how have u been?

It’s been a minute. Between February and Now, a Spring, a Summer and a World Cup have passed; canals have frozen, de-frozen, frozen again, and turned into smelly, wavy dumps; forests have grown, sung, and burned, turning into lifeless yet fertile lands; Substack has enabled three new formatting functionalities, mirroring 3 top-priority human writing/reading needs: writing/reading justified fonts, recipes and prediction markets; and I’ve been up, and down, North, East, West (fortunately not South), crossing seas, clouds, continents and time zones, walking on land and concrete, adventuring to concerts, venues, rehearsals, and job interviews with more questions than answers, all the while returning to x-kölln, moving in and out and in and out, cycling through misunderstandings and insights, quietness and an excess of joy. Simply put, it could be, dear reader, that ‘disappointment’ is disappearing from my emotional landscape. I did not see that one coming. For that very reason, like any other amateur-life-acrobat, a little drunk on the highs, I’m loosening up a lil but can’t bet on that rope too arrogantly. But at least, at last, I’m aware the rope exists. And at least, at last, I’ve entered my Kinbaku era. [ warum nicht ]

Frantic or not, I’ve been missing you so much, dear reader. You’ve been in the back of my mind all this time. I’ve been missing your quiet smiles and hushed laughters, your silent gasps of indignation, your discreet, elegant let-me-politely-skip-this-boring-paragraph-scroll, and your telepathic ô great longing for more music, love letters and stupid jokes—amirite?

So, let our eyes be glued on our phones, our agonizing MacBook Pro from the last decade or our thriving self-programmed Linux, & our ears to our somehow “pleasant” bluetooth speakers, our waxed AirPods or Beats Pro by Dr. Dre X Graff, shall we. Forget about saving your screen time with this one, you’re in for a long, beautiful ride.

It’s a delight and an honor to announce we’ll spend another 2 part series-posts around the work of Michael Pisaro-Liu. I am so pleased, so touched that he agreed to share some material with us all. How lucky we are.

Allez, Thérèse, tu connais la musique, on y va.

Brief bio, no bio

The first time I heard about Michael was about 10 years ago, when he visited the Royal Conservatory in the Hague where I was still studying. With others Composition students, he presented his piece ricefall. That was no less than a shock: how could this piece be and mean so much? Following this experience, I spent many years listening to Michael’s music, without ever daring to look at them too closely either. And surely, a decade later, when hearing about his retrospective at KM28 organized by Quentin Tolimieri, and even being to invited to contribute to it due to my frencheuh mozer tongueuh, it felt things were coming full circle.

Outer-life wise, Michael Pisaro-Liu is that he a composer and professor of composition at Cool CalArts, and closely associated with the Wandelweiser collective. Across more than one hundred compositions, Michael has not only looked deeply into the relationship between sound and its absence, listening, attention, but also cultivated a deep dialogue with poetry and literature, influences that quietly permeate much of his work. And this is perhaps where we’ll spend the most time: trying to lightly outline (and necessarily speculate on) Michael’s inner life, i.e. his life as a subject, through his music and the philosophical landscape from which it emerges. As he (beautifully) writes himself:

“works of art traverse ideas (or are traversed by); […] art is a kind of thought, which takes place on an immanent sensory plane. With great works, or groups of works, or especially, with large constellations of works, we have the sense that the subjective space explored is infinite.”

Compared to the richness and breadth of his work, and how much it has been shared, it remains remarkably under-researched. Little has been written about his music and one may truly, truly wonder: “why”. Yet as one looks more closely, it becomes clear that remaining exclusively within rarefied, conventional academic discourse is limiting, even reductive, when writing about his music. Good for us, dear reader: we can step into those unknown, existential territories without aiming at being exhaustive nor definitive.

A first compass to approach Michael’s work will be another quote from him, in which he writes that sound composition has the potential to hold “ that space open as a place to imagine a better world”. Let’s all pause for the words to sink in.

The quote is an ever-useful reminder, for anyone feeling left out in the field of cold scores, endless sound tweaking, and supposedly solitary explorations: sound composition can be wide in its purpose, larger than itself. It may lead somewhere between ontology and an ethics of generosity: a way of understanding existence while sharing that "open space," and its hopeful possibilities, with others. Like an offering. And what's nice is that there's no need to announce the offering, or to make it grandiose. No need for a 442Hz Calming & Healing Your Mind 8-hour AI-generated yet Sacred & Blessed Prayers "Om, Ah, Hung". Such spiritual bulldozers may help at times, but some of us are far more moved by implicit, subtle, yet genuine acts of generosity, by the magic of offering (almost) nothing. A composer may gradually disappear behind, or through, an attentive realization of their work. The work is released with complete abandon when performed, and the listener, in receiving it, may learn or complete those generous qualities in turn. What-a-re-lief.

I feel those kinds of profound experiences were part of my own encounters with Pisaro's pieces, and I hope you will feel them too. So let's look at Michael Pisaro's quiet offerings, starting today with a comparison of two pieces: Akasa and The Narrow Path.1

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Akasa (1994) and The Narrow Path (2020)

why compare, Jasper

Akasa and The Narrow Path draw from different chapters in Pisaro’s compositional trajectory and sources: one from the 1990s whose title echoes Indian philosophies, the other composed in 2020 and referring to an eleventh-century Chinese landscape scroll. Set side by side, the two pieces share equally rigorous internal logics. What strikes me most, though, is a simpler fact easy to overlook: both pieces ask roughly the same thing of a single performer, for roughly the same span of time. One instrument alone, is given the task of revealing a ‘cosmology’, or at least something as vast as ether or a mountain. Rather than relying on numerous players, this vastness relies on the depth of attention a single body can sustain, inside a set of constraints drawn deliberately tight enough to hold it, making it legible. The vastness all comes from within.

Akasa (1994)

Akasa was written ± a decade after Michael’s studies with Ben Johnston and finding his own voice with just intonation. Let’s listen to it, performed by no less than the amazingly Reinier Van Houdt.

golden ratio-ish macro-structure

The piece is 97 bars long, divided into two main sections by a double bar after bar 38, though another double bar just before it makes the boundary deliberately—or perhaps simply perceptually—ambiguous.2 Within each section, phrases shift constantly in time signature, some of them are repeated twice, and 8 bars (9, 17, 52, 60, 76, 90, 93, 95) are silent, threaded through the structure of the piece. The dynamic across the piece are extremely soft, the performer being asked to attempt to keep all of the notes at approximately the same ppp dynamic by balancing the pressure at the keyboard with the softness of the node. Huuuuuhuh, challenge coming up.

rational intonation

Akasa mixes equally tempered pitches and just intonation, using harmonics taken from five strings —C3, F3, G3, A3, D4— each yielding between 3 and 6 partials.3 Except for a block on the sustain pedale, there are no preparation on the piano: the pianist just plays the harmonics by hand, coming in and out of the piano string board. For this reason, Akasa is supposedly only monophonic, a single line carrying the full implication of the piece's just harmony. Yet with the pedal used throughout, and the sparse appearance of bass notes, the resonance of the strings gathers and sounds together, conveying the piece’s gradually shifting intonation.

micro-shift becoming macro-form

With its simple arc at both ends, a simple beginning, a simple close, what drives the piece is a logic of micro-shift becoming macro-form, i.e. how one small, detail leads to the next shift. So the more closely one looks and listens to the interior of the piece, the more one may experience Michael’s goldsmith’s work.

gradual adding/subtracting pitch classes and shift in modes

The opening reminded me of, in spirit, Clarence Barlow’s series Until: a single five-note melodic motif, drawn from a collection of just-intonation pitches, repeated but gradually shifting in mode. The initial motif — D, F (7th harmonic of G3), E, B, A, is repeated a few times, with a longer sustain on A (quarter note or half note).

The motive reappears reordered as A, F (harmonic), E, B, D (now sustained for quarter, half note or dotted half-note) around 0’55”/bar 10, followed by a silence, and announcing the development of its mutation throughout the piece.

Following this modal shift from A to D, Michael introduces a second high harmonic on bar 12: B, based on A3 and F3.

Last but not least, a G4 is introduced as a mid harmonic at 2’21”/bar 19, with the first apparition of normally played notes: B6, and then B5.

As gradually as that, the E of the initial motif released, the latter being reshaped again into G, D, A, F/F♯, C. u c where i’m getting: this is clever, this is cool. New pitch classes are added and removed largely through high harmonics, the most discreet register available, only to resurface later in lower registers. Like the actual low, “normal” G3 heard around bar 25/3’09” for instance, was already present as a high harmonic at bar19, but now sounding like one of the fundamental/ centres of Pisaro’s JI scheme.

gradual apparition of chords through timbral shifts

The “idea” of chords similarly enters gradually, largely as a question of timbre first, rather than harmony. Just before 3’45”/ bar 32, octaves appear played normally on the piano; and a few seconds later, octaves built entirely from harmonics follow. gorgeous.

At 4’41”, from bars 39-46, a new descending mode appears, and with it the piece’s clearest demonstration of its central device: the same pitch class contrasted as harmonic against “normal” tone, often across octaves — A, Bb7, D, G, and F♯ each treated this way in turn.

By bar 43, the same game narrows to variations on a single octave — Bb7, Bb, and B, harmonic and natural, moving from solo statements into chordal harmonic clusters, or paired as dyads. Around 6’09”/bar 54, the texture clears into the purest piano playing in the piece, anchoring the presence of dyads as well.

At bar 61, the earlier motive returns, ascending and sparser, against a continuing bed of dissonant dyads, quietly announcing the ending to come. There is much to say about the next 20 bars. I will simply invite you to listen, and to notice how the lowest bass notes widen the piece's pitch range even further, recontextualizing the harmony and feeding its refined, subtle timbral variations. For instance:

From bar 82/10’00”, the piece lightens in every sense, harmonically and rhythmically both, closing on harmonic variations of As: A natural, and the bold Ab13 (at least it is bold in Reinier’s hands):

spectacular musicianship please

Dear reader, here is what’s entailed for the performer. Akasa calls for 3 distinct modes of playing: passages of almost exclusive overtones, passages of almost exclusive standard piano technique, and passages where the two intermingle. So each mode asks for its own choreography and physical effort. Showing Michael’s thoughtfulness, the breaks in the piece tend to fall where the performing mode changes, giving the performer a built-in place to rest rather than pushing straight through.4 From pianist Qais Alghanem’s recounting,5 the pianist develops their choreography slowly, internalizing the piece note by note, bar by bar, phrase by phrase, section by section, while also shaping the performer’s presence on stage. Last, but not least, nothing else is needed in the piece: never “gestural” beyond necessity, not expressive nor expansive, but simply faithful to the score’s minimalism. In that sense, Reinier’s interpretation is simply stunning.

final bomb drop: the piece’s title

Akasa takes its name from the Sanskrit ākāśa: ether, sky, space, derived from kāś, “to shine” or “to become visible.” In Indian cosmology, it is the first and subtlest of the elements; while ākāśa carries two related meanings in Buddhist philosophy: spatiality, i.e. the absence that delimits and gives form its boundaries (like the space within a door frame), and vast space, understood as the absence of obstruction, the state of openness in which things appear and disappear. In this latter sense, ākāśa becomes an object of contemplation, one that, I feel, has found its way into Pisaro's piece. I could try to share some reasons why and how, but, after much pondering, I'd rather leave it to you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions.

It’s all open [no pun intended, ofc].

exchanging lines for lattes

The Narrow Path (早春圖) (2020)

Okééé, from vastness, let’s now move to The Narrow Path. [and thanks for following so far ], performed by Christoper Clarino.

similarities/differences with Akasa

Although written during a stream of Michael’s work in which he was intentionally exploring the concept of melody, The Narrow Path shares a underlying exploration as in Akasa: a modulation between solo notes, dyads, and chords, between melodic and harmonic material. Where Akasa begins with a melodic motif and ends in repetition of one single pitch class, The Narrow Path runs a similar shape in reverse: beginning with repeated F#3, arriving at a chord/melodic sequence by its end. New pitch classes accumulate gradually, mostly through dyads, and the density of musical events shifts throughout without following any evident scheme.

A notable structural difference from Akasa is the absence of repeating bars in The Narrow Path: its construction is fully incremental, one step at a time. In this, the piece embodies the very idea it borrows from its title: working within self-imposed limits related to pitch, register, and harmony, to delineate a path for the music to walk.

ascending motions, varying chords

A most striking feature of The Narrow Path is the gradual interweaving of what I will call its musical "ideas." There is the idea of accumulating notes, from solo pitches to dyads, triads, and tetrads; the idea of pitch motions, such as ascending scales and chords that move in contrary motion or hover in place; the (very relative) idea of consonance/dissonance, and the idea of melodies that seem to arrive from somewhere unconnected to what surrounds them. Amid the other three ideas, these melodies shine all the more brightly, sounding like incredibly soft lullabies. At least, that how I experienced them.

Let’s delve in this brilliant piece. With lots of excerpts of the score and admittedly messy added colors on my end, but hey hopefully this helps.

• Bars 1 through 16 (0’00”-3’00”) build an ascending motion in semitone increments, with chromatic/dissonant alterations woven in between, each ascent absorbing one new tone somewhere between a semitone and a full tone. These ascending steps are given longer note values, which makes their motion more perceptible. So it’s less of a straight climb than a series of suspensions, each receding briefly to a lower pitch before the overall upward motion resumes and carries past it. For instance, look at (the blue-circled) A3, Bb3, C4 and C#4. Alongside this ascending logic, the first dyads of the piece appear:

• Bar 20 (3’03“ -3’54”), arriving at Eb4, reads as the endpoint of the piece's initial ascent. Two descending dyad sequences follow, moving down toward G3, but each respectively stays anchored on D4 and E4: one voice holds there while the other descends beneath it, note by note. This allows a discreet widening the piece’s pitch space and introduction of the idea of “consonance”:

• In the following bars, triads are introduced along with the idea of oscillating, pendular harmony. Initially dissonant ascents follow, and several of which seem to conclude on simple, natural minor chords. In (beautiful) bars 33 to 35 (approx. 5’00-5’35”), for instance, the highest voice of the triad ascends subtly from F4 to G4, while the bass holds still on B and the middle voice moves up and down around it. The harmonic span widens slightly as a result, from B3-F4 at bar 33 to Bb3-G4 by bar 35. This last chord shifts the modality of the whole sequence, bringing it to rest on an easily identifiable G minor chord. [ insane progression ]

• Hold on tight, dear reader. Michael’s brilliance doesn’t end here. Besides his harmonic triple fouéttés and entrechats cinq, he doesn't forget the piece's earlier elements once he's moved past them. The monophonic ascending lines, the dyads, the triads, the oscillation between dissonant clusters and simple harmony: nothing is discarded; each is simply carried forward and combined over time, until they arrive at something like synthesis.

  • Bar 41 (6’39”) makes this explicit: tetrads appear for the first time, and with them the "path" itself blurs—ascending, descending, pendular, and static all at once. It's as if the concluding (and, again, shifting the piece’s mode into a simple conclusive Perfect fourth) E4 and A4 (7’40”) form the narrow path surrounding the initial F of this particular chordal sequence, the outer voices holding the space the inner motion moves through.

  

  • A few bars later, from bar 49 (8’09”-8’45”), the idea of ascending chords takes over more fully —dyads, triads, and tetrads combined—before giving way to a monophonic ascending motion.

• If the initial repeated F3 motive of the beginning of the piece is recalled on bar 67 (11’15”), it is now immediately followed by a more direct/condensed ascent, continuously enriched by a diversity of dyads, triads, tetrads and single pitches, and discreet appearance of light arpeggios, all the way to a final F6, in pp.

  Especially from bar 79 (13’23”) to the end, the piece opens into an overall ascent spanning several octaves, interspersed with chordal motives of particular beauty. Underneath all of it sits the piece’s central achievement: the sense of an overall descending, falling feeling conveyed even as the pitch register keeps climbing — not demonstrated didactically, but carried through in a soft, heart-based way, using the mixture of pitch registers to reveal the pitch spectrum in its entirety. Special mention goes to bar 86 (14’38”), using only A natural minor scale, perhaps the most surprising moment in the piece, an absence of dissonance revealing its naive but no less profound softness in the midst of the ascent:

The Narrow Path feels like a lullaby, but barely: barely present, and yet somehow all-pervasive. In fact, the task to convey the piece’s deep softness without either missing it altogether or pushing it into something too expressed, too visible. This held restraint held is not dry at all though, and, in my sense, profoundly impacted by the occasional lifting of the vibraphone pedal—perhaps not so present in Christopher Clarino’s otherwise beautiful recording. When witnessing the piece at KM28 during Michael’s retrospective,percussionnist Michael Weilacher took some pretty wild choices when lifting the pedal, revealing and clarifying the harmony and softness of the piece 10 steps further. That was a very profound musical experience to me, grateful I was there, and I can only encourage you as a listener to imagine it now.

partager c'est important

final bomb drop: the piece’s title, an encore

The title of the piece, 早春圖 (Early Spring Scene), refers to a 1072 shan shui (“mountain-water”) painting by the Song-dynasty artist Guo Xi, now held at the Taipei Palace Museum. Painted entirely in black ink, it unfolds through shifting perspectives rather than a single fixed vantage point—an approach Guo Xi called the “angle of totality.” Its mountains, mist, trees and sparse architecture create a landscape that seems to reveal itself gradually as the eye moves through it.

Guo Xi’s understanding of landscape was dynamic: a mountain appears differently when seen up close, from several miles away, or from further still. That is: the painting makes perception itself part of the landscape. Rings a bell? Fo sho. This idea of gradual, situated revelation is highly relevant to Pisaro's piece, where new musical ideas emerge incrementally, as though the landscape were being encountered one step at a time. For the rest, as with Akasa, I leave it to your own conclusions and contemplations. Like the performers of Pisaro's piece, may you find your own itinerant journey.

see you in the next post

I hope you had fun dear reader. I certainly did. Each time, it feels I have barely brushed the depth of the pieces I write about here, but I’m finding out that it might be best, so that you, dear reader, can become the detective yourself.

I look forward to seeing you son and until then, send you big hugs

ciao bellə,

Good to meet here again, right?

[ . . . ]

ooooooooooh, I know, I know darling, you’re upset, it’s been a while, I let you there, waiting for the second part of our series dedicated to Chiyoko Szlavnics’ music. Not fair. Please excuse me: your humble writer has been riding intense musical waves and literal motions—assisting others, moving places, taking a risky yet meaningful spin on the wheel of fame, fortune, and beauty, as my lovely tarot reader wisely pointed out.

[ . . . ]

ooooh, please don’t cry, cutie: you are my favorite reader. Only with you do I share my most precious musical discoveries: these few grains of sand and sounds that open worlds for us, if only briefly, in our fleeting human lives.

[ . . . ]

oh, you missed ep. 1? That’s okay, you can quietly catch up with the link below. I’ll wait for you here with our second and final episode of this season. Please remember to gently blow your nose as well—your humble writer’s misophonia makes it hard to tolerate the sound of running mucus. Thank you.

[ . . . ]

[ . . . ]

1-2, 1-2, are we all here? Are those who cannot tolerate our hot niche of cringe and lunacy gone? Awesome, it was about time. We may therefore Begin. [NB: those wishing to strictly read about music, do feel free to skip the 6 next § ]

A general question that emerged for me when I reopened my reflections on Chiyoko’s work was: how does a grrrl who writes music takes space today—literally/musically, and figuratively. Old fashioned you may say, especially as the binary boooï/grrrl doesn’t exist below the surface, gender is fluid and endlessly playful, one can feel female, male, nb, and/or like an angel one day and a human pup the next; the ultimate goal being to surrender identification with the surface (/form) altogether.1 True, true, ôô so true. Yet, what is equally true is that a somewhat rigid surface exists as well. It is the very ground on which we walk 99,9% of the time, and it is wildly humbling. At least, it is to me.

First, as a former addict to Patriarchal-heteronormative BS and whose path to recovery and sobriety feels embarrassingly slow, each phase of life is evidently accompanied with new lessons to be learned, often looking like crashing planes and burning houses, needing to be metabolized faster than my body and heart can handle. In other words, as much as I naively hoped and prayed that most of those stuff were behind us, well, not really — the fire keeps burning and too often winning.

Second, the older I get, the more I get what this ‘being a grrrl’ means. Actually: I don’t get it intellectually, but I feel it somatically more, and more. For instance, I feel ‘being a grrrl’ when softness spreads in my chest as I gaze at mothers, sensing one glimpse of the timelessness of motherhood and its absurdly heroic demands. I also feel ‘being a grrrl’ when my guts tightens in respond to those words from 1928: “Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”2 I feel ‘being a grrrl’ when needing to read out loud Anne Carson’s flambloyant Gender of Sound.

Motherhood, 1928 and Anne Carson are the ground that lives with/in us today—as much as our 2026 progressive desires, our well-intended equal gender and diversity-prone policies, our woke politeness and non-violent modes of communication. Motherhood, 1928 and Anne Carson surface in the exchange of glances between certain grrrls whose eyes carry “I know, and I know you know” or this “I know, and I know you don’t know, yet”. They persist in the banal, or in the “highest sphere of the arts” in more or less concealed ways, with a sticky pattern: grrrls may be cautiously (/intermittently?) seen and supported, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the expectations for them to remain a lil weaker, a lil quieter, a lil convenient-er—content and contained.

And yet, the highest, most refined form of embodied grrrl-ity may be an unbitter, loud openness: a discerning brilliance and even a destructive power that threatens surface and form. In the same way, the highest form of embodied boooï-ity may be a grace that shines endlessly, steadily, and gently through surface and form. We need both, equally, within ourselves and in others. Not reinventing the wheel, but reactivating the engine, just like Adrian Piper’s3 [roaring] motto4:

“You can drive the grrrl out of philosophy,

but you can’t drive philosophy out of the grrrl.

;D “

If there’s a grrrl you can’t drive music out of, it is certainly Chiyoko. Today, we’ll look into her incredible Oracles I-V (listening spaces) from 2019-2020 and composed for Ensemble Contrechamps. In her words, an Oracle is a reminder of being human, of single, lonely voices in a vast space or cosmos. The title couldn’t fit this astonishing piece better, which was recently released on Neu Record. Amazingly, Chiyoko has agreed to generously share with us some exclusive excerpts of the score. This your lucky day, dear reader, so do enjoy every bit of it.

As usual, I’ll successively present macro, meso, micro perspectives on the piece, and inject the stupid stuff here and there [ i kno some of you only read those posts for the stupid stuff]. So much to say, so much space to take: let’s go grrrl ;D

macro: c’est le cas de le dire

Oracles I-V’s approach to composition and sound is very different from Gradients of Detail’s. Although both pieces drawing from a rigorous Just intonation pitch space and Chiyoko’s idiosyncratic sense of restraint, sparseness and suspended time, Oracles focuses less on an highly detailed perception of harmonic relationships. Instead, it operates on much wider perceptual, temporal and musical scales, resulting from Chiyoko’s 2-year, intense study of the acoustics of the gigantic space where the piece was initially premiered, in radical interdependence with the piece’s instrumentation. Let’s listen together first to the initial recording of the piece—which I’ve listened to at least 100 times, especially during lockdown. Enjoy.

1. One Giant Space: Bellelay Abbey

The piece was composed composed in 2019-2020, and premiered in the mega Bellelay Abbey in the Swiss Jura in 2020.5 The video doesn’t transpire the enormity of the space, but you might better imagine its dimensions and acoustics by looking at the photo below:

Founded around 1140 by the Premonstratensian Order and rebuilt in the 18th century, Bellelay Abbey is a Baroque jewel, with its abbey church designed by Austrian architect Franz Beer and conventual buildings dating from 1736. Post brutal French Revolution, the church was desacralized and the site fell into decline, housing various industries and later a psychiatric clinic (!). Restored in the late 1950s, the former abbey church has since become a major cultural venue, presenting visual art and sound installations, along with an outstanding concert series launched in 2020.

foundation existed for a longer time, but the specific concert series has been running since 2020, so not exactly "taken over the place"? There have also been visual art and sound installations since before 2020, not sure of the exact year it all began...

Such large abbeys (and cathedrals) carry very specific sound behavior: loooong reverb time due to huge interior volumes and stone surfaces—sound energy bouncing in space instead of being damped. Due to the heights of the ceilings and vaults and arches, sound seems to come from everywhere and diffused, high frequencies mostly decaying faster than low and mid frequencies. In some abbeys, there additional acoustic lenses or mirrors, concentrating sound energy into specific spots—like columns and vaults. Such acoustic ‘hotspots’ can make sound supernaturally loud in one place, and quiet just a few steps away. No doubt the Bellelay Abbey has such acoustic supernatural characteristics, carefully studied by Chiyoko. Indeed, the Bellelay Abbey’s space and architecture inspired Chiyoko, wishing the “experience of sound in the abbey’s resonant, enormous interior” to be at the center of Oracles I-V.

2. 20 Grands Musicians

The piece Oracles was composed for 20 of the very profesh Ensemble Contrechamps musicians: C Flute/Bass Flute, Oboe, 2 Bb Clarinets/ Bass Clarinet, 2 Trumpets, 2 Horns, Tuba in F, 4 Violins, 2 Violas, 2 Violoncelli, 1 Contrabass, 2 Percussion (including vibrophones, bass drums, brass triangles, bowed crotales).6

Naturally, the sounds of these instruments carry distinct directional qualities and spatial impacts. The horn and trumpet project outward and can easily dominate in volume; the clarinet and oboe are more discreet and localized; the flute even more so (except in its highest register), often fusing with other instruments. The bass drum has a diffusive presence, operating “beneath” the ensemble whether played softly or loudly. Bowed crotales cut through and seem to hover above the texture, though without sharply defined directionality. The strings are comparatively mild—gently localizable, gently directional, gently resonant. Gentilles strings.

This interplay of timbral and spatial qualities is very much at work in Oracles.

3. 20 Musicians + 1 Bellelay Abbaye= 5 Stellar Oracles

In Chiyoko’s score, one reads: “The musicians’ positioning for each Oracle is central to how the instruments’ timbres and their resonance within the abbey will be experienced by the audience. Their positioning is also essential to how the movement of sound in the large space has been composed in the score.” There is much to unpack in these crucial opening lines.

First, they underscore the site-specific nature of the piece. Oracles I–V was composed for and with the space in mind, carefully considering both the abbey’s acoustics and the timbral qualities of the instruments. Detailed stage plans specify the musicians’ placement, and these positions are not static. They shift from one section to the next, reinforcing the choreographic dimension of the work. Perhaps one even more salient aspect of the piece is that it sculpts trajectories of sound—lines, curves, circles— passing between instruments, combined with a refined control of texture, timbral masking and harmonic fusion.

Another radical aspect lies in the use of the ensemble itself. Some sections involve all 20 musicians; others reduce the forces to as few as four players. This contrast amplifies extremes: the cosmic (full ensemble filling the vast space) and the intimate (a single voice resonating within it). In the same way, the resonant and hugely reverberant qualities of the Abbey are structural to the piece and its silences. Of course, such a space presents challenges — precise tuning becomes difficult, even unisons can blur. For this reason, Chiyoko explained that she intentionally kept the harmonic material relatively ‘simple’ (up to 7-limit intervals) avoiding more complex dissonances (such 11- and 13-limit intervals). This preserves the clarity of rationally related pitches, allowing them to fuse and move dynamically in direct interaction with the acoustics of the space.

