I composed this short piano piece when I was 16, inspired by ‘silence’, from 95 Poems by e. e. cummings:

silence

.is
a
looking

bird:the

turn
ing;edge,of
life

(inquiry before snow

© 1958 e e cummings

Download the Alúna electronics archive [116.1MB].

The starting idea for Alúna was a ritual sequence where a female figure would lead a group of followers through a transformative process. From a musical perspective the solo viola would represent the leading female figure, the ensemble her people, and the electronics the transformative tools. Conceptually the music of the solo viola generates all the musical material of the piece, while the electronics setup allows the soloist to transform her own sound and the sound of the ensemble through her musical gestures.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff has been the first anthropologist to disentangle the complexities of the Kogi mythology and to notice the uniqueness of their culture in the wider perspective of South American ethnology. The Kogi creation myth is based on a sequence of nine worlds, representing both a chronological series of events and the permanent structure of their universe. A graphical representation of the latter would consist of two conical shapes joined at the base, with the smaller worlds at the top and the bottom, and at the centre the largest, the fifth world, our world. Accordingly Alúna is composed of nine sections of related lengths. An introduction (“Sea”) and a conclusion (“Blood”) frame the nine “Worlds”. Each of the “worlds” links to the following one through a short “weaving” section.

The importance of weaving in the Kogi culture cannot be overemphasised. Every aspect of their physical and spiritual life is dominated by the act of weaving, and the creation myth as a whole can be visualised as a giant spinning fuse around an imaginary axis passing through the highest peak of the Sierra Nevada.

The music of Alúna is derived entirely from an interwoven fabric of nine harmonic fields, built from nine intervals of a perfect fifth. This harmonic structure expands and contracts according to the form of the piece, but maintains its ritual, static character throughout.

For Alúna I developed an interface written with MaxMSP. It performs a realtime spectral analysis and resynthesis of the viola sound, and spatialise the resulting FFT bins individually. The trajectories reflect the weaving paradigm, both in space and frequency. The generative nature of the viola is reflected in how spectral and amplitude data from the instrument are used to control and transform the sound of the orchestra through a bank of dynamic resonant filters, spectral delays and a convolution engine.

I’m looking forward to Gerhard’s contribution to Integra, as I am sure that he will bring a very sharp and personal angle to the project. We will probably meet again at the end of May, in occasion of the Integra scientific group meeting in Belfast.

Copyright© 2003-2004, Dean Allen All rights reserved.

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The conductor was Oliver Knussen, and the programme also included works by Mark-Anthony Turnage, Gary Kulesha and Simon Bainbridge, all present at the concert, and at the dinner afterwards, in a fancy Italian restaurant by the telling nome of Grano (wheat). Grano is much more than just a restaurant, it is a stage for the Toronto artistic and cultural scene, under the amiable supervision of the owner Roberto.

The concert programme was quite peculiar: apart from Gary Kulesha, who is Canadian, the conductor and the other three composers were British. They also had in common the same composition teacher, John Lambert. When Olly described the qualities of his teacher I was immediately reminded of my own composition teacher, Azio Corghi. Both Corghi and Lambert’s students have vastly different musical styles, and they have all been able to develop their own original voice. Far from promoting a school or a house style, Lambert and Corghi seem to have been more keen on perfecting their own type of musical maieutics. They help (or helped, in the case of Lambert, who died in 1995) the students to find their own voice, without trying to impose any aesthetic or artistic rule. It is not an easy way of teaching, because, in true Socratic spirit, it forces the teacher to look at things from the pupil’s perspective.

Gifted artists like them have devoted a great part of their life to teach the younger, limiting their own creative output in order to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. From them we learn a profound moral lesson, not just an artistic one.