Blog 2 - Morphing Time

‘And just as the individual creator discovers himself through his creation, so the world at large knows itself through its artists, discovers the very nature of its Being through the creations of its artists’ (Copland, 1972, p. 41).

Aaron Copland reflects on the artists desire to create and reduces the answer to self-expression, and the need to make one’s deepest feelings known (Copland, 1972). An example of this is the ‘Time Traveller Charles Lyell at Work,’ exhibition at Edinburgh University Library. They currently host a variety of artifacts, including over two-hundred notebooks containing his sketches, and memoirs. These ‘unravelling’s’ and investigations into cyclical time brought about a notion that under certain climate conditions, prehistoric animals could well come into being again. During my visits to the exhibition in November, I was fascinated by Lyell’s drawings and how they visually hold potential to be represented in a musical score.

Photographs above of Lyell's sketches taken at the Charles Lyell Exhibition at Edinburgh University Library:

8 November 2023 by Melissa Bradd.

Schafer, R. M (1971) Beyond the Great Gate of Light - Lustro: Part Two. Universal Edition (Canada 1977. [Commissioned 1971]. Photographs taken 22 November by Melissa Bradd from resource at Edinburgh University Library.

Both Lyell and Shafer use visual representation to communicate an inner world or understanding so that we might connect with their visions.

‘It is true that the eyes dominate the ears in our time’. Karlheinz Stockhausen

(Stockhausen, K and Tannenbaum, M, 1987. p. 102).

Postcard from the Lyell Exhibition.

Comparatively, eyes and ears both offer us sensory feedback. Charles Lyell and James Hutton were explorers investigating enquiries through their eyes of observation. Whereas sonic artists and composers such as R. Murray Schafer, invite us to listen through experiential connectivity with sounds that surround us at all times, as opposed to a representation of time (Schafer, 1994).

Stockhausen coined the term ‘Intuitive Music’ over ‘Improvisation’ to connect understanding of the different consciousness required for this way of relating to composing (Clarke and Clarke, 2011). During the late 1960’s, he was regularly using the ‘Plus-Minus’ idea which incorporated variations of indeterminacy and involvement of performers alongside electronics (Clarke and Clarke, 2011). Stockhausen appears to cultivate this timelessness in Stimmung. Speaking on one of his works, Stockhausen defines ‘Stimmung as meditative music where time is suspended. One listens to the inner self of the sound, the inner self of the harmonic spectrum, the inner self of a vowel, the inner self' (Swenson, 2018. p. 3). Stockhausen made comparisons to 'clock time and biological time; the music is no longer in the time, but the time is in the music; the music itself creates a portion of time. Each human-being has its own time. Time can be relative and objective. The time is created by an event' (Markus Breuss, 2023).

I was curious to find contemporary composers who have been exploring deep time creatively, and was delighted to discover the ‘Festival of Deep Time’ situated in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery in response to the Lyell exhibition. I attended a concert on 19 November 2023 which offered an opportunity to listen in real time to deep time. The festival hosted many composers’ works including Shiori Usui, a Dundee based Japanese composer in residence where her commissioned work, ‘Morphing Time’ made its worldwide premiere (Clarke, 2023). Performed by the ‘Plus Minus Ensemble,’ Usui’s work inspired by impressions of rain on a rock dating back millions of years; captured Lyell’s theory on uniformitarianism. She incorporates bass clarinet, cello and keyboard, thus merging instrumental and electronic sound (Fruitmarket Warehouse, 2023).

Images are screenshots taken from original score of Shiori Usui's  commissioned work ‘Morphing Time’, 2023.

Below are images of fossilised raindrops that inspired Usui's composition. These are currently situated at the Talbot Rice Gallery's exhibition, 'The Recent', that I visited as part of these explorations.

The images of the fossilised rain are taken from another part of the geological time trip at the Talbot Rice Gallery's exhibition, 'The Recent' , in Edinburgh. Photographs taken 1 December 2023 by Melissa Bradd.