Listening to Oracles I–V, then, means attending to large-scale forms and to sound traveling through architecture. To my knowledge, it is one of the rare works that so thoroughly composes spatial motion while remaining deeply informed by just intonation principles.

[ dear reader, if dis ce que makes sense to you— or if its nonsense makes you smile— consider subscribing, sharing, becoming a regular paid subscriber, or making a one-time contribution. the other day, a friend told me that dis ce que felt so smooth to read (v kind) that she imagined i must be drafting the posts in a single evening. i’ll take that as a compliment. what it means is that care, doubt, rereading 10x are distilled until they appear effortless here. so, if this space nourishes you, helps you think, or simply keeps you company, you’re warmly invited to help it grow ]

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meso: brief part-by-part presentation & JI considerations

Oracles I–V presents a wide range of musical materials, aesthetics, and references. This diversity reflects Chiyoko’s spatial explorations of the Abbey, as well as aspects of her musical education, collaborations, and friendships; almost like distinct life “chapters,” or an audible mapping of lineages. I’ll briefly introduce each Oracle with short excerpts, partly drawing on Marc Sabat’s excellent liner notes, in the hope of convincing you to purchase the full release. Last but not least, I highly recommend listening to the piece with a good pair of headphones and/or quality speakers.

• Oracle I

Oracle I is certainly the most ‘spectral’ of the 5 Oracles. Loosely extrapolating from Chiyoko’s own impressions, one might describe its gradual thickening of the full ensemble as oceanic; or like a sun rising from the darkest night, slowly filling the vast space of the Abbey. The sound emerges from the depths of horns and tuba, joined by the lower strings, grounding the harmony around B♭, F, C, and G. Above this foundation, a C–E drone unfolds, later expanded by the addition of D and A — tones foreshadowed earlier through the appearance of their 5-limit counterparts.7

• Oracle II

As Marc Sabat notes, “Oracle II features a spatial and density shift to a circle of strings playing unison G evoking the experience of combination tones by adding harmonics and brief phrases of glissandi. Here one senses echoes of Szlavnics’ earlier music with sliding tones, informed beautifully by her experiences as a singer and student of Dhrupad.” One might also be reminded of Gradients of Detail, yet the distinctiveness of Oracle II lies in the way sound circulates physically through the ring of strings. This spatial choreography creates a subtly hypnotic effect, especially when one listens closely to the minute pitch inflections and the shifting distribution of sound from instrument to instrument. Give it a try:

• Oracle III:

Taking the reduction of the ensemble a radical step further, Oracle III is the most minimalist of the five sections. It serves as an homage to Marc Sabat’s 1996 piece For Michael Baker, itself a beautiful work.

Oracle III unfolds as a dialogue between two bass drums; placed at opposite ends of the Abbey, and two trumpets positioned high above, also at extreme ends, each repeating the same D6. Unison aside, more complex tuning is entirely absent. Instead, the section centres on continuity: the cloudy resonance of softly rolling bass drums and the piercing D6 of the trumpets traveling through space, adding a C♯6 later as well. Their presence becomes even more palpable in moments of near-silence. Simply beautiful. Slightly mysterious, slightly cosmic, slightly “the infinite is an instant”8 — and preparing the ear for a shift in listening as the concluding sections unfold.

• Oracle IV and V

To me, Oracles IV and V have always felt like a turning point in the work as a whole. So we’ll delve deeper into them in a minute. While continuing and synthesizing elements of the earlier sections, they bring Chiyoko’s idiosyncratic, diamond-sharp voice more clearly to the foreground. My own listening shifts here as well, operating from and on the heart. There, I said it. It is like the sensuous shaping and reshaping of material, the gentle turning around something, lightly touching it, yet with such depth of emotion, softness, and intensity in that touch. One simply has to ride the softness without holding back.

The motif from Oracle III flows into Oracle IV, before gradually thinning toward its most minimal reduction in Oracle V—mainly centering on C♯ and D, as well as a high B and G♯ in the strings and clarinets.

The motif from Oracle III carries into Oracle IV, then gradually thins to its most reduced form in Oracle V—largely focused on C♯ and D, with a high B and G♯ in the strings and clarinets acting (in my opinion) as brief points of release or “breathers”. At the same time, Oracle V is the most dynamic and unstable section, owing to its more open notation and sustained tones of 2-3 seconds, combined with the introduction of five triangles. Percussion, winds, and strings occupy only the higher registers; the basses are entirely absent. The result is a continuous shimmer, like distant shooting stars.

The weaving of instrumental roles is beautifully handled, restoring balance between strings and winds, both equally active, with crucial percussive punctuations. The steady pacing of the five triangles, playing fast rolls within the high, luminous texture, seems to accentuate the beating produced by the simultaneous C♯ and D. For me, the triangles function almost literally as an amplification of those interference patterns. Remarkably clever of Chiyoko.

Honestly, I could (and have) listened to this section endlessly. The way the sound falls away at the end, with care yet a quiet, simple detachment, is just astounding.

micro: zooming in Oracle IV

Let’s delve into Oracle IV. Lucky you dear reader, the section is “freely/fully” available on Bandcamp [ But do buy the entire release, you won’t regret it. ]

Interesting aside: Chiyoko mentioned that the recording had to take place at night to avoid traffic noise. The strings could not be arranged in a circle, and the instruments had to be positioned closer to the microphones to allow for more fluid mixing afterward. In other words, the spatial experience on the CD differs significantly from that in the Abbey—an experience one might approach more closely through the YouTube video documentation. In that sense, I fully agree with Marc Sabat’s perspective on how the recording “documents” the piece more than anything else. These processes of translation, from space to recording, raise compelling questions that I won’t pursue here. Instead, let us turn to Oracle IV’s score in its original, spatial feature.

Instrumentation & spatial configuration

Overall, the acoustic balance in Oracles is shaped by unusual lines of opposition between pairs of instruments, with different families occupying distinct regions of the Abbey.

Strings are positioned in regions A and B, while brass and winds primarily occupy region C, with a few players interspersed in A and B. Percussion is distributed across A, B, and C, including one bass drum placed in the apse—the rounded end behind the altar, which acts as a natural sound projector. This placement boosts clergy voices and choir sound into the nave, functioning like a giant parabolic shell to carry unamplified sound across the space. Another bass drum is positioned at the back right, between two reflective columns and the back wall, producing longer delays. This is counterbalanced by crotales in the middle section, on the left, beneath a vault and near side walls, creating early reflections.

Cellos face each other in the middle of the Abbey, placed under respective vaults and next to large stone columns that act as secondary reflectors, adding localized coloration. Trumpets are located upstairs, taking advantage of upward projection and later reflections from the highest points of the vaults. Horns are positioned near reflective columns, naturally projecting sound toward the right side and rear. A circle of strings occupies the back section of the Abbey, while lines between oboe and double bass, and between flute and two clarinets, stretch across the entire space without proximity to reflective columns, covering the full distance from back to near the front of the Abbey.

partager c'est important

Melodic-harmonic material as spatial ‘diffusion’ / JI considerations

0’00'-2’30”: building up

Continuing from the D-motif of Oracle III, the piece begins with a unison around the region of E.9 The latter forms the basis of a musical motif I’ll call the Call Mi. Don’t ask me why, it’s just catch-E. Let’s listen to it and have a brief look at its 3-part, contrasting morphology.

The Call Mi goes as follow:

• a blurry line on the bass drums, like a low, soft cloud, distantly introduced through crescendo and decrescendo, sometimes from complete silence, sometimes introducing the Call Mi musical cell and sometimes ending that cell.

• piercing tone from the winds, like rays of light, with an assertive attack (one may read ‘bring out’ one some of the winds parts in the score) and gradual fade out,

• followed by an overlapping, more diffused, in-between echo or answer by the strings—like added reflections on water, introduced through a soft crescendo and decrescendo.

Once the Call Mi has been complete, a cloud passes on the drums, sometimes with a short silence, before the winds’ high tones attack. Note that within each family of instruments, the material each instrument plays is treated a little bit interchangeably in terms of pitches, who starts or ends each part of the Call Mi. This is especially noticeable between the Flute, Oboe and Trumpets, how they play alternatively the E5, different versions of D, G or A, although consistently in harmonic fusion with the E.

What is especially fascinating in the opening minutes of the piece is how, with each repetition of the Call Mi, instruments and tones are non-linearly added, carefully extending and enriching the texture, expanding the palette, and carving ascending melodic motions. For example, around 0’41–1’20 in the recording: the unison on E5 begins in mf on B♭ Clarinet 2 and Flute, cushioned by the emergence of a soft cloud on the drums, before spreading to B♭ Clarinet 1, contrasted by a more isolated, septimal G5 on Oboe. The E5 continues its trajectory, echoed on Violins 3–4, contrasted with a light touch of D6 from the Trumpet, and finally reinforced on Violins 1–2 and Cellos. In this way, the unison on E5 is veiled by added, unexpected tonal and timbral touches, creating an upward, undulating motion: from mid-high (E5), through low (bass drum), to high (D6).

Another key, recurring feature of the Call Mi motif in the section is how it beautifully reinforces the process of sound decay in the reverberant acoustics of the Abbey. To me, its 3-part morphology (attack with piercing high tones in the winds, gradually harmonically ‘decomposed’ and timbrally diffused on the different instruments, and blurred bass drums) feels akin to meta-reverberation: the acoustic emulation of reverberation, in a reverberant space. As a reminder, when digital reverbs are designed, they often follow a similar principle: louder, fast-decaying highs simulate high-frequency damping, while softer, longer low-frequency tails gradually thin the spectrum over time, mimicking air and surface absorption. This process exists naturally in the Abbey, and is mirrored in Chiyoko’s piece, not only in the musical material but also in the spatial placement of instruments. For instance, a pair of the same instruments may play the same tone in succession while positioned at opposite ends of the Abbey, creating a sense of natural decay, diffusion, and spatial interaction. Crazy, complex, interlaced stuff here.

2’30”- 4’30”: expansion in Just intonation and introduction of bass notes

Around 3’30”, Oracle IV undergoes a subtle shift in color, reinforcing the tonal palette through 5-limit F♯ and C♯, stacked in perfect fifths, along with a low D3 on Horn 1. This combination introduces greater melodic tension and lays the groundwork for the ascending melodic motions that unfold in the following minutes.

4’30”-7’41’”: concealed, upward melodic lines

Here is an example of a concealed upward melodic motion. It’s in these moments that one begins to sense how much activity occurs beneath the macro surface of the piece — subtle interactions that can easily go unnoticed on a first listen. You may need to play the excerpt several times to fully catch these intricate layers.

What I want to clumsily emphasize with my circles and arrows is

• a) [red circles] the most salient pitches of the section, forming an overall ascending line: G/G♯, B, C♯–14c

• b) [blue circles] notes which mostly work in fusion with the others (like D)

• c) [orange arrows ] the way one instrument and note lead into another.

Now, imagine the combined effect of a), b), and c), together with the spatial placement of each instrument in the Abbey. Because of the constraints of the recording session, the trajectory of the most salient notes may not fully translate, but in the live performance, they trace the following trajectory:

A on the Flute in the Altar/back section of the Abbey
↓ G# on Clarinet 1 in the middle of the Abbey
↓ G# on Clarinet 2 at the entrance of the Abbey
↑ C#-14c on the Flute in the Altar
↓ high harmonics C# on Vlc 1-2 in the middle of the Abbey
↓ Vln 1-2 in the entrance of the Abbey
↑ bass drums beyond in the very, very back of the altar

Yes, indeed. Just stunning.

7’41”-8’41’”: closing

The final minutes of the piece build tension, occasionally exploring the lower pitch ranges, before gradually thinning out the pitch variety. This creates a refined transition into the minimal musical material of the last, stunning Oracle V. Tadam.

exchanging lines for lattes

Conclusion: you go grrrl

As usual, much remains unsaid, but we have arrived at the most important point I wanted to make: Chiyoko’s remarkable music seamlessly integrates all musical parameters—harmonic fusion, orchestration, and the choreography of moving sound, without ever compromising its strange, profound beauty. Although highly technical and masterful, the piece is far from a dry acoustic experiment. It’s simply beautiful. So, to nuance my opening question: Chiyoko’s Oracles I-V is one of many examples of how a grrrl making music can feel space, rather than merely taking it.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to Chiyoko for patiently reviewing this post and the previous one, bearing with my occasional cringe, and sharing with us such precious material and music. Thank you too, dear reader, for coming all the way down here.

now, loosen up & play ;D

Lucie

And once again, go check the first post of this series on Chiyoko Szlavnics:

Ich bin züruck, after une petite, well-deserved, pause. In a few words: I’ve let myself… live. Is that decadent? self-indulgent? luxurious? Yes. And no. Did I have the choice? 100% nein. First, it was hard to know what/how to write about after my last deep dive into Cenk’s brilliant works, and I was pretty be-wild-ered since September. So I thought a break a break would let me return as a disciplined, dedicated, resilient and dyslexic hermit—until the end of times. But here I am [ still dyslexic but ] more in touch with a kind of lightness, malleable openness and yeah, undisciplined joy. I’ve just been (re)learning basic decency. Not grandiosity, not self-effacement: just basic decency. Truth is a) the finding out of decency is nothing short but phenomenal;1 b) it’s not as easy as it seems for us, little humans.

In essence, all I’m trying to say is that I’m ready to enter my Sagittarius birthday season with a renewed sense of trust, bébé. I’m in Berlin, waking up to colorful people and gray skies, spending most of the day quietly alone, but greeted at night by warm words and hugs from friends, and falling asleep in an apartment where the reliability of the heating system is inversely proportional to the number of cigarettes smoked by the previous tenant (windows closed) and/or to the number of home-(tree)less bugs constantly streaming in (windows open). And I, Lucie Nerdy, frankly feel on top of my game. I’m onto somethin’ big. somethin’ decent.

And you know what always helps with growing as decent human beings? Listening to music and delving deep with the eyes & ears of a new born. Achso, bring your teddybear, put on your pacifier, your bib, and, most importantly, your widest, wildest smile, because, today, dear reader, we’ll listen & reflect on the work of a dear friend: Chiyoko Szlavnics. In this first post, I’ll introduce you to her and her Gradients of Details and we’ll celebrate a more recent work/release of hers in the next post.

Need I say: this post will follow the usual 4000 words format, including deeply felt ideas around music, composition and listening [mostly, not mines], and irrelevant comments & footnotes [strictly mines].

Chiyoko

Canadian, Berlin-based, composer, graphic artist, saxophone player, translater, singer (+ impeccable cook ), Chiyoko Szlavnics (CA/DE) has one of the most interesting, notable trajectories among contemporary composers today.

Online, one reads that Chiyoko was born in Toronto to a mother from Vancouver—the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants—and to a father of Serbian-Hungarian descent. Both parents were artists, both marked by the weight of WWII. Somewhere on a beautiful corner of the internet, there’s also the story of her visits to her maternal grandfather: a nature lover, fisherman, and devoted mushroom hunter who took her to see the salmon run on the north shore, teaching her about the salmon’s life cycle as she absorbed the stories, driftwood, stones, kelp, and tiny crabs. In many ways, she was already entering her lifelong contemplation of nature’s regenerative power.

All of this—family history, early encounters with nature, layered heritage, lives in Chiyoko’s work, alongside a high sensitivity, an analytical mind, and a contemplative stance toward sound. Perhaps the presence of mixed heritage opened the way to her unusually broad artistic affinities: Western classical practice, improvisation, Gagaku, just-intonation cosmologies, and, very importantly, Dhrupad.2 In her case, “mixture” is not a stylistic, anecdotical gesture but an ethic, an art of living and composing.

In the early 1990s, while still living in Toronto and after finishing university in 1989, Chiyoko looked into Gagaku Music, a probable entrance door to Chiyoko’s fascination for with slowly bending pitch, combination tones. The latter was later fed by her studies of Dhrupad in the Dagar tradition, which she began in 2017, first with Marianne Svašek, then the incredible Pandit Uday Bhawalkar.

Another major influence was her time with James Tenney (1993–1998). They discussed composition, musical parameters, Helmholtz, acoustics, and of course just intonation. Like for many, Tenney seems to have been an empowering teacher: someone who encouraged her to experiment and build systems rooted in her own intuition and curiosity. [digression: i still haven’t heard stories about Jim being a “complicated” or “difficult” person/teacher. +the genuine affection i witness in his students whenever they mention his name feels like confirmation that he was an extraordinary mentor—one who opens your eyes and lets you see an (your) endless field of possibilities.] [ = this is lineage ]

Chiyoko moved to Berlin in 1998, continuing her saxophone and improvisational practice while surrounded by musicians such as Ute Wassermann, Ulrich Krieger, Marc Sabat, Robin Hayward, and the broader improvisation scene (Andrea Neumann, Axel Dörner, Polwechsel, and others). Around her were also festivals featuring works by Alvin Lucier, Klaus Lang, Peter Ablinger, and the Zeitkratzer ensemble. She began encountering Wandelweiser-adjacent circles around 2003, a period that also marked the start of her drawing and painting practices. Later, after moving to a new apartment in 2008–09 with thinner walls and neighbors prone to vocalizing their complains when she played saxophone, her music grew quieter. But no less colourful.

Here is one may see Chiyoko today: through her humility; her methodical, precise, yet non-dogmatic approach; her quiet audacity and playfulness. She also possesses a remarkably astute way of integrating her music education while maintaining a healthy distance from the rigidities of academism—a stance we could all learn from:

As a legacy of my university training, I still open books of theory and try to understand what it is about that theoretical knowledge which academics want to establish so firmly. […] However, when one experiments and makes discoveries oneself, the phenomenal world feels so much more alive than if you are limited to an academic theory. There’s something so inspiring about that direct experience. What I’m always striving for in my work is that something—that spark which you can’t see beforehand, but which is quite magical when it occurs.”

( you, dear reader, are also magical )

Brief introduction to her general line of work

Chiyoko’s work lives at the threshold between abstracting the phenomenal world and engaging with it directly/ fiercely. Her compositions resist categorization—they are neither “conceptual works,” nor technical “tuning studies,” nor “figurative” or depictions. Instead, the tension in her music emerges from the meeting point between a poetic reading of psychoacoustic phenomena and a deeply cosmological orientation.

relation to the phenomenal world: shapes and tuning

Chiyoko’s work with just intonation is uniquely experimental, guided by “lines” that trace the unfolding of sound forms, bringing out the subtle experience of rationally tuned harmonies and melodies. If I may don my pompous sorcerer’s apprentice hat, the mastery of Chiyoko’s craft and the richness of her pieces lie in how the listener perceives a spectrum of superimposed Gestalts and cognitive streams—a continuous oscillation between:

• Macro form ↔ macro listening: cognition of emerging, ever-changing shapes, “energy forms”, passing like clouds—what Marc Sabat describes as “temporally disjunct forces across huge distances”.

• Ultra precise tuning / micro intervals ↔ micro listening: the psychoacoustic cognition of beating patterns. As Chiyoko beautifully puts it, “beating in music […] moves me, like sunlight dancing on water.”3

This oscillation between macro-forms and micro-phenomena, structure and untamed vitality, is where Chiyoko’s mastery lies: a refined craft that makes listening a fundamentally open and dynamic process.

relation to drawing lines: not-knowing

Without revealing too much of what follows, it’s worth noting that for the past ±20 years,4 Chiyoko has often used line drawings as a point of departure for her work and translated into microtonal scores.

From this methodical yet intuitive practice emerges an epistemology: composing while embracing (+ for the very sake of) not-knowing [relatable].

• This way of composing is not “indeterminacy” in the Cagean sense, but a way of composing that remains open to what the process itself reveals. In other words, composition becomes a form of inquiry, where not-knowing is a condition for emergence rather than a lack of direction, allowing Chiyoko to be “surprised” and “blown away” by her own music. Therefore, Chiyoko’s lines are never rigid, mathematical, or strictly representational. The drawings reject both a) a simplistic logic of one-to-one correspondence between visuals and sound, b) a “free interpretation” expected of musicians in other graphic scores.

• In fact, Chiyoko considers “it as my task, as composer, to interpret the drawings musically, to decide amid all the possibilities what notes and chords will be played, to notate and orchestrate that.”5 & as, we will soon see it, the way Chiyoko musically translates her drawings is hugely impressive: it unfolds outside the constraints of harmonic–syntactic tradition while remaining precise. And in Chiyoko’s music, such a practice introduces a choreographic and spatial dimension to both composition and listening, which become acts of spatial orientation, re-orientation and/or disorientation.

relation to time: slowed-down-ness

Chiyoko’s contemplative approach to music-making (and life) along with her interest for acoustic beating, results in slow pieces with quasi-still sections. This slowness invites the listener to fall ‘into’ sound, its ever so subtle, constant shifts with heightened attention. This approach to slowness is radically distinct from “deep listening” practices like Pauline Oliveros’. Chiyoko’s music never comes with a verbalized methodology or explicit instructions for how to listen. Instead, the music itself carries as a kind of non-verbal (I dare say: telepathic) invitation for the listener to meet a most inner, impersonal vastness. [= can’t be put into words, u c what i mean ]

relation to timbre: spectral transparencies

As part of her idiosyncratic approach to working with just intonation, Chiyoko’s practice is also informed by her expert understanding of orchestration: the physical properties of acoustic instruments and/or sine waves, how they sound together, how timbres and spectra interact, and how JI can emphasize or generate “harmonic fusion” between them. This combined attention to timbre (almost spectral in character) and tuning has a consistently stunning, emotional effect in her music.

relation to performance: human

Although Chiyoko’s music involves a high degree of abstraction and precision, it remains, in her own words, “a human activity”. In parallel to her abstract methodologies, Chiyoko writes with specific performers in mind. And there is nothing mechanical about her compositions or their performance: “Sounds are not anonymous; human spirits are involved in producing them.” Amen.

And, we, as listeners, are allowed to be human spirits. My experience of Chiyoko’s piece often feels like absorbing multiple layers of sound, zooming in and out as I listen, and ultimately moving beyond the analytical or cognitive altogether—into a state of heartfelt wonder, and of wondering. That, to me, is the mark of the music I love most; &maybe the highest relief or gift music can offer.

Share dis ce que

Voilà, l’ami·e. We’re halfway through this post, so, before (finally) delving into Chiyoko’s Gradients of Detail, I virtually invite you to take a lil break, a lil tea, a lil walk a lil (tini) cigi—and then come back. [ do come back ]

Gradients of Detail (2005-6)

From 2005–2006, Gradients of Detail hasn’t aged a day. This was the first piece I heard by Chiyoko, and the one I tried to write about during my bachelor’s studies, i.e. a century ago.6 It’s time to revisit it today. The recording was released in 2013 on World Edition, and we’ll use this video as our reference. Viel Spaß, & feel free to take notes and train your listening along with me.

(just listening)

Alright, some first rough listening impressions of this bombastic piece:

• It is radical in its primary focus on tones, dry approach to timbre (no extended techniques, no vibrato, allowing beatings to surface transparently), and overall steady/uniform dynamics, without any traditional climax. That being said, with its plateaux (sustained chords), shifts (straight glissandi) and silences, the music has a sense of direction. Sounds start ‘from somewhere and going somewhere’, emerging from silence with intensity and assertiveness, but without accent.

• the quartet moves in and dropping out of unison, in and out of harmonic fusion (those “pockets of light”). Most of the time, the quartet sounds like a single voice: always aligned, always moving together through dense, shimmering textures. Because of the closeness of the tones and the complexity of beating patterns and harmonic fusion, it is often difficult/irrelevant to distinguish “who does what.” But occasionally, one instrument emerges from these dense textures, sounding against the other three (for instance). The music is also interspersed with quieter, more enigmatic sections in which some instruments appear more “isolated” and exposed.

quick bird view on the score

Without delving into its main, tonal material, here is what can be noticed in the score:

• opening instructions, including the sharp and beautiful line: “expressiveness should be avoided — the form of the material is the expression”. boom.

• Written parameters of:

  • durations, in seconds and bars consisting of blocks of 0’15”, 1’00” per staff;

  • steady, uniform dynamics of mf on all the voices (except two pppp on cello)

  • articulations: mostly absent, except for the following mention, Chiyoko’s style: “sustains should have a clear articulation at the beginning, but not emphasized”. We also find individual and collective, relatively short decrescendo throughout the piece (= Chiyoko’s attention is mainly focused on the way sound ends on a given voice); and a few, intentional, individuated pizz on the viola and violin II parts.

  • rare occurrences of string indications of harmonics or normal strings

Gradients of Detail’s drawings

The drawings can be read as a chronological sequence: left to right, with silences suggested by the spaces between blocks of lines, and the vertical axis corresponding to pitch height. They reflect Chiyoko’s orchestration intelligence, since they are conceived in direct relation to the intended instrumentation of the piece. May sounds basic, but it’s not. Most often we find 4 lines—sometimes up to ±6-8, indicating the distribution of 1 string/tone per instrument and potential double stops. We see the voices merging into and diverging out of unison, while generally remaining in the mid-register (again consistent with a string quartet). Except at the very end of the piece, the lines tend to move upward, with a recurring lower, thinner line in the low register in the second drawing. Note that the lines are generally firm, except at the ends of sections where the upper blocks of lines loosen, and at the end of the piece, where all lines appear thinner, more fragile. [also: these drawings are beautiful as artworks ]

composing: interpretation/scaling the drawings into sustained, rationally tuned intervals

Gradients of Detail employs economical yet rigorous means of translating drawing into sound. The proportional mapping of the drawings—horizontally into duration, vertically into microtonal intervallic ratios—operates almost as a kind of analog wave shaping, where the contour of the line directly informs the evolution of harmonic and temporal structures. This mapping is not ‘sonification’ in an algorithmic sense, but nonetheless a precise, numerically-oriented transduction of spatial relations into tonal ones. Following Tenney’s and other JI lineages, Szlavnics uses “ratios as a network of interrelated pitches connected to each other through direct […] or indirect mathematical relationships”. More peculiarities of Gradients of Detail harmonic space:

• Although they are superimposed and/or alternate throughout the piece, the denominators of the ratios= the “roots” (or what I call “tonal centers”) are fixed: A, B (more rarely) C, D, E (more rarely), G. Chronologically, the piece mostly revolves around C/ G/ D as tonal centres at the beginning; and ratios based on A tend to be more present towards its last two minutes.

  From this clear, simple “pentatonic” basis, Chiyoko proceeds to a branching out of ratios in harmonic space, in a way that is complex and very clever:

• Within each 15’00” bar, we find very close intervals with usually rather high nominators (mostly above 7). Sometimes, the root of the ratio remains the same and neighboring nominators are introduced sequentially on one individual part, but more often than not, the roots change and are mixed together both sequentially and across the different parts of the piece.

