"Contemplation and Action"

Thesis by Manuel Rocha Iturbide

As part of the requirements For obtaining and MFA degree in

Electronic music and Recording media.

Mil ls College. Oakland California 1991

I .- Thesis Concert. 1.- Introduction. 2.- Purpose and structure of my concert. - Background. - Breaking the boundaries between the arts - Structure of my concert. - Relation between the different disciplines in my concert. 3.- Description of my compositions.

I I .- Different aspects of my work.

1.- Process. 2.- Integration and disintegration. 3.- Simultaneous events and Synchronicity. 4.- Texture, mass and density. 5.- Stasis.

1.- Introduction.

I began studying classical piano at the age of thirteen, and until 1983 had focused almost exclusively on the piano1. After living one year in France in 1983 I broke with the idea of becoming a concert pianist and went back to Mexico to start studying composition. I needed to try new and more creative ways of expression, including composition and photography. From then on I learned photography and visual arts in a very intuitive and natural way, while I studied composition in a very traditional way2. My way of getting out from traditional composition was through repetitive music, which I heard for the first time in 19833, but it wasn't until 1987 that a completely new door was opened for me thanks to the discovery of John Cage's philosophy. This was the entrance to a freer and more experimental way of doing music. I got so excited about this new way of thinking that I wrote an essay about Cage and later on an article that has been recently published in a Mexican cultural magazine4. I guess Cage was more important to me than my first influences in contemporary music because I had always been involved with different arts, and here was someone who wanted to expand the artistic expression and to break the boundaries between art and life. I no longer had to struggle because I was doing different things, and I felt more freedom to work with music relating it to the other art disciplines. In this way, my ideas in photography started to inject my musical ideas and vice versa, and I expanded even more my artistic activities into other fields5.

1 Putting aside other creative activities I used to do as a child (I did a lot of painting and some photography). 2 The musical education in Mexico Universities is equal to that of a Conservatory. 3 I got involved with the music of Philip Glass in 1983, and with Steve Reich in 1984. 4 "La pus moderna". Num, 4. 5 I did a happening with a friend painter in 1986, and a sound sculpture in an art exhibition in 1989. I also got started making experimental video.

However, after a period of experimenting with different artistic disciplines6, I knew that music was for me the main and most important one7 and that I needed to go deeper into the new possibilities I had now before me. So I came to Mills to a different environment where I would be able to have plenty of time to experiment and work with new musical ideas without completely abandoning my other activities, which are always a complement to my music. In fact, one of the main reasons I came here was because Mills was well known for encouraging interdisciplinary work. My work at Mills has been principally devoted to learning electronic music. In this field I have been mainly interested in sound processing techniques and in the recording studio. Besides this, I have been researching contemporary composers that have similar interests to mine and listening to their music. This was very valuable to me, since in Mexico City I had a lack of time and very little music material (records and scores) available in schools and libraries8. This thesis paper is divided in two sections. The first one is about my concert and my compositions, and the second is a set of articles where I discuss about different aspects of contemporary music that have to do with my compositions and art work at this moment. In the first part I explain how I structured my concert, how I use the extra-musical elements, and what is the relationship between music and visuals. At the end I make a detailed description of the works that were on the concert. In the second part I try to establish a balance between the explanation of my music, the ideas of other composers about the same subjects, and the comparison between my ideas and theirs with following conclusions. Since my aim is to cover all principal areas that are deeply related to my music, it would be an enormous amount of work if I pretended to make a very deep analysis of every aspect. Therefore, I prefer to leave these chapters open so I will be able to explore them more deeply in the future. At this first stage I am writing at a more conceptual level since my research was about these composers personal ideas about music,

6 Although I played around with other art activities, I was seriously involved only with composition and photography. 7 And the most difficult one too!. 8 I am talking about contemporary music material.

composition and art9, and not about detailed analysis of their pieces, which I hope to cover at a second stage in the future. I.- THESIS CONCERT. 1. - Introduction. I began studying classical piano at the age of thirteen, and until 1983 had focused almost exclusively on the piano10. After living one year in France in 1983 I broke with the idea of becoming a concert pianist and went back to Mexico to start studying composition. I needed to try new and more creative ways of expression, including composition and photography. From then on I learned photography and visual arts in a very intuitive and natural way, while I studied composition in a very traditional way11. My way of getting out from traditional composition was through repetitive music, which I heard for the first time in 198312, but it wasn't until 1987 that a completely new door was opened for me thanks to the discovery of John Cage's philosophy. This was the entrance to a freer and more experimental way of doing music. I got so excited about this new way of thinking that I wrote an essay about Cage and later on an article that has been recently published in a Mexican cultural magazine13. I guess Cage was more important to me than my first influences in contemporary music because I had always been involved with different arts, and here was someone who wanted to expand the artistic expression and to break the boundaries between art and life. I no longer had to struggle because I was doing different things, and I felt more freedom to work with music relating it to the other art disciplines. In this way, my

9 All the readings I made are either essays written by them or interviews. 10 Putting aside other creative activities I used to do as a child (I did a lot of painting and some photography). 11 The musical education in Mexico Universities is equal to that of a Conservatory. 12 I got involved with the music of Philip Glass in 1983, and with Steve Reich in 1984. 13 "La pus moderna". Num, 4.

ideas in photography started to inject my musical ideas and vice versa, and I expanded even more my artistic activities into other fields14. However, after a period of experimenting with different artistic disciplines15, I knew that music was for me the main and most important one and that I needed to go deeper into the new possibilities I had now before me. So I came to Mills to a different environment where I would be able to have plenty of time to experiment and work with new musical ideas without completely abandoning my other activities, which are always a complement to my music. In fact, one of the main reasons I came here was because Mills was well known for encouraging interdisciplinary work. My work at Mills has been principally devoted to learning electronic music. In this field I have been mainly interested in sound processing techniques and in the recording studio. Besides this, I have been researching contemporary composers that have similar interests to mine and listening to their music. This was very valuable to me, since in Mexico City I had a lack of time and very little music material (records and scores) available in schools and libraries16. This thesis paper is divided in two sections. The first one is about my concert and my compositions, and the second is a set of articles where I discuss about different aspects of contemporary music that have to do with my compositions and art work at this moment. In the first part I explain how I structured my concert, how I use the extra-musical elements, and what is the relationship between music and visuals. At the end I make a detailed description of the works that were on the concert. In the second part I try to establish a balance between the explanation of my music, the ideas of other composers about the same subjects, and the comparison between my ideas and theirs with following conclusions. Since my aim is to cover all principal areas that are deeply related to my music, it would be an enormous amount of work if I pretended to make a very deep analysis of every aspect. Therefore, I prefer to leave these chapters open so I will be able to explore them more deeply in the future. 14 I did a happening with a friend painter in 1986, and a sound sculpture in an art exhibition in 1989. I also got started making experimental video. 15 Although I played around with other art activities, I was seriously involved only with composition and photography. 16 I am talking about contemporary music material.

At this first stage I am writing at a more conceptual level since my research was about these composers personal ideas about music, composition and art17, and not about detailed analysis of their pieces, which I hope to cover at a second stage in the future. 2.- Purpose and structure of my concert. My thesis concert is the synthesis of a series of ideas I have had in the past eight years. These have not been necessarily musical ideas, but many times started up as concepts that later on got converted into music, visual images, installations, and even happenings. The main difference between this concert and the one I did in Mexico to fulfill my requirements for my bachelors degree is that at that time I felt constrained to undertake certain ideas that were not musical18. Luckily, out of school I was active doing things which were a mixture between music and other disciplines. My first experimental experience using visual images with a music work was back in 1985. This composition was a sort of minimal piece for cello and piano called "The Dessert", and it was constructed with different patterns that were repeated and shared by the cello, the piano right hand and the piano left hand. My idea was to represent each of the three voices by photographic images that were projected in three different screens19. Edward Weston made these images out of a single picture of the dessert20. What I was doing is to work in the same way with the images and the music by breaking up in pieces the picture and constructing three different photographic sequences, and by breaking up the patterns of the musical piece and moving them around between the three different voices. I have kept this way of working with sound and visuals through all these years, but now I am not longer strict with respect of having to have a direct relationship between the images and the music. I have in some 17 All the readings I made are either essays written by them or interviews. 18 Because I was in a conservatory kind of environment 19 Every screen represented a voice in the piece. 20 Little portions of this image were photographed to make the small fragments of a puzzle, like the melodic patterns of the piece, which were the same, but changing from one instrument to the other.

way established a separation line between the different disciplines I use thanks to Cage's idea of events that go on at the same time but have each their own space. Nevertheless, my events have certain points where they touch and interact one with each other. I will explain this later on. After my second experience trying to put photographic images to music in a real time relationship21 I realized that it wasn't worth it because my music had its own rhythm, and it didn't really need images going on with this same rhythm. I also realized that I was getting involved more and more with continuous movement, and so it was difficult to use discontinuous series of photographic images. This is the reason why I started to get interested in experimental video since with this discipline one can have continuous images through time. Getting into video was complicated since editing is very laborious work and as a composer I didn't have time to deal with both activities22. So I decided to make it as simple as possible and use only a still camera since anyway, I was interested in continuous processes23. Besides working with visual images and music, I started to discover other ways of relating sound to other artistic disciplines. In 1989 I was involved in a conceptual art exhibition at a colonial convent in the woods of the surroundings of Mexico City24. Originally I was supposed to do a sound environment for the exhibition, but the speakers of the convent were all blown, so I discovered a way to present my sound track by building a sound sculpture that emphasized the meaning I wanted to express25. The installation worked out really well and an art dealer even wanted to buy it while I wasn't even an artist. With this experience I realized that what's important is not the means you use to express and idea, but the content of the idea. This I learned from Cage, who has been

