music never felt so familiar. Music Centre De Toonzaal and SM’s (Stedelijk Museum ’s Hertogenbosch) are presenting together with the Dutch/Argentinian foundation Stichting Plan B the concert series Muziek als… (Music as…). A lucid integration of contemporary music, theatre and visual arts. During the first concert in De Toonzaal, this Sunday, the stage will be transformed into a nostalgic seventies living room. Pianoplayer Nora Mulder will be hostess and for this setting she will perform specially composed works. Theatrical music, for instance for piano, cassette players, a mirror and shoes. ‘We can do a lot with almost nothing’ Cecilia Arditto says. She is the artistic leader of this series and one of the composers to be performed. Living in the Netherlands, this Argentinian composer wants to investigate and create a stage for this kind of musical theatre with her foundation, Plan B. She collected a group of Argentinian and Dutch composers around her, who have written works for this series. Plan B doesn’t bring high tech musical theatre, but freshly written music within a nostalgical theatrical surroundings, allowing different branches of art like film and theatre to merge with music.

‘An esthetic choice. We want our audience to be taken back to our child memories from the seventies, while our music sounds very modern. We, as young composers, are against nothing. We only happen to live in a time of little money for the arts. First in Argentina and now in Holland. We’re used to it. Happily we can make our voice sound stronger with limited means.“ These newly written compositions are fully notated, and the theatrical acts, stage lighting and requisites are an integral part of each composition. This Sunday works will be performed from the Dutch composers Martijn Voorvelt, Joke Kegel and Argentinians Florencia Sgandurra and Arditto herself. The first concert is entitled ‘Muziek als licht’ (music as light) and concerts in January and April will have their own themes: analog sound carriers (Muziek als tapes & vinyl) and theatre (Muziek als theatre).

The concerts in De Toonzaal will be presented together with a pre-concert the same day in the Stedelijk Museum ‘s Hertogenbosch. The first of these ‘installation concerts’ will be an installation ‘Chromorelax für Licht, Sofa’s, Laptops und Lautsprechersystem’ created by Berlin artists light sculptor Michael Vorfelt and composer Ana Maria Rodriguez. This is a three-dimensional composition for cymbalom, electronics and vintage light bulbs. Piano player Nora Mulder will be playing the cymbalom at Stedelijk on Sunday October 19^th, at 2 and 3 pm.

Chromorelax - excerpts

Excerpts from the composition Chromorelax by Ana Maria Rodríguez and Michael Vorfeld that will be presented next October in the Stedelijk Museum Den Bosch

Back from Bs As, part three

At the evaluation of the concerts Lola made another interesting remark. We were talking about things that went wrong during the concert. (For instance the music piece ‘finger scenes’ by Abel Paul, where the piano player was having trouble with the cassetteplayer. Lola told me her dad thought this was part of the piece. I too was for some time in doubt.). She said that it was interesting when a concert can incorporate those ‘mistakes’. And that it even can be creative when unexpected things happen. That is, I think, very true. On the other hand there is a point when a mistake can’t be incorporated any more into a piece, that it is really something from outside, intruding the music in a way that can’t be dealt with. There is a very small twilight zone between those two states. I think, I hope, the mistake in my piece was from this twilight zone.

The surprise element was a problem with one cassette-player of one changuito, –in which the tape was getting stuck-, just shortly before the concert, so there was too little time to fix it. At least too little time for me, although the time I spent on it on stage, closely watched by the audience, while Cecilia was telling about the political dimensions of the changuitos, felt like an eternity. Even replacing the cassette player by a spare one would have taken to much time, but then I should have taken that decision earlier, which was a difficult one, because I already sacrificed my one and only spare cassette player because of problems during the rehearsing process with one of the tape-players. So there I was with my back against the wall having no other option left than playing the piece with only one changuito with sound and other without sound. Because having come all the way to Buenos Aires, having put so much effort into the piece and then not performing my piece was out of the question.

Of all surprises the real ones come from unexpected corners; that’s why they are called surprises; that’s literally what Luciana told me a day before. So this was a real surprise which changed my composition considerably, for the sonic interplay between the changuitos and the singer is very much a trio, with hoketus elements and imitation, mirroring, etc. And now I was missing one instrument! Luckily the visual part, the choreography was still there. That saved the piece. One could think (and so I did) the intended sounds from the changuito without sound.However the audience didn’t know what to expect and they received the piece enthousiastically. That was an enormous relief….