Let’s make sense of all that by briefly listen and look at score of the the first 45 seconds of the piece:

We encounter the following tones: 14/13/12:D and 16/15:A. In case this helps, here is a scheme with ratios:

vln1 :  13:D (B-61c)      →   14:D (C-33c) (// vla)                                        → 1:C (-6c)
vln2 : 15:A (G# -12c)   → 1:A (0c) ( // vlc)      → (silence)  → 14:D (C-33c) 
vla   :  14:D (C-33c)    [ → 14:D   ]                    → 1:A 
vlc   :   1:A                     [ → 1:A      ]                                      [  → 1:A doubled ]

Root-wise, the first violin revolves around intervals built from D before moving to C; the second violin begins with intervals from A and D; the viola starts on root D and then shifts to A; and the cello remains anchored on A. This interweaving process produces voices that move in and out of unison, while also ensuring tunability across the instruments and allowing for a wide variety of tones. It is a beautifully ingenious way of “travelling” through harmonic space, also in consideration with each instrument’s range and tunability (particularly when double stops are involved).

Now, in the piece as a whole, we may encounter numerators anywhere between 4 and 22. I was initially tempted to do a statistical analysis of when more complex ratios appear, as I have with other pieces by Tenney, Barlow,7 and others. More interesting would have been the analysis of the translation between the ratios of the drawings, and the ratios of the intervals in the score. But the truth is: there are no external “rules” that explain why Chiyoko’s initial drawing was translated into these specific ratios, or why they unfold as they do throughout the piece, beyond the drawing itself and Chiyoko’s artfulness. This mysterious mapping is everything—and I love it so much. We must approach these aspects of the piece with reverence and respect, for they are not meant to be analyzed or explained; we, dear reader, are not meant to “know.” There is no need to know.

drawing and spectral analysis (16’00”- 18:30”)

Just for fun: let’s see how precise the translation is from: drawing, to sounding in the recording, to spectral analysis. [ and this, dear reader, will be proof of what composition can be like: the genius of composing, the creativity, precision, endless devotion and rewriting of perspectives of a single “idea”, until its realization is complete. enjoy ]

drawing

From this drawing, here is what we can expect in the music: 5 distinct pitches and equidistant/evenly spaced, sustained for a while, joining together at the same speed to one single pitch, holding that unison for a while, before moving as one single voice upwards, sustaining that pitch for a while, and then separating into 4 different voices: 3 upper ones (pitches close to each together) and one lower voice way bellow.

listening to the excerpt

For logistic reasons, I won’t include excerpts of the score but here is what I can say (and what we can all mostly hear in the recording):

• 16’00”: Beginning on a chord built over 5 pitches based on B and E, with a double stop on Vl1, and one pitch per instrument otherwise. The 5 initial pitches are: F#+6c, E+2c, E-55c, a D#-10c and an A-29c [not exactly equidistant in harmonic space. unfortunately, i don’t have the time or resources to get into this whole topic of intervallic distances in the piece, and how that differs with the perception of equidistance (or not) when listening to the tones together ] [ but if there is an invitation from you, i might proceed ]

• 16’30”: unison of the 4 voices on F#, all moving together to E at 17’00'“

• the cello drops its sound at 17’15” ; the 3 others continue to their ascension from 17’23” up to G# until 17’53” and sustain it until 18’00.

• at 18’15”, a lower A appears on the cello (corresponding to the the lower line in the drawing) and the 3 other parts start to separate from each other to different tones.

Let’s see now go full circle and compare the initial drawing with a spectral analysis.

[ prepare your astonishment ]

spectral analysis

Do I need to say more? Nein. Regardless of the ideas, genres, aesthetics etc, very few people can claim to come full circle—from their initial visions to the completed piece. This= the precision of the proportions of intervals and durations, the delicacy of the orchestration, and how it all sounds, is nothing short of astounding. But while Gradients of Detail’s spectral visualization comes incredibly close to the original drawings, the latter do not represent sounds one to one, and that remains true. To me, the music remains forever impossible to fully “picture” or grasp, resulting in a fundamentally disorienting listening experience. Super fascinating.

Voilà, dear reader. That’s my finishing line [= i’m out of jokes]. I’ll go enjoy Berlin’s last falling golden leaves, & see you in a few weeks for episode 2 — we’ll get cloudy

Lucie

exchanging lines for lattes

Comment va? Wie was dein Sommer? Und hallo Zeptember, schön wie eh und je

Besides the most precious friends I’ve been lucky to meet lately, another cherished companion of mine these days is big old yoga buddy. I hadn’t spent proper time on the mat in years. And you know the saying: when a fairly lazy and soft body needs to yog, the mind has no choice but to give in. Not trying to convert anyone here, but come on, yoga is certainly one of the greatest, most profound, and refined innovations humans have developed. The experience it offers is continuously humbling. My body & mind are rusty AF but with the sweat, heavy breaths, & cracking joints (mmmm) come the deeper longing and slightly wider gaze on life, oneself and others. As I linger in wobbly warriors, attempting to balance upward with downward, one side with the other [= fully given up on understanding such concepts as left & right], inward with outward, flow with stabilization, the gross with the subtle, hesitations with openings, yoga has also become a lens through which to revisit, listen to, and read music. And maybe it’s no coincidence considering the piece we’re looking at today.

So, after introducing one of his piece, Celare, here is a second post on Cenk Ergün’s music, this time on his ± 40 minute long string quartet: Yekpare. As the piece hasn’t been officially released yet (but will be, in 2026), Cenk has generously shared a wealth of information and agreed that I can share short excerpts of the video recordings and the score. For these practical reasons, I won’t discuss the piece in depth/details this time, but I’m sure we’ll get somewhere, taking a macro perspective and explore the resonances the piece has within our current musical context. We’ll see how far I can go with this. Om. Inhale. Exhale. Chaturanga, updog, downdog—and you know, let’s all just stay in downdog for a moment, exploring the form, nice & steady, while reading this very short post. u’ve got this.

[ / little reminder of where we landed last time ]

Let me return to where we left off last time. My perspective was to explore the kind of mirroring between psychological processes on the one hand, and compositional logics on the other—how both can serve as conduits for cycles of individuation (whether of a person or a piece). More specifically, I became curious to consider Cenk’s work as a case study in the musical expression of post-migration subjectivity, where identity is never fully stable but constantly re-learned and re-heard. It is as if one revisits, again and again, the impossibility of grasping “identity,” while remaining open to the many facets that “identity” can take in music at a given moment.

In that sense, each musical or personal “reference” in Cenk’s music seems to have arrived in its own time—rather than being rushed into a ready-made synthesis of influences. His work gives space for these references to surface—whether in individual pieces, scores, or even across decades, as in the ten years separating Celare (2016) and Yekpare (2023). Both pieces are rich with references from diverse times, geographies, and traditions, yet they reveal radically different relationships to Turkish makam [note: makam = Turkish, maqam = Arabic]. Yekpare is, in this sense, more assertive; less polite, one might say [i like]. Through this renewed engagement with its source, Yekpare glows with an unapologetic musical confidence.

Alzzzzo. Let’s take a step back and cast a distant gaze on how the piece was built, how it came into being (without, as usual, any claim to exhaustivity). But first, let’s listen to excerpts performed by the unapologetic JACK Quartet.

broaden ur shoulders

Multilayered references to the pieces — what a piece is made of

As Cenk explained, Yekpare is the result of many musical and non musical influences. First, its title was inspired from Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s poem from 1933, Ne İçindeyim Zamanın [which was hanging for a year on Cenk’s wall while composing the piece ] and its first lines:

Neither am I inside time, nor entirely outside; / In the indivisible flow of a monolith [ yekpare ], vast moment.1

What’s particularly striking about this inspiration is that Tanpınar’s literature often grappled with the tension between Ottoman-Islamic cultural heritage and the modern, secularizing Turkish Republic. His writing frequently drew on Sufi imagery, blending traditional Islamic sensibilities with existential and aesthetic reflections—always as a cultural observer rather than a religious practitioner. This is especially telling in relation to Cenk’s approach to Yekpare, where he was listening not only to polyphonic chansons like Trebor’s Passerose de Beauté and Alice Coltrane’s radiant Kirtan: Turiya Sings, but also embracing what he himself calls “a secular infatuation with Sufi and Bektashi music [that made] its way into the piece through my non-Muslim but nevertheless spiritual lens.” At the same time, as Yekpare turned more deeply toward Turkish music, it emerged as an invitation for the listener to partake in a kind of secular ritual. During his exchanges with JACK, Cenk noted that Yekpare was shaped by pieces such as:

… or this Rast Naat composed by Mustafa Itri, totally an hymn in Turkey, especially during Ramadan + used as a prelude to almost all sufi music rituals.

[ btw: intentionally letting you listen to these pieces what you can rather than imposing any words on the experience of these pieces ]

flexibility with score, “form” & performance

The scoring of Yekpare stands in stark contrast to the more traditionally notated Celare. Its pages are colorful, “messy” yet rigorous, playful, scratched, multilayered, multidirectional, at times echoeing to notational experiments of ars subtilior, at others just free and fun. Come on, look at thaaaaat:

The score of Yekpare shows a process of exchange with musicians, who were integral collaborators rather than external observers or mere “executors” of notation.

1. It reflects the work’s roots in aural and oral transmission, emphasizing rehearsal and performance over traditional scoring. This communicative orientation is evident in the pitch notation, which can be read through six different systems: Helmholtz notation, ratios, overtone numbers, ct deviations from ET, Hertz values, and intervallic relations. + i imagine, audio recordings of the tones.

2. Such an approach situates performance and collaboration as the space where time, i.e sound, is collectively experienced and discovered.2 = The temporality of the piece is thus shaped in rehearsal, with musicians, rather than being predetermined on the page. Strikingly, while this may appear fundamental, it is mega rare in “industrial” contemporary music contexts, where limited rehearsal time barely allows performers to inhabit or uncover the temporal dimension of a work. [ this is incredibly odd ]

3. . . . & central to this figuring-out-of-time process is Cenk’s return to his concept of the “wave”: “hearing and composing long tones in waves—that is, in swells: ppp < mp > ppp.” In Yekpare, this idea is extended across parameters such as register, instrumental and harmonic density, bow position, and more—sometimes prescribed, sometimes left as suggestions.

4. Another notable feature, and one entirely consistent with the work’s ethos, is that much of the piece is performed from memory. As Cenk observed: “With nothing to look at, I felt that the quartet listened better—and this is also a reference to traditional Turkish music, which is an oral tradition performed from memory. With no stands in the way, I think the quartet also formed a very intimate relationship with the audience.” aaaah, yes x100, couldn’t agree more. It’s a super great challenge for the musicians but gosh, that makes the music so lively in Yekpare.

(ur also v flexible)

tuning & blur between harmony and melody

Lettuce turn to the core of the piece: its remarkable tuning. Since Celare, and over nearly a decade of exploring rational intonation, Cenk eventually, as if “accidentally”, returned to makam sonorities through his encounter with the multiplication of primes up to 13. As he explains:

Multiplication with primes up to 13 gives me a great variety of tones that are beautifully related, and which can create endless chains of makam sonorities. So, multiplication with 2, 3, 7, 11, 12, 13 gives me numbers like 39, 49, 77, 91, 121, 132, 143, 144, 147, 169 – which I have found to be excellent at clearly expressing subtleties of makam intonation, at least enough to serve the purposes of my music… Now I can transcribe Turkish tunes using these numbers.

One of the major inspirations for Yekpare’s sonorities came from this recording already linked above, and specifically from the makams Huseyni and Ussak3. Both share A as their tonal basis and, from my mega basic understanding, their most refined shades lie in the subtle region between A natural and B natural. In Yekpare, the core tuning is based on G [G +0 c], or 256. The primary tones are as follows:

• 9 (leading) [A +3.9 c] — or 144, 3-limit (9)

• 10 (tonic) [B −13.7 c] — or 160, 5-limit

• 11 [C −48.7 c] — or 176, 11-limit

• 189 (almost 12) [D −25.3 c] — or 189, 3-limit (9)

• 27 (dominant) [E +6 c] — or 216, 3-limit (9)

• 121 [F +2.6 c] — or 242, 11-limit

From these foundational tones arises a vast palette of additional colors or limits (−5, −7, and −13), creating a complex yet coherent tuning system always traceable back to the original makam scale of Yekpare. For example, the scale concluding the first section of the piece emphasizes the region around A and B, with no fewer than five distinct colors in that space:

Just this mini example reflects the broader compositional approach in Yekpare.

• On the one hand, it achieves a saturation of colors by repeatedly multiplying ratios within their respective limits. Especially salient colors include:

  • 13*13 — C −18.9 ct

  • 11*11 — F# +2.6 ct

  • 7*7*7 — C +6.5 ct

• In addition, some tones function as what I might call “synthesized” or bridging colors between different limit poles. For instance, A# +42.5 ct results from G *2*7*11, while A −8.2 ct corresponds to G*11*13.

Very, very importantly, while the precise tuning of each tone is central to the piece [ the ct deviations are crézy ], Cenk approaches it with zero dogmatism or rigidity—the influences remain entirely open. As he described his palette of tones to JACK:

It’s our makam. Not Turkish, not Ottoman, not Sufi. Of course, that’s all in the DNA. But so is Feldman, Cage, Oliveros, Curran, Lucier, Tenney, Young, Alice Coltrane...

brief part by part analysis

Alright, I won’t spoil the piece for you, but here’s a sneak peek into its main sections. Originally, Cenk envisioned Yekpare as a “monolithic” series of chords, like those in its first and last sections, unfolding in slow waves. It feels to me that this approach soften or diffuse the references to makam while making them more accessible for those who are ready to hear them. Indeed, the slow, swelling, reductive material is particularly suited to reveal the subtlety and richness of the tuning variations beneath, allowing the listener to linger in it. However, when Cenk mapped his pitch collection onto a keyboard and played them rapidly and monophonically, a new dimension door opened. This faster material was incorporated into the middle of the piece, aligning perfectly with his approach [ which also sounds like a great slogan ]: “Melodizing harmony instead of harmonizing melody.”

Part 1 — Dem

• Dem refers to a form of Sufi group meditation in which players drone on the lowest tone of the ney flute for extended periods. In Yekpare, Dem revolves around the tetrachord: 91 (C# +9.4 c), 121 (F# +2.6 c), 143 (A −8.2 c), and 169 (C −18.9 c). Microtonal differences in intonation are treated not as technical feats but as melodic, expressive, and, in my experience, simple “heart-opening” elements.

• The section begins and ends with all 4 instruments, gradually introducing the tones of the piece interspersed with general pauses. It also features two Taksim: John Taksim, written for JACK’s violist, John, and Jay Taksim, written for Jay, the cellist [sweet]. The section results from the kinds of poetic, “merging-of-opposites” instructions that I love, and that I suspect many musicians find nightmarish: “Everything in waves / Waves in everything”, “one tone per instrument for relative stasis / 4 tones alternating on each instrument for relative flux”, “waves of single VS double stops. waves of sordino; waves of bow position, pressure speed, etc”.

• Notably, ornamentation is absent, emphasizing a precise tonal exploration.

explore ur breath

Part 2 — Zikir

This middle section, exhilarating and rhythmical, marks a clear and unexpected shift in the music. Borrowed from Sufi meditation practice, the term Zikir refers to a form of meditation that overlaps with Hindu and Buddhist mantra traditions, involving repetition of words, melodies, rhythms, breath, and movement. As you might guess, the aim of both the practice and this section is to alter consciousness: to reach a state of trance or ecstasy, followed by a sense of wellbeing, clarity of thought. Reflecting this, Cenk noted that he could imagine this section being repeated for an hour or longer, allowing the music to allowing the music to fully support listeners in reaching the highest of the highest realms. [ i’m not even joking: i did feel so shocked and high the first time i listened to this section — like ‘w o w’. ]

• The fixed six-tone scale for this section is: 132 (G# −46 c), 143 (A −8.2 c), 144 (A +3.9 c), 156 (A +42.5 c), 168 (C −29.2 c), and 169 (C −18.9 c), again concentrating the material within the condensed pitch region around A and B.

• The section is organized into 2 main recurring subsections:

  • (a) Primarily regular repetitions of a four-tone scale (excluding the Cs), with mostly ascending motions and occasional “syncopated” rhythms.

  • (b): Introduces the full six-tone scale (including the Cs) through downward more melodic motions, syncopated rhythmic cells. Super exhilarating.

  • (c): a slower melodic motif of the Zikir, made of waves of successively ascending and descending scales — very vocal, vibrant and slightly (= tastefully) ornamented, especially in its last/conclusive appearance.

• Variations are introduced through instrumentation: cello solos, tutti played loco (at the notated pitch), and tutti with different transpositions (violins at 8va or 15ma, viola loco, cello at 8 basso). They also arise from textural shifts, ranging from bare tones to more and more bow pressure. Overall, this section gets louder, denser, brighter. The build-up is super effective, particularly through the dynamic curves (waves) from p to f in the repeating subsequences (a), giving the music more and more intensity until finding release in (b).

For both Cenk and JACK, Zikir is the most vulnerable and difficult section of the piece, and that is precisely what I find most compelling. Performing it requires a willingness to be open to / confront discomfort and the risk of sounding. . . “other”. This is striking because it remains rare to hear Western contemporary musicians engage with non-Western-inspired works, and equally rare to hear non-Western musicians approach contemporary compositions that draw from, but slightly deviate from, their traditional repertoires. In this light, any such uncomfortable bridges are in and of themselves interesting, valuable, and crucial, provided they are built on mutual respect and genuine curiosity. JACK did great.

Part 3 — Hayal

For Cenk, Hayal refers not only to the Arabic word meaning “image,” “mirage,” or “soul,” but also a genre of Hindustani music. “In the context of Yekpare, it is the state we arrive at after Zikir – clarity of mind… a clear perspective on the past and the way forward amid an aura of shapes… where all types of combinations of tones which before might have been out of place, can now come alive.” I must admit, this section gives me goosebumps so I won’t even attempt to analyze it too deeply. In a few words, it opens to wider pitch ranges, where harmonics and always light, subtle and retrained bass intersect, and denser, more focused mid-range swells and ascending scales, before concluding the piece with three descending trichords.

As Celare, Yekpare is tastefully composed, never climatic and yet. I hadn’t felt that much exhilaration and release in a piece in a long while. Alright cocos, that’s that: you’ll have to experience the rest yourself at the next performance of Yekpare. Let’s move on to some concluding thoughts. [ longer than expected ]

yes, stay for another 1, 2....

polarized listening VS permission to explore

As I was initially searching online for a program note about the piece, I came across a review [won’t link it] by an “educated” NYC writer/musician who attended the premiere of Yekpare. [sorry Cenk & all, i promise there is a point to be made ] The reviewer wrote Yekpare “was like Romanticism, but with all the wrong notes”. A constructive start.

There were quartertones and ultra-dissonances, but many times when they played together, an amorphous cloud of sound would resolve rather nicely into a fairly conventional cadence. There was also an attempt at melody […]. I think I even heard a fragment of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”… At times, it felt even rock’n roll, while one viola passage evoked a folk fiddler playing something that could have been out of Bartok.

Okay pause here: I don’t want to ridicule the writer [that was the very last review he wrote anyway]. But this paragraph, written in 2023 (!) illustrates a narrow, Eurocentric + conservative listening perspective—one lacking reference points outside the Western musical canon and thus ‘missing the whole point’ of the piece. Not only do such review not do justice to Yekpare and, I imagine, many more pieces of new music, but it also shows how stuck the reviewer is to engage with repertoires they are not familiar with.

Allow me dear reader, as usual, to take the risk to sound cliché. In the new music field or elsewhere, we all the capacity to cultivate this openness, curiosity and thirst for otherness — a deep appreciation for each other’s meandering paths in music and beyond, each other’s ways of writing, listening & being. And to me, this deep appreciation and acknowledgement of what is “other” provides the foundation for meaningful discussions about diversity and inclusivity in music. Without it, we risk boxing ourselves and others, defending our musical territories, traditions, and interests. & do we need that today Alfredo? noooOOoOOOoOOoooo. When this deep appreciation is present, however, something transformative can occur: what once seemed distant or alien can suddenly feel intimate, and what appeared “other” can become profoundly close.

+ While past encounters between Western and non-Western music were rare, these intersections are now unfolding more frequently and dynamically in the experimental music scene. Chosing to be mega optimistic: just as the presence of female and non-binary composers has grown, so too will the normalization of such ‘diverse’ pieces. Learning to ‘listen to’ this diversity is no longer optional; & nor is cultivating clarity about the contexts and lives we engage with. For instance, composing with makam/maqam scales today does not mean the same as it did 10, or even 2 years ago (yes). By zooming in and out, from the personal to the collective, and back, we eventually all face our biases, however uncomfortable that may be. Cultivating this honesty and openness in the ‘harmless’ music field [or on this harmful yoga mat] is always a meaningful, luminous place to begin.

[ let's sigh together ]

Another side of the picture. My dear friend has recently shared this post by about the Politics of Maqam Scales and the Decolonization of Music Studies. The article is rich, insightful, and thought-provoking/confronting in many ways and very, very much needed. Do read it. As Sami writes in his article:

The representation of scales as mathematically determined is inherently political, creating hierarchies of correctness and authority. When applied in a colonial situation, these assertions of authority through mathematics are a tool of White Supremacy, fostering exploitation and appropriation, denying agency to colonized peoples, and enabling cultural erasure, one of the accomplices to genocide.

Here is a response/contribution—take it for what it’s worth. For some of us, non 100% Western but Western-educated composers, approaching makam/maqam or other traditions through numbers is a way of ‘decolonizing’ ourselves. It is an attempt to reconnect with what our bodies resonate with, even if our minds have been Western-washed, sometimes by dysfunctional education systems. For Cenk, myself, and other mathematically inclined composers with non-Western roots, numbers have been a neutral entry point, a kind of playground, to rediscover our ‘colors’—in music, in scores, and sometimes even in our own skin. = structuring scales through numbers can serve goals close to those Sami Abu Shumays defends: reclaiming a heritage that felt lost, and resisting cultural erasure [ & more ], and carry a deep, deep reverence for these traditions though our unorthodox pieces. Here are Cenk’s own words, drawn from his exchanges with JACK and our brief email correspondence — a very sharp and balanced pespective imo:

20 years ago if you told me I would be thinking about makam, I would have laughed at you. Today I know it's an undeniable part of my musical DNA - even if I had no formal training in it. … makam was never been my goal with JI, but more and more, it has revealed itself as an arrival point I had been unconsciously traveling towards. I don’t advocate JI as a sufficient system to fully theorize about makam. But JI gives us access to these tones so we can play with them in our own terms.

Personally speaking, working with JI and Arab music has only widened what feels like an abyssal distance between the music I make and the music I love. It brought the heartbreaking question of why I was disconnected from Arab music in the first place. That distance, however, is what I am willing to work with and openly acknowledge [ + care for] in my music. No matter how ambiguous and amateurish the music may appear, at least I can keep learning to refine my stance and hold all its no-man’s-lands and contradictions. Cenk’s music has definitely given me the courage to embrace that standpoint even further.

coffee is cool though

Bon beeeeh voilà. I want to send my warmest, most positive thoughts and a HUGE THANK-YOU to Cenk for sharing and trusting this publication with his music. It has been such a treat and a amazing learning experience. I am deeply grateful and look forward to hearing your next works. And thank you all for reading & listening.

Simple love then, ni + ni -,

Lucie

multi ps: 1) EU-based friends: JACK will be perform Cenk’s music on 01.11.25 in Essen (DE)= be there or be square. 2) Berlin friends: i’ll be there some time during the fall, let’s be in touch. 3) URL friends: here is a very recently released piece by Cenk to wrap it all up

4) for you who are still reading, well you’re a sticky stalker at this point, so here is a sticky special gift: an excerpt from the story of the three non-existent princes.

Once upon a time in a city which did not exist, there were three princes who were brave and happy. Of them two were unborn and the third was not conceived. Unfortunately all their relatives died. The princes left their native city to go elsewhere. Very soon they fell into a swoon unable to bear the heat of the sun. Their feet were burnt by hot sand. The tips of grass pierced them. They reached the shade of three trees, of which two did not exist and the third was not even planted. After resting there for some time and eating the fruits of those trees, they proceeded further. They reached the banks of three rivers; of them two were dry and in the third there was no water. The princes had a refreshing bath and quenched their thirst in them. They then reached a huge city which was about to be built. Entereing it, they found three palaces of exceeding beauty. Of them two had not been built at all, and the third had no walls. They entered the palaces and found three golden plates; two of them had been broken into two and the third had been pulverised. They took hold o f the one which had been pulverised. They took ninety-nine minus one hundred grams of rice and cooked it. They then invited three holdy men to be their guests; of them two had no body and the third had no mouth. After these holy men had eaten the food, the three princes partook of the rest of the food cooked. They were greatly pleased. They thus lived in that city for a long time in peace and joy.

( may we all lavishly, non-existently proceed further )

Thank you for being back here, and welcome to the weird zone again.

So. Here we are, our hearts shattered — aren’t they. As they keep breaking open, it feels like we’re all in some collective gestation phase, layering slowness with urgency, actively, continuously deciding and discovering how (ir)responsible we are with the life growing within us, around us, how far we can (must) grow alongside it. I wish us all the best kind of luck and the quiet determination to keep growing.

In the meantime, allow me to lift your spirits, even just a little [/ make you regress ].

Today’s post is a special one, for at least 2 reasons:

• It marks my very first two-part post series. I might start spreading some posts out in the future, to go a little deeper into certain topics [ + sneak in my repertoire of stupid jokes ] [ pouet pouet ]. Ironically, though, posts won’t get any shorter.

• This specific series was partly sparked by the dis ce que platform—which still blows my mind. The composer we’ll explore today found my earlier posts and reached out before I even had the chance to ask. He kindly agreed to have his music featured here, along with some extras I’ll be sharing with you, dear reader. So, this little branching-out moment is very touching — and a good reason to keep writing non-sense, because sometimes that’s where virtuous circles begins.

Allez Jean-Claude, on désenfle ses chevilles, on pose sa brouette et son arrosoir, on prend son courage à deux mains et sa plus belle plume. ô rage, ô désespoir,

ô manifesting love, positive cashflow & successful business announcements

• you now have the possibility to buy me coffee here: https://coff.ee/disceque

• i’m currently gathering ideas to organize reading/support sessions with you on themes dear to dis ce que= music-making + (mostly) everything surrounding it. if any of you are curious and/or want to contribute, put your hands up

encountering Cenk’s music (while writing mine)

This story begins with the string quartet I’m currently writing for Quatuor Bozzini.
That project was, and still is, hmmm a little confronting. I’ve always walked this thin, precarious line where my non-conventional musical path and beginner’s mind are either my greatest strength or my downfall. I’m not quite sure which side I’ll land on this time. Let’s just say: this piece has brought up every part of music-making I find difficult: notation, communicating with performers, and other technical things. And honestly, I’m not sure I’ll find the fix for it all. Continuing with my gestation/parenting metaphor: no matter the food fed, the lullabies sung, the diapers endlessly changed, the tenderness nested in between, this baby of a piece keeps needing to be soothed. And yeah, that’s it, you know. Sometimes, writing a piece feels like sticking with a screaming baby (or teenager) and learning to love the process anyway. [ reminder: u are the bébé ] [ oh i kno we’re all cringing at this point ] [ the discomfort of softness ]

Three extraordinary things have already come out of this project: a) basking in the hot-ness of Montréalais people, tabernacle b) truly, truly, remarkable conversations about music-making [ hugs to David, Nirantar, Julia, and Niko ] c) Zosha Di Castri’s suggestion that I listen to Cenk Ergün’s work, which I followed upon returning from my residency last June. That’s when I first encountered his work—and, in a way, silently befriended him through his music, before knowing anything about him as a person. I say befriended because his music gave me a profound sense of relief and renewed momentum; the kind of inspiring, gently destabilizing support you only receive from a friend. His music seemed to offer a kind of mirroring I had long been searching for: a precise, almost uncanny form of shared acknowledgement/reconciliation with things/inner experiences I had been trying to articulate in my own work, without yet being able to name them. One of those was the near-absence, and the resulting need for reinvention, of a contemporary music language grounded in non-Western performance, modal systems, and tuning practices.