21 This was for "Trance lumínico", a composition I did inspired in some photographs I took of luminous signs in Las Vegas. 22 Photography was simpler because you deal with one image at a time. 23 What I mean by this is setting a video camera in a tripod and making a continuous shooting without making any cuts. 24 In "Convento del Desierto de los Leones". 25 This installation is called "( + x - ) = - " and in my thesis concert I presented a second version.

able to go from one discipline to the other expressing always the same ideas in a very clear way26. Recently I have begun to explore the theatrical aspect in music. In 1989 Chris Bobrowsky (a friend and graduate composer at Mills) and I made a musical performance in "Galería de la raza" in San Francisco. This was for an exhibition about the Mexican celebration of "the day of the dead" where people celebrate their dead friends, relatives, and famous characters. We titled our event "Homenaje a Perez Prado" (Homage to Perez Prado) who was "the king of Mambo" music back in the fifties and who recently died. Four musicians, who started playing out and far away from the gallery, always improvising with Mambo motives, performed our happening. There was a microphone outside of the gallery that picked up their playing, and inside a tape recorder with a loop plugged into a speaker, and someone processing the sound that came from outdoors. In this piece the musicians approach the gallery until they come in and both the sound of the speaker and their sound come together in the same space. When they came in the gallery I remained outside shouting MAAAAMBO! Into the microphone (as Perez Prado used to shout while singing), and some people walking on the street that didn't know what was going on joined me with their shouts. Once more I was able to break the barrier between disciplines, this time acting as choreographer and actor. It is important to be conscious of the expansion of artistic expression that has been taken place in this century27 since now old manners of presenting cultural events are in process of disappearing. These days few people are too excited about going to a concert and having to sit for two hours, always looking at the same musicians playing the same music, and with no other entertainment. I feel it is necessary to explore new ways of presenting our music in public. Concerts are still important social events, but I feel we have to give new blood to the way these events are presented.

26 It is well known that besides being a composer, Cage is a good writer, he is into art printing, and he was one of the first persons to do "happenings" in the US. 27 This has happened since the appearance of the Modern Vanguards in the beginning of the century with Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Fauvism, Constructivism, etc.

Structure of my concert I borrowed the title of my concert from a book I bought at Rothko chapel in Houston Texas in the fall of 1989. The book is called "Contemplation and Action in World Religions"28 and is about different ideas of these two concepts29. I have always been interested in religions and they have always influenced my work. After reading this book I decided that I was going to make a concert where I would use these ideas in different ways. I structured my concert in two different halves. In the first one I wanted to have music with visuals, and I was interested in linking smoothly the different pieces. This halve is meant to deal about contemplation. I started with "Puesta de luna en Malinalco" which is a video about a moon set. My idea was to start with this work while people were coming into the concert hall. The video finishes with the early morning bells of the church of the town, and this is marking the beginning of the concert. Next, lights go off, and a candle is lighted on stage. The flame of this candle is videotaped by a camera and shown in two TV monitors and the first piece of the concert starts30. Then I have my piece for two pianos "Moviles" performed along with a slowed video of a mechanical game from an amusement park in Mexico, and the last piece is "Atl" for tape, which is presented with a still video image of a swimming pool where the water moves very slowly and then stops moving completely. The relationship between the images and the music is not literary or programmatic. Both worlds have their own space but are related to one another. I use a certain kind of juxtaposition in the first and last pieces ("Avidya" and "Atl"). While the images are static (a flame of a candle and a still image of a swimming pool from above), the music is continually changing but also in a static way. In other words, I have different static processes going on at the same time and they are all about contemplation. In "Moviles" the video images are also taken with a still

28 "Contemplation and Action in World Religions". Selected papers from the Rothko Chapel colloquium. Edited by Yusuf Ibish and Ileana Marculescu. Rothko Chapel, Houston, 1978. 29 What's interesting about the book is to find out that people from completely different religions have the same ideas about contemplation and action. 30 This is my radio piece "Avidya" for tape.

camera, but there are greater changes since the mechanical game moves in different ways. The connection between the composition and the video is that both are cyclic processes, but since they go at different speeds, it is very interesting how one perceives an opposition that adds a new element to the music31. I used video in this first halve of the concert because I was mainly playing tape music and I wanted the audience to have something to look at32. It was hard to choose the correct images because I didn't want to distract people too much from the music, so it was not evident to find the correct balance between sound and visuals. In the intermission I reconstructed a sound installation I made in Mexico and did a new version with video. This piece worked very well since it followed my water piece. The installation33 is a sort of meditation that deals with our unconscious world, and the water piece that preceded it has to do also with this since water is always related to our psychic world. The second halve of the concert is different to the first one since I am dealing with music in a more theatrical way. In my refrigerator piece "Frost clear energy saver" it is already funny to see a musician performing the double bass along with a refrigerator, but there isn't any theater in all the piece until the end when the performer stops playing, opens the refrigerator, gets something to drink, and then shuts the refrigerator off. My original intention while composing this piece wasn't theatrical, and the changes I made later to it came in a very natural way34. In the last piece of the concert "Bandas de pueblo", there is for the first time real physical action when the performers start walking in the hall and then go out to keep playing along with the band, which is playing

31 After the concert a friend told me that he liked very much this piece with the video since in the mechanical game the people were happy but there wasn't any thing happy about the music, so the images were taken out of context and became something different. Other interesting thing to see is that here the images were the ones that changed while the music almost didn't seem to move. This is the opposite of what I did with "Avidya" and "Atl". 32 In tape concerts people usually look at the speakers, which seems to me a little ridiculous. I think there has to be lights or something else going on. 33 Look at the end of the chapter "Simultaneous events and synchronicity" for a better description of the installation. 34 My first idea for this piece was to present it as a tape piece with maybe some video. Later on I introduced the double bass and the refrigerator.

outside. In my concert I used the recording of a band since in USA there aren't any Mexican village bands, but I am planning to perform this piece in Mexico and use a real band which will be playing outside, and people will leave the concert hall and walk along with the Mexican band and the musicians which were playing in the hall. I was very lucky to find an incredible bus that a friend of mine reconstructed as buses were in Mexico back in the fifties. Thanks to this I was able to make a "happening" at the end of the concert. I wrote in the program that the last piece was being performed out of the concert hall. My purpose was to make people go outdoors and find that there wasn't anything happening. Then, the bus would arrive with the musicians playing inside and individuals disguised as Mexican wrestlers would come out and tell the people to get in the bus. I wanted to create confusion, something unexpected. Although things didn't happened as I planned them, the audience never thought of getting in a bus with the musicians, and everyone got excited. My interest in having the bus was because village bands play in Mexico in "Religious celebrations" where there are processions with people, cars, and buses, and where some people get disguised in different ways. Some of these celebrations have to do with catharsis35, and this is why I wanted to end the concert with the bus and all this confusion. In a way, my whole concert was a process that went from a meditative state to a final catharsis where every one present participated. I went from the passive attitude of just contemplating, to the active attitude where people acted and became part of the concert.

35 Like in ancient pagan celebrations where everyone got drunk and there were orgies, or like in any kind of carnival. All these are situations where the individual has a need to forget about himself and become one with the community.

3.- Description of my compositions. "Avidya" for tape. Oakland Cal, 1989. In Buddhist Philosophy they call Avidya (or ignorance) to our way of dividing things into separate things and to experiment ourselves as separate entities. This is the state of perturbation of our mind. "When the mind is disturbed, the multiplicity of things is produced, but when the mind is quieted, the multiplicity of things disappears."36 In this tape composition I recorded every radio station that my AM and FM radio was able to receive (50 stations). The structure of the piece is the process of the gradual addition of the different stations, thereby generating different textures of sound. At the beginning one can distinguish clearly one station from the other, but at one point they become unclear and one only perceives small fragments of each one of them. From this moment on, a sound mass of great density and its dB level increment until it arrives at a thick white noise, which is the union of all frequencies. At the climax of the piece the dB level goes down slowly until it dies. In this piece the noise generated at the end is in one hand "The big noise" generated by mass media communication in this century that overloads ourselves of information, but on the other hand, this same noise that fills all space and overwhelms us is also fusion and unity37. Besides being a sound process, "Avidya" is a reminder to concentrate again, to look at the separation of things not as fragmentation but as something homogeneous, because we live in a world in which simultaneous things that are apparently opposite coexist. This piece can be performed with a visual image, which will make us think of something that apparently doesn't change38. Although the piece is transformed in a continuous way, on the other hand it keeps being the

36 Ashvaghosha, The Awakening of faith. Fritjof Capra in “The Tao of Physics” uses the quote. Bantam books 1984. 37 "....the return to the origin where the mind is quieted". Ibid. 38 In my concert I videotaped the flame of a candle that was lighted on stage.

