New piece for Brass Quintet...

Constructed Languages

Today I'm pondering the universe of constructed languages (or "conlang").  I'm thinking about artificial and experimental languages created purely for the purpose of artistic expression - particularly in the context musical composition and performance.  I don't mean to detract from a global effort to protect the thousands of endangered languages that struggle for survival on our planet. Linguists estimate that at least 3k of our remaining 7k spoken languages will disappear in the next century alone.  It's a mass-extinction occurring before our eyes.  But imaginary languages have been and are being constructed anew and can add diversity to the modern linguistic jungle.

While Klingon (Star Trek), Na'vi (Avatar), Cirquish  (Cirque du Soleil), Newspeak (Orwell's 1984), or the Simpson's inspired post-apocalyptic gobbledygook in Anne Washburn's "Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play" emphasize the cultural issues of communication, I'm drawn more to the innate timbre, texture, and rhythm of spoken sound regardless of the meaning its language attempts to convey.  Meaning and language are not necessarily joined at the hip.  Steven Pinker for one has postulated that ideas and language exist quite independently from one another.

A large body of contemporary vocal music has exploited the human voice for its sonic effect and has treated its sound rather abstractly.  This music often minimizes (or even annihilates) the contextual meaning of the text (if any) and goes directly for the auditory and emotional jugular.  It allows for an auditory experience free of the constraints of linguistic meaning.

Luciano Berio's "Sequenza III" for solo voice (1965) is an example that leans heavily in this direction.  The majority of the vocal sounds composed in Sequenza III are mutterings which evoke a wide range of basic emotional states - some of which are akin to "baby talk."  The text (a mere three lines by Markus Kutter) is greatly obfuscated and treated as a found-object, subjected to permutation, transformation, and processing not unlike deconstruction of sampled vocalisms in today's electronic music.





Milton Babbitt's "Phonemena" for soprano and tape (1969) is unique.  Babbitt bases his invented language on sounds sourced from the notations and tables carefully compiled in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).  The result is stunning.  It sounds syntactically correct, even though any semblance of linguistic meaning is utterly elusive.  I could imagine intelligent alien life communicating according to its serial patterns and algorithms.







John Cage's "Aria" (1958) also verges on a new language.  While it borrows words from Armenian, Russian, Italian, French, and English (almost as a distant memory), most of the text is sourced from isolated vowels and consonants.  Not only is the music invented from scratch, so is the text.

Contemporary musicians and composers have been working at the forefront of language creation - knowingly or not.  It's a conceptual activity that is at the very core of both musical creation and vocal communications.  There very well could be a common link between the creation of human language and the creation of a new kind of music.

Here is a new digital realization of my orchestra work "Tone Poem" (2003).



Hope you enjoy it!

-James Ricci

The Final Frontier

Earlier this week I spent a day in the comfortable surroundings of the Library of Congress Music Division reading room pouring over dozens of letters written between composers that I either know personally or have known in the past.  The sample of hand-written and carbon-copied typed communications I accessed were revealing, sometimes technical, occasionally touching, and quite often profound.  From a perspective of an eagle's eye looking down, the totality of the LOC collection certainly sheds light upon the far-reaching scope of the inter-connectedness of working composers, the intricate network of their professional and personal associations, and a consistent theme of mutual support seemingly directed towards achieving an elusive yet shared collective objective.

 

I still have flashbacks of my four decades of living in Boston, and the dynamic network of established composers and their aspiring students who resided there.  But, as we know all too well, the passage of time degrades and erodes the institutional memory of the collective consciousness. The totality of these connections has shifted and evolved, especially when we consider that the subject at hand is "new" music.  Today it is a different cultural and musical space than it once was given how many composers have regrettably left the stage.

 

I recently compiled a list of Boston-area composers that I knew personally or professionally who have passed away.  The list of names totaled 33.  Sadly, and for the most part, their music is rarely performed today - if at all.  As Milton Babbitt once quipped (I paraphrase), "...the worst thing you can be is a dead American composer."

It is my hope that in the future when alien cultural anthropologists travel to earth and study our civilization, that the little green musicologists among them will decipher the LOC Music Division special collections and find a glimmer of hope in the vast body of hard and soft information about American composers so meticulously housed and cared for by that noble institution. They will learn that human composers (particularly from Boston) were not merely obsessed eccentrics working in relative isolation composing music that few of their species could or would understand. These highly intelligent alien researchers will follow the myriad pathways of learning, compassionate sharing of ideas, and the new and radical models of musical hearing that extended out well beyond the printed score and audio recordings of the work they left behind.  They will realize (and perhaps comprehend better than us) that beneath the paper trail of a small and elite group of deceased Boston-area composers from the late 20th and early 21st centuries are tangible indications that they did their best to advance and extend the definition of concert music far beyond the status quo of their time.

http://www.loc.gov/rr/perform/guide/spcmus.html

David Holzman at Spectrum

Grammy nominated pianist: 
David Holzman 
(www.battlemuse.com)

 

Sunday June 7th, 2015

3 PM
Spectrum

121 Ludlow

New York City
http://spectrumnyc.com

   

Piano Sonata                                    Aaron Copland        

 

Intermezzo (premiere)                     James Ricci

 

Five Pieces for Piano                       Roger Sessions

 

                         

                  

Love Song of Two Pigeons            Ursula Mamlok

2000 Notes                                     Ursula Mamlok

 

By the Water's Edge                      Arthur Kreiger        

 

Passacaglia                                    Stefan Wolpe    

***