https://twinstrangers.net
they ask for money, but perhaps worth the $...
Friday, 29 January 2016
Wednesday, 27 January 2016
come out, steve reich. 1966 - fase, anne teresa de keersmaeker. 1982
(of doubles repeating in sync and out of phase...)
from wikipedia:
Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson, who chose Reich on the basis of his earlier work It's Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project.
Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten). The police had not previously wanted to deal with Hamm's injuries, since he did not appear seriously wounded.
from wikipedia:
Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson, who chose Reich on the basis of his earlier work It's Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project.
Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten). The police had not previously wanted to deal with Hamm's injuries, since he did not appear seriously wounded.
Reich re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which initially play in unison. They quickly slip out of sync to produce a phase shifting effect, characteristic of Reich's early works. Gradually, the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation and, later, almost a canon. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, until the actual words are unintelligible. The listener is left with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words. Reich says in the liner notes of his album Early Works of using recorded speech as source material that "by not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm." The piece is a prime example of process music.
In dance, the piece was used in 1982 by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as part of one of her seminal works, Fase, which became a cornerstone of contemporary dance.
here the videos for the plain track by Steve Reich, and for the same track on the film/performance Fase by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. To compose her choreography, she uses the same phase-shifting principle that Reich uses. If you don't want to listen to it twice, I'd recommend directly watching the second video for a double experience (hehe)
and here is her entire performance/film
xl
Sunday, 17 January 2016
dédoublement
Re the below link to Alvin Lucier's 'I am Sitting in a Room':
It came up in relation to 'Igitur' - the idea of consciousness doubling itself. Or even a room doubling itself in consciousness. Or consciousness of consciousness redoubling in a room.
I recall mentioning (in our session, amidst the cling-wrapped furniture - another redoubling? or another act of a room calling consciousness to itself?) Paul de Man's take on Baudelaire's essay on comedy in this context. For Baudelaire (in 'The Essence of Laughter'), comedy needs two men to happen: one to trip, and the second to see him trip and laugh. But (he adds), there is a special race of man who can both trip and watch the trip: a member of this race can embody both, he can double himself. This is the blessing - or curse - of the philosopher or poet.
De Man (in 'The Rhetoric of Temporality'), glossing this 'doubling' or dédoublement, notes that once you're doubled you can no longer be unitary, 'pure' or 'authentic'. Your experience from here on in is a self-conscious one of your own inauthenticity, which you can only repeat, or redouble, at more and more conscious levels, and 'to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic'. He continues:
It came up in relation to 'Igitur' - the idea of consciousness doubling itself. Or even a room doubling itself in consciousness. Or consciousness of consciousness redoubling in a room.
I recall mentioning (in our session, amidst the cling-wrapped furniture - another redoubling? or another act of a room calling consciousness to itself?) Paul de Man's take on Baudelaire's essay on comedy in this context. For Baudelaire (in 'The Essence of Laughter'), comedy needs two men to happen: one to trip, and the second to see him trip and laugh. But (he adds), there is a special race of man who can both trip and watch the trip: a member of this race can embody both, he can double himself. This is the blessing - or curse - of the philosopher or poet.
De Man (in 'The Rhetoric of Temporality'), glossing this 'doubling' or dédoublement, notes that once you're doubled you can no longer be unitary, 'pure' or 'authentic'. Your experience from here on in is a self-conscious one of your own inauthenticity, which you can only repeat, or redouble, at more and more conscious levels, and 'to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic'. He continues:
'The moment the innocence of authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unravelled and comes apart.'
All this - still - in relation to falling: to the original trip, to the Biblical l fall into self-awareness, and ultimately, simply to gravity, and the grave.
This is all very pertinent to 'Igitur'. The whole piece is a descent. It's also all about doubling, and unravelling. But the unravelling never attains its end in the purity of death-as-absolution or death-as-simple-nothingness. Rather, we get this endless regress of redoubling - very like in Lucier's piece.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)