same thing. Unity is equivalent to multiplicity. This is why I wanted the audience to look at the flame of a candle. In one way the flame is always a flame, but it's form changes all the time. "Atl" for tape. Oakland Cal, 1990. The aim of this piece was to transform water sounds and to make an allegory about water, and about listening to water. I worked in the computer39 with a water sample I recorded from a small stream and generated new sounds with different timbral characteristics. I was able to create some timbres that remind us of Indian music drones due to the overtones of the processed water sounds that generated rhythmic patterns. These sounds are metallic-like and some times they sound like little bells. It was very interesting to discover the different qualities of a water sound by processing it on the computer, because like a painter, I could bring out different colors and textures from the same source material. The piece is always static and I just go gradually from one sound to the other, but at the end of the composition, cascades of water fall down continuously as if we were going into our inner world, and from this sounds a texture made with my voice emerge. This is the only sound, which is not made out of water, and it is the symbolic connection between water and our unconscious. "Moviles" for two pianos. Oakland Cal, 1990. The structure of the piece was set beforehand and it's about different notes of different lengths that start up together and are out of phase one with each other, until they come up all together at the end of their cycles. I used the prime numbers 1, 3, 5, and 7, and it is easy to know that if they start together they will all meet at a certain point which is the common denominator of all (this is 1x3x5x7= 105 ). So since every number one is the basic beat of the other numbers, at the beat 106 all these numbers will come together again. The following is an example of the structure of this piece:

39 With sound designer and turbosynth.

To fill the structure with notes I used serial techniques. There are four different voices in this piece that are distributed between the two pianos, and each voice is either an interval of a major seventh or a minor sixth. Each voice drives an eleven40 note series. The four series are out of phase with each other since each one of them has a different rhythm. Since the coincidence points between the notes of the different series are already set up by the structure of the piece, I had the problem of being constricted to have obliged harmonies. What I did to solve this problem was to make different eleven note series with their variations (inverted, retrograde and retrograde inverted) so I could use any one of them to match the other ones and in this way be able to have similar harmonies41 through the entire piece42. Although the different eleven note series are out of phase with each other, there are places when two of them finish at the same beat. I used these points to switch the series from one piano to the other so the two performers wouldn't have to be always playing the same rhythmic structure, and so they could both have the number one beat series which is the driving motor of the piece. "Moviles" is a piece where I am interested in points of coincidences between the different number cycles that are taking place, and between the notes of the two pianos that come together in time.

40 I used number eleven instead of twelve, because it is also a prime number. 41 Or pitch collections. 42 This way of working is like with a puzzle, where you have to try different pieces until you find the one that matches with the other ones.

There are three types of coincidences between the two pianos. One is when both have one voice43 to play at the same beat, the second one when one piano has two voices to play and the other just one, and the last one is when both pianos play their two voices.44 So I used three different accents to mark the different points of coincidences between the two pianos, mf when there are two voices at the same time, f when there are three voices at the same time, and ff when there are four voices at the same time. When there are no coincidences the performer always plays’ p. The last important thing to mention is that the tempo of the piece is free within a time frame, so the performer that has the one beat series chooses his own tempo and the other one has to follow him. This makes the piece more organic so it doesn't become like a clock machine. "Frost clear energy saver" Oakland Cal, 1991. In this piece I transformed the sound of my refrigerator. I used Turbosynth from Digidesign sound tools to process a sample, using the reverberator to emphasize different natural harmonics. In this way I created different sounds that all came from the first one. Then I recorded them in different tracks of a recording studio, and while mixing the piece I tried to make a continuous sound that was the result of all the other sounds. So I ended with a timbral transformation. All existing refrigerator sounds have a low hum, which is like the fundamental. I isolated the low hum of my refrigerator on the computer (with the parametric EQ) and recorded it in another track so I could bring it in and out, but besides doing this, I added to the piece a live double bass which only plays an open string that is tuned as the low hum of the refrigerator. The double bass has instructions to play in different parts of the string, so when there are all high overtones in the tape, the performer plays "sul ponticello" in order to bring out the high overtones as well. So there is also a continuous timbral transformation in the double bass, which only plays one note.

43 It’s important to know that each note of a voice is composed of a simultaneous two-note interval (either a minor sixth or a major seventh). 44 This only happens at the beginning of the piece, at the end of the first cycle, and at the end of the second cycle.

This piece in general is like a long changing pedal, where I am trying to go into the microcosms of the sound of a refrigerator. Nonetheless, at the end of the piece I fragment the original sounds to create melody-like sequences45, and my aim here is to get out of stasis and try to create what would be the inner thoughts of a refrigerator46. These crazy fragmented sequences disappear little by little when a new drone which is made with some of the first sounds of the piece (but transposed an octave higher) comes gradually in. This drone gets louder while I introduce new and very high sounds47 that I took also from the first processed sounds. The high sounds also get louder until we reach the climax of the piece. At this point, these high sinusoidal-like frequencies become very piercing to the ear. My aim was to bother the audience just as a refrigerator bothers one at home. Suddenly, the tape stops48 and the double bass keeps playing as if nothing had happened, then the real sound of a refrigerator on stage49 comes in as a reminder of what this sound was like before being processed. "Bandas de pueblo" Oakland Cal, 1991.

45 I tried to imitate LFO's on a synthesizer to simulate machine-like sounds. 46 This is like a metaphor of a refrigerator becoming crazy. 47 These high sounds are the resulting resonances from the reverberators I used in turbosynth and they are overtones of the refrigerator sounds. 48 Also as a refrigerator suddenly stops and one is aware that it was going on. 49 The piece starts with the amplified sound of a refrigerator on stage, then the double bass starts playing along with it and finally I introduce the tape that has the refrigerator processed sounds. This piece has a symmetrical structure. It would be something like ABCA where A is the beginning of the piece with the refrigerator and the double bass, B has the timbral changes of the drone with the tape and the double bass, C has the introduction of the fragmented sounds and the climax of the piece, and A the return of the original refrigerator sound with the double bass.

The purpose of this piece is to generate musically abstract ideas derived from the music of Mexican village bands. The piece is for tape made with samples from Mexican bands, mixed with the following live instruments: Two saxophones (tenor and alto), French horn, trombone, trumpet, and two percussion players.50 Specialization is an important feature of the piece, so the performers are distributed in different parts of the concert hall. The music written for them is based on the music of the village bands, so they can blend well with the tape, but the tape is the point of departure and it is the basic structural element of the work. The structure of the piece is a process of integration, and the different elements of the composition oscillate between roles of conflict and total integration. "Bandas de pueblo" begins in a state of complete fragmentation of the musical material with no recognizable references. Extreme pointillism plus variable densities further characterize the beginning. The tape starts to generate textures made out of the repetition of small fragments that increase and decrease in density. Then, longer fragments begin to appear through different speakers and the performers start to play similarly. At the end, the sound of a Mexican band starts to be heard from outside of the hall gradually becoming more audible. The players start to move around, playing and repeating small rhythmic and melodic fragments of different bands, over a big mix of not processed village band music. The players continue in this manner as they leave the hall and play along with the Mexican band that is outside. An ending that re proposes both unity and fragmentation at the same time.

50 The instruments played by the percussion players are: Bass drum, snare drum, cymbal, marching cymbals, and cowbell.

II.- Different Aspects of my work. 1.- Process. "Where pre-modernists had pursued nature in terms of its omniscience (i.e., that to become one with nature one had to paint like a god), modernity found its omniscient metaphor in process51". Morton Feldman My interest in Musical Process started when I first listened to Steve Reich back in 1984. First I thought he was a minimal composer as Philip Glass and Terry Riley but later on I discovered that he didn't liked being called a "minimal composer", and he described himself as a composer of processes. I was mainly interested in this music because it had a hypnotic quality. At that time listening to Steve Reich was like meditating while concentrating on two rhythms getting slowly out of phase, or in a melody that grows gradually and constantly with the addition of new motive cells52. Although I used before some of Reich's techniques in various compositions, my first composition that was a process from the beginning to the end was "Avidya". Even though we clearly know the process that is taking place in this piece, we have a listening experience where we perceive many details in the microstructure of the composition53. In Avidya the process is about 51"Morton Feldman essays".1985 Beginner press/Walter Zimmerman(pg. 97). 52 In the essay "Music as a gradual process" Steve Reich writes about his ideas of processes: "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the processes happening throughout the sounding music. To facilitate closely detailed listening, a musical process should happen extremely gradually....so slowly and gradually that listening to it resembles watching the minute hand on a watch-you can perceive it moving after you stay with it a little while......Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself...." 53 Reich talks about this phenomena:

the gradual destruction of the broadcast of every radio station, and in this destruction we are able to listen to small broken fragments, as if an old Pompeian mosaic painting had been broken in pieces and we could read in the broken mosaics a new and abstract painting. The interesting thing is that while some stations gradually disappear, others persist due to the characteristics of their frequencies54. At the end of the piece for example, when we hear the white noise at a very low dB level, we can still listen to tiny fragments from a Mozart string concerto that was being broadcast in another station55. Also, it is interesting to see how the perception of the white noise is completely different at a high dB level and then at a low level. When the level is up, we perceive the sound almost as an airplane passing by, but when the level goes down, one gradually perceives the white noise56 like a water cascade in the distance. Steve Reich describes an interesting experience while generating or listening to a process: "While performing and listening to gradual musical process one can participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outward (or inwards) towards it".57 This is a liberating experience because we move in a musical space, which is out of duality. There are no contrasting elements that fight and argue with each other as in the development of a classical Sonata. There is just process and we just follow it. A basic difference between Reich's music and the process of "Avidya" is that he sets his processes having certain control over the results. Or we could say that there is a global homogeneity in them. In "Avidya", I didn't know what was going to be broadcast, and I didn't