So. Let’s shall, shall we? As usual, we’ll start with a look at Cenk’s bio and a brief introduction to his music—plus a few personal thoughts and sprinkles along the way.

share the cake

Cenk Ergün’s bio / music

Cenk [pronounced “Jenk”] Ergün is a Turkish composer and improviser based in NYC, whose work spans it all: acoustic and electronic music, live performance, collaborations with musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, and sound installations.

Born in 1978 in İzmit and raised in Istanbul, he grew up surrounded by Western classical music but non only. As a teenager, he picked up classical guitar while immersing himself in metal, rock, and contemporary music—and became fluent in English along the way. Clearly brilliant, he was accepted to Eastman School of Music at 17, where his work—already minimalist, dry, and provocative, earned him the self-described title of “black sheep.” He then went to Mills College for his Master’s at 21, where he studied with Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, and Pauline Oliveros.

Between 2002-2003, Cenk went through a period of what I call positive disintegration — literally getting lost, walking around California, and eventually returning to Istanbul. These non-linear meanderings, so characteristic and precious to gifted minds, coincided with the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the growing prevalence of racism toward people of Middle Eastern descent, like himself. Still, in 2004, Cenk (courageously) returned to the U.S., where he began teaching audio engineering. Fast forward to 2010: he started a PhD in composition at Princeton, where he later taught. More recently, after a few years spent in Berlin, Cenk is now based in NYC again, continuing to teach and compose, while maintaining ties with the Berlin scene and collaborators like those in the Harmonic Space Orchestra.

In his own words, Cenk is “interested in building near-static sound fields made up of repeated patterns, sustained tones, and what can be called islands of sound: brief sound events surrounded by silence.” To me, his aesthetic signature could be described as an interplay between two distinct yet interconnected modes: on one hand, sparse, kaleidoscopic forms (his “islands of sound”) where precision in tuning is subtly veiled beneath soft, delicate timbral textures and slow mutations; on the other, more transparent patterns and uniform timbres, where tuning emerges more assertively and clearly. This alternation doesn’t feel like a division, but rather a process of individuation: a weaving together of complementary opposites in pursuit of balance. Throughout it all, a certain quality of silence remains ever-present, permeating his music with a sense of spaciousness and quiet intensity.

I’ve chosen two different string quartets by Cenk, written roughly ten years apart. Today, we’ll focus on the first: Celare. As always, I don’t claim to offer an exhaustive/academic analysis, rather an introduction shaped by my own subjective lens that might spark your curiosity to dive deeper. [ + in all honesty, the depth of my analytical/writing capacity was inversely proportional to my overwhelming bias and goosebump reaction to the pieces ]. Alright dear coco, on y go.

add sprinkles

Celare (2014-5)

Illustrative of Cenk’s two-sided signature, Celare is the twin piece of Sonare. Both pieces were written for the JACK Quartet during 2014-5 and are Cenk’s earliest works written in alternate tuning systems. If Sonare is a dense, buzzing, microtonal piece composed through rhythm patterns using Max/MSP1, Celare is a much sparser, quieter piece. Listen here [ +link with score available here ]

Celare’s reference sonorities & tuning

Originally, Celare’s sonorities were informed by early string quartet music, in particular Sonata a quattro No. 4 by Scarlatti.

Cenk explained that while experimenting with frequency ratios and reframing early European musical references through the lens of just intonation, he "stumbled upon" melodic fragments reminiscent of Turkish modes. 2 [ofc, this kind of stumbling is never entirely coincidental ]. This meeting point between early European and Turkish music, shaped by the influence of the American school of rational intonation, forms the foundation of Celare's scale and tuning system.

The piece’s clarity and precision of tone are achieved by focusing throughout on a single 12-tone scale, mostly colored by septimal (7-lim) intervals, with touches of 13-lim and 11-lim harmonics — echoing the finely calibrated microtonal systems found in Turkish tuning. There’s also a single nod to a -5-limit interval. More precisely, the scale is based on A (0 ct) and includes a 3-lim tetratonic anchor: the pivot tones C, D, G, and A. From this foundation, additional tones branch out, derived from or approximating the harmonic series of:

• D (7th harmonic = C -33 cents),

• G (7th = F -35 cents, 11th = C +47 cents, 13th = E -63 cents),

• C (5th = E -20 / -31 cents, 7th = B♭ -37 cents, 13th = A -65 cents).

My general sense is that the micro-intervallic differences in tuning (particularly between tones like C, E, and A) function not only in harmonic fusion when combined as chords, but also quite vividly in sequence, that is, in melodic “isolation.” Moreover, as we’ll see, the tonalities in Celare appear with varying degrees of clarity or transparency. This depends on two key factors:
a) the timbral, dynamic, and instrumentation context in which they’re presented, and
b) the simplicity or complexity of the tone combinations from which they emerge.

In this way, tuning in the piece is not just an abstract compositional tool, but is intimately tied to, and continually reshaped by, its sonic and contextual unfolding.

a brief chronological analysis of Celare

Celare unfolds in a beautifully semi-symmetrical and fluid form, enhanced by its unmeasured temporal framework.

[0’00”-1’00”] part 1 / introduction — lively silence

The first minute of the piece features precisely tuned notes played silently by the quartet using mutes and alternating between vibrato and non-vibrato.

Jay Campbell, cellist of the JACK Quartet, described these sounds as “all vibrating and you’re hearing nothing. Then, all of a sudden, they stop. You’re focused in a different way.”3 Beyond their perceptual effects on performers’ and listeners’ attention,4 these silent notes also evoke a kind of silencing—as if the tones had been gently muted yet continued to resist in their liveliness. In other words, the silent tones don’t feel neutral; they are charged, like carrying a persistent presence and meaning.

Last but not least, the pitch material beneath these silent notes is revisited throughout the piece, emerging with varying degrees of audibility, timbral lightness, and softness.

[1’30”-6’00”] part 2 — sparse Messa di Voce

The following section5 features short, widely spaced non-vibrato tones and chords that resemble fragmented melodies revolving around E, D, F, A, C, and G, played with messa di voce, the Baroque technique of fading each bowed note in and out. The meticulous dynamics and articulations, combined with two-note motives (such as the M6/m3 between D and F -35 cents, octaves between A and A/A -65 cents, D, and F), create descending melodic fragments that generate a pendulum-like movement. Chords emerge and dissolve within silences, interspersed with softly plucked notes, primarily in the cello part.

As a listener, one experiences fragmentation both horizontally, through these broken melodic events unfolding over time, and vertically, as the melodic material travels across different voices in the quartet. Amid this fragmentation, “pivot notes” can be discerned, guiding subtle modulations within the fragments.

Although the main chords and building blocks of this section are fundamentally consonant—based primarily on P5/P4 —dissonance emerges on two distinct levels:

• micro level: when two pitches are doubled with slight accidental deviations. This mostly occurs around Es (E–20ct, E–63ct, F–35ct), As (A 0ct, A –65ct), and Cs (C –33ct, C +47ct).

• macro level: when chords are spread across a wider pitch range and combined with brighter, more ethereal timbres—mainly harmonics and flautando.

Towards the end of the section, the pizz notes on the cello gradually moves to the forefront, culminating in a solo passage played in a “guitar-like” style. This solo features three descending scales of three notes each, marked by very precise micro-intervallic differences. You’ve guessed it by now: these plucked scales evoke “relics of [Turkish] monophonic music”, reminiscent of ajnas — the building blocks of maqam.

This section ends with silent notes as in the piece’s introduction — only this time, with different pitches/octaves and played without mutes [ every detail counts ]

[ every detail counts ]

[6’00” - 7’45”] part 4 — introducing sustained, naive-like in-between chords and scales

This part expands on the previous material, evolving into more continuous, block-like chords. What can I say. This section is lovely [lol, not even trying to be objective]. Cenk introduces what feel like “naive” chords that shift into ajnas-like ascending and descending scales of 3, 4, or 5 notes, repeated several times. I say “naive” because Cenk dares to present this minimal material with such delicate care, working with an overall timbre that is slightly muffled, quiet, and very restrained.

[ Cenk described Celare as having “a moment in the piece which I think of as Turkish music with the piano pedal down.” could this be the one? i luv it. moving on ]

[7’45” - 14’45”] part 5 — sustained chord progression

This section begins by freezing one descending scale from the previous material and reframing some of the ajnas into a (no longer “naive”) succession of slightly louder, denser, and more compact sustained chords in a lower pitch register. Revisiting the piece’s tuning through these longer durations is especially effective and moving.

Without going into the details of its [ stunning ] chord progressions, here are some notable aspects of this section:

• The chords begin as very compact structures built from adjacent tones within a perfect fifth or less and including micro-intervallic differences between pitches. As the section develops, these chords are harmonically spread out, while still preserving those subtle microtonal deviations.

• The anchor pitches of the progression are C and E (in all their tonal “shades”), with touches of G, F (treated almost as a “sub-color” of E), and B♭ (similarly acting as a “sub-color” of C).

• A central feature is the emphasized septimal color, particularly highlighted by the cello tuning its C string down by 31 cents. This allows for a moment of “mixtured unison” around C, where violins and cello sound C natural, C –33 cents, and C +47 cents simultaneously. When the cello eventually retunes its C string back to C natural, the contrast enhances the perceptibility of the septimal color and its accompanying beating patterns, making them shine even more vividly. In Cenk’s words, “seemingly static on the surface, there is a kinetic energy in each chord”.

• Much could be said about the way the instruments enter and exit, sometimes creating a kind of spectral masking between them, at other times emphasizing the subliminal presence of ajnas and their ascending/descending trajectories woven into sustained tones. For example, in m. 140–141, we hear the two violins play a three-note descending ajna, which they then sustain—melody and harmony intertwining and amplifying one another.

• Even as the material becomes denser and more resonant, the piece never reaches a climax. The music remains contained and restrained, which, paradoxically, makes it all the more moving.

[14’45” - 16’30”] part 6 — (incredibly) soft return to sparse textures

As we are now fullbodily attuned to the pitch colors of the piece, the next section introduces clearer, block-like chords built from the same material, but now gradually transposed into higher and higher octaves. These chords are interspersed with single notes (or very light chords) that pass delicately among the four instruments, and with general pauses — silences in which the previous section seems to continue resonating internally.

Timbrally, this section acts as a synthesis of everything that came before. It traces a kind of envolée, both in pitch and its increasingly delicate disappearance of sound. It begins with ordinario bowing, shifts progressively toward higher and higher harmonics, and finally dissolves into silently fingered notes.

This is pure gold, pure gold, dear reader.

Toward the end of the section, the cello quietly reintroduces a single pizzicato and the small two-note melodic motive from the opening —this time descending from D5 to a lower D4 (or E4 -20ct), preparing for Celare’s epilogue.

[16’30”- 17’00”] part 7 / epilogue-”coda” — further unveiling of Kanun references

Far from being anecdotal, the final 30 seconds of the piece feel especially decisive. In this closing section, a heterophonic texture emerges: a single melodic line shared between violin II and the cello, always revolving around and ascending from C (-33 and/or nat) and D, while violin I and viola sustain C natural and G -27ct.

These final bars brings the non-Western musical references in the piece more clearly to the surface. The score explicitly cites the kanun as a reference, reflected not only in the pizzicato timbres of the violin II and cello, but also in the rhythmic and pitch “geography” of the melodies. I also hear the reintroduction of mutes as a subtle timbral nod to Arabic violins (keman). Cenk also described this “strange coda” as “informed by the cyclic rhythmic modes (usul) in traditional Turkish music. Without knowing why, I wanted to end the piece with this seemingly irrelevant gesture.”

Much like the silent vibratos in the opening, this return of the mutes weaves a full-circle metaphor. These more audible references to Turkish music feel offered à demi-mots — half-spoken, or as the score itself notes, “everything tip-toeing” — which, to me, makes them all the more profound & moving.

phenomenology of silence and fragmentation in the piece

Silence and fragmentation strike differently in Cenk’s music.

For him, silence functions as a “fundamental tool for shaping our experience of time”. In other words, it is self-reflective. At first glance, one might draw a parallel with Cage or the Wandelweiser composers, who also foreground silences in their work. But in Cenk’s case, are not “dissociative,” dreamy, or open-ended but feel sharp, saturated, imprinted with an unspoken personal significance. There’s a tension in them, as if they are holding something back. Some listeners might miss this subtle quality; but for those who feel it, it cuts deep.

My sense is that this quality of silence, and the fragmentation that accompanies it in Cenk’s music, reflects a process of inner and geographical dislocation and of reintegration. And the silences in Celare felt so poignant to me as they mirrored not only Cenk’s trajectory but also my own. It is as if the piece’s compositional language spoke directly to the psychic and geographic landscapes I’ve inhabited, consciously or subconsciously, both in life and music. In simple terms, the piece made me feel understood to the core. How cool is that.

[ = i mean: it’s astonishing. i can’t get over what music can do. if you allow me to put my rational woo woo hat for a sec: there’s a point where music operates (for listeners and composers alike) as a permeable membrane between the inner & outer, like a threshold where the personal and collective unconscious merge. music can speak of/to these places. that’s how deep, radical it can be ]

beware of what discreet pioneering may look like today

Now, the same goes with tuning/ pitch stuff. I believe the most innovative approaches to tuning are integrative — reconciling the self, exposing an inner journey of finding (or remembering) oneself through music. In that sense, the soft resurgence of maqam tonalities in Cenk’s music isn’t nostalgic, but a mutable, continually evolving intersection of histories unfolding within. As Cenk noted in an interview:

When I find things like [relics of Turkish music], I’m reminded of the intersections and exchanges among people, music, and ideas over millennia — in this case […] around the Mediterranean. This is a cultural heritage I identify with and find in my music, so I’m personally motivated to think in these terms.

In general, the reappearance of modal monophony/heterophony in today’s contemporary music raises parallel questions. Many of us — myself included — are stubbornly returning to tuning complexity and melodic simplicity as a way to recentre our work and express voices shaped by, but not limited to, non-Western musical lineages. If this material may sound “too simple” or “too homogeneous” to some, it holds meaning for us. Modal monophony/heterophony becomes shared ground for those who’ve listened across traditions and are now re-integrating non-Western traces within themselves. It’s as if our simple melodic lines whisper: “hear, there’s more to it.”

So, writing this kind of music doesn’t reflect a lack of technique. Quite the opposite — it signals the emergence of a refined and speculative technique that merges contemporary compositional codes/tools with aurally transmitted practices. When we draw from music that is a) emotionally close to us, b) only partially inherited, and c) transmitted outside of written archives, we enter something inherently experimental. This process is not auto-ethnographic (which would demand traceable sources, archives, and genealogies and seek to achieve an accurate reconstruction of some sort). But it’s closer to auto-archeology: a speculative, open-ended, sometimes subversive monologue, resulting in music that can sound disorienting or ambiguous. But often, it carries a message like: “maybe this piece was shaped by this, maybe by that, who knows — I do, and I don’t. And that’s exactly what I wish to share. ”

I want to highlight how much courage this kind of music-writing takes. It reflects resistance to being fully shaped by dominant musical voices, but more importantly, a desire to grow. That kind of inner growth isn’t defensive — it’s defenceless.

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Okééé. That was that dear reader. I hope parts of the blabla made sense [& if not, please let me know — i’m also here for feedback & dialogue] . I’ll meet you with post no. 2 in August, where I’ll be thrilled to share some precious insights into one of Cenk’s most recent pieces, which, honestly, is ze bomb. I’m deeply grateful to Cenk for his trust. Until then, I’ll leave you with another beautiful vocal work:

monophonish-ly yours, but never voiceless

Lucie

/////// for more please read/ listen to

15 question: Cenk Ergun About Alternative Tuning Systems

Cello peace, an early piece from 2002

Snares, a piece written for So Percussion

Cenk Ergün's realization of Jason Treuting's 'June'

June okay so far? Starting to feel like summer? Already glittering/sun-bathing, summer-flirting, or pétanque-ing with Pépé Jean-Claude? or maybe sunbathing while flirting with Pépé Jean-Claude?

I’m happy to finally share this long-overdue post. Today, dear reader, we’re diving into a kind of musical monument: shade/gradient by Catherine Lamb. Go grab your fancy matcha and/or overly sweet chocolate bar from Jumbo, your stylish and/or greasy glasses, your soft, heavy blanket and/or your gross, smelly, stained hoodie — and without further ado, let’s fall into the multidimensionality of Cat’s music.

(very short) bio

Catherine Lamb [Cat pour les intimes] is an American composer based in Berlin, born in 1982. While Cat carries forward the legacy of James Tenney, her musical influences reach far beyond. At the heart of her work is the interaction of elemental tonal material—especially precisely tuned intervals played at subtle volumes, allowing acoustic phenomena like combination tones, phasing, and beating to emerge naturally. She’s been steadily planting the seeds of rational intonation in her music and collaborations, notably with the Berlin-based Harmonic Space Orchestra.

I think I can speak for many composers and musicians when I say we’re deeply grateful to Cat: for being a vital source of inspiration, and a generous teacher and sharer on her own terms. Her informal, open approach to mentorship echoes that of James Tenney, but is equally shaped by her second, deeply influential mentor: Mani Kaul. Since the early 2000s, his philosophy and approach to sound and art have guided Cat’s thinking, forming a bridge into concepts closely related to Dhrupad music. [ do watch the documentary below, filmed by Mani Kaul — c’est kdo, c’est gratis & an absolute beauty of a film ]

shade/ gradient

And speaking of Mani Kaul, shade/gradient is dedicated to him. Composed in 2012, the piece marks an important moment in Cat’s early, substantial, and systematic exploration of rational tuning, focused on her main instrument, the viola, along with voice and electronics. Whether you’re familiar with the piece or hearing it for the first time, let’s listen (or re-listen) and remember just how radically intimate, minimal, and rich it is — a work that foregrounds extra-subtle shifts in resonance and intonation.

personal back story [ skip this if u’re in a rush ]

I was first introduced to shade/gradient by Edgars Rubenis, around 2018. Feeling both estranged and moved by it, I quickly asked if we could try to analyze and recreate the piece together in SuperCollider. At the time, neither of us were familiar with the world of just intonation or rational tuning; and this piece turned out to be a perfect entry point for grasping the basics of that musical language/theory.1 But back then, we could only go as far as the LP booklet allowed us, which included the score for the viola part. Since then, I’ve had the unexpected privilege of taking part in the rehearsal / transmission processes of the piece between Cat and Elisabeth Smalt in 2024, as part of the Echonance Festival. This experience offered me a completely different perspective. Not only did I gain access to the full set of materials—including the SuperCollider patches for the electronics—but, more importantly, I witnessed the precious exchange of words between Cat and Elisabeth, the way we all groped around in the dark together, before slowly, slowly finding light.

On paper/score, the building blocks of the piece are relatively simple; but the moment you begin to engage with its realization, the incredible complexity of the work quickly reveals itself. And that, dear reader, will be our path of exploration: starting from the score, moving through the electronics, touching on the unwritten instructions around how the piece is sounded, and arriving, inevitably, at some ethereal concluding thoughts [cuz u kno i can’t help it]

primary colors (fundamentals / roots)

Here is the first page of Cat’s score. You won’t find traditional notes here—only color names, each corresponding to the fundamental of a specific harmonic series. Accompanying each color is an Arabic numeral (e.g., “red 1”), indicating its position within that harmonic series, a Hertz value (such as “30 Hz”), and a set of ratios. These ratios represent the intervals formed between each pair of colors/Hertz values. For example: the interval between 30 Hz and 32.5 Hz corresponds to the ratio 12/13, while the interval between 30 Hz and 35 Hz corresponds to 6/7, and so on.

This first page demonstrates an incredible ability to distill complex information to its bare essentials, all with a clear internal logic, a strong sense of structure and transparency (+ a charming handwriting). It also reflects a synaesthetic approach to sound. Whether or not you personally subscribe to this perspective, in Cat’s world, 30 Hz (and its harmonic relatives) is interchangeable with “red,” 32.5 Hz with “yellow,” 35 Hz with “green,” 37.1875 Hz with “cyan,” 39.375 Hz with “blue,” and 48.125 Hz with “magenta.” In that sense, blending these tones may truly be akin to mixing watercolors—yielding increasingly refined, complex, and rich. . . gradients.

A few additional/personal/extrapolative observations & speculations

• All the Hertz values listed here fall below the threshold of human hearing. I love that. It suggests a kind of meta-music approach: a way of engaging with music, sound, and composition that extends beyond strictly human perception, perhaps even trusting the unfolding of the music, without the need for it to be fully heard.

• Similarly, beginning the score with these extremely low fundamentals and the micro-differences between them (ranging from 2.5 Hz to 18.125 Hz) subliminally reveals a core intention of the piece: an uncompromising exploration of micro-intervallic/comma-related precision and tonal density.

• If we zoom in on the ratios formed between these fundamentals, we can already identify different “limits” or harmonic flavors based on their prime factors: 2-limit (ratios involving the prime 2, such as 13/14), 3-limit (ratios involving the prime 3, such as 17/18), 7-limit [u get the idea], 11-limit, 13-lim and 17-lim.

In brief: quite an opening.

string tuning

The next page of the score presents the specific scordatura required for the piece, i.e. the tuning of each open string on the viola. Compared to page 1, page 2 feels like a breath of fresh air: the ratios between the strings are simple and relatable. Between string IV and III, the ratio is 2/3 (120 Hz to 180 Hz), followed by a septimal coloration between strings II and I (280 Hz to 420 Hz), themselves tuned a perfect fifth apart. The overall “colors” assigned to these four strings are also elemental: red and green.

Yet, after that initial moment of relaxation, a performer might quickly wonder [/panic] how to achieve the intervallic precision of page 1 with such a simple scordatura. And honestly, that’s exactly where the piece reveals itself as a mind-blowing exercise in tuning and listening.

adding shades & gradients (secondary ratios / branches) : a systematic exercise of tuning, string per string

The next page of the score begins with a simple instruction: “low to high.” Each string is explored systematically, from the lowest (string IV) to the highest (string I), and within each string, from its lower tones to its higher ones. This page also provides an overview of the intervals to be explored on string IV, laid out one block after another:

A performer might begin by focusing on a “pool” of tones, first between the open string and 8/9, then between 8/9 and 7/8, and finally between 7/8 and 6/7 —zigzagging between these microintervals/commas and their associated colors.2 The delineation of interval zones serves as clever and effective landmarks within each string—both as a notational strategy and as a practical consideration for tunability and finger placement. In practice [more on this in a few §], the performer isn’t expected to rigidly explore every tone on a string from low to high. Rather, they actively choose which subdivisions to explore and which tones to activate, all while maintaining the overall directional movement from low to high.

The next page, focused on string III, begins at the endpoint of string IV (red 7 / grn 6) and continues with similar subdivisions of intervals (7/8, 6/7, 8/9), while also including potential connections to other strings—through harmonics, for example.

When we turn to page 3, dedicated to string II, we find the following interval map:

By introducing references to other strings—both open strings and harmonics—the score encourages the performer to play double stops, revealing new timbral colors. For example, string I (red 14 / grn 12) can be played as an open string simultaneously with a tone from the higher section of string II. Similarly, string III’s second harmonic may be paired with tones from the midsection of string II. Conversely, string IV’s fourth harmonic can be played in rotation with tones from the lower section of string II. [ nb: hope i’m getting this right, if not please lmk as my dyslexia makes it sometimes impossible for my brain to know what is low or high, right or left etc ]

electronics on Supercollider

The electronics were programmed on SuperCollider by Bryan Eubanks [ who, btw, also composes/performs excellent music]. More than just supporting the viola score, the electronics act as a kind of navigational map and backbone for the piece. They trace the same low-to-high trajectory as the score and strictly follow its pitch material. Crucially, mirroring the performer’s meandering through the score, they’re not fixed: the electronics unfold as probabilistic sequences of randomized tones, often overlapping but also leaving space for silence. Without revealing the entire SuperCollider code, I’ll share some key snippets here & there.

synthesis — formant oscillators

Throughout the piece, a single type of synthesis is used: formant oscillators that generate harmonics around a formant frequency, designed to emulate the resonant frequency bands of the human vocal tract. This connection is especially compelling given shade/gradient’s vocal part.

To keep it brief, the formant synths in shade/gradient have several key inputs:

• a fundamental frequency, multiplied by a variable partial that changes over time.

• a formant frequency, which is also based on the fundamental but multiplied by another variable.

• a band pulse-width frequency in Hertz—essentially the same as the fundamental input—which controls the bandwidth of the formant.

This synths then pass through a bandpass filter whose resonance (quality factor, or RQ) changes linearly over time, from a narrow starting band (minimum Q) to a wider one (maximum Q). The synths are further shaped by an envelope with a short 0.1-second attack, a variable sustain, and a 0.1-second linear release, plus a bit of reverb and randomized panning. Boom.

macro perspective — synths routine

Formant synths are triggered randomly within a routine, each assigned a randomized fundamental frequency and sustained for a random duration, ± always exceeding the waiting time between triggers, ensuring these synths overlap.

For example, at the start of the piece, each synth is triggered roughly every 30 seconds, gradually accelerating to about every 13 seconds by the end of part 1 (the exploration of string IV). At the beginning of part 2 (string III), synths trigger at random intervals between 11 and 30 seconds before stabilizing around 13 seconds. Similar patterns apply to the following sections, with trigger intervals shrinking to between 1 and 7 seconds in part 4 (string 1).

Viewed statistically, the piece follows a broad arch: longer trigger intervals at the start, accelerating to shorter intervals toward the middle, and then lengthening again towards the conclusion. The durations each synth is sustained also follow a similar arch—starting longer, then shortening, then lengthening once more near the end.

It’s all beautifully & precisely crafted, giving the piece its distinctive and undeniable rhythm.

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micro perspective — parametric detail of each synth

Another meticulous aspect of the piece lies in how each synth is carved. There are 26 synths in part 1/ StrIV, 32 in part 2/StrIII, 42 in part 3/StrIV, and 29 in part 4/StrI. Overall [each of these parameters would deserve a specific statistical analysis]:

• The six fundamentals/colors (30 Hz, 32.5 Hz, 35 Hz, 37.1875 Hz, 39.375 Hz, and 48.125 Hz) appear in each section to varying degrees throughout the patch, mirroring the viola’s parts and their varying colors.

