FWD: Berkeley concert: Shafqat / Wessel / Matt / Ali thisWednesady

[Kim Flint <kflint@loopers-delight.com>]

some of you bay area folks may be interested in this. I saw Dave and Matt
play with Shafqat once before, and it was very good. Certainly a lot of the
music technology involved would be interesting to folks on this list.

kim

>Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 12:44:49 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Matt Wright <matt@cnmat.CNMAT.Berkeley.EDU>
>To: matt@cnmat.CNMAT.Berkeley.EDU
>Subject: Shafqat / Wessel / Matt / Ali this Wednesady
>
>Hello, friends.  I'm very excited to be performing once again with the
>incredible 11th generation Khyal vocalist Shafqat Ali Khan.  My good 
>friends
>David Wessel and Ali Momeni will join me in accompanying Shafqat with 
>various
>computer instruments.  At the bottom of this message are the program 
>notes we
>wrote for the performance, explaining our instruments and artistic goals.
>
>But first, the important stuff:
>
>Wednesday, June 6th, 8pm.  Doors open at 7:30.
>Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley, near the corner of College and Bancroft
>$15
>Part of CNMAT's TEMPO Festival of Contemporary Performance,
>http://www.tempofestival.org
>
>
>I hope to see you there!
>
>-Matt
>
>
>*********************    Program Notes    *********************
>
>
>What are we trying to do?
>
>Musical meetings that combine very distant cultural influences very
>often end up as aesthetic disasters.   Our particular ingredients
>tonight consist of a voice strongly grounded in the highly developed
>Khyal vocal tradition of Pakistan and North India, and a collection
>of computer music practices that has little, if any, grounding in a
>strong musical tradition.
>
>Although Wessel, Wright and Momeni have all studied this music to
>some extent, we cannot pretend to be well situated in this profoundly
>deep music culture.  Our strategy then is to adapt the computer's
>role in the direction of the more highly developed Khyal tradition
>but not completely. We strove to create a common meeting ground, a
>situation that would provoke a musical exchange.  Improvisation is
>central to the Khyal tradition and to each performer's musical
>background; it will be the basis for tonight's performance.  We did
>not use another genre with which we have familiarity, such as jazz,
>rock, or 20th century western art music, but rather we concentrated
>on building musical material from scratch, starting with the
>essentials - rhythmic structure, pitch organization, timbral control,
>and an enveloping diffusion of the resulting sound. We focused on the
>most salient features; the drone, the pitch collections related to
>the particular rag, and rhythmic structures compatible with the
>Hindustani tal.
>
>What are the Instruments?
>
>Shafqat Ali Khan will be singing.
>
>Each of the other three musicians will be playing a computer-based
>musical instrument that he designed and implemented specifically for
>this performance.  All three instruments consist of a "gestural
>interface," a physical device that somehow measures the way it is
>touched and transmits these measurements to a computer.  The computer
>interprets these gestures according to pre-programmed rules, and
>controls different kinds of sound synthesis and processing.  All of
>our computers are networked and share a common time pulse and other
>information.  Each computer musician's sound will be played primarily
>through the loudspeaker closest to him on stage in the hopes of
>providing a sort of embodied physicality and so you the listener will
>be able to associate the sounds you hear with the people who are
>playing them.
>
>David Wessel's gestural interface is a Buchla Thunder.  The Thunder
>has many pressure- and position-sensitive strips played with the
>fingers.  It is polyphonic in the sense that the parameters of
>multiple strips are sensed at once.  Wessel's instrument is based on
>the idea of "dipping": a probabilistic generative process for rhythm
>and melody is associated with each strip on the Thunder's surface,
>where zero pressure causes silence and increasing pressure adds
>volume and density to the musical result.  Orchestration, the
>selection of which processes are sounding at a given time, is
>controlled by which strips are touched.
>
>Matthew Wright's gestural interface is a Wacom tablet and stylus.
>The tablet senses the absolute two-dimensional position of the stylus
>with a resolution greater than 0.001 inch, as well as the pressure
>and two-dimensional tilt of the pen with respect to the tablet
>surface.  Different regions of the tablet correspond to different
>kinds of musical behaviors, including control of the drone and the
>construction and scheduling of rhythmic patterns.  The most
>expressive feature of the interface is "scrubbing," real-time control
>of additive resynthesis of musical phrases sung by Shafqat.
>
>Ali Momeni's gestural interface is a pair of joysticks, each sensing
>two-dimensional tilt, rotation, and a number of buttons and switches.
>Momeni's software maps these dimensions to various synthesis
>algorithms modally thus allowing him to control many different types
>of processes using the same two joysticks.  Unlike the other two
>performers, Momeni begins each piece with very little prepared sound
>material.  All in real-time, this instrument allows him to listen to
>and analyze Shafqat's voice, record samples and to replay those
>samples using granular synthesis.  Momeni also uses a second
>microphone to record percussive sounds produced by a collection of
>small objects he has at hand.
>

______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com