"Even when all the cards are on the table and every one hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process". Ibid. 54 For example, there is a rock tune in one of the stations, and through all the piece we never loose track of the drum sounds of the song 55 String sounds travel easily trespassing other sound frequencies. 56 It is not purely white noise. We can still perceive small details of the disintegrated radio stations. 57 In "Music as a gradual process" by Steve Reich.

select any particular broadcasts. I just recorded every station that was on my radio. In fact, this piece is meant to be performed live with fifty radios on stage (or as many radios there need to be to have all stations available going on) and enough mixers to make a gradual mix of all stations. So "chance" is a very important factor in this piece. Here I can turn to John Cage and his ideas about process. He opposes the concept of process to that of object, and thinks that the world itself is a process58. What Cage is doing is trying to get away from the world of objects59. Cage considers life as process, and in his chance compositions every thing becomes a process (not necessarily being a gradual one). In his piece 00'0 for example he amplifies himself while he is preparing a vegetable juice. This is a daily process of our lives, and its continuity is completely different to that of "Avidya". Cage doesn't want to have any control over a process because he wants to remove his Ego from his creative work and just let sounds be as they are. I understand very well this attitude but I believe in choosing very carefully a process and having a certain control over it. In the video "Puesta de luna en Malinalco" which I did in Mexico in 1988, I had the idea of showing a very specific event that only takes place at a certain time of the day and of the year. The video is about a moon setting before dawn, the first full moon of spring (in holy week) in the town of Malinalco in Mexico. It begins in the early hours of the morning while still dark, with the moon just above a mountain. While the moon gradually hides behind the mountain, dawn becomes present and the sounds of the night are gradually transformed into the sounds of the day. To contemplate this process of change between night and day in a TV monitor implies to be conscious of a visual and listening activities

58 "The world, the real is not an object. It is a process......The function of art is to preserve us from all the logical minimizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in". In "For the birds". John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles. Marion Boyars Boston: London (1976). 59 "In contemporary civilization where everything is standardize and where everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an object and its duplication. If we didn't have this power of forgetfulness, .......we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects". Ibid.

towards processes in nature. This has been forgotten in the big cities like Mexico DF. Emphasizing this particular process seems to me interesting because in 7 minutes there is a great deal of change in nature. I also try to go beyond the process and bring out other meanings. There are 13 full moons throughout the year. When there is full moon it is completely opposed to the sun, and this is why when the moonsets the sun comes out. This opposition (moon-sun) talks about the balance between day and night. Also, the full moon of holy week used to be the first full moon of the ancient Hebrew calendar. The year started with the solstice of spring, which is in reality the beginning of the year cycle. All this symbolism related to the video help me to make emphasis on the continuous regeneration of cycles in nature, and to make urban people pay attention to them and experience them. I owe this interest or attitude to John Cage, but I am still interested in processes with perceptible gradual change, because they let you concentrate and contemplate. Cage on the other side is interested in listening to the sounds that surrounds us at any given moment60. I would say that in "Avidya" and in "Puesta de luna en Malinalco" I am somewhere in between Reich and Cage, having control of these processes but giving space to chance. I want to continue stating other composer's ideas about process. Morton Feldman says that all activity in music reflects its process. He wants to determine his own processes, manipulating the material in different possible ways, and not to create a process that "controls the experience". What Feldman means is that he is concerned with "sound" itself. He wants to manipulate sound, but to let it speak, not pushing it towards any determinate direction. On the other hand, Feldman thinks that it is important to perceive the process that is taking place in a musical piece. He criticizes Boulez and Cage because in the music of both, what is heard is indistinguishable from its process. I, like Feldman and Reich, like to be aware of processes.

60 He doesn't want to establish a listening hierarchy. Cage's piece 4"33 for example is about listening to the environment where the piece is played and it could be anywhere (in this piece one or more musicians come to the stage and instead of playing their instruments they turn their chronometers on until four minutes and forty three seconds have passed. While nothing is happening, the audience supposedly starts paying attention to the sounds that surround them).

In some way I feel nearer to Ligeti's aesthetic toward process. A very interesting composition of his is "Poeme symphonique for 100 metronomes". This is a piece which begins with one hundred metronomes in unison and is about the transformation that takes place while the metronomes get gradually out of phase with each other. This process happens within the framework of chance. The rhythms that are produced by the metronomes getting out of phase will never be the same in different performances but the overall effect will always be the same. This is what would happen with my piece "Avidya" if it were performed live, although in Ligeti's composition the composer is completely out of the process once he has conceived the piece61. I should expand the term "process" into the words "transformation" and "metamorphosis" which are more representative of my latest compositions. I have been getting more and more interested in gradual transformation of timbre. This compositional devise62 has been used by Ligeti since the end of the fifties in pieces like "Atmospheres". Ligeti as I, is interested in the continuity of sound. He catalogs some of his pieces and describes them as "like a precision mechanism63". In my piece "Frost clear energy saver" for tape, refrigerator, and double bass I have a similar kind of continuity at the end of the piece when different layers of irregular rhythmic patterns start to build up creating a uniform texture. This continuity, rather than "fine ground" is more like an organic continuity. On the other hand, at the beginning of 61 In a live performance of "Avidya" there would be the human element of different people doing the mix of fifty radio stations while in Ligeti's composition the metronomes are the performers. With the participation of the human element there will always be subjectivity and this will affect the chance process of my piece in some way. 62Ligeti explains how he got away from traditional musical concepts: "Melody, harmony and rhythm do not constitute the real event, which is rather like the slow, gradual transformation of the 'molecular state' of sound or the changing pattern of a kaleidoscope". In "LIGETI in conversation" with Peter Varnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and himself. Eulenburg books. London 1983. 63 The compositions with this characteristic are: Continuum, second string quartet, third movement of Chamber concerto, and poeme symphonique for 100 metronomes. Ligeti describes this type of music in the following way: "A state is represented in terms, not of a smooth, but of a 'fine-ground' continuity, so that the music is seen as if through a number of superimposed lattices". Ibid.

the piece I have a slow and gradual transformation of a refrigerator sound. This is a mutation where I make emphasis on the different overtones of my original sound. It is like making twelve sounds out of one, and bringing out different partials in each of them. Then, there is the process of blending one sound to the other (which in reality are all the same sound). This is a timbral transformation of one sound, as if we were bowing the same string on a cello but changing the bow gradually from "sul tasto" to "sul ponticello"64. Other analogy I have for this type of transformations is like looking at a sculpture while you are walking around it. It's always the same sculpture but it always looks different, depending on our position. One can see how there are different degrees of control over different processes. In "Avidya" I didn't have absolute control over the result since I couldn't know what was being broadcast in the different stations while in "Frost clear energy saver" I had control over the process since I was transforming and mixing the sounds I was going to blend. Having either little control or much control, what I am mainly interested in is to be able to follow a process, but there is a big frame where the audience stands while listening to process music; at one side there will be the transparent process which we know even before the composition starts, and at the other side there will be the process which is impossible to perceive just by listening to the music. As for the first extreme, I would like to talk about Alvin Lucier's piece "I am sitting in a room"65 where the process is all set from the beginning and the performer

64 Which is in fact what the double bass does when playing along with the refrigerator. 65 The instructions of the piece are the following: Chose a room the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke. Attach the microphone to the input of tape recorder #1. To the output of tape recorder #2 attach the amplifier and loudspeaker. Use the following text or any other text of any length: "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have".

recreates it having the freedom to use any kind of speech and any room. The transformation of the speech into the frequencies of the room is very gradual, and this is what the piece is about. To listen to one or various recorded speeches would not make much sense. You have to listen to the whole process. At the other extreme there could be an indeterminate piece where you only know that it was made through chance operations but you don't know anything about the process, or a total serial piece where everything is organized by a serial process, but we are unable to distinguish it and listen to the transformations of the row due to the complexity of the piece66. I think that as a composer we have the liberty to move freely between those two opposite places. I like being aware of processes, but at the other hand it is also exciting to listen to a composition which seems to be moving on a completely different sphere since we can't get a hold of it. In my music, "Moviles" for two pianos would be an example of a composition, which is a process, and yet, if we listen to it, it is not completely evident how this process is taking place. In this composition there are different types of coincidences between the different notes, and it is not so evident to perceive the relation between them since all are played by the same instruments, nonetheless, the structure is not hidden either and the overall effect of the process can be perceived.