So the premiere was a mixed experience. It was half nightmare but also half of it was quite satisfactory, because somehow the piece still worked. It kept standing on it’s legs. We’d been working very hard on it, and that showed. My musicians did very well. I saw the piece and I felt happy.

One of the things I’ve been enjoying so much is the rehearsing process and reworking the piece, that is mostly: skipping parts that were not working. For instance some passages with too complicated rhythms, which would take too much time to practice I had to skip. The music only benefited from it. And then: I was fortunate to have such a considerable amount of time to practice (in total 17 hours in one week, which is a luxury). Plus: I had very dedicatied musicians. Both the changuito players and singer did their utmost during the rehearsing process and concert. I’m very thankful to them.

I had an interesting moment, a moment of divine irony. While I was on stage trying to repair the problem with the tape player, with trembling fingers, with a heart-beat of 120, sweating all over, in front of an audience watching the scene on stage and Cecilia introducing my piece telling a long story about the changuito politics, and the audience being quite amused because they were laughing, -a sound coming from very far-, while I was still trying to fix the problem, on and on, desperately trying forever, my eye fell on the empty cassette which I used to guide the tape (that was getting stuck all the time) through the cassette-player. It was a new age cassette from the nineties. It’s title was: a taste of tao.

Back from Bs As, part two

The concert-series ‘Muziek als…’ as it premiered in the Biblioteca National was quite an enterprise. To say the least. One might also put it another way: an impossible project. To organise in a period of a little bit more than three weeks one presentation with composers in different countries, and two different concerts with in total 17 compositions, all demanding their own set up, with all the different musicians and rehearsals, is a hell of a job. But… all the difficulties taken into account, the outcome was miraculous. Two very interesting concerts, with a very diverse audience and for that matter an enthousiastic audience! (There were even families with children, something very unusual for a contemporary music concert) All in all, it was a great success and Ceci and Flor managed very well this crazy project.

I want to express my deepest admiration for their relentless effort, their positive energy during the whole three weeks. I think I can say it was a very good experience for all of us involved; it was a dive into the deep and now we know it works; the concept of the concerts works, the pieces work and knowing that, we can shape up the programme, change some things, fine-tune, etc.

The tape concert was a real surprise show with all the objects and different tape and record players on stage. Together with the wonderful tape labyrinth of Luciana that created an environment where you could expect anything to happen.

The light concert was really a balanced concert with compositions very well matching each other. The quality of the compositions and the performance was very high as well. And the stage looked wonderful with the different lamps and the projected images... The tape programme was in my opinion more uneven, with very different compositions, but on the other hand, that also had it’s charm.

As I am part of the tape concerto I will focus on that. During the evalution Lola Linares asked me how I had experienced the concert as a whole (I had been talking a lot about my own composition). That was a good question. During the concert I was under quite some stress because of an unsolved technical problem concerning my piece (the last one of the concert). But even then, I could enjoy the concert. For me most pieces were completely new and surprising. I really enjoyed the concert as a whole (including my own piece, with the unsolved technical problem).

Cecilia and I were talking, back in Amsterdam, about the unevenness of the programme. It deals with a split between the more abstract compositions (like Abel Pauls La medida del mundo, a very interesting and also humorous piece) and more song like compositions, like Piet Jan van Rossum’s beautiful “A song”. But not only that, there are also different approaches of the theatrical element. Like Joke Kegel’s composition ‘Clouds of sound’ and Sofia Escardó’s composition ‘Beautiful songs, Beatle full songs’, which are more in a literal way using theatrical means: especially Sofia’s composition is more a theatre piece with music than theatre becoming really part of music. As music. Though I enjoyed the piece (it was funny and well performed) it is something with a very different approach. Also Joke’s piece is quite literal in the way it uses water as a theme, with sounds of water alongside a text of a singer also dealing with water. We really want to have a programme with pieces connected with each other in a same mentality, a shared approach. Which doesn’t mean of course that there can’t be differences in attitudes between composers or artists.

Apart from these considerations we also talked about the difficulties of the tapes concert. There was too much things on stage, getting in each other's way. e.g my changuito's were in the way of Luciana's original idea of a dynamic tape installation. The original idea was to start with a stage full of tapes, a real labyrinth, which would gradually change, because every musician after each piece would cut one or two tapes. The concert would end with an empty stage and then my composition could be started with the changuito's. We tried this idea of the changing tape installation in Lomas in the garden in the evening with some lamps and tapes and it looked fantastic! But alas, it was too ambitious for the short rehearsal time we had and so Luciana and Ceci decided on the last moment to change this idea for a permanent tape installation, above stage, so there was room for the changuitos to move.

