[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Michael Maier: “Fuga V: Appone mulieri”

From the album Renaissance Music in Bohemia

Court physician of the illustrious Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, Michael Maier (1568-1622) was a man of universal and esoteric learning in the grand style of 17th-century Europe. Among his many intellectual affiliations, Maier was associated with the Rosicrucian movement, an esoteric society that first emerged in the early 17th century. His numerous writings employed various intrepid conceits intended to exercise the mind: in Lusius Serius (“A Serious Pastime”) a menagerie of animals submit their virtues to man’s judgment, whileViatorium is a guided tour of the (then) seven planets and their associated metallic elements.

In 1618, Maier published a remarkable book entitled Atalanta Fugiens (The Fleeing Atalanta), a treatise of alchemical wisdom that contains some rare examples of notated music composed under the spell of that arcane discipline. The book consists of 50 poetic epigrams conveying the arcane teachings of alchemical lore, each illustrated with a woodcut and accompanied by a short essay elaborating on its symbolic meaning. In addition, each of these allegorical poems was set to music in a three-voice composition written by Maier, who was an amateur musician.

Although Maier called his compositions “fugues,” we would now call them canons. The same cantus firmus reappears in each of the songs, in one of the three voices, while the other two follow each other in strict canonic imitation meant to illustrate the mythical pursuit of Atalanta by Hippomenes.

These compositions are among the few extant traces of notated music conceived in the context of alchemical knowledge. Their interest in the present lies largely in the remarkable way that text, image, and music are intertwined into a single, multidimensional experience in Maier’s book: a kind of multimedia avant la lettre. In the preface to his book, Maier explains the logic of his unorthodox presentation:

In order to have it, as it were, in a single view, and embrace these three objects of the more spiritual senses, namely of sight, hearing, and the intellect itself, so as to introduce to the soul that which is to be understood at one and the same time, we have joined Optics to Music and the sense to the intellect, that is, rarities for the sight and hearing with the chemical emblems that are proper to this science.

Parts of Atalanta Fugiens can be found on a number of albums, but the only complete recording of which I’m aware was released on a cassette tape in conjunction with the edition of Atalanta Fugiens edited by Josceyln Godwin (Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks #22, published by Phanes Press in 1989). This exquisite interpretation of Maier’s music is by the Czech group Ars Cameralis, who recorded 10 of the 50 fugues.

Epigram V: To woman’s breast apply the chilly toad, / So that it drinks her milk, just like a child. / Then let it swell into a massive growth, / And let the woman sicken, and then die. / You make from this a noble medicine, / Which drives the poison from the human heart.

July 26, 2011, 9:30am

Cosmogony in sound: A review of Iannis Xenakis’ The Legend of Er (1977-78)

As released on DVD by Mode Records (2005)

The Pompidou Center in Paris: a monument to modernism erected at the historical moment of that movement’s decline.  It was here, at the inauguration of the Pompidou in 1978, that the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis presented his “gesture of light and sound” known as Le Diatope. 

Made of red vinyl stretched over a metal frame, the Diatope’s curvilinear form recalls the famous Philips Pavilion designed by Xenakis and Le Corbusier for the Brussels World Fair in 1958, which housed the Poème électronique of Edgard Varèse.  Indeed, the immersive multimedia plan of the Philips Pavilion was the model for a number of later works Xenakis called Polytopes.  He created four of these prior to the Diatope: the Polytope de Montreal in 1967, an open-air spectacle in Persepolis in 1971, and two Polytopes in the Parisian Abby of Cluny in 1972 and 1973.

Inside the Diatope Xenakis arranged a light show involving 1600 flashbulbs and four lasers guided by four hundred adjustable mirrors.  Both abstract and representational figures were meticulously choreographed and traced by light. Xenakis’ sketches for the light show mention shapes such as “lotuses,”galaxies,” and “wheels.”

In the program booklet for the original 1977 presentation, Xenakis included five quotations that together capture the metaphysical ambiance of the work.  I reproduce them here in the order in which they originally appeared:

Each group would spend seven days in open country, and on the eighth, they had to break camp and head out for four days to finally reach a place where one discovers, stretching all across the sky and over the earth, a beam of light straight as a pillar, akin to a rainbow, but much more radiant and pure. – Plato, The Republic

From there emerged a crying out, indistinct, one I likened to a voice of fire,  just as there emerged from the light…a holy Word blanketing all of Nature, and the purest of fire was thrust out of the humid natural world toward the sublime area above. – Hermes Trismegistus, Pymander

For indeed, what is man within nature?  A void in the face of infinity, a whole before the void, a center between nothingness and wholeness…unable to perceive the void from whence he came, nor the infinity in which he is submerged. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées

 Christ went on: “I traversed the worlds, I ascended into the suns, and soared with the Milky Ways through the wastes of heaven; but there is no God. I descended to the last reaches of the shadows of Being, and I looked into the chasm and cried: ‘Father, where art thou?’ But I heard only the eternal storm ruled by none, and the shimmering rainbow of essence stood without sun to create it, trickling above the abyss. – Jean-Paul Richter, Siebenkäs

In the first stages of the explosion, the general distribution of the star’s energy closely matches the distribution known for theoretical black holes at a temperature of 12,000 degrees Kelvin.  In the case of SN 1970g the radius was measured at 3x10¹⁴ centimeters, in other words, as large as the orbit of Uranus.  Once the supernova’s radius is known, it is possible to determine its absolute luminosity.  For SN 1970g, this was calculated at 10⁴² ergs per second, or one trillion times that of the sun…  During the 30 days following the explosion, the radius of the surface from which the light was emitted increases at a near-constant speed of 5,000 kilometers per second.  At the end of this period, the star’s photosphere, in other words, its visible surface, reaches a radius of 2x10¹⁸ centimeters, a much larger radius than that of our solar system. – Robert P. Kirshner, Supernova

These quotations offer no program or story, but rather, at best, set a mood for the spectacle: a sort of saturnine melancholy tinged with childlike wonder.  The first quote, taken from the end of Plato’s Republic, demands explanation, as it the source of the title Xenakis chose for the musical component of the Diatope.  It concerns a soldier named Er who returns from the dead and describes what he saw on the other side.  The vision culminates with Er’s sighting of the “Spindle of Necessity,” a great shaft encircled with eight rings representing the eight celestial spheres known to ancient astronomy.  On each ring is perched a siren singing a tone corresponding to the circumference of its orbit and together forming a cosmic harmony.  Seated on thrones amidst the sirens are the three Fates, or “daughters of necessity,” who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens: Lachesis, singing of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future.

Finally, there is the music: comprised of seven tracks distributed over 11 loudspeakers placed throughout the Diatope, Xenakis’ tape composition La legénde d’Eer (The Legend of Er) is a sprawling, 46-minute journey in sound.  (For the DVD release, Xenakis’ original seven-channel mix has been reduced to a 5.1 version.)

Given Xenakis’ reputation as a composer of fearful complexity, the form of the music is remarkably transparent: beginning with pure, high twinkling tones that Xenakis described as “sonic shooting stars,” layer upon layer of sound is added, from harsh, wailing industrial noises, to recognizable instrumental timbres such as thumb piano and mouth harp, to a throbbing electronic vortex that emerges midway through the composition.  These sound layers enter at lower and lower registers, suggesting a descent from the rarefied upper realms into the chthonic domain below.  Hearing this music at high volume over a surround-sound system in a large room, one is confronted with the sublime aesthetic terror of sensory overload.  As one listener described the experience, it is the auditory equivalent of staring directly into the sun.

Finally the density of sound subsides, and at the end the listener is left once again with the shooting stars.  These too gently fade away into a now-resonant silence. The emergence and passing of these distinct sonic textures gives the music a powerful if extremely dilated sense of motion.  Indeed, the time scale of The Legend of Er, and the primal violence of its sounds, are suggestive less of human music than of natural phenomena: as if we, like Er himself, are here witness to some vast cosmological process otherwise inaccessible to human ears and eyes.

April 20, 2010, 5:39pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD (1967-69)

From the album HPSCHD

On May 16, 1969, the 16,000-seat Assembly Hall of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the site of one of the most ambitious multimedia spectacles of the 20th century: HPSCHD (from the computer abbreviation for harpsichord), a collaborative work by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller.

The piece comprised seven specially-composed solos for amplified harpsichord, based on aleatorically generated results of the Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game) attributed to Mozart, as well as randomly selected excerpts from Mozart’s piano sonatas and samples from the music of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Schoenberg, and others.  The harpsichord parts, to be played simultaneously or in succession in a manner determined by the performers, were accompanied by the computer-generated sounds recorded on tape and projected from a circle of 52 loudspeakers surrounding the audience.  Each tape part used a different division of the octave, with scales ranging from five to 56 steps.

For the premiere, multimedia artist Ronald Nameth prepared more than 6,400 slides and 40 films to be projected on the 11 massive screens of the hall.  The footage included Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and the computer films of John and James Whitney.

The first performance of HPSCHD lasted about five hours and was attended by some 8,000 people.

This excerpt of the work is taken from the 2003 recording realized by Joel Chadabe, with Robert Conant playing the harpsichord solos.

January 07, 2010, 5:24pm