Record your voice on tape through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1. Rewind the tape to its beginning, transfer it to tape recorder #2, play it back into the room through the speaker and record a second generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1. Rewind the second generation to it’s beginning and splices it onto the end of the original recorder statement on tape recorder #2. Play the second generation only back into the room through the loudspeaker and record a third generation of the original recorded statement through the microphone attached to tape recorder #1. Continue this process through many generations. 66 Composers that write this type of pieces are John Cage and Pierre Boulez respectively.

What I like particularly about this piece is that the process doesn't seem to take us anywhere. There is no climax or high point. There is only the first beat, all which happens in the middle, and the last beat that is also the first beat of a new cycle67. Cycles are interestingly related to processes, although not every process has to do with cycles. What is interesting about them is that everything in nature is cyclic (the change of the seasons, day and night, life and death), and always, the end of a cycle is also the beginning of itself. Cyclic processes can be felt easily because we are constantly involved with experiencing them, so if working with cycles in a composition it is not necessary to make the structure completely transparent to the listener. It is also nice when the form of a piece remains hidden until we go and find it because in this way there is some mystery. I always like an ingredient of this in my music. I think that a process may not be intellectually perceived but should always be felt. 2.- Integration-disintegration. "The effect of music where the tuning system clash is like a body in a state of gradual decomposition"68 . Giörgy Ligeti. Integration and disintegration are two processes that take us to the polar opposites of life. We could speak of integration as the human being that is born and in the process of becoming an adult, and of disintegration as the adult becoming old until he dies. Once again we have duality, life and death and their processes. The first time I realized I was deeply involved with disintegration was when I made a happening with my friend artist Mauricio Maillé. I photographed him while he was painting the floor and himself until he became part of the painting. From the photos that I took, I chose three and called them "Fragmentos" ("Fragments"). The first picture shows his 67 In "Moviles" I do two complete cycles, which are equivalent to 211 beats. 68 "LIGETI in conversation". With Peter Varnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and himself. Eulenburg books. London. (Pg. 54).

hands in the process of painting, the second one of his hands as part of the painting, and the third one of his feet as part of the painting69. In music, disintegration would be the annihilation of a motive (rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, timbral, etc.), a theme, a song, a movement, etc, by means of variation and fragmentation. Integration on the other side would be like building up a motive or a whole musical idea by putting together its elements. An example of disintegration is the composition "I am sitting in a room" by Alvin Lucier70. A visual analogy to this piece would be photocopying something, then photocopying the photocopy, and so on and so forth over and over, getting as a result an opening of the grain and the blackness of a certain portion of the original photocopy. In my composition "Avidya" I work with the disintegration of separate entities, which are different radio stations that add up increasingly. At one point, there are so many stations going on at the same time that it is no longer possible to differentiate one from the other. Working with concrete sounds I've dealt with the concepts of integration and disintegration. Processing concrete71 sound samples is disintegrating more than varying them since the original sound has a specific meaning (like a water sound), and if we process the sound well enough we will no longer recognize its original quality and it might loose its meaning. It is like a dead body in decomposition that changes continually until it’s gone. We kill a living sound once we record it, and then we disintegrate it while processing it. One could also work with the idea that we are varying or metamorphosing the sound, so there is a close relation between these concepts. The difference is that disintegration has to do more concisely with dissolving or breaking something into

69 There are two opposite processes taking place, one is the gradual disintegration of himself, and the other is the gradual integration of the painting. 70 Where you record a speech, play it back in a room through two speakers and record it again with another tape machine, then you playback the second recording through the speakers and record it again. You repeat this process over and over again using the resonance of the room as a filter that accentuates certain sounds. When getting to the fiftieth recording you will no longer recognize the speech and will only listen to the resulting resonances (See also description of the piece in the chapter Processes). 71 By "concrete" I mean sounds that exist in any environment (The only sounds excluded would be synthesized sounds).

pieces while variation and metamorphosis doesn't necessarily implies fragmentation, but transformation. Other terms that are closely related to integration and disintegration are construction and destruction, and deconstruction, which are derived from these two terms72. In my piece "Frost clear energy saver" I processed the sound of my refrigerator, obtaining variations of the original sound, then I blended the new sounds in the mix as if there was a metamorphosis of the original sound. Later on I introduced the same sounds but cut them in small pieces and connected them, creating melodic-like sequences. So I destructed the main quality of the sound, which was to be a long continuous drone, and deconstructed it by fragmentation, creating something completely different. I could say that in this piece there is continuity and discontinuity coming from the same sound source. I like very much to go from one pole to the other, from unity to multiplicity, integration to disintegration, continuity to discontinuity, construction to deconstruction. For me there is a dialectic relationship between these polar terms. You can construct something by destructing it. And you can create something completely new constructing with the same element as in Reich's technique of having the same rhythmic pattern in two instruments and making them go out of phase with each other, creating in this way new rhythmic patterns which are different from the first one73. In "Bandas de pueblo" I use the idea of integration in the following way. I start the piece in a very abstract way, using very small samples of recordings of Mexican village bands. The first sounds are only 30 mms long, and they are noise and pitch-less. I gradually use longer samples but still, it would be impossible to know that these sounds belong to these bands. Then I make sequences of even longer samples (one second samples) and I combine them creating a very particular texture. After this I use for the first time very long samples that could be recognized as Mexican bands, but I stretched them in the computer and mixed them together, so we are still unable to recognize the bands. The difference is that now they are not fragmented samples, but whole processed musical

72 The term is referred to a 20th century literary theory in which the text has no fixed meaning. Deconstruction is a positive term opposed to that of destruction. It means to me destructing something and giving it a new meaning. 73 Ligeti does the same thing by adding up the same rhythmic patterns until they are no longer recognizable. He creates sound masses adding up very small elements. See more about this in chapter "Texture, mass and density".

phrases. The last step in this piece is having many different bands playing all at the same time in the tape. Here the bands are at last as they are, but since they are all going on at once, you can't still hear them very well as separate entities. The piece finishes with a band that is playing out of the hall. This is the only moment when we hear a Mexican band playing all alone, and it is the end of this integration process. In my piece "Atl" I work with a similar idea. I start the piece by using the water samples that I processed the most. The first drones one listens to are not recognizable as water sounds. I gradually introduce new sounds, which are less processed and are more recognizable as water sounds. At the end of the piece I have my original water sample as it is, but transformed into water cascades.74 So I ended with the real water sound that I recorded. 3.- Simultaneous events and synchronicity. "Synchronicity is a phenomena that seems to be related with the psychic conditions, that is, with processes of the unconscious"75. Carl Jung In the last chapter I was talking about my composition for two pianos "Moviles" which as I already said, it's a piece where a process with numbers takes place. I want to talk now about other aspects of it that deal with synchronous events. Although the tempo of "Moviles" is free within a certain frame, the two piano players have to be in synchronization with each other when there are notes that come in time together76. So this piece is about the coincidences in time of the different note cycles. In order to highlight this characteristic and to provide the piece with different planes of intensities, I placed different types of accents when there are coincidences between the two pianos. What is nice about having a relatively free tempo is that

74 I made this effect by pitch modulating copies of the same sample over and over, and then I pasted the resulting samples. 75 "Sincronicidad" . C.G. Jung. Editorial Sirio, s.a. Málaga. 1988. 76 See example of structure in description of my compositions.

the space between the coincidences becomes flexible, so the piece doesn't behave like a quartz clock. In "Moviles" one interpreter drives the tempo when he plays the notes with the basic beat, then this notes are passed away to the other player. The player that has the tempo gives cues to the other one every time there is a coincidence between the two pianos. It is interesting to think that if we set two clocks running at the same time they will very fast get out of sync with each other, so even though the players are trying to be in time in the coincidence points, they will never come together perfectly in time. This doesn't bother me at all because there isn't any event in nature, which is completely synchronous with another one. I like very much these phenomena77. Although I like this idea and use it in a certain way, in "Moviles" I am rather doing quite the opposite because I am trying to be in sync at certain time points, but being conscious that I am not going to be able to do it. In his essay "Synchronicity", C.G. Jung conceives synchronous events as opposed to the phenomena of chance. He expands the triad of classic physics of space, time and chance into a "quaternio" which includes synchronicity. This new addition fills the empty space where chance didn't have its opposite element:

77 It is interesting how Ligeti works with this in the piece "Poeme symphonique for 100 metronomes" where 100 metronomes start in sync with each other and then get out of phase creating the most interesting rhythms.

For Jung, Synchronous events doesn't necessarily have to be at the same time, it is our mind that connect one event with another and is able in this way to understand the relationship between things. So Jung's theory is based on the relationship of different events by the unconscious mind, and the process of composition has to do with this very closely. Even if we compose something without knowing what the internal relations of the structure might be, there are unconscious connections we make and these connections exist not in the field of chance but in synchronicity. If later on we discover these connections, we can underline them and bring them out of "chaos", thus giving the composition the logic of our unconscious mind. This is a phenomenon I discovered in my piece "Moviles". I had composed the skeleton of the piece beforehand, but I didn't know what notes to put on the piece. I decided to use a serial technique, but had certain restrictions because the structure of the piece was very tight, and I didn't have very much freedom to choose the notes for every series. Nonetheless, at the end I found out that I had repeated certain kind of harmonies (or pitch collections) through the entire piece, and I did this unconsciously. Now I am analyzing the piece and trying to find new coincidences so I can underline them by changing the articulation of the notes or by any other devise78. Synchronous events happen in the vertical plane, so simultaneous events are sometimes in sync and sometimes out of sync. They can be thought of on a vertical plane and on a linear plane. Music is about physical simultaneous events while in non-temporal arts like painting they can exist but we establish our own time relationships to make the connections between them79.