It is a lot of words, blabla, which I expect not even the composers in the project will bother to read, but as I am writing somehow this clears my mind, and even if these words are here for eternity on the world wide web, (a nightmare) dear reader, be aware that it’s only a moment’s notice, and tomorrow my opinion might have changed. Consider this blog as a leaflets of a little booklet containing raw sketches, which some people share together; so whoever you are, and wherever you are, but mostly of all my dear fellow artists, I invite you to comment and contribute to this blog!

Back from Bs As

One month ago, 19^th and 20^th december ‘Muziek als…’ had it’s maiden voyage: it’s premiere in Buenos Aires. It felt also like a maiden voyage to me. I’d never been in the Americas before. Then, not speaking Spanish and finding one’s way in Buenos Aires is an adventure… A friend of mine asked me, after my enthousiastic descriptions of –according to Dutch standards- the rough everyday life in Bs As, what I’d got out of this journey. No emigration plans or concrete plans of coming back. But then what? I stopped to think and I got the answer: an experience, a broader vision. There’s nothing that compares to doing a project in such a different environment with all the unexpected surprises that go with it, (and there were quite a few).

It was a crazy three weeks before the concerts and then I was only in charge of my own piece… Ceci and Flor were working non-stop in organizing the whole project, 17 different compositions on 2 different concerts, each piece requiring it’s own set-up… Logistically a nightmare. It was a miracle the concerts went pretty smooth, apart from a technical problem with my piece (I will get on to that later). Yes, the concert were very succesfull with an enthousiastic audience! (more on that and the great experience of the whole project also later).

Let's continue with the unexpected surprises, for instance the changuito story (changuito=shopping trolley). It took Ceci and Flor a disproportional effort to get two changuito’s for my piece. Ceci made an interesting remark about it, telling the changuito problem in Argentina is a reflection of the economical situation. In Holland shopping trolleys are close to junk, you can find them easily on the streets, abandoned. But in Argentina it’s almost impossible to get one from a supermarket. You need to leave your passport at the supermarket even to get to the car with a changuito. It’s because of the cartonneros: people who collect card-board from the streets. Everywhere you see them, most of them pulling heavy wagons full of card-board. Some of them even with horse and wagon (children on it as well, collecting carboard along with mother). But you also can see some of them with a changuito. That gives the piece, which was partly intended as a kind of recycling performance, a very different meaning.

The title of my piece is “Nostalgic overdrive”. That was a happy choice: I didn’t realize how big nostalgia is in Argentina until I was there. Of course nostalgia is an industry everywhere, (since when?) but in Argentina it’s very much part of everyday live. The nostalgia is as much a physical part of the city of Buenos Aires, with its faded cinema’s, worn-out night clubs and old cars (lots of Peugeot’s and Renaults from the seventies, kept together with wire and tape) as it is of the Argentinian psyche, (which is reflected by the many nostalgic TV-channels recycling old TV series (Argentinian and American) from the seventies. The summit of nostalgia is a channel devoted solely to the peaks of Argentinian football history). Maybe this nostalgia is the reason why old fashioned rock music is so popular in Argentina and the Beatles so astonishingly present.

Freud compares somewhere the unconscious to a city like Rome where century-old ruins are standing next to brand-new buildings: an archeological site, where there is no logic to the emerging pattern; no city planning. Such an associative city, full of poetic wonders, is Buenos Aires. As a matter of fact Freud is very much alive in Buenos Aires. That can’t be a coincidence. There is some hidden connection between the world around us and our psychic life. It’s these kind of correspondences Benjamin writes about in his Passagen. I’m sorry to mention these intimidating names, but since I’ve seen so many Argentinian bookcases full of classics proudly inside living-rooms I’m only too glad to display here some of my painstakingly acquired erudition.