• As mentioned before, these fundamentals are multiplied by a random partial, ranging between 8 and 16 and gradually increasing as the piece progresses.

• The patch includes conditional amplitude adjustments: if the partial is below a certain threshold, the amplitude is louder; if it’s above another threshold, the amplitude is softer. This helps keeping higher tones at a soft amplitude level.

• There are also randomized panning positions (among 9 potential positions).

• A very clear linear progression occurs in the minimum resonance quality (RQ) of the bandwidth filter: this value smoothly increases over the piece, moving from low RQ ranges (between 0.025 and 0.1) up to higher ranges (between 11 and 19).

Since each synth’s parameters are manually defined, shade/gradient shows how a piece can be both probabilistic and meticulously shaped in its parametric detail.

Example of a synth at the start of part 1/strIV: the partial (4) multiplies the fundamental (35 Hz), producing a tone at 140 Hz, belonging to the color green. This tone passes through a BP filter with an RQ ranging from 0.025 to 0.1. The synth sustains between 27 and 79 sec, while the next synth triggers randomly between 29 and 43 sec:

Example of a synth at the beginning of part 4/str I — notice the change of partial (chosen between 14,15 or 16), of minQ and maxQ (random number between 7 and 17), sustain time (between 5 and 43 sec), and wait time before the next synth (between 3 and 19 sec):

Example of at the end of part 4/str I — notice the change of partial (18), minQ and maxQ (randomized between 11 and 23), sustain time (between 2 and 30 sec), and wait time before the next synth (between 1 and 5 sec):

In effect, every aspect of the electronics mirrors the structural maps laid out on each page of the score for the performer. Some might argue that the programming could be more streamlined or synthetic—but in this case, I think the pointillistic, detailed approach is entirely justified. It is consistently crafter, rather than arbitrarily manufactured, and serves the piece’s precision and clarity. And, crucially, it reflects a clear intention to break habits, to resist the lure of passive droning, an intention just as present in the electronic layer as in the performance practice.

ALRIGHT—still with me? good moment to take a little break before diving into the final stretch of our analysis.

peace bro

aural instructions: detailing the interdependent relationship between string(s), voice and electronics

Here’s an essential but unwritten aspect of the piece: the performer is invited to select and play the different tones not only on the viola, but also with their voice—sparingly, minimally, and within the limits of their vocal range. This requires developing a literal physical intimacy with the intervals, locating them on the viola’s body and one’s vocal chords, sustaining them all steadily, without vibrato.

More precisely, here are some of the unwritten performance principles I’ve gathered from listening to the piece and rehearsing it with Cat and Elisabeth:

• Cat’s use of her voice and vowel shaping in the recording is masterful—subtly mirroring the behavior of the formant oscillators and bandpass filters.

• There is a delicate interplay between with the durations of a) sustained notes & bowing of the viola b) silence c) a breath. Each tone’s entry and exit is never ‘round’: they emerge and fade as distinct layers. [ btw, the ending of the piece is phenomenal, precisely because of its simplicity & complete absence of climax ]

• That same simplicity defines the beginning: the electronics remain a quiet, steady guide; the focus rests entirely on one “voice”= one string. Double stops and vocal tones are introduced slowly, each on their own terms. [for ex, in Cat’s recording, i believe the first double stop enters at 5’50”, with much restraint]

• Later in the piece, even amidst a dense and complex mixture of tones, moments of unison emerge—brief pockets of light.

One of the most beautiful instructions given by Cat to Elisabeth when rehearsing the piece was the following: the piece is like “meandering through a forest where colors fuse or contrast. Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes light cuts through. Sometimes, you stop to look at one tree, then return to the forest as a whole.” As a performer, you focus on a single interval that draws you in, then shift back to the full texture of the piece. You move between the score and listening, tracking tones on the viola, in your voice, and in the electronics. You recall a tone, return to it, or leave it behind. You propose something new, then let it fall into silence, never holding on too tightly to any mixture produced. And this, my friend, is no less than a spectacular deed.

multiple configurations & ‘site-specific’ aspect of the piece

The piece unfolds through the interdependence that arises from the probabilistic layering of its elements (viola, voice, and electronics). The result depends on the ever-shifting configurations the piece makes possible:

• < ‘no sound’ (i.e. the sound of the room) >

• < ‘no sound’ + electronics (none/one/several tones) >

• < ‘no sound’ + electronics + string (none/single/double) >

• < ‘no sound’+ electronics+ string + voice >

Once again, the core challenge of the piece lies in cycling through and balancing these layers—allowing blocks of density to emerge, linger, and dissolve. It’s a navigation between density & clarity, silence & sound, a single pitch or unison & complex clusters, the muddiness of certain intervals & the clarity of simpler ones.

One last interesting aspect: the electronics in shade/gradient are systematically rearranged depending on the site/space, the time and length of the performance, and the speaker setup available. =The piece is conceived in relation to its environment. For example, when I was in charge of the electronics during the Echonance Festival, it was a delicate and fascinating task to find the right level. The goal was not only to balance the viola, voice, and electronics so that none would overpower the others, but also to preserve the original intensity and density of the piece while projecting it in a larger hall—very different from the intimacy of the recording.

conclusion: pieces are enriched by their transmission to others

As mentioned before, Cat has transmitted her piece to another viola player, Elisabeth Smalt, for the first time. Passing on a piece you’ve been the only one playing for years is a courageous act. It requires a great capacity to let go of your attachment to the work [ ur little bébé] and allow it to continue blossoming, with or without you. It’s not easy, but ultimately, it’s what we are all fortunate and meant to do.

Analyzing pieces—whether they are others’ works or your own, in academic or informal ways—feels to me like a continuation of this transmission process. I cannot express how grateful I have been to study pieces with friends. Perhaps this is one of my love languages: immersing myself in listening and dissecting a piece with others, or discovering it through the eyes, ears, and care of someone else. In a simple, fundamental way, these analysis remind us how we all long to understand and to be understood—in our fleeting or lasting curiosities, confusions, questions, & in what we create, perceive, conceptualize, or simply experience at a given moment in life.

All this to say: maybe this analysis has touched some of you, maybe my longing to understand and be understood has found a meeting place with yours. Consider this as a very preliminary, bird view analysis, as shade/gradient would deserve much, much more. [for ex: JI graphs with all the ratios in the piece, statistical analysis of their unfolding in the piece (score / SC patch), aspects of performance, eeeetc] 

Abruptly cutting here, Cat-style:

à la chaine-pro,

Lucie (your pépé Jean-Claude)

Alors, on se la coule douce ou ienb? between the celebration of Eastern, the Dutch Royal family, and the Fête du travail — busy weeks we’re having atm.

Today, I felt like talking about a few dance pieces I’ve encountered or even danced and that, in one way or another, relate to North Africa. Beware, dear reader: you might be in for a strange ride, uncomfortable at first (especially for me, as you’ll soon find out), but less bumpy towards the end, I promise.

1905-1912 — Egyptomania / Orientalism [ = ooops ]

uuuu yea baby, let’s begin at the source: ballet & modern dance pieces.

Skipping the Bayadère, I’ll start with a personal ‘favorite’ example of mine: the in-sa-ne Pharaoh’s Daugther. This 4-hour long spectacular ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa in 1905 and presented in Russia by the Bolshoi. It was still programmed until fairly recently at major ballet houses like the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Considering the title, one might expect a plot closer to the original Pharaoh’s Daughter story with the rescue of little baby Moses floating on the Nile River. But nein, the Pharaoh’s Daugther ballet, my dear reading friend, was actually inspired by The Roman de la Momie — a little confusion which already smells like a burning oil warehouse.

Ze plot: an English nobleman, high on opium in an Egyptian pyramid, dreams he's an ancient man who falls in love with a Pharaoh's daughter. Their epic romance defies royal duty and death, but ends as this English respectable man wakes—forever haunted by love lost in time. With his English nobleman imagination, this dude witnesses all kinds of stuff: kings and queens doing fouttés, dangerous guards showing their best développés, fishermen doing entrechats quatre, palaces, palm trees, rivers made of foam, cobras in tuttu, etc. Although sprinkled with historical inaccuracy all throughout, the beautiful, expensive decors and costumes were initially supposed to give the audience a better feel and insight into ‘Egyptian taste and nationality’.

[ . . . ]

Is this necessary to even say. This ballet is beyond political incorrectness: it is simply 100% offensive and racist. I won’t even post an excerpt here, but hey, it’s still all out there on the internet when the whole thing should be banned. Rather unfortunately for my inner child. I can no longer brag that I once danced in this ballet. Yes, dear reader, I actually performed sections of it with the Bolshoi at the Opéra de Paris when I was ten, in the early 2000s, in front of 2,000 delighted, gullible spectators, including my poor parents. I played one of these little, funny, charming, entertaining, so-called ‘négrillonnes’. I wish this anecdote wasn’t true. But it’s all true. And I’ll spare you the details of our little cute costumes and make up — you can guess it all, Zwarte Piet aesthetics & all.

And this, my friend, was one of ± my brightest moments under the spotlight [ trigger warning: the following photo includes outdated and harmful racial representations ]:

[ ]

[ i mean: ]

[ ]

alright.

let’s take a big, really big breath together,

remember love will prevail,

exhale from the absolute depth of your lungs,

. . . and move on to a next, much more interesting example: Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune. It was written in 1912, so around the same time as Petipa’s horror show, reflects a similar wave of orientalism in the air. But Nijinsky’s piece is a (thank god) totally different vibe. It was originally conceived as a kind of prologue to Mallarmé’s poem and, of course, set to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (who, by the way, wasn’t exactly thrilled with the result). Emblematic of the Ballets Russes, the work evokes Mallarmé’s drifting between consciousness and dream — and yes, it’s super sensouél. It draws on the Greek mythological figure of the faun and the aesthetics of ancient Greek art, while also slipping in a subtle touch of something vaguely Egyptian, particularly through its choreographic vocabulary.

And indeed, what’s especially fascinating about Nijinsky’s Faune is its compositional hybridity or the ‘composite-ness’ of the dance. The dancers’ heads and legs are often turned in profile, while their torsos face forward, creating an angular, segmented vocabulary that recalls the flatness of ancient Greek art and Egyptian frescoes. This choreographic language powerfully reinforces the faun’s animal-human ambiguity. Nijinsky was remarkably bold in making such a radical break from classical dance codes, especially for the time.1 At its premiere, people reportedly lost their minds: the piece was called indecent, ugly, a failure, filthy. It nearly sparked a political and diplomatic scandal between France and Russia2. And yet, many Parisians were absolutely captivated by the provocation.

Since the piece never aimed for historical accuracy, it continues to age beautifully. Nijinsky’s Faune still feels fresh: scandalous, strangely beautiful, and unapologetically, gloriously mega queer. So if you don’t know it already (and even if you do), consider this your invitation to drift off:

1980s + 2009 — Bagouet

Back in June 2009, after having processed my pharaonic ballet trauma (and a few other relative triumphs), I had become a ‘pre-professional’ contemporary dancer. I was working my quietly rebellious, 16-year-old a** off with a Romanian teacher who was as extraordinarily unpredictable as mind-opening — the kind of authority figure that shapes you forever. For our end-of-year exam, my fellow students and I had to prepare and present a solo. A bit of context. In France’s national conservatory exams, neither students nor teachers choose the material: the solo is imposed to ensure "fairness." In 2009, the solo was an excerpt from a longer piece by a choreographer I knew nothing about: Dominique Bagouet.

[ couldn’t find the original video or a better version than this one — it’s already miraculous this one is online tbh ]

I remember feeling pretty destabilized by this dance but oddly inspired by its language, how it oscillates between rigidity and a freedom I hadn’t encountered until then. Initially, this dance reminded me the typical 80s postmodern, non-figurative dance conventions: superficially emotionless, geometric, while evoking a primal and symbolic something I couldn’t pinpoint. And it felt like an intelligent and rich piece, an introspective journey that didn’t announce itself. Beneath the simplicity of the movements, preparing the piece was demanding: getting all its precisions in place, finding the right amount of openness and detachment — and, at least for me: the right gaze.

Our teacher, as baffled as we were by the piece, drew a parallel between this solo and Nijinsky’s Faune. It was an interesting and helpful comparison for us. We kept in mind the faun’s lazy, drowsy afternoon, injecting what we understood about the Faune and its Ancient Greek-Egyptian influences= admittedly, a caricature. And quite frankly, some of us were annoyed by the strange music of Bagouet’s solo. It had no real pulse to lean on at first, no familiar melodies, no lyrics we could understand. No one knew where the music came from or what it was exactly. I certainly felt as disoriented as anyone else, but as I rehearsed more, I began to “feel” it. Beyond the simple hope of passing my exam, dancing this piece unexpectedly became meaningful.

So. Dear reader. Have you guessed by now?

vazy dis oam

Yés, extraordinarily, the music from Bagouet’s solo is from the Arab-Andalusian repertoire, specifically from Morocco. It actually took me a good 5-8 years to discover this, and I was stunned by the delayed discovery, especially considering how impactful this dance had been in my life. In fact, Bagouet’s piece was the last proper contemporary dance solo I danced, a rare moments of alignment and presence, but also of body failure. To put it bluntly: during my rehearsal of the piece, I got injured. My body collapsed, from its very core, in a bloodless, invisible yet deep injury. [ the kind that’s strange to describe to others, and strange for others to understand ]

So, merging shitty synchronicities with serendipity, this dance became a portal for me: a) to leave the dance community, confronting its totalitarian tendencies3 that I couldn’t cope with, b) to subconsciously acknowledge how dissociated I had been from my North African origins, and c) to understand that my body was bridging a deep desire to uncover parts of my genealogical roots, and how ‘hurt’ I was from that dissociation. Needless to say, all this took time to unpack, but u kno: it only helped on the long run.

Du coup, sending un gros bisous à Dominique:

Here is what I have found on this very interesting choreographer. Domique Bagouet (1951–1992 = similar generation and fate as Hideyuki Yano) was a leading figure in the Nouvelle danse française movement of the 1980s. He began his dance education by focusing on ballet, before shifting to dancing Balanchine, Béjart, studying with Cunningham and Brown among other American dance pioneers. Bagouet drew inspiration from contemporary experimentation, Baroque dance, Andalusia, and broader Mediterranean themes, exploring dance as a living tradition rather than a formal art. [in passing, for those curious or fans of Pascal Dusapin, you might wanna check out this bizarre piece.]. He was also a generous teacher, sharing his practice with both professional and amateur dancers, showing equal respect and genuine interest in each. Regardless of their background, he encouraged his performers to reach a state of “deeply internalized emotion,” as if caught between memory and movement. In truth, this description exactly encapsulates how his dance resonated with me back in 2009: between memory and movement.

When it came to his Andalusian inspirations, Bagouet wasn’t trying to quote traditional dance forms, but rather to absorb their emotional density and their daily, ritual dimension into a new, liberated vocabulary. His “Andalusia” was an openly imagined, internal landscape — a place that may never have existed, yet whose preserved mosaics and fountains evoked a deep, mysterious kind of beauty. Bagouet carried a semi-naïve, nostalgic gaze that I find delicately handled, not heavy-handed. And notably, to my knowledge, he’s the only contemporary choreographer to have integrated Arab-Andalusian music into his work.

A couple of years ago, as I was beginning my research on Arab-Andalusian music, I stumbled upon this link — a version of the music used in Bagouet’s solo. It reopened the portal once again, from yet another angle, as if each piece of this multidimensional, karmic dance puzzle were arriving in its own time. Enjoy this musique d’après-midi.

2023 — Nacera Belaza

Continuing our time machine journey, we now land in a different era: today-ish, with Nacera Belaza’s minimalist and rather charged/dense choreographic writing.

Born in 1969 in Médéa, Algeria, Belaza moved to France at the age of five and grew up between France and Algeria, between two cultures, without placing one above the other. Remarkably, Belaza never had any formal dance training. She is entirely self-taught, developing her choreographic work by gradually weaving in themes of cultural duality and personal identity. Her style is defined by a continuous breath and a strong focus on repetition, patience—and, I dare say, a quiet echo of violence. At times, she performs along together her equally talented sister, Dalila Belaza.4 Beyond her artistic career in France, Nacera Belaza founded an artist cooperative in Algeria to foster cultural exchange and collaboration between her two homelands.

She views dance as a way to confront the "deafening din of our existences" and to restore existential meaning to gesture. Compared to Bagouet, Belaza is far less naïve but she similarly draws inspiration from everyday and ritual movement. Her work seeks to bridge a vital force that connects the stage to daily life, opening up spaces where one might feel whole again by “listening” for new paths through the body, and getting back to some kind of unknown.

Another striking feature of Belaza’s work is how terre à terre and austere it is. Instead of projecting into some idealized, distant past, her choreography often foregrounds raw, recent realities that many would rather ignore—like the Algerian Civil War and its consequences, including the near-impossibility of contemporary dance in Algeria. Reflecting on her return after the war, she recalled:

I was struck by people’s lack of foresight, a loss of faith in the future, a kind of self-repetition. […] Having undergone brutal colonization and a civil war, Algerians no longer look to the future[…]. When dancing there– around 2001 or 2002–I’d be told contemporary dance wasn’t part of Algerian identity. I’d hear things like, ‘Our identity is about traditional dance, not contemporary dance. We don’t want to open up to that.’ 5

All these themes are evoked in her beautiful piece Paris-Alger from 2003:

Belaza wrote the following poetic description about the piece:

Algeria is not part of the world. It’s as if it turns its back on it to sink into its own belly. Creating there means rediscovering the deep meaning of a scream, and constantly measuring one’s own resistance. The air is dry, brittle—nothing can grow, everything is doomed to break. The body burns through its last reserves. Thought, meanwhile, is caged so that fatality may be fulfilled. One must hold on in order to scream, one must scream for everything to begin again.
I thought maybe a lighthouse should be planted in the heart of Algeria to signal to the rest of the world, to tell life in a desperate yet fiercely persistent way—to take one’s place in that lighthouse and believe oneself to be at the center of the world.
Algeria is not part of the world. 6

As time unfolds, Belaza’s work seems to bridge more and more imaginaries. I first encountered her through La Nuée, a piece deeply reliant on the interplay of light and shadow. Dancers emerged and receded into a central circle, signaled only by dimmed lights in an otherwise pitch-black theater. The movement vocabulary was minimal and relentless: indistinct but systematic marches, runs, static jumps, and centrifugal torsions of the upper body, arms slicing and spiraling into space. In my memory, the soundtrack was made up of layered drum samples, gently filtered, along with rustling noises, cries, and fragments of song from the dancers. The result was trance-inducing. As a spectator, you had to squint, focus, almost hallucinate to perceive the dancers, their subtle movements, their stillness. It demanded an unusually active, engaging kind of process, something quite rare in my experience.

I came across a filmed piece that, music aside [which i’ve deliberately muted — forgive me], is quite similar to La Nuée, and beautifully performed by the amaaazing dancer Paulin Blanc. Enjoy to the max.

I later learned that the piece was created after Belaza traveled through the Midwest of the US, where she attended the Mendota Pow Wow in 2022 — a gathering of First Nations people. For several hours, she observed participants from various Dakota communities entering, forming, and leaving a large circle to dance to a percussive rhythm, each bringing their own stories like a living chorus. Much like with Bagouet, even though Belaza’s choreographic research was sparked by cultures and rituals that weren’t her own, she doesn’t put them on display. These inspirations don’t appear as references or representations. Instead, they’re subliminally folded into the fabric of her work, as if by ricochet.

///

And so, as we begin to depart from North African imaginaries, I’ll fly away.

I hope this post brought you some enjoyment, maybe a good laugh, maybe a good thought. Thank you for taking the time to read with me.

all moving on & dancing along, like reeds in the wind

Lucie

ps: shall you have any topics you’d like to me to investigate/write about, i’m open to your suggestions & invitations. 100% silly, dumb topics will be equally considered as supposedly serious ones — we’re inclusive in here & debunking snobbism is one of our top missions

Alors, au top ou gros flop? la pêche ou la fin des haricots? le bitter ou le sweet?

Or perhaps you’ve reached this enlightened gaze on things, where the bitter is the sweet, the pêche the haricots, the top the flop, the nase the wise?

I certainly haven’t, but you know, after a little pause, I’m back behind the keyboard, ready to spin my best words & tracks with a special sauce du jour. Indeed, allow me, dear reader-listener, to, fearlessly, for the first time here, and using Substack’s latest streaming technology, share a piece of mine called for kali.

Following the cool words heard from Chiyoko Szlavnics: sometimes it’s best not to reveal too much about the process behind a piece, and instead let the mystery remain intact. [a valuable lesson that may apply to many other areas of life we try to share with others. like cooking. dreaming. & other innocent activities]. So, while keeping the mystery whole, complete, alive, I’ll share just a few ongoing reflections on for kali.

for kali’s background

Initially, for kali was commissioned by Kali Ensemble and written for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, harmonium, piano and zither. The piece is inspired, from a distance, by the vast repertoire of Arab-Andalusī nūbat, in particular their modes and slower, semi-improvised sections. for kali is not an attempt to recreate this genre: it rather displays a kind of 'hollowness' — emptying the substance of these music traditions and eventually finding something that has everything but mostly nothing to do with them.

Why you may ask? It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: studying the psychology of what I’m trying to do in my music as opposed to the concepts that might underpin it (which don’t feel especially relevant or appealing at this point in my work). To put it briefly: I’ve realized my music somehow addresses the loss of musical heritage and experience of marginality (real, or imagined, collective or individual). Theoretically, Arab-Andalusī nūbat would be part of my cultural heritage. But when contextualized in my actual genealogy & life, this heritage is almost entirely lost, gone, muted, inaccessible. [ mystery no.1 for some of you, but you may read a previous post of mine on Mustapha Skandrani & start to put some pieces of the puzzle together ]

Although I’ve only scratched the surface of how this loss has shaped my experience of life, it feels already crucial to clarify the posture I wish to develop in relation to it. For instance, I’m not interested in gazing at that loss with nostalgia nor an excessive, suspicious kind of pride and wonder. I’m also not drawn to claiming an ‘identity’ or a sense of belonging to a culture that was never truly transmitted to me. It just feels more aligned, honest and humbling to simply acknowledge the loss, in my music and life. Like a kind, heartful hello, there you are (or hello there, you are) — gently tiptoeing into waters that are at once familiar and unknown.

for kali, different versions

But back 2 the zikmu. Although the full ensemble version hasn’t come to life yet (fingers crossed it will someday), several other versions have emerged from the score so far: one for solo piano, one for two pianos, and one for piano and zitherJoel Gester Suárez and Nirantar Yakthumba.

Working with versions in my pieces has been a way to unpack their different facets, to get to ‘know’ and understand them more intimately through the prism of different musicianships, sensibilities, instrumentations, and configurations. This process often revolves around one recurring question in my work: how ‘bare/naked’ and reduced, or conversely, dense and extensive can the same material of one piece be presented? I believe for kali is a good illustration of this ongoing exploration.

for kali (solo / hollow)

Let me first introduce you to the solo version of for kali, performed by Nirantar.

DIY-recorded & performed by Nirantar Yakthumba in feb.25. as usual, feel free to:

Strictly focusing on the performance aspect of the recording, what I find most interesting about this version is its austere, polymorphic beauty — one that reveals the fluid, a-referential quality of the piece, or its ‘hollowness,’ waiting to be filled with references and projections from both the performer and listener. Personally, I hear at the beginning of the recording a restrained, careful, and ‘contemporary’ approach to sounding, with an emphasis on resonance. Midway through, I hear Niru transition into Arab-Andalusī touches, letting go of a careful ‘sounding’ and entering more expressive, wavering realms. Towards the end, it feels as though Nirantar grows curious and determined to lead the piece in a different direction, closer to classical music performance. This introduces a certain rigidity, if not quite literally a measure, which unveils some structural aspects of the piece, sometimes coming into friction with its fluid, melodic material. [ i dare say i hear in the last minutes of Nirantar’s performance (≠ the piece) something akin to Glenn Gould playing Bach. ]

for kali (duo / relational)

In the case of for kali, working with versions helped clarify the multiple sources of its ‘hollowness’. The latter is undoubtedly tied to the nature the piece’s melodic material, its equal simplicity and ambiguity/fragility. But this sense of ‘hollowness’ I was pursuing was reinforced by the openness of the piece in terms of performance and instrumentation. In a way, there is fundamentally no definitive answer to how for kali should sound. And it is worthy to try to make it sound, see how far one can go with it.

We worked several times with Joel and Nirantar with duos of piano(s) and/or zither(s). Now, I don’t have proper recordings of these rehearsals, but, perhaps because the piano is their primary instruments, the duo version played by Joel and Nirantar on 2 pianos was especially moving and effective for me. Here’s an excerpt below:

The piano duo version revealed two things. First, it brought to light for kali's core, i.e. its heterophonic potential, which, on the surface, is reminiscent of certain aspects of Arab-Andalusī music. In doing so, and at the risk of sounding nonsensical to some of you, I feel that the heterophonic texture in the duo version adds depth to for kali’s ‘hollowness.’ It’s difficult for me to articulate all of this with full clarity, but I sense that the more heterophonic for kali would be — that is, the denser its instrumentation (perhaps moving toward an Andalusian ensemble configuration) — the more the distance between the piece and traditional Arab-Andalusī nūbat would become obvious, abyssal. And perhaps this is where the loss of heritage would be most foregrounded as well.

A second, beautiful insight from the piano duo version lies in how it integrated the relationship between Nirantar and Joel as part of the music: their loving, interwoven playing, the way their respective musicianships and sensitivities subtly locked into each other (or didn’t), how they listened and got lost in each other’s sounds. Witnessing and fostering this kind of relational dynamic through music feels like an immense privilege: it is an offering and receiving of trust — a different kind of openness.

Here’s a little excerpt of the piano/ zither duo:

souscris-donc

unmeasured notation + one melodic line (±= ‘hollowness’)

Keeping aside its algorithmic aspects [a-not-so interesting conceptual mystery no.2], here are the contours of my not-so-secret recipe in the piece: one single melodic line + unmeasured notation.

One initial challenge when composing the piece was working with restraints and limitations. More specifically, I aimed to stick to a single melodic line throughout the entire piece, ± keeping it all within the mid-pitch range and keeping harmony out of the picture — at least, on paper. Speaking of, here is one page of the score:

Like with any other pages, every note must be played by the performer, whether playing solo or in duo. As you may have noticed, none of the notes are vertically aligned = they are meant to be played sequentially. The score consists of 4 staves, each serving a specific function:

• the first staff is the core, meandering, melodic line of the piece

• the second staff features quick ascending/descending scales with an ornamental flavor to them

• the third and fourth staves act as the skeleton of the piece, providing structural support to the melodic lines above [ not so interesting mystery no.3].

One reason for keeping the score at 4-staves score, despite the piece being monophonic, is to serve several purposes for the performer: a) to keep them fully engaged with the material, truly listening as they zigzag up and down the score;
b) to allow them, as they become immersed in the score, to eventually let go of the initial functions suggested for each staff; c) to encourage them to explore each line as having interchangeable functions — melodic, ornamental, and structural.