78 This phenomenon has happened to me very often in photography. First I take the pictures and later on by looking at the contact sheets I discover an image I like which in some cases I didn't even remember taking it. The same thing happens when I enlarge the picture in the dark room and I find elements in the image that I didn't see while taking it and that are particularly meaningful. In many cases the subconscious mind knows about this things but one is not aware of them until they are revealed to us. 79 While we look to a painting, we can perceive the overall work but we usually go from one place to the other looking at the different details and establishing our own connections in time. It is interesting that with this art we have the liberty to observe just one small detail for a long period of time while in music the detail goes away and we can't get a hold of it anymore.

In the realm of simultaneous events I always liked when there were different things going on at the same time. This is something I often experienced with sound in Mexico's religious fiestas where very often there were different groups of musicians playing at the same time. I've had this experience many times in a plaza called "Garibaldi" in Mexico City. This is a place where folk groups from different parts of the country gather to look for jobs. People usually go there to hire musicians for their party and others go at any time of the night and pay them to play for them right there in the plaza. So you have different types of music going on at the same time and while you move around in the plaza you gradually shift from the sound of one group to the other but always having a background with the music of all the other groups. It is a very fascinating experience of different simultaneous events that happen within a spatial environment. In "Bandas de Pueblo" I try to recreate this environment with the music of Mexican village bands. In the piece I always have sound events that belong to different songs going on at the same time, and at a certain point the musicians walk playing around the hall as band musicians do in processions. In "Avidya" I have completely different types of sound events going on at the same time since it is a tape piece where I use the broadcasts of different radio stations. The result is very different at the beginning and at the end of the piece. In the first part we are able to recognize different stations and this sometimes gives a feeling, which reminds us of surrealism. When there is no relationship between different things, our mind makes its own connections and this takes us to a sphere that is out of reality (What could be the relation between a Basketball game, a priest sermon and a Latin commercial song?)80. At the end of the piece it is no longer possible to differentiate one station from the other and thus the addition of every station adds to the homogeneous sound mass.

80 These are the three different stations I have at the beginning of the piece. Ligeti talks about the surreal effect of having different simultaneous sound events: "I take bits of actual music or signals, put them in an unfamiliar context, distort them, not necessarily making them sound humorous but interpreting them through distortion just as a surrealist painting presents the world". In conversation with Ligeti".... In "LIGETI in conversation" with Peter Varnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and himself. Eulenburg books. London.

My sound installation "( + x - ) = - “ is about meditation. When we try to concentrate on our breathing or a "mantra", our mind becomes more powerful and sends continuous disturbing images that distract us. These images are irrational and have no connection with each other, they put us in a dream-like state that becomes surreal and drives us away from our concentration. The soundtrack of the installation is made with four different tracks, one of them is a Gregorian chant that repeats itself continually and unaltered while the other three tracks are made with different sounds (percussion, electronic sounds, sexual sounds, TV sounds) which fluctuate sometimes making the Gregorian chant disappear. What I am trying to express is that this dream like state is a product of our unconscious world where the interaction and connection of events has its own logic far removed from our conscious mind. 4.- Texture, mass and density. "Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft"81. Morton Feldman. I always liked paintings that were worked out taking special care of the texture. I never liked to see them in books because they lost their main quality, the feeling of the texture. I once went to the Metropolitan museum in New York with a friend painter when we were teenagers. His fantasy was to be able to touch a Van Gogh painting that was in one of the rooms. He told me it was silly you couldn't touch the paintings since part of experiencing them was in a tactile way. I have a visual background. Nobody in my family did any music at all but they always introduced me to painters and photographers, so my experience of music is very visual. Many times I judge music in a visual way, I like very much a piece when it awakes images in my inner imagination.

81"Morton Feldman Essays" Beginner press 1985/Walter Zimmermann (pg., 90).

I never thought of texture in music until I started working with electronic and concrete sounds. I guess I was always too busy thinking about rhythm, melody and harmony in the traditional sense, and not in new possibilities of manipulating sound. Thanks to this discovery, I realized that one could paint and sculpt with sounds, and that the best canvas for this purpose was the recording machine82 since one can have as many layers of sounds as one wants. Discovering John Cage's thoughts was a way to think about music in a visual way. For example, he once mentioned something about having all Beethoven movements of his symphonies being played at the same time. The result of the simultaneous addition of music by the same author is to me like experiencing a particular kind of texture. It is intriguing to me what would become of every composer if we added up together his or her pieces in the same way. The only thing for sure is that there wouldn't be any more harmony, melody and rhythm (in the traditional way) but only a textured mass of sound that moves very steadily. The addition of the same element in a canvas will bring out a specific kind of texture. Pollock's paintings for example are made with the same technique of throwing the paint over a canvas that is lying on the floor83. He's types of textures are always the product of his movements and the only thing that varies is the color modulation of the textures. In the same way, if we use the same kind of sounds pasting them together in different ways we get always the same type of texture but a different timbral modulation in every case. Morton Feldman talks about the difference of the working process between painting and composing: "Renoir once said the same color, applied by two different hands, would give us two different tones. In music, the same note, written by two different composer, gives us -the same note......The painter must

82 Or the computer since now you can have many tracks or layers of digitalized sounds. 83 The way Jackson Pollock painted was concentrating and coordinating his physical movements when throwing the paint over the canvas. The result wasn't the product of chance, but of very controlled movements that exist within a frame of chance.

create his medium as he works.....The composer works in a pre-existing medium"84. These statements are true to a certain point because doing electronic music you have direct control over your result, and you can create as the painter your medium while you work on a piece. This is a very nice quality of this musical environment, especially when you want to experiment with sound textures. It would be more difficult to do it with instruments since you would need the performers to work along with you all the time.85 Feldman talks about how many contemporary composers forgot about the physical and sensual aspect of music. He was a very good friend of different painters back in the fifties in New York and was very much influenced by their ideas. This is a very interesting fact, because I do not know many composers that have had a close friendship with painters and established some kind of relationship between the two arts86. Cage was also involved with visual artists and opened musical activity by letting it interact with other disciplines87.

84 "Morton Feldman essays". Walter Zimmermann. Beginner press. 1985 (pg. 69). 85 Varese has the same opinion with respect to having complete control over electronic sounds: "I am fascinated by the fact that through electronic means one can generate a sound instantaneously. On an instrument played by a human being you have to impose a musical thought through notation, then, usually much later, the player has to prepare himself in various ways to produce what will -one hopes- emerge as that sound". "Conversation with Varese". Gunter Shuller (pg. 38). 86 In the last centuries, composers were always interacting with other artists but particularly with writers. It wasn't until this century with abstract painting that there was a bigger interaction between composers and visual artists. One example is the relationship between Schoenberg and Malevich. 87 "With the advent of John Cage, one by necessity must ask questions that previously were avoided, never thought about when composing a musical composition. My preoccupation with the fascinating aspect of how painters deal with light is only because of Cage. In effect, what I am suggesting is not that the music should explore or imitate the resources of painting, but that the chronological aspect of music's development is perhaps over, and that a new mainstream of diversity, invention and imagination is indeed awakening. For this we must thank John Cage".

I think texture has to do with the sensuous realm. It is related to our senses rather than to our intelligence, and my personal experience of working with sound textures has been related mainly to feeling them rather than thinking them88. I work both guiding myself by my instinct (inner images) and with concepts that I set beforehand. In this I feel identified with Feldman who blends both, falling in a confusion between when is he using his concepts and when his inner images89. An example of this would be my tape piece "Avidya" where my concept beforehand was establishing a process that would bring as one of the results the genesis of different textures determined by a certain chance frame. The only thing I knew very clearly beforehand is that I wanted to arrive at a very dense noise (as a result of the addition of many radio stations). The resulting textures in the middle while going from one station to fifty stations were unpredictable to me and the only control I had over them was while mixing the piece90. On the other hand, in my piece for tape, refrigerator and double bass "Frost clear energy saver" I am intentionally trying to modulate the timbral texture of a refrigerator sound by mixing different variations I obtained while processing the original sound. Every one of these new sounds emphasize different overtones that exist in the first sound, and in these way I was able to work as an artist that is sculpting the same material in different ways, changing in this manner its texture but preserving its inner atomic characteristics. It is not necessary to use electronic or concrete sounds in order to work with music as texture, and György Ligeti is the best example of this.91 Morton Feldman in "Morton Feldman essays". Walter Zimmermann. Beginner press. 1985. 88 "Henry Bergson establishes that the only two ways to express ourselves is either conceptually or by way of images". Ibid. 89 "That's essentially how I work. I don't know which is which and what is what. There's a confusion between the conceptual and the images". Ibid., p. 185. 90 Alvin Lucier's piece "I am sitting in a room" is a process set beforehand that is also unpredictable in that it depends on the qualities of the room where a speech is going to be recorded many times until it disappears (See description of this piece in chapter "Processes"). 91 In 1961, Ligeti's orchestral composition "Atmospheres" was premiered in Donaueschingen, surprising the public with its originality, since it was far removed from total serialism, which was the technique to be followed in those days. Ligeti's innovation was to be working with sound masses in a sculptural