Image from Talbot Rice Gallery's exhibition, 'The Recent' , in Edinburgh. Photograh taken 1 December 2023 by Melissa Bradd.

On the lower level there was a piece of work by Angelica Mesiti titled, ‘The rain that fell in the light of the young, 2022’ accompanied by 5:1 surround sound of Future Perfect Consciousness, 2022’, of the sound of rain being passed through generation to generation in a children’s clapping game.

Another composition performed at the festival was Ideation #2.1, 2018 composed by Davíð Brynjar Franzson. This piece of sonic art drew me in with Franzson’s sensitive use of clarinet, cello and electronics. The space, soundscape and texture appealed to me in that it seemed to dissolve personal sense of time, transporting me to an almost ‘non-state.’ The low electronic rumble created a sense of depth almost like a submarine submerged below the sea water. The high pitch dissonances and flurries of trills along with the electronic morphing, distilled a heavy, yet floating movement in time sensation. Below is a clip of this work:

Lovemusic (2019) Davíð Brynjar Franzson - Ideation #2.2 [EXCERPT]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A3T6GBs_wg (Accessed 19 November 2023).

I have since listened to other works such as the Cartography of Time (2016), which has further deepened my interest is in the way Franzson depicts an experiential capsule of time, as opposed to a representation of time. He appears to present a formless sense of an unknown and eerie, yet alluring atmosphere that captures time in motion, similar to the sensations of water in motion in the deep depths (Lovemusic, 2019). 

‘But music has always been perceived as motion entirely independently of whether it possessed rhythm in our sense or not' (Zuckerkandl, 1969. p. 76-77).

Zuckerkandl shows how rhythm is not required to measure or represent time in music. What is more impactful is how music is experienced as motion.  Hegel speaks of music’s tasks “of echoing the motions of the innermost self” (Zuckerkandl, 1969, p. 77). Equally, Copland referred to the discoveries of the creator expressing himself, and in doing so offers the recipients the possibility to experience its nature of being through these creations (Copland, 1972).  

References

Clarke, D and Clarke, E. (2011) Music and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clarke, P. (2023) Interview: Deep Time Curators Talk New Festival. Available at: https://thequietus.com/articles/33581-fruitmarket-edinburgh-deep-time-interview-katherine-tinker-sam-woods (Accessed: 22 November 2023).

Clarke, P. (2023) The Quietus Fruitmarket Edinburgh Unveils New Music Festival, Deep Time. Available at: https://thequietus.com/articles/33560-fruitmarket-edinburgh-deep-time-new-music-festival (Accessed: 18 November 2023).

Copland, A. (1972) Music and Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Fruitmarket Warehouse (2023) Deep Time: A Festival of New Music Programme [Pamphlet]. 19 November 2023.

Lovemusic (2019) Davíð Brynjar Franzson - Ideation #2.2 [EXCERPT]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A3T6GBs_wg (Accessed 19 November 2023).

Breuss, M (2023) Karlheinz Stockhausen - "Es" (1968). Available at: https://youtu.be/aEd3ut9TDYc?si=5K5Bs8A9tBon_-rE (Accessed: 11 November 2023).

Schafer, R. M. (1971) Beyond the Great Gate of Light - Lustro: Part Two. Universal Edition (Canada 1977. [Commissioned 1971].

Schafer, R. M. (1994) The Soundscape. Vermont: Destiny Books.

Score Follower. (2016) Davíð Brynjar Franzson — The Cartography of Time [w/ score]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1Gyn-AapXk (Accessed: 21 November 2023).

Stockhausen, K. and Tannenbaum, M. (1987) Conversations with Stockhausen. UK: Oxford University Press.

Swenson, K. (2018) Stimmung: Tuning, Timbre, Form and Performance. Available at: https://kevinswenson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Stimmung.pdf (Accessed: 12 October 2023).

Wishart, T. (1995) On Sonic Art. London: Routledge.

Zuckerkandl, V. (1969) Sound and Symbol. Princeton: University Press.