In short, as the performer grows more intimate with the piece, they may discover that the melodic line can become ornamental, that the second line can fully integrate with the first, or that the last two lines may become ornaments or part of the melody, and so on. Once again, this interchangeability contributes to the openness I’m interested in: taking the risk to get lost at times, taking the chance to find oneself at others.

‘hollowness’ / openness

Finding the right equilibrium when displaying the ‘hollowness’ / openness I am after takes time. This is something I also need to discuss with the performers IRL, to get to know them, how they play, to find their alignment in the piece. This is the actual mystery, one that I couldn’t even begin to articulate with words, even if I tried.

[ edit: you may find ’s impressions on working on the piece at the end of this post — his words are truly touching and perhaps he’s able to articulate what i can’t ]

In for kali and most of my pieces, I wish to retain openness, a lack of certainty, as a basic experience for both the performer and the listener. It’s not an easy position to maintain as a composer, and it’s certainly not an easy one for the musician to inhabit, nor for the listener to embrace. There’s a prevailing trend that asks composers to ‘own their material.’ I’ve never fully understood this. I’ve tried, time and again, to ‘own my material,’ but the more I do so, the more I realize that my approach to music is about not owning (or at least, owning the least possible) and not-knowing (or, at least, knowing the least possible).

I can’t help but relate that kind of proposition of musical openness as a way of being: how some of us prioritize living openly, decisively, yet lightly diffused, and developing the awareness that certainty is only an illusion. Don’t get me wrong, prioritizing a clear, conscious, defined direction and purpose is beautiful and necessary. But so is prioritizing the awareness that there is no ground, no real territory, no fixed identity. And music, in my view, can certainly help cultivate this awareness; it certainly did in my own experience as a listener.

The journey is still long before my music matures enough to offer these kinds of experiences to listeners, but this is the kind of road I’m on. Semi-patiently putting one small step after the next, while trying not to take the whole enterprise too seriously.

POUET.

That’s it for today, dear reader. I hope this made a bit of sense.

Thank you for tagging along this far — it means a lot.

for kali is available on SoundCloud [perhaps soon on Bandcamp if there’s interest?], where you can shower it with your virtual love.

( u kno, these small stuff do go straight to my heart )

warmly, springly,

Lucie

edit: Nirantar’s impressions on performing the piece:

the sort of indeterminacy that lucie brings into this work is quite bizarre, challenging, and confrontational at the same time. like a mirror, and unlike a mirror.

another mystery central to the work was lucie's skill for mental cues. wild horses, the movement of rivers. these cues brought me closer to the piece than even the score itself. but these images do not programme the music—they are not notes or instructions—and they change from one attempt to the next.

performing this piece feels less like interpreting and more like honing in on underlying secrets, which disappear from the mind as soon as the piece ends. but they leave a beautiful and uncanny impression nonetheless.

Alors, ça gaze ou gazouille comme les oiseaux à l’approche du printemps?

Breaking news (a day too late): yesterday was women’s day. Each year, my opinion on this topic shifts: some years, I feel like boycotting the whole thing, other years, I just wanna support the concept to the max. Here is my (subjective) truth:I wish we celebrated womxn every single day. The 1/365 ratio is simply ridiculous, nonsensical. Not to mention the once-in-a-year-bouquet-to-please-the-ladies. Come on: every sentient beings on this planet should receive flowers every single day. And deep respect. Elémentaire mon cher Watson.

But the cool thing about Women’s day is that it’s a great occasion to share the works of artists who have been precious companions in my music & life. So, for your enjoyment and mine, here a list of works written by

1. experimental music (perhaps slightly contemporary)

2. womxn1

3. composers or musician-composers (sound artists/bands for another time)

4. who write incredibly beautiful music, acoustic and/or electronic

5. who mostly don’t stream on the mainstream

6. but still have some music on bandcamp (= an incentive for those who don’t have their music there: upload it)2

7. who are in their 30s

Why womxen in their 30s you may ask? First, a disclaimer: I don’t & will never assume that things are/get easier before or after your 30s. That being said, I’m focusing on this specific category of composers because well, I’m one of them, and I have the feeling we are on all fronts. We face the difficulties to get our pieces or research funded/supported at the time where we need it most, we try to pierce through the rigidity of institutional narrow-mindedness (= the persistent lack of recruitment of womxn composers in music education), we often relocate across of the continent to pursue a paid PhD to try to mitigate the precariousness of our condition, we may experience motherhood and/or multidimensional and/or multigenerational caregiving—whether with a partner, without one, with friends & family nearby, or not— and we continuously fight against self-doubt, among many other challenges. If this sounds like an impossible equation, well, I’m not gonna lie: it does feel impossible at times, and isolating. In fact, some of these issues tend to remain invisible, as so few of them have the time, space, or resources to openly speak about them.

Punaise quoué. Punaise.

And yet.

AND YET MY FRIENDS.

Truly against all odds, like the actual dragons that we are, we keep

showing up, focusing, smiling, going at our desk, being curious, facing walls, playing, presenting, plugging in, offering, blanking, analyzing, loosening up, cabling, scheduling, writing, singing, scratching, scrolling, recording, standing, curating, laughing, programming, dedicating, reading, walking, amplifying, listening, losing, bowing, silencing, looking away, theorizing, erasing, imagining, zooming in, engaging, brushing off, releasing, loving, explaining, receiving, well: music-ing.

Gosh, let’s pause for a minute and celebrate each other. These daily victories have created so much beauty for ourselves and others.

ZE (très short) LIST

That’s the reason why I made this (absolutely non-exhaustive) list. Disclaimer 2: it’s almost funny that it’s so short (i.e.: lack of time, space & resources), but it’s also already a mega sweet treat. Mostly, this list is just a prompt to continue to make it grow, through your contributions and mines.

How to use it: a) the list being in alphabetical order, go until the end of the post b) consider buying the music of these artists to support their works — know this will make a huge difference for them c) contribute by suggesting additions to the list by leaving a comment or msg d) say hi to them here or on their Bandcamp — they will surely appreciate it.

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• Clara de Asís & Rebecca Lane with Sarah Saviet, Deborah Walker — all extraordinarily talented and intelligent composer-musicians, the combo is magical. Sending love to them all.

• Ellen Arkbro — I mean, what can I say. Ellen’s crystal-clear approach to sound has shaped the experimental music forever. She managed to keep her musical integrity intact over the years, and her humility is proportional to her talent.

• Pluto Bell — I’ve loved their music since forever. Underground LA music, so, so well written, polished like little diamonds. Bonus: they’ve done very funny Animal Crossing concerts during Covid— a highlight

• Katrina Burch — I’ve mentioned them in a previous post — do read it to find out about Katrina’s deep commitment and extraordinary trajectory.

• Victoria Cheah — aaaah beautiful music and approach to timbre. Please also do listen to her piece I watched Her Smile Her Hand.

• Pan Daijing — Pan is simultaneously a star and a spy, under the radar. More importantly, she’s totally aligned. Her performances are mind-blowing and radical in their meticulousness and power.

• Jessica Ekomane — hands down to one of the most inspiring computer-composers I know. Her multichannel works are not only effective but often evoke, as described in Manifolds notes, “a chant of overwhelming humanity”.

• Marta Forsberg — I've been following Marta’s work for a while and her work is blossoming, perhaps especially recently. She does many stuff: electronic live sets, electroacoustic pieces, and more recently voice pieces (luv the one below)

• Judith Hamann — cellist, composer, singer (+ karaoke master) — her voice is WOW and so is her sound on the cello. I’m counting the days until the release of her next album:

• Amina Hocine — super cool electroacoustic composer and instrument builder, working with customized organ pipes & tuning

• Charmaine Lee — a wild composer & improviser; able to bend her voice and mouth in unexplainable ways that give you goosebumps. Also highly recommend her early works.

• Clara Lévy — a truly amazing musician, with an unbelievable stable sound and ears. Just stunning work. Go see her play if you have the chance to do so. Also admiring her fearlessness and eloquence, in all areas of life

• Karmen Ponikvar — loving Karmen’s sensitivity so much and experiencing her pieces in multichannel set ups is such a treat. She recently (but totally under the radar as she’s humble as hell) wan Xenakis composition price. And the crazy thing is that it’s only the beginning of her musical journey. Sending much love

• Giulia Rae — another aaaamazing computer-composer focusing on ‘immersive-ness’ as an underlying concept of her music. Giulia’s music is soft —but never weak, enveloping and deeply poetic. And the programming part of her pieces is super clever. Bellissima Giulia

• Emer, alias Marija Rasa Kudabaitė — In 2 words: Marija rocks. She writes sensational, beaaaautiful electronic music, with such a rare level of details, care & precision for each sound in her pieces. Cherry on top of the cake: her breakfasts are the best ❤️

• Jules Reidy — I luuuuuv their multifaceted works, and their approach to the guitar is crazy + masterful: electric, acoustic, retuned, with 100 strings, you name it, they do it all. Stephan Kunze wrote a great itw with them, check it out here:

  zensounds with Stephan Kunze

  Jules Reidy: A Space That You're Allowed Inside

  Jules Reidy came to Berlin from Sydney as an ambitious young guitar player, finding inspiration in the city’s rich experimental music scene…

  Read more

  2 years ago · 23 likes · 2 comments · Stephan Kunze

• Ángeles Rojas — totally fascinating how Ángeles’ music unfolds from her beautiful, poetically open scores. The delicacy of the material is maximal and yes, her kindness shines through. How cool.

• Germaine Sijstermans — awesome clarinettist, performer and composer, a beautiful multifaceted practice and pieces. Each time she’s programmed in a concert, you can be sure it’s gonna be a good one

• Zeynep Toraman — again, an incredibly gifted composer and bright researcher. Her craft with instrumentation and harmony is beyond refined, and yeah, brilliant. I cannot wait to see her music continue to blossom as she enters the next chapter of her life. Much love

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As I said, the list is short & meant to grow, so feel most welcome to join me in this endeavor. I send much gratitude to all the people mentioned in this list: power to you and the changes you continuously bring in this world through your music.

love, to everyone

Lucie

Comment ça va chez toi? It feels like it’s been ages since my last post. Life is life-ing, and the world keeps world-ing, and both bring delightful & wild surprises. No further comment, your honor. I believe most of us have subsequently 3 pressing questions in the back of our minds: what’s the purpose of music-making these days, how to sustain its creation and diffusion in times where it keeps falling lower & lower in the list of the priorities (legitimately so), and also, what are we having for dinner tonight. That last question keeps nagging me every, single, day.

Dinner aside, today’s plan is to write about a composer I didn’t know much about before ± a month ago: Loren Rush.1 His music is somewhat very close to my compositional practice so I quite don’t understand how his works have escaped my radar until now. Naturally, the detective in me is maximally intrigued. Was Loren Rush accidentally or ‘rightfully’ forgotten from our experimental music history e-books? And, more importantly, who is Loren: a serialist killer or a hopeless post-romantic composer? Ich bitte euch, let’s solve the mystery together by getting to know his pieces without scores or much conventional music theory knowledge/vocab, but good ears & a big, slightly broken heart.

Dear reader, what do you say: do you also feel... the Rush? [ you had to see the pun coming ] [ at least i didn’t commit the crime to title this post ‘Loren Order’2 ]

The crime scene: SF Bay

Loren Rush is an American composer (b. 1935), who studied music in the US and Europe and was mostly active in the Bay Area / San Francisco new music scene since the late 50s. Together with Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson and Bill Bultler, they formed an improvisation group with a focus on an aleatoric and improvisational techniques. That’s cool. After receiving a 2-year scholarship to go to Rome in 1969, he co-founded the Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) in 1975. Also cool. For all this time, he only had 3 releases in total: one in the 70s, one in 2021 and one in 2024. Ah? In the notes accompanying his CD releases, the label Recital writes: “Though few of Rush’s compositions have been published, he has garnered deep respect from his peers and colleagues over the decades.”3 Let’s face it, that sentence reads a bit like: “Rush may have garnered deep respect from his peers & colleagues, we’re afraid no one else knows about him”. From a Wiki-bird’s view, one can note Rush mostly wrote for orchestra and piano, and electronic at times. In general, it is said Rush’s applies in his pieces “a whole spectrum of modern techniques, including serialism, spatial distribution, controlled improvisation, and pointillistic (🕵️ ) exoticism (🚨).”4 Red flag? Let’s dig in.

Exhibit A: Dance (Dans le Sable)

Written in 1968, Dance is part of Rush’s actual first LP: Dans le Sable [ yes, dis ce que keeps being involved with sand & desert ]. No trailer, no blabla, no political correctness, just kyosaku-ing your shoulder like the Zen master that I am not: here is the piece:

[ & do listen until the end — i promise it’s worth it ]

When I heard the first seconds of this piece, I wasn’t sure if the music was weird, brilliant or brilliantly problematic (‘exotic’). Truth is: Dance subsumes all those adjectives and many more. The piece is an amazing blend of algorithmic, serialist, XXth century modern orchestration and maqam-modal thinking. It’s powerful, energizing, effective, its orchestral grandeur almost brushing the bad taste but not quite so. Never in my life did I have a stronger urge to write a megalomaniac piece for orchestra and spatialized electronics. Cherry on top of our mega cake: the end of the piece is hilarious.

As a detective, I continued investigating this strange monument, gathering clues to begin discerning the type of composition we were dealing with. Exotic or not, Rush’s integration of maqam sonorities in a conventionally orchestrated piece is successful thus respectful. The piece feels like waves of repeating patterns assigned to each family of instruments—strings, brass, and percussion in particular—alongside the wild, undoubtedly algorithmic electronics. There’s a constant alternation of crescendos and decrescendos for each part, until one suddenly surges to the foreground, sometimes signaling a shift in mode, confronting the listener head-on.

Investigating further [ to the max actually ], I’ve found out later on the initial version of the piece featuring the electronics and a piano part replacing the orchestra, originally named A Little Travelling Music. Quite an enlightening finding:

The computer-based electronic part features a vibrant plucked-like synthesis (Karplus?), generating randomized arpeggios and ornamentations that cleverly anchor the piano’s melodic lines and repeating pitches/trills. The spatial ("in your face") aspect of the piece becomes particularly evident here, with the electronics continuously swirling in all directions while the piano remains centred—static yet diffused. Apparently, the piece was realized with the Mus10, a software designed by John Tovar at the CCRMA at Standford. The computer synthesis incorporates two digital techniques developed at CCRMA: the simulation of moving sound sources and a method for controlling the spectral evolution of each sound. It all starts to make sense.

Report from Exhibit A: Rush’s alien style already feels magnetic, & his music undoubtedly smart. One question remains: was Loren only into massive pieces? The suspense being unbearable, we better move on to Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti to find complete the profile of our missing composer.

but first, support your detective

Exhibit B: In Memoria (Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti )

Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti is the second (!) (released in 2024) recital album of Rush, for piano and chamber ensemble. At first, one may think, “oh, just one of these JI pieces à la Monte”. Well. NEIN: I beg you to pause and closely listen. Like many pieces I appreciate most, Mattina is deceptively simple.

Contrasting the extroverted brilliance of Dans le Sable, Rush reveals his inner radiance in In Memoria—a profound sensitivity and perhaps a touch of melancholia, echoing that of Giuseppe Ungaretti. The latter was an Italien poet born in Egypt [ sand keeps surrounding us] who wrote in the trenches of WWI to maintain his humanity by recalling experiences of his earlier life in Alexandria. Rush translated Ungaretti’s poems into Just Intonation piano improvisations, treated with the Enhanced Piano in Just Intonation5 — an electronic process that enhances the piano’s natural resonant qualities, emphasizing its sustaining, coloristic, and expressive capabilities. This intriguing process was developed at Good Sound Foundation by composer Alfred Owens, and from the data I’ve gathered, the methodology is certainly effective in Rush’s piece [for the geeks: find more info in the foot note].6

But more importantly, In Memoria feels like a biography: it’s the sound of a composer who has mastered a vast array of musical knowledge, to the point of seamlessly integrating it into his work, and, what’s even more impressive, while improvising. In fact, the piece epitomizes a rich blend, fusing just intonation sonorities, maqam-like ornamentations and modes, and post-romantic chromaticisms that evoke the impressionistic touches of Frederico Mompou.

The tuning of the piano is delicately unveiled at first through its higher registers, combined with chords and mostly descending harmonic progressions. As the music reaches the mid-high register, Rush introduces ornamentations and modes closely resembling maqam, along with chords that showcase his rare skill in blending maqam and harmony. Rush’s pianistic talent allows him to seamlessly weave chords into ornamentations, and vice versa, with each type of material absorbing and transforming the other. Another striking aspect of the piece is the presence of semi-regular ascending, harmonized scales, which beautifully complement the free phrasing of the other melodic lines. At times, these scales are presented in their naked simplicity, while at other moments, they are blurred through a masterful, more complex harmonization. The end of the piece is equally remarkable. Maqam and Just intonation no longer the foregrounded features of the piece and we instead encounter a more mellow, tender, and romantic kind of Western piano. It’s kind of stunning to arrive at this result — like a meta-modulation between musical genres and histories, the familiar and the foreign/evocative.

Report from Exhibit B: Loren Rush knows his multidimensional compositional and improvisational craft, to the point where he can create/perform music that is both highly complex and softly beautiful.

Dear reader, the thing is: we’re not even done with Loren yet.

comment w/ ur favorite composers

Exhibit C: Mattina (Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti )

To drive the point home: here is one last piece, one last exhibit of Rush’s talent: Mattina, a piece for piano, violin and piano reflecting Ungaretti’s words: ‘I illumine me, with immensity’. [ listen with headphones bitte. ]

Similarly to In Memoria, Mattina is unassumingly intricate. The piece is structured around the weaving and reciprocal emergence of repeating, sustained chords on the piano and sustained tones on the violin and cello, with the resonance of each part leading to the sounding of the other. While the intervals present in the piece may feel conventional, the overall softness is anything but. Mattina's timing is particularly intriguing: the chords on the piano are repeated every 5 seconds on average, yet they are always slightly shifted, keeping the flow of the music fresh and engaging.

In terms of performance, the instrumentalists occasionally feel uncertain or raw in some of their articulations, but this 'human' fragility provides a perfect balance to the subtle, yet noteworthy artificiality of the recording and mixing process. The ± hard left-right panning violin and cello make their presences distant; in contrast to the piano which central and spatially diffused and recorded very closely to the instrument — a result of the Enhanced Piano technique. This contrast results in an overall recording that feels simultaneously intimate and distant. I also suspect that subtle fade-ins and fade-outs were added at the entrances and exits of the instrumentalists to emphasize the acoustic envelope of the instruments and the conceptual depth of the piece. Once again, Rush’s craft is tip-top-notch.

Report from Exhibit C: Rush not only knows his craft: he also obviously writes his music from the heart — something confirmed by:

do stick around my friend

Exhibit D: Loren Rush interviewed by Pauline Oliveros

Right before finalizing this post, I’ve stumbled across an interview Rush gave to Pauline Oliveros in 1978, so I’ll just share some excerpts as extra.

The interview is a precious jewel in many ways [one of them being how confused or rushed the typist seemed to have been:

more crunchy stuff in footnote »].7

The biggest finding for me in the interview is that Rush composed music a) to keep himself entertained, b) without deadlines, c) for/with his friends. This resonates deeply with my compositional practice, validating an inner knowing that sometimes, cultivating a certain secrecy around one’s music serves the preservation of the music itself. At last, we’re touching on the reasons of Rush’s (in)visibility: Rush’s lack of outward/marketed attitude was, at least partially, intentional. [ Hear me sighing in relief — that’s so relatable]. In his interview with Oliveros, he mentioned the following:

I've resisted in getting involved having lots of performances and doing lectures and lots of recordings and all that kind of music business. And in the last few years, I've come to understand what that attitude is and to be comfortable with it. […] I'm basically just writing music for performers who are close friends and we work on it together. And that’s really about my total interest in getting performances and making music. […] I need to transmit a piece personally — because otherwise, the essence of the music doesn't get through. And that has little to do with developing a better notation or something.

His approach to creativity/ music-making and time management is also highly humbling and relatable to some of us:

For most of the work I've done, it turns out there's a very small amount of real creative thought, i.e. with an intense concentration. Other times periods are sort of conversations to myself that are fairly casual, where your sort of work things out. I have this sound image which may eventually become a composition. I know that in focusing on that image, there come stages, until I get the image pretty well worked-out. And then it’s a matter of bringing it into reality. So at one point, the compositional problems disappear, it clears up, and it then becomes the matter how you transcribe it. And although I can already hear the music at that stage, there's still nothing like the reality and pleasure of listening to real sounds. I need to get the sound image down to reality so I can enjoy the music I thought would be fun to hear.8

Investigation report: Loren Rush rocks (my world)

In brief: Loren Rush unexpectedly swept me off me feet, through his music, his philosophy and attitude towards the contemporary music scene. It is so refreshing to hear about composers who have ± continuously composed music, yet released very few pieces, and by doing so, have kept their integrity and curiosity fully alive. Rush’s compositional process (and to a certain extent, his aesthetics), feels personally like home and recall my own musical experience. For instance, the other day, my dear friend and I spent 3 hours tuning one octave in his piano in a rationally tuned scale. That felt fun and luxurious. A few days later, joined by Joel, the 3 of us spent 5 more hours rehearsing and recording different versions of a piece I wrote for them, for kali [ recordings to be shared here soon…]. These kinds of experiences are profound. So, back to our initial question: what’s the purpose of music-making, especially these days? One simple answer= it reminds us friendships, beauty and softness matter.

So, keep being soft & weird, & occasionally megalomaniac if that brings you joy

Lucie

To go a step further: some extra resources

• a 2 hour long collection of his work on the great series Other Minds: here

• an awesome, touching interview of Loren Rush from 1968: here

• Rush’s early piano pieces:

  • the contemplative piece soft music: here.

  • A drone piece for 3 amplified pianos, Hard Music.

7

Source available here: https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb9050744m. As the interviews unfolds, the typing gets worse, to the point where the end is frankly disastrous or Cage-an like, and incidentally funny & poetic as you might see below:

Comment va en ce jour béni des dieux?

After days of pondering a potential topic for my next post, and frankly resisting the temptation to list my 5-favorite-earplugs-of-all-times, inspiration hit. Inspiration—or perhaps old objects/subjects of personal fascination, call it what you will. Either way, the spark of inspiration confirmed a curatorial direction here. The dis ce que series is becoming a quirky yet charming niche where music and art serve mostly as excuses to portray lives well-lived, some of which, at one time or another, were geographically scattered. Boom. And, of course, dis ce que also turns out to be a spot for making dubious jokes with a rather limited vocab and writing skills built on sand.

Speaking of art, sand, and transitional words I don’t have, I thought I would introduce you to two choreographers today: Hideyuki Yano and Natsu Nakajima.

Ôôô my dear music purists, know you are heard and seen. Stick around, you’ll be served, I promise. In fact, this post offers different ways to relate to Yano & Natsu—through their lives, their works, or personal memories of their dance. Perhaps these accumulated perspectives point at the equal flexibility and challenge experienced in writing/speaking about dance. Like Yano said in an interview: “La danse, ça ne s’explique pas”1 —Dance cannot be explained. Mais ouais, allez, on tente. wesh.2

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Hideyuki Yano

Hideyuki Yano (矢野英征) was a dancer and choreographer born in 1943 in Japan. He left for the US in the early sixties to study literature, then returned to Tokyo, where he became involved in both the traditional and avant-garde theater scenes of noh and butoh. In 1973, Yano moved to Paris and co-founded a theater-dance-music company group called Mâ Danse Rituel Théâtre together with Elsa Wolliaston. In 1986, Yano became the director of the Besançon-Franche-Comté National Choreographic Center, though only for a brief period. Like many dancers of that time, Yano passed away from AIDS in 1988. But even in death, his body did not remain still or confined to France; it continued to move and travel with the same intentionality it had in life. Indeed, Yano’s ashes were scattered in his birthplace, Tomiaka, and somewhere in the El Oued desert in the South of Algeria. [ can you also hear an unexpected, coincidental link with our last post on Mustapha Skandrani? I couldn’t find any information on Yano’s connection to Algeria, but that’s all fascinating ]

Besides Elsa Wolliaston, Yano’s main collaborators were the dancers/choreographers Karine Saporta, Mark Tompkins, and François Verret. Interestingly, all these artists had non-linear trajectories where contemporary dance was met at a later life stage or in parallel with other professions: photographer, architect, theater performer. Most of them were not of French origin either, thus forming a multi-culti (in the best sense possible) group of independent spirits. Rather than striving to affirm their respective 'identities,' this group, and Yano in particular, sought “ways to go beyond differences, towards the merging of four continents”, aiming to find a sort “of cultural neutrality.”3 This paradigm was not only forward-looking but also miraculous considering France’s tendencies toward ‘entre-soi’.

Importantly, Yano was a magnetic teacher for many young artists, as his work explored how the boundaries between dance, theater, and music became irrelevant when viewing the performer's body as a medium for a singular, global expression. Yano’s approach was uncompromising: an intricate back-and-forth movement between spirituality and contemporary consciousness, a traditional rigor and an exemplary freedom where each piece, each performer may be a new field of experimentation. So, for some, Yano was a “non-maître” creating a “non-héritage”4. For others, a smaller minority, Yano could be cruel—which is a plausible hypothesis.

After some online research, it remains unclear whether Yano’s pieces have ever been performed since his passing—a sign that they likely haven’t. His works are also absent from YouTube; only a few are available on Numeridanse. What’s mostly left is one (excellent) book written in French in 2008 by Chantal Aubry5. So yeah, it’s time to revive Yano’s works, while recognizing the fragility of archiving choreographic creations and the humbling reality that there’s no guarantee for the longevity of even the most excellent pieces.

I will focus on one of Yano’s pieces: the 5-minute-long film L’Oubliée.

Remembering L’Oubliée (1982)

[ those who get it get it ]

L’Oubliée is the first piece I’ve encountered from Yano. Apparently, it was performed only a handful of times in studio spaces. I keep returning to it year after year, with the same (if not even deeper) fascination. Find a silent trailer below. The full piece is available on this link [ go watch it ]

© Alain Longuet & Robert Cahen 

[ did you watch the piece? sure? alrightoe then ]

For better or for worse, Yano’s research and choreography have been described as 'metaphysical'. I don’t fully buy this ‘metaphysical’ thing but what is certain is that Yano’s work contrasted with the codes of conventional Western contemporary dance: mostly formal, external, and voluntarily energetic. Like butoh or noh, Yano’s research requires a rich inner, introspective quality of energy. Specifically, it feels that the dancer’s ‘inner energy’ can never be pushed, forced or directed, but has to be a complete, steadfast abandonment. Without such energetic qualities, the dancers in L’Oubliée would appear confused, left to their own devices, or grotesque and overly performative. Especially since the piece carries such profound meaning, imaginative power, and potential for interpretation.