It is interesting how this composer goes beyond texture, creating sound masses that change in form. He is a sculptor rather than a painter92. Ligeti opens a door that takes us to another dimension of music since it is impossible to imagine a physical sculpture that continually changes in form, texture and color. A close physical example of this could be heating a block of ice until it starts to evaporate, but in nature there are not many processes that can change drastically back and forth within seconds93. Now we have moved from texture to sound masses. Ligeti's technique of constructing these masses is by adding up very small and clear rhythmic patterns that all together disappear and create a homogeneous musical mass. The rhythmic patterns he uses are sometimes very complex, he says that the string parts of one of his pieces is made in such a way that no violinist can play them, but the mistakes the violins will make are considered beforehand as a way. Ulricht Dibelius wrote a very interesting essay on Ligeti called "The logic of a sculptor in sound" where he compares him to a sculptor. The following is an excerpt from the essay: "The métier of the composer thereby assimilated something of the imaginary world and formal intentions of the visual artist. For it was no longer a question of inventing points of sound, sonorous lines and their ramified progressions and superposition’s, but rather of proceeding straightaway from complex phenomena, from a quasi three dimensional mass of sound, whose construction could no longer be made up of numerous singled ingredients mixed together for a total effect. And with this masses of sound of a rather pulpy, viscous, almost loamy consistency, plastic forms could be modeled, almost tangible structures of curves, arches, bays, reliefs, profiles, stretches of material either diminishing or becoming more compact". 92 Dibelius furthers down talking about the difference between sculpture and sound sculpture: "Of course, sound sculptures of this kind differ in two basic essentials from those sculpted in clay, plaster or metal. For one thing, the material texture of the musical sculpture can change constantly because it is the result of a minute synthesis, and it can switch from being earthen to glass, to aerial, to-web-like or to liquid; besides this, its colors can change, or vary considerably in different lights. And it was this constant internal mutations that Ligeti brought into relief in "Atmospheres". 93 Certain organisms like Amoebas change constantly in form but always maintaining their own consistency. Clouds change constantly in form and texture with the wind and sometimes even in color if we are watching them in a windy sunset.

compositional effect, so he uses a certain quantity of controlled chance to create his sound masses.94 Lets turn now to Edgar Varese which is on reality the first contemporary composer to conceive the growth and interaction of sound masses in space through a continual process of expansion, projection, interaction, penetration and transmutation. In 1936, Varese gave a lecture at the Mary Austin house in Santa Fe where he stated: "When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived. When these sound masses collide the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows95." We can see how close is Verse’s idea about the totality of music to that of Ligeti's. Varese divides his pieces into what he calls "zones of intensities"; he explains that various timbres or colors and different loudness levels differentiate them. On the other hand, in Varese’s music there is a very similar idea about transmutation to that of Ligeti's.96. Chow Wen-Chung furthers down on this idea writing about Varese's music: "Sound masses seem to emerge out of the expansion of an idea-"the basis of an internal structure"-into the sonic space. The sense of projection of sound masses obviously depends on the source location of the emission as well as the independent movement of each sound-mass

94 "They players make mistakes but different mistakes all the time, creating then a floating, fluctuating pattern". In "Ligeti in Conversation". Eulenburg books. London. 1983. 95 Excerpts from lectures by Varese, compiled and edited with footnotes by Chou Wen-Chung 96 In his lecture at Santa Fe he talks about this: "In the moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations when they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities, or are dilated into certain refractions". Ibidem.

as opposed to the others. When such sound-masses collide, the interaction tends to bring about penetration, during which certain attributes of one sound mass are transferred to another, thus causing transmutations to take place and changing the attributes of each sound-mass"97. The main difference between the music of Ligeti and Varese would be that Ligeti's music is inclined to be more sculptural and textural, like just one three dimensional object that is constantly transforming, while In Varese's music there are various independent objects which interact one with each other. We could say that Varese's objects are well defined and can be musically recognized, while the form of Ligeti's original rhythmic and melodic patterns is hidden. So, with Varese we have differentiated individual elements that at certain times collide and interchange their qualities. This seems to be to me a more biological and organic way of treating sound masses. It reminds me of cellular life. In my piece "Frost clear energy saver" I use a similar idea to that of Varese's where one sound mass collides with another one transmuting their characteristics as a result. I make momentary collisions between different refrigerator sounds, so when they blend they loose their individual qualities, transforming into a new sound which is the result of various sounds together. The difference is that I am using the same type of timbres, so all these sounds are perceived as one element that changes continually (as in Ligeti's music). Varese's intention is still different from mine and that of Ligeti because he makes his individual elements to travel through space and you are able to follow them. In the last part of my piece I have fragmented elements that are added to each other and that because of their different textural qualities collide in a certain way, but for one thing, they are made out of the same timbre and so they blend easily one with each other, and they move always in the same way and don't seem to go anywhere. It is like bees of different sizes moving all in the same crazy way in their honeycomb. There is similarity between blending and collision, because in certain types of blending there is collision (like blending my refrigerator sounds which have different harmonics that are sometimes dissonant to each

97 Chow Wen-Chung in "Varese: a sketch of the man and his music", the musical quarterly, April 1966.

other). This way of blending produces a change of density of the sound mass.98 This idea makes me think of photography. This is an art that deals principally with light, and sometimes there are pictures where you go from a dark zone, gradually to a lighted zone, which of course is less dense because it has less grain. You can manipulate light in the laboratory while printing, and this is working like Ligeti. Of course, the texture in photography is limited because it is just points and their graduation from white to black99. One also finds opposition of densities in painting, but here we have texture as an important element. I like to play with the idea of having different elements coming out of dense sound masses, and then disappearing again100. In my refrigerator piece, there is a place where different sound sequences start to add up until it is difficult to differentiate them. This is due in part because they are made with the same timbre, but suddenly, a new sequence, which has the same timbral characteristics gradually, emerges out of this sound mass, and this happens because its rhythm is much slower from that of the other sequences. I like this idea very much

98 Composers like Ligeti manipulate this parameter in a very conscious way. He contrast different types of densities in a gradual way, going from one state to the other: "My idea was that instead of tension-resolution, dissonance-consonance, dominant-tonic, pairs of opposition in traditional tonal music, I would contrast 'mistiness' with passages of 'clearing up'. 'Mistiness' usually means a contrapuntal texture, a micro polyphonic cobweb technique". In "LIGETI in conversation" with Peter Varnay, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and himself. Eulenburg books. London. 1983. 99 I am talking exclusively about black and white photography. 100 Ligeti does the same. He talks about this in the following way: "My general idea for that movement of my Chamber concerto was the surface of a stretch of water, where everything takes place below the surface. The musical events you hear are blurred; suddenly a tune emerges and then sinks back again. For a moment the outlines seem quite clear, then everything gets blurred once more". He also describes the same thing in another of his pieces: "In Clocks and Clouds tunes emerge from the fog and then sink back into it". In "LIGETI in conversation" with Peter Varnay, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and himself. Eulenburg books. London. 1983.

because it is very similar to things emerging from our subconscious mind101. In "Avidya", something similar to this idea happens. The sound mass I create in this piece is the result of the addition of all radio stations, but giving to every station exactly the same dB level, so there is no hierarchy, as I don't bring out one station more than the other. Nonetheless, the sounds coming out from certain stations become clearer than the others due to their specific acoustic qualities102. While I was making the first mix of this piece, I had an interesting experience. I was trying to balance all my tracks bringing them one after the other taking care that not one of them would be more important, but after I had all fifty stations going on together there were some string orchestra sounds clearly coming out of this sound mass, and I couldn't resist bringing them out from this chaos until they were completely on the surface103. They stood out thanks to the acoustic characteristics of the string sounds, which are very piercing104. Contrasting a single element with a sound mass is a very plastic thing that artists use all the time, where sometimes there is a textured homogeneous background, and one or various elements superimposed on it. In music this becomes more interesting because there is time, and so we can modulate with elements coming in and out from a sound mass. 101 The subconscious would be like a sound mass made up with single elements that are hidden to us, and at certain times some of them come up to the surface in our dreams. This is also like sitting on a meditation where our mind is creating an incredibly fast succession of images and once in a while nothingness emerge. Once, while I was in a Zen retirement our Korean teacher Samu Sunim said about meditation: "It’s like watching the moon traveling through the sky in a cloudy night, we can only see the moon at short periods of time. The clouds represent our disturbing mind which keeps us away from our meditation, and watching the moon coming out from the clouds is like getting back to our concentration". 102 I also talk about this in the chapter "Synchronicity and simultaneous events". 103 It happened to be a Barber's string concerto. 104 I didn't keep this mix of course, because the piece wasn't about a romantic concerto taking over everything. My romantic spirit betrayed me.