Yes the whole idea of an intellectual education, an idea that is almost extinct in the Netherlands (if it ever existed), of being an intellectual, (of course together with some snobbery), is still alive in Argentina. In that sense I felt much at home in Argentina. You enter a bookshop (there are a remarkably lot of them in Bs As) and all the classics (unfortunately in Spanish) stare you in the face. You can even buy literature in a kiosco! Argentina seems much less of an experience economy than Holland, where everything is more pre-digested. How is this possible? Is this a stage Argentina has yet to come, or will Argentina develop in a different way? That is probably wishful thinking. But who knows? Left is dead for many years in Europe and still very much alive and kicking in Latin America.

winkelwagens, an update

Already more than two weeks ago, or is it three? (how time flies!), I had a run-through with Ceci and Flor of the first version of my shopping-cart piece. Although we couldn’t make the run-through of the whole piece, it was very useful. The things I had in mind more or less seem to work, so in that sense I’m satisfied. But there’s one thing that worries me. Before the run-through of the piece Ceci and Flor were testing the carts, (which I now equipped with a morse on-off button and a volume control, both at the handle, so giving more possibilities of a quick control of the sound) trying out different things. I was delighted with the sounds they produced. Why is it my piece doesn’t have this wonderful atmosphere they were creating while improvising? Maybe it’s because of my fondness for chaos that I prefer the improvisation more than a well-ordered composition? Or is my composition simply too dull, having not enough interesting ideas to capture the ear?

Some of it has to deal with notation, and the problem how to notate different movements with different speeds, having no connection with a shared pulse.

This is going to be a bit of a technical story, I’m afraid. So, dear reader, a warning beforehand! Also I don’t want to bother anyone with my compositional hang-ups, but as this blog is dealing with the ‘work in progress’, inevitably the gory details of composing are part of it. Maybe a blog like this is not such a good idea; after all, you don’t want to take a look in the kitchen of the restaurant you’re having dinner, do you?

For those who are still with me, some general information: the piece is a recycling of a golden oldie, the 1970 hit 'Du' from Peter Maffay. Both players of the carts are walking alongside a tape with a recording of this song. So, that is the original material that shall be used as a sort of acoustic clay. The singer is using the text of the song, stretching the words, and using the megaphone as an extra device to modulate her voice (there's a 'morse' button on the megaphone that is used to modulate the voice with rhythms.). She's not so much singing. I thought the megaphone was necessary, in order to include the voice of the singer in the same kind of crappy sound world as the portable cassetteplayers: some sort of acoustical waste land.

When I started composing I had to choose which kind of notation I would use. First I was thinking of a score on the floor, a rolled-out wallpaper with arrows and numbers pointing out the car-drivers how to move. I rejected this idea, because a score like this only indicates positions, and no timing. For an installation-like piece this idea could have worked perfectly, but not for a theatrical song-like piece where the singer uses words and her timing has to be coordinate with the movements of the carts. I decided that the movements of the carts would be my starting point, and the music would be the mere result of these movements.

These movements could be indicated using conventional notation with some additional indications for the direction of movement, (e.g. an arrow above the note pointing out the direction). One step of the cart-mover would in principle equal one beat. In this manner it shouldn’t be too difficult to notate a dance-like movement.

This is all practical enough (one has to be practical), but it doesn’t produce the most interesting sounds. Cassette-tape has a very slow speed (4,75 cm/s) and in my opinion the most interesting sounds are those produced around that speed, when the ‘original’ so to speak is still distinguishable. Preferably slower, but a slightly higher speed is also great. A normal walking speed, being a great deal faster, produces very squeaky sounds, also nice as an incidental sound, but for me less interesting to explore structurally.

So it seems there’s a conflict between the piece as a dance-like movement and the piece as a musical composition. The music wants something different than the dance. Or is it?

Maybe it’s mostly a problem of notation I’ll have to overcome. Slower speeds of the car-drivers can be equally of interest in terms of movement, but they are difficult to relate to a pulse of around 70 beats/minute.

The first pages I wrote, were a rigid movement, some kind of hoketus between carts and singer, not too difficult to execute. I was thinking that this rigid, clockwork like motion might be an interesting counterpart to more fluid pulse-free (or seemingly pulse-free) sections of the piece. But I’m still not sure how to fix this free floating motion in a score. So here’s the challenge...

(first rhythmical part of the piece, after the introduction)

Tapewagens in concert

Here an improv session with two tape-trolleys, unfortunately not in stereo. According to Wenko it sounds like cats fighting. I like the theatrical element a lot, and the challenge of course is to make a real piece out of this material. What i find interesting is the opposition between the 'abstraction' of distorted, trashy material on the one hand, and the 'realism' of quoting recognizable song on the other hand. I'm thinking of dividing tape-lines into different sections (e.g. spoken word, pop music, classical music, etc.) to have more than only one kind of material in the piece, and to be able to combine different sound textures. Only pop music as a source may be a bit boring. And then the pitch and location would be the only parameters involved. A problem to overcome is the fragility of the material. Still thinking of a smooth way to guide the tape into the cassette-player, this is the point where the tape often cracks.


by Wobbe