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Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990)
From the album Numbers Racket
Beginning in the late 1960s, Jim Horton (1944-1998) was an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene. In the early 70s he studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College under the leadership of Robert Ashley. With Tim Perkis and John Bischoff, Horton founded the “world’s first computer network band,” the League of Automatic Music Composers, in 1978. The League pioneered the collaborative use of microcomputers in live improvisation. Many of their “compositions” were driven by game-like interactions between the players. Around this time, Horton also began using computers to implement alternate systems of tuning, and in particular various forms of just intonation.
These influences are at work in this piece composed by Jim Horton in 1990 and released on a 1992 cassette by the Just Intonation Network entitled Numbers Racket. The sounds in this piece are vintage 80s digitalia. Although I’m generally fond of these bright, metallic sounds, the timbre of the piece wears a bit thin by the end of it. The real interest here is on the level of tuning and form.
The composer provided the following cryptic notes to “Rebirth”:
The computer, empty of suffering, simulates high-speed attainment of nirvana by playing the medieval Tibetan Buddhist game “Determination of the Ascension of Stages,” invented by Sakya pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (“Whose Banner is Total Joy”). The board shows 104 places of a fantastic cosmic geography.
The game mentioned by Horton is a variation on an ancient Indian board game in which “the player progresses according to the throw of dice from hell states and other inauspicious conditions by way of the Tantric path to Buddhahood and nirvana.” (Amazingly, it belongs to the same lineage as the modern children’s game Snakes and Ladders.) This strange “program” behind the piece resonates with the cyclical quality of the music, which climbs ever upward only to tumble back down again and start anew. Each iteration is slightly different, and the various levels seem always to be slightly out of phase, thus creating the overall sense of motion and vitality suggested by the title.
Played 120 time(s).
June 10, 2010, 2:32pm
