The Irish Timeshas a look at the arts
Sonorities Festival/International Computer Music Conference
Queen's University, Belfast
Belfast's Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music moved from its spring slot to August this year and effectively merged with the performance programme of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC).
The ICMC, which brings together the worldwide community of computer music experts, is being held in Belfast for the first time, and this year's theme is ROOTS/ROUTES, exploring "notions of placement and displacement in the context of music practice".
The programme of concerts includes over 200 pieces, but the choice of music was not, as you would normally expect in the context of a festival such as Sonorities, a free one. A panel of curators made their selections from some 600 pieces submitted for consideration, and the concerts were mostly presented under the names of the selectors.
Computer music is an area of endeavour which aims to make most anything possible. The kinds of sound manipulations that preoccupied composers in the electronic studios of half a century ago are child's play to the number-crunching machines of today. And Belfast's Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) boasts a performance space with unrivalled technical facilities. If you want to hear sound move in space around you (including above and below) SARC is the place to go.
Hand-in-hand with the development of resources has gone a stretching of compositional aspiration. The programme notes detail the extent of those aspirations, though very few of the works I heard over the festival's opening days on Sunday and Monday were remotely as intriguing as the programme notes promised.
Some examples. Colin Johnson's It's All Out Thereon the Internet is "a piece that combines composed music, improvisation, theatre and text, all directed by a computer programme that controls a speech synthesis system". Andrea Szigetvári's Swinging Doorfeatures a dancer, whose hand movements activate pre-recorded sounds.
Jason Bolte's Friction "explores the sounds and structures that are produced when a secondary force is applied to an object in physical contact with another".
Jon Christopher Nelson's objet sonore/objet cinétique "explores the kinesis/stasis continuum as it relates to sound objects and musical motion". Juan-Pablo Caceres and Alain B Renaud's Net: Disturbances is "a structured improvisation that explores multi- channel feedback delays on the network" (in this case the delay path between SARC and Stanford in California).
David Plans Casal's Chasing Frankis "an improvised conversation between a live algorithm and a human musician".
The line between research and finished composition in these and other works I heard was by no means clear. The detail of the processing, it seemed, was often far more important to the creators than the sound of the outcome or indeed, in some cases, the quality of the actual material that was being processed.
The best moments were to be found in works which combined sound and visual imagery.
Kotoka Suzuki's musically limited Piano Con Motohad fascinating video by Claudia Rohrmoser, though in a piece where the pianist was to be "not only the interpreter of the visual components, but also the 'controller'", it was hard to see why the video shown was from the première, which was given in Germany last year.
Brian Cullen's Thrice Removedwas burdened with one of the most pretentious programme notes. But once his visual response to Coronation Streetgot to the point of treating the physical street as a kind of lonely asteroid, things improved.
And Lance Putnam's S Phase, "a musical metaphor of the work a cell undergoes during interphase to prepare for division", had the kind of linkage between visuals and sound that most composers only dream of. The piece was both cartoon-clever and somehow persuasively organic in its presentation of visuals with a brush-stroke finish. It came as no surprise that, in a festival where the audience response had been mostly muted, this piece raised a few cheers.
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