Javier Alejandro Garavaglia
Arte
Poética (I) for quadrophonic tape
(1995).
Duration: 8: 09
By the beginning of the
1990s, I became more and more interested in the writings by
Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. I composed some instrumental pieces based
on and/or using some of his poems. These compositions are: Laberinto
(..”palabras, poemas”..) from the years 1990/1 and Poème
du temps qui ne passe pas (.."del otro lado del muro"..), a chamber opera
from 1993/4.
What fascinates me most about
Borges’ work is his non-Christian philosophical approach to life and
beyond, where (no matter if by his poems or by his short stories, as the
boundaries among those genres seem to disappear in his oeuvre), the recurrent
theme is the fine line between dream, death and life, where sometimes life
seems to be dreamed and dreams seem to be lived.
His so called “systems of
symbols” is what attracted me most about his work. It describes in
general an atemporal or timeless dimension, which in many cases is represented
by images like the moon, mirrors or antique Greek philosophers and myths, just to
mention the most recurrent.
By 1994, I dedicated my full
attention to his poem Arte Poética, written in 7 Stanzas of 4
verses each, these all containing 11 syllables. What
fascinated me the most and actually triggered my interest to compose a
piece or a number of pieces about the poem was, that Borges resumes in this
poem his entire artistic and philosophical conceptions in such a concise and
precise way. To understand better what I mean, I added a free
translation end of this page.
Brief description of the
piece
The electroacoustic piece Arte
Poética (I) is based only on the first stanza of the poem.
The aim of the piece is
merely to musically and sonically recreate the meaning emanating from the first
four verses of the poem. In these four verses there are two words related to
water ("río"/river and "agua"/water), two related to
time ("tiempo"/time and "recordar"/remember) and one
implying contemplation
("mirar"/to look or contemplate) all of which are both present and
suggested throughout the work. From these, only the first two are a
“tangible” substance, the other ones are immaterial. The challenge
was to recreate the latter sonically.
To commence with, the main
basic material for the entire composition was the human voice, my own. Being
the words extremely important, it was my aesthetical conviction and decision,
that they should be present as such so that the audience could understand the meaning of the poem.
The piece is formally divided
in two sections, each of them of around 4 minutes long, whereas the first one
relates to the element Water whilst the second part to relates toTime.
After the recording of the
stanza and the entire poem, a process of isolation of the words mentioned above
took place, so that they could be present through the piece, having each one a
different channel fixed allocated. These words are repeated throughout the work
at programmed intervals.
The rest of the recorded poem
was used in many ways to create, modify or trigger different synthesis
processes on Csound. After the introduction with the words alone wandering in
the space, the first water-like sounds appear. These were treated with the
process known as Sample and hold, using the transposition (4 octaves down) of
each of the verses of the stanza as “train pulse” for the process.
Added to these are some other sounds based on Amplitude Modulation of both Frequency
Modulation (Simple Chowning FM) processes and the recorded verses, plus some
extreme filtering processes on the recorded voice. These sounds cross the room
through the quadraphony, like “rivers of sound”, trying to recreate
the image of water and rivers. The Csound files for this part can be seen on
the score, pages
12 to 33 (“Water Files”).
When this part approaches its
end, around minute 4, the second part makes a crossfade to the former one.
Being this new one dedicated to describe sonically the concept of Time, the sounds
involved here were produced only synthetically. The main process is again
Simple Chowning FM. This time however, my experimentation with Csound gave me
the opportunity to develop a quite original algorithm, where the ratio between
carrier and modulator was given by a random generator working on a continuous table
of values (the “ktabelle”). The randomness of the function made the
values to literally “jump”, generating very fast glissandi (due to
the continuous “k” values); the result was a very original sound.
As there were many files compiled with the same procedure, they were mixed
giving the impression of being involved in a surreal movement of sounds, giving
the feeling (at least in my view) of atemporality. These algorithms can be
found on the score, pages 33 to
41 (“Time Files”).
Another important aspect of
the work, as usual in acousmatic compositions, is the diffusion of sound in space. The
quadrophony of the piece is based on the musical concept of 4x voice
counterpoint. Electroacoustic music has however the advantage -compared to
traditional instrumental music-, that the sounds can wander free from speaker to
speaker, bringing to the audience the perception of the space’s
dimension through the music itself. The entire quadrophonic
surround movement of words, “water-like” and
“time-like” sounds was programmed using CommonMusic (Lisp). The
algorithms are shown on the score, pages 42 to 55.
The piece has been edited in
the public domain commercially twice on CD, as shown below:
1996
CD
Piece: Arte
Poética (I) for quadrophonic Tape on the CD:’EX MACHINA
– tangent ’, edited 1996 by Cybele (Germany) and the Folkwang
Hochschule Essen (Germany). CD n°: 960.102 – 1996 / LC 3738,
DDD.
2002:
CD
Piece: Arte
Poética (I), on the CD ‘Florida Electroacoustic Music
Festival – VOLUME 1’, edited by the EMF
Media, Electronic Music Foundation ltd. New York USA and the Florida Electroacoustic
Music Studios, University of Florida. EMF CD N° 031. CD Production by
Healey Disc Manufacturing – 2002. DDD. Code: 6 53727 81192 5.
Free translation of the first
stanza of the poem Arte Poética by Jorge Luis Borges.
To look at the river made of time and water
remembering that the time is another river,
Knowing
that we loose ourselves like the river
and that the faces flow like the water.
Quadrophonic distribution (according to the
typical German clockwise distribution)