To me, as a viewer, L’Oubliée distantly reminds the unfathomable power of death and beauty to engulf everything and everyone. That’s in fact exactly what the main female dancer in L’Oubliée, Karine Sapotra, felt as a performer: “we were like ‘vertiginous containers’ […]”6.

A brief analysis of the piece

I was curious to move beyond the mere symbolism of the piece and my own emotional gaze on it, and instead understand the mechanics at play. So, for your pleasure, and mostly mine, here is a brief analysis of the piece.

First, let’s break down its main components.

• Format: It is impossible to truly categorize L’Oubliée. It is undeniably both a film and a movement/theater piece, with music playing an incredibly central role. Achieving such a (successful) blend, deep exploration, and balance between all the mediums involved is quite rare in my opinion. And cool.

• Scenography: It could hardly be more minimalist: an empty space, a few white columns, black and white clothing, reminding the gradations of light and shadows in the space.

• Movement: From a bird's-eye view, there’s almost nothing: a collective march, some changes in facial expressions, one central dance sequence with arms ornamentations recalling baroque dance, bodies laying on the floor, & basta cosi

• Music: alright, I have more to say about it. The piece is based on excerpts of a 1967 recording of François Couperin’s Leçons des Ténèbres interpreted by Alfred Deller and Philip Todd. It’s so, so beautiful, we might as well listen to the original recording:

The excerpts used in the first 4 minutes of L’Oubliée are based on the opening of the Leçon [0’00”-2’45”], manipulated very lightly, carefully and transparently: slight changes of speed, abrupt but mastered cuts/jumps from one section of the Leçon to another, superimposing of excerpts. Overall, added to the ‘antiquated’ quality of Couperin’s recording and its interpretation, all these subtle manipulations of in the soundtrack are very effective and emphasize some flash-backs kinds of sensations.

But truly, the piece’s magic (i.e. its implicit symbolism) happens when examining the symbiosis between all its elements: the music, spatial arrangement of the dancers, their movements, etc. So, moving to a more detailed but not exhaustive analysis:

• Introduction [0’00” - 0’53”] :

  • The opening of Leçon is heard slightly sped up. The space is empty, the 4 dancers appear with neutral facial expressions, wrapped with white shroud-like fabrics. They start walking. The scene resembles a funeral march, reinforced by the ghost-like sped-up voices from the Leçon.

  • There is a prolonged silence, like a suspension,, followed by a cut to a shot of the space completely empty.

• Section 1 [0’53” - 3’00”] : Leçon’s opening is played at normal speed. One dancer enters the space, followed by the others. The shot zooms in on the dancers' shadows, pausing on the face of one (resembling a priest) and on a female dancer, Karine Saporta. As the dancers slowly march through the space, the dominant movement in the scene is not their actions, but the shadows in the background, seemingly swaying like waves.

• Section 2 [3’00”-3’50”] :

  • [ 3’00” - 3’21” ] : As Leçon begins its duo of descending, melodic, and ornamented lines, Karine is shown in black, collapsing to the floor on her side with wide-open eyes and mouth—an agonizing expression that evokes despair, abjection, or horror. Her fall is replayed once; and in a split second, we see her lying down. A similar sequence follows with Yano [3’06”]: first, a zoom on his head gently falling back, his mouth open, exuding softness and sensuality, mirrored by the delicate undressing of his black and white clothing, revealing his bare skin. Another abrupt cut then zooms closely on Yano’s hand, and his body lying on the ground — wearing black, his face discreetly turned away.

  • [ 3’21” - 3’50”] : Here comes a much slower, ornamented, delicate fall from Karine, capturing her full body, as well as 2 dancers standing behind her. Her face is neutral, she is like suspended, bending from her side with her head tilted back, her thick, dense chevelure leading the way to the ground, her arms falling like branches of a tree lightly caressed by the wind — this is an incredible scene. At 3’33”, we’re back on a closer shot on Yano, his neck and upper body back softly arched. This time, one may notice a shadow brushing his skin as his cloth slowly falls from his chest again as he straightens back. In the same sequencing as before: the camera abruptly switches to Yano lying on the floor, brushing slowly parts of his body and transitioning to the last part of the piece:

• Section 3 [3’50” - end] :

  • L’Oubliée jumps to another section of Leçon [4'47-5’17”], combined with an almost hallucinated, very distant superimposing of another section of the piece. The film switches to Karine laying on the ground, a revulsed expression on her face, while a third dancer caringly examines her body, as if checking if she is dead. The same ‘caring’ dancer then carries Yano’s inert body: his legs first, his hands next. Another shadow takes much space in the scene [4’09”].

  • 4’13” : Karine wears white again, she’s standing next to the ‘caring’ dancer who now has a strange, content, crooked smile.

  • 4’26” : The ‘caring’ dancer stands next to the ‘priest’. The soundtrack has jumped to yet another section of the Leçon [6’52”- until its conclusive phrase at 7’53” in its original recording], with another faded and light superimposing of the final section of the piece [12’27” - end]. In addition, there is a panning effect: the foregrounded excerpt of Leçon goes to the left, and the second superimposed excerpt softly emerges from the right, giving an impression of a widening of the space until the end of the piece. In the meantime:

  • 4’35” : Evoking the beginning of the piece, the 4 dancers stand next to each other in line, all wearing white, with these rocking shadows behind them.

  • 4’44” : Wearing black, Karine is curled up on the floor, caressing it, in a warmer light. She’s looks innocent, like a child. Then the film switches to Yano’s face, his simple, far-reaching gaze. He also looks like a child as he softly embraces his white, dense fabric, a bit like a comfort blanket. This scene is soft, peaceful, tender.

  • 5’00” : Zooming back on the whole space, the 4 dancers face each other in a square. We mostly see their backs, the light is much more deemer.

  • 5’05” : Cut to the empty and even darker space, with the rocking shadows encountered at the beginning of the piece, and one fixed shadow of a person. For a second, we catch a glimpse of the entrance of a white figure in the space. And that’s the end of the piece: an impression of ‘déjà-vu’. In fact, this last scene is actually a repetition of the end its introduction.

My conclusion is : GOOD LORD, his piece is decisively smart. Through its mix of visual/sound cuts and loops, it feels as though it has no true beginning or end—only a collection of delicately crafted messages and fleeting images, ad infinitum.

( invite ur humble writer 4 coffee)

From Yano to Natsu Nakajumi

When asked if he had one message to convey as a creator, Yano answered “perhaps the journey: […] the curiosity that drives one to travel, and the inner journey.”7 And among the texts written by Yano that I’ve read, one has remained with me inexplicably over the years. Here it is, in its original, impeccable French:

Le retour à Istanbul de Bandırma en bateau. […]. Il y avait un garçon de 3-4 ans qui hurlait dans les bras de sa mère au moment où le bateau partait et où son grand-père, qui est venu les accompagner pour dire au revoir, quittait le bateau. L’enfant ne supportait pas que le bateau quitte la terre (cela lui faisait peur, peut-être), la distance entre la terre et lui augmentant (bien sûr, la distance entre son grand-père et lui-même aussi).

—  The return to Istanbul from Bandırma by boat. […]. There was a 3-4-year-old boy screaming in his mother’s arms as the boat departed and his grandfather, who had come to see them off, was leaving the boat. The child couldn’t bear the boat leaving the shore (perhaps it frightened him), the increasing distance between the land and himself (and, of course, the distance between his grandfather and himself as well).

I’m not sure why, but this description evokes in my (admittedly vivid) imagination a kind of Noah’s Ark setting sail from the shores. The mother’s arms blend with the boy’s, which soar upwards towards his grandfather, forming an arch between the mother, the boy, and the old man, with water in between. Somehow, more than his dance, those specific words by Yano remind me of Natsu Nakajima’s trajectory.

Natsu (yes, I feel like calling her by her first name) was a Japanese butoh dancer and an exact contemporary of Yano, born in 1943, just like him. And like Yano, Natsu developed a fearless relationship to death and a disciplined freedom in her dance, qualities likely inherited from her primary teacher and collaborator, Tatsumi Hijikata. She considered that “butoh rejects any notion of symbolism, message, or formalism, and only express its energy and freedom. It is not art that I aspire to, but love.” For that last reason, she was an awesome teacher, one who included everybody in her classes and could make every-body move. Last year, at the age of 81, after postponing the trip for years, Natsu finally went to Mexico, a place that felt like a second home to her. Shortly after her arrival, Natsu passed away. I can’t help but notice how her dispersed departure somehow echoes Yano’s.

I had the chance to meet Natsu in the Hague in 2017 during a workshop in a local dance studio. She had an extraordinary strength, lightness and remarkable precision. [spoiler & nervous lol: I promise this is the last ‘departure’ I’ll mention in this post] In the last day of our workshop together, Natsu learned the passing of one of her dance colleagues and friend. Butoh being butoh, of course, Natsu decided to dance for him. Here are my notes from her piece.

Emerging from a foggy kind of music, Natsu appeared in the studio with her face covered in white pain, wearing simple, black clothes enhancing her graceful bearing, her eyes blinking. She looks like a kid. She begins to push an empty, rolling chair, ‘dressed’ with a few pieces of fabrics and two rocks placed on top of them. Natsu opens the studio curtains, showing the chair/ghost the Hague’s grey sky through the window (she smiles). She pushes the chair further until it reaches the mirror, gently showing it its empty reflection.

As she returns to the center of the studio from the mirror, the music is no longer heard, and Natsu no longer smiles as if the chair/ghost had become a burden. Delicately, she stops pushing the chair, adjusts the ghost’s clothes, and takes the stones in her hand.

( A long moment of silence and stillness )

Natsu strikes the stones together, loudly, in several directions, before walking to a small pile of sand or ashes placed on the ground. She softly rubs the ashes on her upper chest and neck. She touches the ashes with her hands, caresses them, forms another pile. In her small hands, she takes two handfuls of ashes and carefully stands up. Her walk is slow, as if moving through thick air, while some ashes fall lightly from her hands, as if by accident. When she reaches the center of the space, Natsu stiffens and rises onto the tips of her toes. She raises one arm and lets the ashes fall to the ground in complete silence. She then raises her other arms, the ashes continuing to fall. She repeats the gesture in several directions, until she faces us. Slowly, as the Adagietto from Malher’s 5th Symphony lightly plays in the background, Natu sits down, and even more slowly lies down until the recording ends.

When she stands up, no one speaks nor move. She simply brushes herself off and moves on.8

What surprises me in those notes is that although they don’t give much detail of the piece, the simple description they offer feels, in itself, deeply evocative and moving. And mysterious. Those qualities inherent in Natsu’s craft and gift. Please enjoy a recording below of her in action

..and cut. I’ll stop there, not knowing where I ended up — maybe somewhere between sand and ashes. At least, this was a small contribution to keeping Yano’s and Natsu’s pieces known and seen, with a subtle invitation for those of us inspired by their work to share it further. And, dear reader, here’s another invitation to you: you’re warmly welcome to share your secret shelters & treasured pieces here. Rest assured, they will be cherished.

Take good care,

Lucie

ps: i might not be able to post in 2 weeks, but i’ll be back soon. . .

How is it going? I hope 2025 is already rocking your boat.

I’m just starting this year with a new cycle of pieces, (for)semaison, partially inspired by Mustapha Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations. Needless to say, I’m a little nervous to start this project — not only because I’m the QoP, i.e. the Queen of Procrastination, but also because I’ve loved Skandrani’s pieces for many, many years. My relationship with his pieces has evolved over time, supporting my journey of unveiling the history of my complex family tapestry. Skandrani’s music has somehow mirrored my awareness of this topic: prolonged absence(s), and sudden flashes. Anyway, as I finally lean into composing (for)semaison, I returned to Skandrani’s music and already bumped into some interesting stuff along the way. For instance, the Istikhbars and Improvisations were repressed by EM Records in 2021 and re-edited in December 2024. I had no idea, and this made me think that ‘something’ around Skandrani’s music was perhaps in the air. But are we talking about the same ‘something’ or even the same ‘someone’? Short answer: nein. And it’s probably oké si c’est pas kif-kif.

3, 2, 1, let’s go.

Mustapha Skandrani & Algiers

For those who don’t know him, Mustapha Skandrani (1920-2005) was an Algerian multi-instrumentalist and dedicated member of the Mouloudia Algiers football club.1 While scoring goals, Skandrani spent hours at the club playing on the piano that was there, next to other Algerois musicians. Since the piano wasn’t commonly used in Andalusian or chaābi orchestras in those times, Skandrani’s talent was even more quickly noticed, allowing him to perform with la crème de la crème of Arabo-Andalusian musicians. For instance, he worked at Radio Alger in the late 30s/early 40s alongside Meriem Soussan and Rachid Ksentini, an infamous & audacious music-comedy Jewish-Muslim duo. Skandrani also gradually replaced exiled Algerian Jewish pianists, until he fully dedicated his time to this instrument, accompanying other popular musicians in Algeria and abroad, like Salim Halali, Lili Boniche, and Alice Fitoussi. Skandrani was appointed as a soloist in the Radio Alger Orchestra from 1956 until 1963 and then became a professor at the Conservatory of Algiers in 1966 (= 4 years after Algeria’s independence). He may have taught young people resembling the following who may, or may have not, left for France:

[ a worth-while documentary ]

He finally directed the Andalusian/ chaābi orchestra of the Algier Conservatory until 1982 (= year of the Algiers Accords), in an Algier probably resembling the following:

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Mustapha Skandrani & the School of Sanāa

Skandrani’s contribution to Arab-Andalusian music and the Algerian classical music scene in general is immense. More specifically, he composed over 300 modern compositions or chaābi and 187 qasida and songs, belonging to the repertoire of the Alger School = School of Sanāa, Çan’a, or çanāa (or the more hypothetical ©’@n@) — a sophisticated modal music, mostly orally transmitted, where interpretation and improvisation play an essential role. Skandrani was not only the first Algerian pianist who developed a technique specifically adjusted to this Sanāa School, i.e. one emphasizing an ‘Alger-interpretation’. He was also the first Muslim Algerian pianist of the XXth, whose style contrasted with ‘previous technique supposedly used by Jewish musicians.’2 Although I don’t support the idea of assigning one religion to one type of musicianship, it is probable that

1. some of the Jewish Algerian pianists of that time may indeed have experienced a Westernized music education and approach to piano playing;

2. Skandrani’s piano style results from his musical upbringing = his uncle’s tuition, Habib Skandrani, himself a musician trained in traditional Arabic music;

3. + as Skandrani worked with Muslim and Jewish musicians alike, and many more, he was most likely influenced by all kinds of musicianships throughout his life.

This multiplicity of musical influences reflects all at once an essential dimension of Arab-Andulasian traditional music, the Sanāa school, and Skandrani’s style: they exceed national/religious borders and don’t have clearly delineated origins. For this reason, Sanāa music bears the marks of the more or less approximate means used to preserve it but also of the under-exploited strokes of its ingenuity.3 At the same time, Sanāa music remains “in perpetual and slow evolution, one that participates to a quest for ‘beauty’ without ever claiming ‘perfection’“.4

Listening to Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations

Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations were recorded in 1965 in Paris. Istikhbars refer to the introductory sections of the traditional Arab-Andalusian vocal suite called nūbat and are essentially one single melodic voice introducing the main mode of a nūbat, with elaborate modulations and ornamentations.

So, without further due, let’s finally listen to Mustapha Skandrani’s Istikhbars.

Skandrani’s music has quite clearly the power to allude in a split second to a multiplicity of musical references, styles, and contexts, without ever being fixed on one but its own. Approaching the piece from a music analysis perspective, what is striking besides Skandrani’s extraordinarily rigorous exploration of modes and rhythms, is his sense of (dynamic) restraint and clarity, the richness and elegance of his pianistic touch. The latter is embodied in subtle ornamentations and articulations, a light but very central use of the pedal (giving the recording a quality of resonance found in contemporary music repertoire), a sparse and delicate presence of bass notes in an overall, narrow collection of notes unfolding in the middle range of the piano. In the rest of the CD, one may also notice an interesting mix of different recording qualities, some pieces being noisier, roughly, and distantly recorded, and others rendered in a more ‘Westernly produced’ way.

So, overall, from this very succint analysis, one can already sense there’s something fundamentally a-stereotypical in Skandrani’s Istikhbars and Improvisations, appealing to a plurality of listening experiences, themselves being potentially multilayered.

Mustapha Skandrani, a vessel for various projections

As I returned to Skandrani’s music, I started to collect descriptions and comments made on his recordings. At first, I did it for fun, but the process of collecting and comparing the different impressions from Skandrani’s listeners led me to experience an unexpected plethora of thoughts and emotions. Something like a slightly tightened throat, a slightly clearer mind & a slightly more open heart.

• EM Records: a politically correct, stereotypical (& perilous) story-telling of trans-Mediterranean ‘co-existence’

In their LP description, EM writes that listening to Skandrani’s recordings reminds us that “the Mediterranean is not a barrier, but a unifier, and that the differences between the cultures are not vast.” [ ]. Wait a minute, Sherlock, could this un-tout-petit-peu-naive description be a footprint of a gigantic red flag? Let’s give EM Records the benefit of the doubt. In the rest of their linear note, they claim Skandrani’s playing “may remind the listener of a modal Goldberg Variations, Bach and Glenn Gould transplanted to Andalucia.“ As much as their reference to Bach can make some sense musically speaking, I lost it after the adjective transplanted and the misuse of Andalucia. The coup fatal came with the following description: “Skandrani's powerful musical vision perceives the European element involved in Arabo-Andalusian musical culture, a world of exchange and co-existence, and his decision to play this music on the piano reminds us of this European influence.” I might be wrong, but I sense an undertone in EM’s description that could glorify something resembling colonization. The discomfort is real. This is what uninformed, politically correct descriptions of ‘World music’ can do: like pharmaceutical companies, they can homogenize a complex, certainly not easy-to-swallow historical context (with potential healing properties in it) into something sweet, easy to sell and digest.

But well, let’s embrace EM Record listening experience as one having its own ‘validity’. In fact, their description may be the more common view on Skandrani’s music, one reflecting our uninformed knowledge of Algerian history and Arab-Andalusian music.

• Youtube commenters: opening the valve for interpersonal / intercommunal listening experiences

Mixing Arabic, French, and Hebrew, the Youtube comments under Skandrani’s pieces praise his beautiful and emblematic style, but rather briefly. Mostly, it is as if Skandrani’s music was teleporting Youtubers-listeners in a different time and a different place, one where they could be heard/read and discreetly find their peers. Contrary to EM’s description, Youtube comment sections do not convey a monolithic reality, and do not suppress/silence the existing social, historical, linguistic, real, and imagined gaps between the different lived experiences of Skandrani’s listeners. Instead, Skandrani’s music becomes a modular kind of vessel for Youtubers-listeners to express anything between political stances (nationalism), grief (of a country, a people that is no more), nostalgia, mere joy, and (family/childhood) memories. Although based on a common appreciation of Skandrani’s music, this large spectrum of listening/ life experiences comes with its share of opacity and tensions without resolution. Perhaps, the comments are haunted by a joint, lived history of violence and disruptions that led to individuated ‘conclusions’, wishes, and (sometimes unprocessed) emotions.

I’ve just selected a few comments among many, but their accumulation is like a wide-open wound feedbacking onto itself. For instance, under a video of a performance in Paris in 1988:

‘انا محضوض عشت هذاك الوقت.زمن رائع.’ — I am blessed to have lived through that time. A wonderful time. [ joy / perhaps nostalgia ] 

‘نضنا مع الهماج مزية كاين هاد الفيديوات نشمو بيهم ريحت هداك زمان’ — We grew up with the savagery. It's a good thing these videos smell like that back in the day. [ childhood / grief / nostalgia / perhaps joy ]

‘Vive l'Algérie authentique’ — Long life to the authentic Algeria [ nationalism / joy ]

‘وين راهي هذه الجزائر التي كان يحكي عليها ابي.’ — where is the Algeria my father was speaking of? [ nostalgia / nationalism / family / childhood / perhaps grief ]

‘Cela me ramène des années en arrière, ma jeunesse, ma famille formidable, mes parents, mon papa, ma soeur, mes 3 oncles, ma grand-mere et bien d'autres encore décédés, mon départ en France, la maladie de mon aîné, les lourdes responsabilités qu'il fallait assumer. allah yarhamouhoume ou allah yarahmou skandrani, un virtuose, une perle rare que je connaissais depuis ma tendre enfance, 55 ans plus tard il continue a bercer nos vies ’ — This brings me back years ago, my youth, my wonderful family, my parents, my dad, my sister, my 3 uncles, my grandmother and many others deceased, my departure for France, the illness of my eldest, the heavy responsibilities one had to assume. allah yarhamouhoume or allah yarahmou skandrani, a virtuoso, a rare gem that I knew since my early childhood, 55 years later he continues to rock our lives. [ nostalgia / childhood / family / grief / perhaps joy ]

In this next video from 1994, Skandrani and Reinette l’Oranaise — a very famous Algerian Jewish singer with a commanding presence to say the least, are squabbling with one another. See one of the comment below:

بحجة أنهم يهود حُرمنا من الإستماع إلى هاته الأصوات الجبارة التي تدعوا إلى الفخر بموروثنا الشعبي ‘ الأغنى في كل هذا العالم .. كم كنا كبارا بفكرنا الراقي وقبولنا بالآخر وأصبحنا صغارا جدا بتعصبنا المبالغ فيه ..’ — Under the pretext that they were Jewish [= referring to Reinette], we have been deprived of listening to these powerful voices that inspire pride in our richest cultural heritage in the world. How great we once were with our refined thinking and acceptance of others, and how very small we have become with our excessive intolerance. [this one hits differently. It echoes to what Azoulay and Negrouche’s describe as “Algeria’s incompleteness without its Jewish genealogy,” pointing at a collective and intergenerational feeling of loss.5 ]

So, there we are. Listening to Skandrani’s music is woven in a poignant flow of emotions, highlighting how much contemporary meaning there is in his music. Extending the spot-on words of Samuel Sami’s Everett about Reinette l’Oranaise to Skandrani: this collection of listening experiences shows “the importance of music as an embodied materiality with affective resonance that can transcend political bolstering without playing into the saccharine clichés Andalusi intercommunal imaginary”.6

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‘comparative music-ing’ — an open proposition

Feeling like zooming/zoning out even further to conclude. This little case study around Skandrani shows that listening/music-ing can be “a means to compare the different manifestations of the human experience — the process of trying to understand, reflect upon, shape, transform, know reality with the help of all the means available to us” — which is how Raimundo Panikkar defines comparative philosophy.7 For Panikkar, we do comparative philosophy […] as a mature ontonomic activity of the human [mind], contrasting everything, learning from everywhere, and radically criticizing the enterprise itself’. ” Accordingly, comparing requires to rely on diatopical hermeneutics8, i.e. a “method of interpretation when the distance to overcome is the distance between 2 (or more) cultures, which have independently developed different spaces (topoi), their own methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility along with their proper categories.” This method calls upon “the researcher’s conscious engagement with empathy and a preparedness to bracket-out belief in the truth of one or the other position.”

Panikkar’s methodology of interpretation feels especially relevant when listening, composing or performing music that inherently mixes/originates from multiple topoi, like Arab-Andalusian music. I also see how diatopical hermeneutics are perhaps especially relatable and empowering for those of us who have been raised (/torn) between radically different musical heritages. This category of ‘hybrid’ listeners, composers, and musicians may be more prone to feel estranged and/or easily impressionable by the conventional (= homogenized/predominant) ways of considering music, listening, analysis, and composition. Instead, people with a hybrid music heritage may have a different wiring — one where some of them would prefer to attend all these activities of listening, analysis, and composition by actively giving space and exploring their hybrid cultural heritages in rigorous and systematic ways. By doing so, listening, performing, and composing may really become a self-reflective venture for them. A vaguely contoured methodology could look like the following. A subject interested in learning/creating from/with their hybrid musical heritage would be invited to:

1. delineate which music heritages have shaped their personal, and family trajectory;

2. set a respectful yet fresh gaze/analysis on these musical repertoires, i.e.

   patiently develops a fearless, deep intimacy with these musics, bypassing any feeling of ‘illegitimacy’ or ‘estrangement’;

3. patiently debunk any stereotypes around these repertoires (including racist, exotic, and exilic imaginaries) ;

4. perhaps, experience a sort of symbolic dissolution of the musical repertoires and topoi initially examined ;

5. turn the latter into a new, a-referential, a-stereotypical something (for instance, a piece of their own)

+ have fun throughout.

Moral of the story: I better practice what I preach & start composing my pieces.

///////

Thank you for reading until the end. You’re most welcome to connect here you’re always most welcome to connect here, the best part for me remains to hear from you.

With warm, non-bracketed wishes, take good care

Lucie / QoP,

How is it going, how’s the end of 2024? Sending positive thoughts. Thanks for joining me here again. Without further due, let’s begin this post with a short, existential intro.

For most of us, art-making prompts or enhances in ourselves an equal amount of escapism (from the practical, emotional, relational matters, etc.) and a wide broadening + deep intimacy in our experience of life. By making art, we learn to bridge the two ends: escapism and insightfulness. In the same way, we learn to conciliate the outer, superficial, and repeated (mis)understandings with the profound, rare inner realizations we may have — until we accept both are one and the same and serve the same aim: unveiling our selves, little by little.

In that sense, coming across the works or minds of composers/artists/thinkers Catherine Christer Hennix, Adrian Piper, and Katrina Burch was a shock in my system. They all showed (/ reminded) me that a) one has permission (and the right) to live with a radical kind of alignment between gravity and lightness, courage and humor; b) art can be an infinitely declinable means to this end.

So, here is a dedicated (merely introductory) post to these highly gifted, highly distinctive, highly multifaceted artists — so multifaceted that they sometimes feel like a continuation of each other. Above all, I hope this post will inspire you to delve deeper into their works [see footnotes for resources]. This post might also enhance the rather obvious connection between the giftedness1 of these three women, the depth of their artistic processes (recalling the many forms of overexcitability2 gifted people tend to manifest), and how greatly misunderstood they felt/were at times, particularly in the conventional academic and/or artistic field(s). There might be a topic there, something to think and talk about.

Allez, c’est ti-par, buckle up cause we’re delving into it, heads on.

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1. Adrian Piper

Adriaaan, Adrian, Adrian. Born in NYC, Adrian Piper is an artist, philosopher, teacher, yoga practitioner, and funk dance connoisseur living in Berlin since 2005. She studied both visual arts and philosophy, expanding the realm of conceptual art and minimalism as a tool for social critique and self-examination. As a result, Piper truly did unveil her self further and further as time passed, and by doing so, added more and more layers of significance in her pieces. The latter reflects issues of race, sex, class, and ethics while incorporating two main branches of philosophies Piper committed for life (and put to the test): Hindu philosophies and Immanuel Kant’s philosophy (+to a certain degree David Hume’s). This commitment led her to write and self-publish the impressive 2-volume Rationality and the Structure of Self, which she introduces in the interview below, with outstanding clarity.

