winding streams…
[The mutiny] of rivers
Composer, improviser, oboist, and longtime sfSoundGroup comrade Kyle Bruckmann’s gorgeous new album, of rivers, is now available on CD, digital, and streaming, via New Focus Recordings. The record unfolds a contemporary oboe recital, featuring solo and solo-plus-electronics pieces by Jessie Cox, Hannah A. Barnes, Helen Grime, and Linda Bouchard, alongside one of Kyle’s own compositions, and demonstrates the incredible breadth of Kyle’s interests and capabilities as a musician.
The album concludes with The Mutiny of Rivers, a piece I wrote for EKG - Kyle’s electroacoustic duo with Ernst Karel - in 2010. It’s a pleasure to share their brilliant recording with the world, and especially in the thoughtful and compelling context of Kyle’s disc.
In hindsight, The Mutiny of Rivers was a crucial piece in my development as a musician - opening up new ways of thinking about improvisation, and new modes of collaboration, that eventually led to the formation of ensembles like Minor Vices and Tanngrisnir. I’d be grateful if you gave it a listen, doubly so if you wanted to purchase of rivers and support Kyle’s work. And I’d like to spend a bit more space here reflecting on the piece and its creation.
A trip upriver
The composition of The Mutiny of Rivers began with an email invitation from Kyle. While EKG had existed from the late 1990s as an improvising group, with no need for scores or other compositional input, they were looking for new challenges, new ideas, and new provocations. Kyle wrote, “the ideal is pieces suitably idiosyncratic (eccentric?) to account for who we are as an ‘ensemble’; i.e., …things that somehow incorporate modularity, improvisation, interpretation, live electronics, sketchy and half-broken equipment, etc.” I don’t know if every composer would find that particular creative challenge to be catnip, but I was hooked.
In that email, Kyle also invoked my decade of experience performing Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura, and in doing so set the The Mutiny of Rivers on a very specific path: “...the elegance and brilliance of Nono’s approach to composing for live electronics (the gist being that the part is crystal clear while not being hardware-specific, and while still retaining ample space for interpretation, musicality, PERFORMANCE: you know, as if it’s a “real” instrument or something....)”
With that encouragement and/or provocation, I began the piece using La Lontananza’s template: written music for Kyle to perform on English horn, plus a reservoir of pre-recorded “tape” material from which Ernst could select and mix specific elements. That said, I sought to increase the level of interpretive freedom beyond what Nono provided. I asked Ernst to process the pre-recorded material though his modular synthesis rig - license he used to shape and distort those recordings in ways that I never would have imagined, but found thrilling. I found other ways to provide latitude in the written music - unordered pages of material for Kyle to put into sequence, deliberately unspecified tempi, and the option to apply live-electronic manipulations at any point. And while some of the leaves of music used conventional notation, others provided instructions in prose, using the layout of the text to reinforce the ideas and constraints. Here’s one page:
That approach to material, specified via text-plus-graphic-design, would later become the sole basis of another piece written for Kyle. Alligator Char, embodied in a deck of 158 “playing cards,” eventually became the foundational text of Milwaukee-based ensemble Minor Vices, and that group’s activity led to a whole sequence of projects exploring unconventional types of scores (everything from flowcharts to computer-controlled lighting designs), and the spaces between traditionally “fixed” compositions and wholly “open” improvisations.
For all of the ways in which The Mutiny of Rivers represented something new and generative in my artistic trajectory, it also expressed one of my core aesthetic values: the idea that an overloaded, information-dense experience could invite a variety of interpretations from both performer and listener. The Mutiny of Rivers is designed such that there can’t be a singular “correct” way to perform the work, and I hope that same multiplicity extends to the act of listening. With so many details to observe and possible paths to consider, the listener is compelled to make choices, forming a unique experience by attending to whatever elements they find most interesting in the moment. Even as a fixed recording, the music strives to reward relistening.
At the workbench
Alongside my usual music-oriented work, I’ve been giving myself a few creative “pauses” to enjoy making visual art.
I’ve worked extensively with animation in the past, but this is the first time I’ve truly devoted effort to making (and in a few cases printing) still images.
In particular, I’ve relished exploring ways to balance deliberately “digital” aspects of the design - grids, geometric shapes, etc. - with (metaphorically) “painterly” qualities of color, transparency, and “brushstroke.”
Nonce
As we approach the vernal equinox, cartoonist John Granzow reminds you that a rigorous approach to earwax is an important part of your spring cleaning routine.
Thanks as always for reading and listening - yours,
Christopher
Christopher Burns
http://sfsound.org/~cburns