5.- Stasis. "I'm involved in stasis. It's frozen, at the same time it's vibrating"105. Morton Feldman. It is strange to think about stasis in music since it moves in time. Maybe the only true example of immobility would be a steady sinusoidal wave, and even this wave fluctuates in gain so there is variation. Absolute stasis doesn't exist on earth, and it is just a concept that make's us think of something that doesn't move, that is stable and in equilibrium. The easiest way to attain stasis is through repetition. This resource has been used in all culture's rituals and religions as a means that helps us to concentrate and to feel detached from ourselves. One interesting musical example of this can be found in "Sidha yoga"106. The people that practice this Yoga use singing as a way of meditation. They have a special celebration where they sing the same mantra during 24 hours. Minimal music has its origins in ritual and religious music, although some composers have used it as a way to criticize mass repeated actions in our modern society. I was interested in this kind of music for a long time, but later on I felt it was a dead trap. This is because the compositional process becomes too limited, and at a certain point we end up repeating ourselves all the time. A good example of this is the compositions of Philip Glass. I like very much his original way of creating atmospheric stasis, but after listening to all his music, I get tired of hearing always the same kind of musical patterns (melodic, rhythmic and harmonic) being repeated in the same way107. In order to create stasis it is not necessary to have continuous repetition of the same elements without using variation. Certain composers attain stasis through repetition and variation in different

105 "Morton Feldman Essays". Walter Zimmermann. Beginner press. 1985. 106 This is the Yoga of meditation and is practiced Ganeshpuri in North India. Swami Muktananda brought it to United States and it is now spread through all the world. 107 I imagine this is why Steve Reich doesn't like to be called a minimal composer and says that he is a composer of "processes".

ways108. Steve Reich for example repeats melodic and rhythmic patterns and after a certain number of repetitions he gradually changes them by adding or subtracting notes109, having in this way a very slow metamorphosis that doesn't seem to be changing until we look back and see that what was at the beginning is completely different from that at the end. This stasis effect is taking place because we are always concentrated in the present transformation without caring too much about what happened before and what will happen later. György Ligeti achieves stasis in a very similar way, but creating this effect in the opposite way. He makes a process of musical elements that change incredibly fast, so we have the impression that nothing is happening. He describes this phenomenon as an illusion.110 I am more interested in this kind of static processes of metamorphosis, than in repetition. Even though there is variation in these transformations, it is happening in a sphere where the opposition of elements doesn't exist. This music is out of the realm of duality, and it has a great level of complexity. I have always been interested in drones found in nature (like the sound of a fountain), but just recently became also interested in motor drones. In the first part of my piece for refrigerator and Double Bass I am interested in creating stasis through the slow and gradual change of a refrigerator sound. It is always the same drone, with the same low 108 Like Erick Satie, Anton Webern, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman. 109 "Music for eighteen instrumentalists" is a good example of this". 110 "It is music that gives the impression that it could stream on continually, as if it had no beginning and no end; what we hear is actually a section of something that has eternally begun and that will continue to sound forever....The formal characteristic of this music is that it seems static. The music appears to stand still, but that is merely an illusion: within this standing still, this static quality, there are gradual changes110". (Ligeti uses this technique in works like "Atmospheres" and "Apparitions"). Later on he furthers this idea: "Something similar happens in "Continuum"; it is like the wheel of a railway engine, which at high speed seems stationary. Or think of the stroboscope effect, which was what you actually noticed in the second movement of the double concerto. Fast moving music that seems static. It ties up again with the idea of something deep frozen". In "LIGETI in conversation" with Peter Varnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel and himself. Eulenburg books. London. 1983.

fundamental, but the higher overtones change from sound to sound. The overall effect is that of a refrigerator sound that doesn't change but this is an illusion. In reality I am exploring the microcosms of that sound without killing its main quality that is to be a motor drone111. In my tape piece "Atl", I created different water sounds processing a sample I recorded from a water stream. The result was different continuous sounds, some of them that reminded me of Indian music drones (due to their metallic qualities). There is variation in the piece while I go from one drone to the other because they have different timbral and textural qualities, but the piece is always static until the end when new different sounds come in. La Monte Young is a very interesting composer that has worked with motor drones, and what's interesting about him is how he stands between repetition and variation in order to create stasis. In a conversation with Richard Kostelanetz he talks about how there can be stasis in serial music: "...even though we can define serial technique as constant variation, we can also redefine it as stasis, because it uses the same form through out the length of the piece....we have the same information repeated over and over and over again, in strictly permuted transpositions and forms, which recalls the thirteen-century use of cantus firmus. The theme and variations technique depends as much upon the static repetition of the theme as upon its variations"112. Although not all-serial music is static, the fact that in a twelve tone row all the notes have the same value makes possible to move around in a static way (like in circles). La Monte Young says how climax and directionality have been among the most important factors in western music after the thirteen century. Before that time, Gregorian chant, organum and composers like Machaut used stasis as a point of structure a little bit more the way certain Eastern musical systems did. With serial music, composers like Webern were able to go back to stasis through

111 In the second part of the piece I break up this quality by fragmenting the sound into little pieces. 112 La Monte Young in "Conversations" by Richard Kostelanetz.

variation. Although La Monte Young used serial music to structure his early compositions, he no longer uses this technique113. Other methods with which we can create stasis are machine-like processes. In my piece "Moviles" for two pianos I create stasis through a structural process of different numbers that start up synchronized together and then get out of phase one with each other until they come back at the same starting point114. This is a cycle made out of smaller cycles that goes in circles and therefore is static115. On the other hand, I used different series of eleven tones and their variations but looked for the same kind of sonorities in the vertical plane when the different rows have points of coincidences. I have a great deal of melodic variation of the rows, but this is not perceived because of the structure that doesn't seem to take us anywhere116. What's interesting about this kind of structure is that there is repetition and variation at the same time. Repetition can be perceived establishing relationships between the cycles of any two rows (there are four rows that represent the numbers 1,3,5 and 7). For example, for every three cycles of number one there will be one cycle of number 3, creating a repeating rhythmic pattern every three beats (the smallest of all). Every seven cycles of number 1, there will be one cycle of number seven, creating a longer rhythmic pattern every seven beats. Every five cycles of number 3 there will be three cycles of number 5, creating a longer rhythmic pattern that takes place every fifteen beats. And every seven cycles of number 5 there will be five cycles of number 7 creating then the longest rhythmic pattern between two notes, which happens every thirty-five beats117. Then there is the result of the cyclic relationship between all four numbers (1,3,5 and 7), which is the longest cycle that lasts for one hundred and five beats. So there is repetition in every cyclic relationship, but when we run the whole thing together we have constant variation in the longest cycle that is the synthesis of the smaller cycles. In this way movement can be perceived at different levels and so I named the composition "moviles" ("mobiles" in 113 "I was beginning to discover reasons for moving beyond the twelve note system. I felt that it was by no means the final word as far as structure is concerned". Ibid. 114 It seems to me that great deals of musical processes are static. 115 Like the machinery of a clock, which has different sizes of dented wheels, all of them connected between each other. 116 Like a carrousel in an amusement park. 117 Cycles last always the multiplication between the two numbers.

English ), inspired in Calder's mobiles. A mobile is always the same but its different sections slowly move in different directions. It is static because it stands always hanging in the same point in space and has always the same components. Morton Feldman is another composer that works with stasis. He let's sounds be themselves by writing just the note and telling the interpreter to make it as long as he wants. In "De Kooning" for percussion, violin, cello, French horn, piano and celesta, every instrument has to play its note before the note of the preceding instrument dyes away. Why is there stasis in this way of composing? because there is no directionality. Sounds move one after another and they are not going anywhere, they just exist by themselves. There is of course timbral variation and rhythmic variation, but all sounds are played pianissimo and it doesn't matter how long they are, it is the structural idea of having one sound after another that works out in order to create stasis. Erick Satie is a composer that creates the illusion of stasis by repeating the same musical elements (like Feldman in a way) but always in different ways. To listen to him is almost to feel that it wouldn't matter what he's going to do next. On the other hand he creates his own balance and equilibrium by the way he accommodates the repetitions, so it is not a matter of just repeating the same elements but of how he repeats them. In Satie's music there doesn't seem to be much development going on. It is like working with sound blocks. Why did contemporary composers get interested in stasis? Ligeti tells us about this: "The reason why 'static' sound was in the air was that musicians were reacting to serialism and to Cage's aleatory ideas. More exactly, reacting to their basic formal structure, which is: event-pause-event-pause. Continuous sound is at the opposite pole". I agree with Ligeti in that non-continuous music is not very static, but to a certain limit. Although John Cage's chance music has on many occasions the alternation between event and pause, his music in general is static to me because once again, it lacks of directionality. This is music made with chance operations and therefore it doesn't matter where it will end or where it will start. Although there is so much diversity in Cages music, it seems to me that so many different sound elements going on

different directions reduce every thing to a certain balance118. Of course, this stasis is completely different to that of any other composer because it is chaotic119.

118 Like opposite magnetic fields that reduce their forces to nothing. 119 It is interesting how in his early pieces for prepared piano, Cage was using stasis in a similar way to Satie and Feldman, I mean, in a controlled way and setting the structure beforehand. He called his structures, "Square root structures". Later on he got into total chance and he created a new way of stasis.