Be it in her writings or art, experiencing Piper’s work is conducive to experiencing one’s self — what Kant conceives in his Critique of Pure Reason as a precondition for experience itself, a unifying force that enables us to connect various representations into a subjective grasp of reality3. In Piper’s pieces, one may see their self in action and inaction, its beauty and contradictions/blind spots, its intangibility and fleeting embodiment, the uncertainty of its appearance(s) and certainty of its disappearance, its concurrent motions of revolt and joy.

For all these reasons, perhaps even more acutely than other artists, studying Piper’s artistic trajectory limpidly teaches us about the ‘chronology’ of her self. This chronology could be captured as the following arch: an intense dive into abstraction, leading to a form of dissociation and diffusion into the collective, and a return to an even more complete integration and elevation.

During the first stage of her artistic practice, Piper recognizes having been drunk on abstraction, which she described with a poetic and surgical precision. For those in love with abstraction, her experience may be very relatable. In her words, abstraction is “a framework organizing increasingly comprehensive concepts into a coherent tapestry, an intellectual act of ascending to higher conceptual levels”; “a dizzying object of contemplation the details of which stun one into panic by their connectedness, significance, and vividness.” At the same time, abstraction is freedom from “the immediate spatio-temporal constraints of the moment; […] the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, […] the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; […] a solitary journey through the conceptual universe, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to.”4

By being so ‘high’ on abstraction, Piper admitted having “traumatized herself”, leading to burn out and a withdrawal from the artworld, back into the external political/collective world where she lead for instance her Funk Lessons in the early 80s.

Later on, her philosophical training helped Piper to “purify the imagery in [her] artwork of excess theoretical baggage and [offering her] a new kind of reflective conceptual tool” — one that shed light on her experiences of fear, fantasy, mistrust, suspicion, anger, confusion, ignorance. To Piper, the latter obstruct her “self-transcendence, [her] ability to lose [herself] temporarily in the other, in the world, in abstract ideas. These are the barriers [her] art practice reflects, because they are the ones that keep [her] grounded.”

Perhaps, by accepting these barriers, acknowledging and embracing their existence, Piper grew more accepting of her self and of the respect she rightfully deserved. After decades teaching philosophy in the US, Adrian eventually relocated in Berlin in 2005. From her writings, although this relocation was filled with an audacious sense of renewal, this choice was also a result of a gradual process of ostracisation she experienced as a philosophy teacher in the US. For those who would be interested, this equally absurd, painful and empowering experience is portrayed at the end of her very up-to-date essay Passing for White, passing for Black.5 [ As the title suggests, the essay actually casts a much broader net — it is truly a must-read ].

Adrian received the Golden Lion Award in 2015 for her 40 years of art-making, performance and theory. During her participation in the Venice Biennale, she presented The Probable Trust Registry, a piece where visitors are asked to sign contracts with themselves adhering to statements such as: ‘I will always mean what I say’, ‘I will always do what I say I am going to do’, or ‘I will always be too expensive to buy’. Why not keeping all those as resolutions from 2025 onwards. I’ll leave it there with one last quote of hers: “My art practice is a reflecting mirror of light and darkness, a high sunny window that holds out to me the promise of release into the night.”6

2. Catherine Christer Hennix

Not sure where to begin with the Norwegian composer, musician, poet, artist, mathematician, philosopher, Catherine Christer Hennix. Understanding her work asks for dedication: a wish to dive (and get lost) into the numerous expansions of her mind and modalities of existence. Before her music and writings were made finally accessible to a larger public on Blank Forms Editions7, a few outstanding musicians/artists— like Katrina Burch, Marcus Pal, and Amedeo Maria Schwaller — have dedicated some years in their 20s to work with CCH. They would surely be more apt to talk about her legacy than me, and give a more complete account of Hennix’s complex character. So, keeping this in mind, I’ll just share my experience of her work, which was no less than a tidal wave in my music and life.

To begin with, let’s listen to her music.

Hennix’s work results from an assemblage of various artistic practices (jazz, raga, maqam, blues, poetry, noh theater), and teachings (mathematics, logic, buddhism, muskim sufism) — and this is probably only the top of a much broader iceberg. To me, her body of works represents and the epitome of "transdisciplinarism", one which may be more specifically described as attempts to wed mathematical formalism and introspective states of mind. Logic and numbers are not only tools to model her music, for instance when considering her way of composing using Just Intonation. Rather, it feels like CCH’s relation to mathematics is existential — a medium for the mind to reflect on its own functioning.

In fact, Hennix's work is permeated by intuitionism, a radically novel —and controversial — conception of mathematics and mathematical creativity consisting of a mathematical theory of introspection, founded by the mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer around the early 1900s. As a philosophical position, intuitionism puts the "creative subject" and its psyche at the centre of the mathematical activity, where it can be understood as the fruit of internal acts of thinking. Because reasoning is always attached to a specific mathematical context and the creative subject, intuitionists acknowledge mathematical notions have only a provisional, relative existence. In Hennix's music, the role of the composer and performer are inspired from the Brouwerian "creative subject," and this emphasises putting one’s intuitions at the center of a rigorous creative process. Thus similar to the Brouwerian mathematical activity, the musical activity, is interpreted as the result of internal or introspective states of mind; it is highly subjective and revisable, offering transitory solutions to a musical inquiry.

As much as my mind allows it, my experience of CCH’s music revolves around ‘perceiving’, a state akin to direct and immediate knowledge (VS knowledge produced by inference, deduction or reasoning). Put differently, CCH’s music invites a listener to experience glimpses of their mind’s essence—as clear cognition or a luminous state. For some of us, experiencing such clear states of mind is no less than a revolution and a revolt from/against our common narrow-mindedness. [ btw, isn’t astonishing what music can do? ]

So, differently from Piper, CCH’s primary companion was maybe less abstraction per se but luminosity. That being said, with her push & pull relationship to academic /artistic institutions and her numerous relocalizations, CCH’s trajectory echoes to Piper’s. Hennix taught Logic and Mathematics in various prestigious institutions in the US and Europe, before moving to Turkey to study Sufism and maqam. But her music and art certainly didn’t get the success they deserved before Blank Forms Editions stepped in a few years ago. That is: CCH struggled to have her pieces performed and heard for most of her life. This is another example that sometimes, things in life don’t make much sense. And they don’t need to.

Before her recent passing in 2023, I’ve dreamt of CCH, several times actually, which is strange for someone I have never met IRL. In one of these dreams, we were dancing and laughing. Between jokes and stories, she invited me to study maqam together in Turkey (I wish). In another dream, I was the one inviting her, this time to give a lecture in a big concert hall in the Netherlands. She was again incredibly bright, with the same spicy sense of humor, and this half-smile and sparkle in her eyes that said: ‘there is nothing to take seriously, ever’. Interestingly, before giving her lecture, she had entered the hall on her wheelchair. As she began her presentation (about the relationship between mathematics and her music), she stood up and walked to center stage in room packed with people, making them laugh and think all at once. So, for what it is worth, this is my understanding of Hennix: she was so bright that she could overcome the limitations of her frail body, stand up and invite others to experience glimpses of clarity with her.

3. Katrina Burch

Katrina Burch’s works show yet another declination of a highly gifted person’s artistic path. I met Katrina during my first year at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague in 2016, and I had never met anyone like her before. She was so clever, rebellious, free, transparent, and kind. Back then, Katrina had a MA in Anthropology, was studying in the Sonology MA program while doing an MSc in Archeology. Shortly after, she left to Canada where she enrolled in a PhD program in Anthropology at McGill University, combining community-driven research and artistic practice through sensory ethnography. This uncompromising academic trajectory is worth celebrating but too reductive to portray Katrina — who is also a photographer, musician/composer, poet, yogi, activist, a mother, and much more.

As briefly mentioned before, Katrina studied together with Catherine Christer Hennix. To me, the lineage is clear, not because Katrina and CCH’s aesthetics or philosophical frameworks would be similar, but precisely because they are so distinct, unique and holistic in their own ways. Katrina’s work has a primal and cosmological dimension, one that touches more closely on ‘the feminine’, desires, rituals and ecology. When she was in the Netherlands, Katrina was invested in algorithmic and electronic sets as Yoneda Lemma, which she developed sometimes in collaboration with her partner (another exceptional artist, Donatas Tubutis).

Following her entry into parenthood, Katrina/Yoneda Lemma became ICA-RINA. In these most recent pieces — at least in the way I see it, it feels like Katrina simply brings love to the foreground, with a kind of rare intensity, accompanied with very profound descriptions and research around her works.

Katrina’s Anthropology current research is also at a fascinating intersection. Her doctorate “explores the ephemeral poetics of timing and place in the intricacies of rotational farming practices in northern Thailand and the resurgence of this traditional livelihood for Indigenous Karen in the face of cryptocolonial conservation laws. In this context, Katrina is led by women's economies of care looking at food sovereignty from a maternal-medicinal perspective, while sharing a personal interest in ancestral grieving/healing at the nexus/interface of body, spirits and land. Through this work, Katrina is developing sensory ethnography as a form of art, wherein hope, beauty, grief and pleasure can nourish philosophical insight with/in the emotional politics of everyday life. Katrina is guided by listening as a practice of cosmological attunement that moves with and beyond the human.” Nothing to add. Synthesizing of all these different yet interdependent topics into one comprehensive research is an accomplishment, in and of itself. I look forward to reading her PhD, and to seeing how Katrina will continue to strive over the years, in or under the radar.

One last personal memory, back in 2016-7. As students at the Institute of Sonology, we have so-called ‘colloquium’, a 30/40min presentation to discuss our respective research with ± every other students and staff members. From memory, Katrina shared in her colloquium how her research was integrating the poetics of eroticism and media archaeology into her algorithmic approach to music-making and voice synthesis. These very topics and their mixture were terrifying for some male students/staff members, who composed ±93% of the Institute back the, but especially exciting for the remaining ±7% female/non-binary students. As a result, Katrina’s research raised some serious discomfort among some members of the Sonology community, and even anger. Although Katrina managed to elegantly ignore or transform these incidents, she was not protected by anyone/anything from these kinds of aggressive interactions back then. [NB: this Sonology context has changed since 2016-7]. All this to say that Katrina’s guts, integrity, strength and sense of humor remained even more deeply imprinted in my memory. She planted a seed, paving the way for other students to ‘dare’ conducting their research because it was deeply meaningful to them, and to decisively refuse to bare anyone else’s uneasiness. That’s actual empathy.

A brief conclusion

Adrian Piper, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Katrina Burch have all understood, in their own ways, how to direct their respective intelligence to keep growing positively, and by doing so, allowing others to grow with them. They were/are never subjugated by their own intelligence, beauty, talents, or altruism, and rather continuously transformed themselves with less and less ‘artifice’. Their trajectories may illustrate what some members of the gifted/neurodivergent community call ’positive desintegration’. At least to me, they show what being self-driven may look like: moving on and with the world around you, and sometimes finding grace in provocation.

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Voooooilà for tonight. I somehow haven’t shared much about sound/music, so next time, we might do some music-bookworming together.

Thanks for reading, and always feel free to respond

good night or good day, and good hug

ps: are these posts too long? i’m curious and have no idea

ps2: i’ll update a resource section here with every post published

I hope the end of the year is treating you well, and, that, well, your year ends with treats. Yesterday was my birthday (yay) and I felt like reminiscing about one of the best gifts I’ve received over the last year: assisting other composers at Orgelpark, Amsterdam (NL).

Since its 2024 edition, I have had the great pleasure of working together with Claudio F Baroni for the Echonance Festival at Orgelpark. Although I am officially a producer/coordinator, I have another invisible ‘hat’ as a technical assistant. In brief, I help commissioned or invited composers during the (re)creation of their pieces, and in particular, if they wish to use Orgelpark’s two computer-driven or so-called ‘hyperorgans’. It is an invisible ‘hat’ as we don’t make publicity around our multifaceted roles with Claudio, but also for another fundamental reason. When assisting other composers, the assistant is/becomes invisible if they do a good job — to achieve a complete transparency or seamless workflow between the composers and the music they envision. So, if all goes well, my work begins with assisting these composers and ends with receding completely in the background, solely witnessing (with wonder) their compositional process.

So, let me humbly open the door to these ‘behind the scenes’ glimpses of what assisting other people in composing looks like from my perspective. I did not anticipate working with composers I admire so much, but here I am. To the expense of sharing technical details, I will try to keep it short & informal/simple —we’re here to relax after all.

[2024] Remembering Clarence Barlow — developing a later intimacy

The first process I’d like to share is a metaphorical kind of assistance — one where I adapted the piece Für Simon-Jonassohn Stein by Clarence Barlow, a few months after his passing. At that time, we all felt the urge to pay tribute to his life and work. Originally, Für Simon-Jonassohn Stein was written in 2012 for the Saint-Peters Church’s hyperorgan in Cologne, and later on rewritten for Dutch Ensemble Modelo62. We thought playing the organ version of the piece at Orgelpark would be a great idea.

In all honesty, I didn’t know Für Simon-Jonassohn Stein too well and did not anticipate how much work adapting it for Orgelpark’s two hyperorgans (Sauer and Utopa) would entail. So this task had a very big speculative dimension, reinforced by the fact that I had never met Clarence before his passing.

As I started engaging in this project, it became clear that although Clarence had extensively written about his compositional methods for the piece, there was little available documentation to be found on its realization per se. For instance, I had the MIDI files of the piece but were not sure how he played them on the organ at the Saint-Peters Church, i.e. which registers he used or if he used other effects like changes in air pressure and so on.

So, I just began to feel my way along: analyzing the original MIDI files extensively, listening to the two versions of the piece for organ and ensemble, translating the MIDI messages thanks to a comprehensive SuperCollider patch sending OSC messages straight to Orgelpark’s organs along with changes in registrations (all this in collaboration with Andrea Vogrig), and of course, choosing the right registrations for this new, 2024 version of the piece. I made several versions of the piece for the two hyperorgans at Orgelpark, following different logics: staying as close as possible to the original solo organ version, combining the organ and ensemble versions, imagining other versions following the overall structure of the piece or simply experiments I wanted to try — and mostly, imagining what would have been the most musically fulfilling (and fun) version for Clarence.

My main finding was that the piece’s macro structure was mainly defined by Clarence’s choice of ‘orchestration’, which was a rather simple, linear sequence of accumulation of registers, from soft to more imposing ones (if not slightly grotesque). This sequence was somehow superimposed on the conceptual, algorithmic ideas beneath the piece, with a great talent, musicianship and sense of humor. In the 2024 version of the piece, the simpler my choices of registrations on the Utopa and Sauer, the better. Similar to how Clarence orchestrated the ensemble version of the piece, I mapped each organ to each of the customized algorithmic program used by Clarence in the piece. The Utopa rendered the MIDI files related to the ‘Autobusk’ improvisations, and the Sauer organ played the MIDI files generated following the ‘Chorale synthesis’ algorithm. And at the end of the piece, both organs played the last Chorale section of the piece. Coming to this simple conclusion was perhaps laborious but enlightening.

A personal take away from this experience was that there is much responsibility involved in caring for and perpetuating a composer’s musical lineage. And taking on this responsibility is rewarding. Throughout this process, I got to know ‘a piece’ very intimately, but, most importantly, I have found a way to thank Clarence for his work and its influence in my own musical path. It might have been a bit too late, but maybe we kind of met at last, somewhere between memento mori & memento vivere.

[2024] Bridging Catherine Lamb and Elisabeth Smalt — witnessing transmission

Still for the 2024 Edition of Echonance at Orgelpark, a second assistance experience I was involved with was related to the transmission of Catherine Lamb’s shade/gradient to the viola player Elisabeth Smalt. The piece consists of 3 parts: one for viola, one for voice and one for sine tones. The first two parts are derived from the piece’s score — which is kind of a proposition of path(s) where the performer goes through rationally tuned intervals — and the electronic part is is probabilistically generated on a standalone SuperCollider patch, originally programmed by Bryan Eubanks.

Before this project, I had an intimate connection to the piece very well. In 2018-9, my friend Edgars Rubenis (who I will have the pleasure to introduce in an upcoming post) and I had already analyzed its score and reprogrammed all its ratios on SuperCollider. To me, the exercise was a first decisive entrance door to rational intonation and composition in general. A few years later, I had the great pleasure to meet Catherine during a residency and then in Berlin while I was living there in 2022-3. I’m especially thankful for the meetings she had generously organized at hers with other young composers like myself, where we had some collective listening sessions together, brought our scores, discussed all kinds of things — music making, tuning, art, life in general. Those meetings were highlights for our group of mostly solitary, perhaps a bit lost yet lovely weirdos.

Getting back on track: I was especially touched to help her and Elisabeth in any capacity to bring shade/gradient to Orgelpark in 2024. This was not any kind of performance, but a an actual transmission, from one composer/viola player to another. Until then, Cat had been the only performer of the piece so, Elisabeth was (again) feeling responsible for receiving this piece— and so was I.

After a first discussion with Cat, Elisabeth and I began dissecting the score, going through the different ratios present in the score, discovering the rigorous and wide kind of freedom of choices of pitches involved in the piece — and thus the incredible mastery required to perform it. The piece is like embracing and enhancing a complex palette of colors of intervals — and accepting to get completely lost (/ found) during the process. In Cat’s words, performing the piece is akin to a walk in a forest, staring at the trunks of one trees for a while, becoming aware at the vastness of the forest later, staring at the sun’s rays piecing through the trees’ leaves. And in the music itself, one may hear pockets of light resulting from the emergence of a rationally tuned intervals between bowed strings, the voice, and sine tones. [I would gladly write another post on this piece — thoughts?]

Elisabeth had already worked with just intonation system, but with a different notation. So we mostly spent some time going through each ratio and Cat’s ingenious approach of assigning colors to prime numbers and their resulting intervals. I also prepared some SuperCollider patches for Elisabeth to practice each section of the piece so that she would be as autonomous as possible, and feel comfortable using this technology without needing to know anything about SuperCollider.

Our first and only rehearsal with Cat and Elisabeth in Berlin was a privileged moment. I remember a quiet, focused, slow and intimate atmosphere, an overall dedication, an unusual care— and the softness of our interactions. Maybe we were all walking on eggshells at times (in the best sense possible), experiencing the vulnerability involved with this transmission process as it began to unfold under our eyes and ears.

Cat wasn’t able to be there during the concert at Echonance — so her complete trust with our work with Elisabeth (voice/viola) and myself (electronics) was touching and empowering. Elisabeth and I had to find ways to bring the intimacy of the rehearsal we had found with Cat, to Orgelpark’s concert hall — and bring audience members in ‘the forest’. Elisabeth impeccable presence during the concert was inspiring; and I believe we both let the piece spoke through during the concert.

A take away from this experience. It is quite beautiful for me to retrospectively observe a multifaceted transmission diffused patiently over many years, many people, many places. In some sense, the piece and its philosophy were passed on from a distance from Cat to Edgars, from Edgars to me, from Cat to our group of young composers, from Cat to Elisabeth and I, from me to Elisabeth, from Elisabeth to audience members, and back to Cat. Who ‘assisted’ who and when is no longer clear nor relevant — we got all lost and found in the same interdependent music forest.

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Let’s now move on to other experiences assisting the making of pieces to be presented in a few months in Amsterdam. As the works are still in progress, I won’t share as much as the previous ones but hope these previews will make you feel inclined to come join the Echonance Festival in February 2025 at Orgelpark.

[2025] Playing with Arnold Dreyblatt — the fruitfulness of (seeming) detours

The first commissioned composer for Echonance 2025 is Arnold Dreyblatt, who will present his new piece Descendants — Music for Four Pipe Organs in One Space.

When meeting online for the first time and discussing possible options for his piece and if/how I could be of help to him, Arnold explained he usually works very much on spot, finding out about the piece by interacting with the instruments, and perhaps an overall ‘situation’ (my interpretation), rather than by working ‘abstractly’ or planning in advance all kinds of schemes and procedures. To a certain degree, I’m kind of the opposite when composing my own music so I was slightly worried our differences of composing methodologies would prevent me from being truly helpful.

Arnold’s initial idea was to adapt a recent piece he had written for a hyperorgan in the Auenkirche in Berlin, for the two hyperorgans at Orgelpark. The piece was derived from the ‘Dreyblatt tuning system’, a rationally tuned scale based on the harmonic series where -3, -5, -7 and -11 limits are emphasized. The piece being written in MIDI, I was expecting a similar process than the one I had gone through with Clarence Barlow’s piece. Things did not go according to plan.

At first, Arnold, Claudio and I spent a lot of time figuring out if Ableton Live or Logic would be more efficient to Arnold to control the two organs at Orgelpark. Eventually, we found a way that was relatively satisfactory to Arnold on Logic, but working on the computer for this piece was somehow exhausting for all of us and not particularly pleasant. What was pleasant though was the extensive lunch breaks we had during the day, where Arnold was sharing a great amount of incredibly funny stories: his life in NYC, the many different jobs he had back then, his self-taught musicianship — interspersed with rather rather unconventional music lessons, like Chinese oboe lessons with Dewey Redman, the way he built different instruments fitting (or not) his tuning systems, his memories of his dear friend Phill Niblock, his life in Berlin since the late 80s. Arnold was reminding us something very essential here: making jokes, relaxing while composing is not trivial but very much essential and most likely beneficial to the music that is being made.

The next morning Arnold and I met at Orgelpark and this time, things were getting more serious and concrete. As I began to look into the mapping between Arnold’s session on Logic and the hyperorgans console, Arnold started to test another organ, the late Middle-ages replica organ Van Straten. He then came downstairs and asked me to play a number of pitches on this organ, sustaining them and changing their octaves to get as many combinations as possible, while he would do the same with different pitches on the Utopa organ. While playing together, I was hoping Arnold would hear the same as I was: this felt like a piece, and a very beautiful one. At some point, Arnold asked me to stop playing, and nonchalantly said we now just needed to rehearse what we just did, and that this would be the piece. The relief, joy and overall playfulness that emerged from that conclusion were palpable. In the meantime, Claudio had just arrived at Orgelpark, and happily joined the process. The three of us went through all the different organs of Orgelpark, testing which pitches were approximating pitches of the ‘Dreyblatt tuning system’. In the end, 4 of these organs were containing some of the pitches. Arnold decided he would play on the Utopa, Claudio on (his favorite) the Verschueren , I would play on the Van Straten, and Reinier van Houdt on the cabinet organ, renamed by Arnold ‘the Little one’.

What amazed me throughout this assisting process was to see that nothing had been lost from the time spent pondering if/how to use a computer in the piece or just laughing together. Arnold is not only generous with funny stories, but also his music and the joy of performing it. Last but not least, it is obvious that Arnold’s consistency and life-long experience with tuning were underlying and diffused throughout his time composing at Orgelpark. To me, his musicianship is a mixture of an expertise with tuning systems and the ‘tunability’ of instruments, as much as a presence/availability for the unexpected and ‘attunement’ to the situation.

[2025] SuperColliding for Chiyoko Szlavnics — soft meticulousness in action

Next to Arnold, the 2025 edition of the Echonance Festival will also feature a new piece for organs and ensemble by Chiyoko Szlavnics, Concurrences: Circles of Light & Solar Winds.

Similarly to Catherine Lamb, Chiyoko Szlavnics had been/is one of my music heroes for almost a decade. I not only relate to the austere, radical beauty of her music, but also the genealogical/cultural scission present in her first and last names. Needless to say, meeting her and providing some technical assistance for her was a big deal to me.

During our first online meeting, I was immediately impressed by Chiyoko’s strength and intelligence, her structural thinking and articulate technical questions. In brief, she was as über cool as I had imagined her to be. At the same time, the mystery around what/how she would compose remained (and still remains) complete.

Differently from my work with Arnold, my task with Chiyoko had to do with preparing an open field of possibilities yet easily workable programming environment. It was about anticipating what could be needed in a SuperCollider patch for Chiyoko to compose for Orgelpark’s two hyperorgans i.e.: sending OSC messages for notes and registers, ramps to control the air pressure of the pipes and any other desired effects available at Orgelpark: tremolos, pulses, etc. [I’m thankful to Michael Winter for thinking along and helping me find an elegant way of programming these patches.]

When Chiyoko came to Orgelpark, she had already prepared some Excel sheets to manipulate strings very effectively and write each line of the SuperCollider patch in a very efficient way. It was striking to me to see how quickly very autonomous she was when writing the piece on SuperCollider, although she hadn’t used this program before. Her technical adaptability was truly humbling. It was as if she had created her own path in this open programming field, and was now ready to embark alone in her music journey. Therefore, the rest of the process remained completely hers, and again, shrouded in mystery.

Importantly though, Claudio I had the privilege to hear glimpses of the upcoming pieces and were amazed by her way of intuiting and mastering timbral explorations with the two organs. Her process felt to me like a quasi-immediate synthesis of rational intuitions — when (in my own experience) this process of synthesis tends to usually take months, weeks, if not years. Chiyoko’s mastery of timbres is also very evocative, calling to the listener’s mind numerous extra-musical images in a poetic assemblage. Being able to do all this with computer generated processes is an achievement. When technology doesn’t affect in the least one’s composer’s style but reinforce it, letting it shine even more brightly, this usually speaks for this composer’s craft. It certainly did speak for Chiyoko’s artistry, as well as the depth and intensity of her focus.

I am glad to say there is nothing else I can share about Chiyoko’s compositional process and upcoming compositions. I cannot, cannot wait to find out about the integrality of her piece, including its ensemble part, in February, almost like any other audience member.

A few last thoughts

Working with/for other composers is kind of an indescribable, simultaneous process of zooming out and zooming in — like witnessing from above the way they work, while potentially providing an assistance that could be as precise, minute as possible. It is also about developing an openness to the different modalities of composing.

I’d like to specifically note how special and precious it was for me to sense the solidarity among female composers/musicians when working together. Probably for the first time in my life, I felt how profoundly related our music and life experiences were — without needing to even mention it. I also see how essential it is to develop spaces for us to share safe, non-judgemental, non-’trying-to-prove-something’ but simple/neutral (if not positive) spaces around using technologies such as SuperCollider.

Last but not least, I’m amazed to have received trust (and patience) beyond measure and would like to extend my gratitude (by order of appearance) to Claudio, Andrea, Cat, Elisabeth, Arnold, Michael and Chiyoko. Also, you still have a chance to join the Echonance Festival at Orgelpark, Amsterdam in February and listen to Arnold and Chiyoko’s works on the 7th and 8th of February 2025.

super best,

Lucie

ps: let me know if any of you would be interested in ready a more thorough analysis on Catherine Lamb’s shade/gradient in the future

congratulations on finding this corner of the internet, i hope you’ll feel at home here.

i feel like i’ve just moved in a new place myself, spending my first 24h there, trying to find my feet — placing the only chair i own to catch the light during the day; hearing through the walls at night while catching up on sleep

writing about music and music-making is a delicate, never fully satisfactory venture — perhaps especially for those who write it. some of us write music because we’ve felt, at some point, that words were useless or limited, while sounds (and silences) never were. and some of us return to words to discover, reaffirm, or share the depth and multifacetedness of certain musical experiences we had

no doubt i’ll oscillate between those two postures here, and i hope we will together as well

a hug until writing something more substantial soon,

lucie

( a moved-out piano, catching a few sun rays and raindrops all at once before being put to sleep for good )