Disrupted Human REBOOT; 20.01.23; University of York Concert series; Rymer Auditorium/SJLCH; 19:30

Originally scheduled for January 2020 - cancelled three times due to various unexpected circumstances - Disrupted Human REBOOT will take place on Friday 20th January at 19:30. It is a concert for piano and electronics, the interplay of which is explored as both disruptive and complementary. It will be paired with a Disklavier installation created by Federico Reuben: Midlockdown listening :: HDArchive_(date.today). Federico writes:

Midlockdown listening :: HDArchive_(date.today) is an installation by Federico Reuben, conceived during the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. An autonomous mechanical piano (Disklavier) plays music to an empty concert hall from a digital musical archive. On the 20th of April 2020 at 19:37:50, Reuben unleashed an algorithm into his hard drive that spread through its folders and subfolders searching for musical data. The algorithm found 1389 MIDI files capturing his own compositions, performances, unfinished drafts and sketches, encoded messages, as well as his own collection of music by other composers. The algorithm traced and chose small samples from the files, infecting, in a selected few, digital mutations and disorders and storing its results in 2 floppy disks, lasting a total of 6 hours, 1 minute and 32 seconds of music. Midlockdown listening :: HDArchive_(date.today) examines themes of isolation, listening, memory, loss, symbolic representation and cognitive structure.

The installation is an extended prologue for the Disrupted Human concert. We would like this to take place before the concert, allowing an audience to experience both aspects of this performance in succession.

The concert will feature two world premieres: Maya Verlaak’s Whispers (2022), which was composed and recorded for Maya’s new album. It involves seamless integration of body and technology, where my felt-sense, voice-pitching, and sight-reading form the components of what a listener hears. Maya writes:

"Whispers is specially written for Kate Ledger. She inspired me to think about physical awareness in a performance. I then gave myself the task to think about how she can physically feel the process and become part of the compositional structure. Her full embodiment is required to shape and control the sound. With a foot-pedal she triggers a pitch, this pitch can be felt as extreme low pitch through a bass shaker (tactile transducer) attached to her left leg. She sings this pitch and sees it appear as a white dot on a black computer screen. She proceeds with breathing in and a second white dot appears and moves upwards, also this is a pitch and she can feel it through a second bass shaker attached to her right leg. After breathing in and rising the second pitch to its maximum position, Kate breathes out and moves the pitch back down. She can now choose a position for the pitch by stopping her breath. She can feel the interval between the two pitches in her left and right leg and has to guess the pitch of the second white dot. She plays the pitch on the piano and the computer application compares the played pitch with the pitch of the second dot. It calculates a faulty harmonic series in relation to how far she is removed from the actual pitch. Every time she plays the same note she can build up more (faulty) harmonic series for that specific note. The goal of the performance is not to get the notes right but to build her own sound world, shaping the sound of the piano while having full insight to the construction of the composition. While Kate carefully shapes her sound world, the black computer screen slowly turns white, this makes the white dots disappear and Kate can only rely on feeling the notes in her legs. At this point the full embodiment is complete and Kate can stop the performance whenever she likes.”

This concert will also feature a world premiere by James Williamson, called Fragments to Loop (2020). The piece is ‘built-up’ of fragments taken from Beethoven’s op. 4 mvt. II; I use megaphones to record and project these fragments to an audience improvise alongside. James writes:

“I heard a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 4 in E-Flat Major, Op.7 in this very auditorium, exquisitely performed by Clare Hammond. I was taken with the heart wrenching opening few bars of the second movement, Largo con gran espressione, which has stuck with me to this day. I previously wrote a piece for solo piano, commissioned by the Late Music concert series in York, as part of a creative transcription project based on Madrigals. I chose to use a Madrigal by Gesualdo as a starting point, taking fragments of music to create a new work. I have taken the same idea with this piece, extracting fragments from the first few bars of music from the Beethoven and re-wrote these in new ways to create eighteen new fragments. Three of these fragments are recorded live into megaphones which are then looped to form an homogenous backwash. It is then left up to the performer to improvise in-the-moment with the other 15 fragments, which can be played in any order and repeated as many times as desired.”

Other pieces include:

Desmond Clarke’s Naricissus (2018) - a piece that involves my reading of a harmonic analysis of different piano pitches that I play live. Des writes:

“A pd-extended patch performs live acoustic analysis of a “seed” performed by the piano, and uses the results to generate a score in real time. This process is then iterated – each analysis is converted into notation, the performance of which becomes the subject of the next analysis. This creates an evolving soundscape derived from the acoustic properties of the piano, the performance, and the surrounding acoustic.”

Joanna Bailie’s Artificial Environment No. 8 (2012/13), where the piano is able to ‘accompany’ the delicate and complex sounds of daily life. It consists of three sections: ia ‘...and the dreams that you dare to dream...’; i ‘babel’; ii ‘street’. Joanna writes:

‘In “Babel”, the piano is paired with excerpts from a long recording that was made while walking up and down the queue of tourists waiting to enter Notre Dame de Paris. The title refers to the density of languages encountered at this particular tourist spot and it is speech itself which is the focal point of the composition. Central to the piece is the idea that a musical proposition exists within the accidental narrative of the field recording, to be outlined by the piano part and accessed by a listener willing to play his or her part in this framing of the sound of real life.’

This concert also includes Federico Reuben’s On Violence (2012), a gnarly and intense piece for piano, live electronics, computer display and sensors. It requires many aspects of technology and the many ways in which it is controlled. It serves as a ‘three-dimensional’ piano etude, where body, technique, control and ‘game-play’ drive a pianist to the end of the piece, and take a breath! Federico writes:

“On Violence is a composition that combines generative music, improvisation, algorithmic composition, non-standard forms of notation and real-time scoring, machine listening, real-time data and sound analysis/processing, gesture tracking and computer networking. The pianist reads from a score displayed on a laptop screen, which combines conventional notation with real- time scoring. The performer also wears headphones to receive audio triggers and cues that constitute the aural element of the score.
During the performance, the score gradually changes from conventional notation to more experimental notations. The real-time scoring elements use a combination of chance, generative and spectral methods to generate visual and aural material that changes and adapts for each performance. The pianist therefore is asked to follow a real-time score that has both fixed and unfixed indications, some of them involving spontaneous reaction and improvisation.”

Federico and myself will also perform an improvisation.