Music and the Valley Nightmares: Three Compositions for Instruments, Gestures, and Electronic Sounds

Natacha Diels

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016

Copyright 2016

Natacha Diels

All rights reserved

Abstract

Music and the Uncanny Valley

Natacha Diels

This dissertation is comprised of a recent series of compositions, titled the Nightmare series, and this thesis. The three compositions are Nightmare for JACK (a ballet) (2013), Second Nightmare, for KIKU/2.5 Nightmares for Jessie (2014), and Child of Chimera (2015). The thesis describes the aesthetic impulse behind this series of works, and identifies sociological and technological elements in the work. The primary topic of investigation is the “Uncanny Valley,” a term used primarily in and gaming in reference to towards androids and digital humanoid characters. This thesis investigates the uncanny valley in film, gaming, and psychology; examines the potential of the concept for use in experimental art; and describes the methods I have used to incite the emotion in my compositions.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii 1. Introduction...... 1 1.1 Works...... 1 1.2 Use of Theatre and Gesture ...... 1 2. The Uncanny Valley ...... 2 2.1 In Artistic Practice...... 4 2.2 Overcoming the Valley...... 6 2.2a ...... 8 2.2b Physical Movement ...... 11 2.2c Stopping short of the Valley...... 16 2.3 The Psychology of the Uncanny...... 18 3. My Work : Nightmares ...... 20 3.1 Nightmare for JACK...... 21 3.2 Second Nightmare, for KIKU/2.5 Nightmares for Jessie...... 26 3.3 Child of Chimera ...... 31 4. Historical Context ...... 33 4.1 Instrumental Theatre ...... 33 4.2 American Avant-Garde...... 36 4.3 Summary ...... 37 5. Conclusion ...... 38 Bibliography ...... 40

i List of Illustrations

Figure 2-1. The Uncanny Valley graph. Masahiro Mori, 1970

Figure 2-2. Still from Splice (motion picture). Distributed by Warner Home Video, 2010.

Figure 2-3. Two images of the Grand Theft Auto IV character Hellboy. Mike Mignola, 2007.

Figure 2-4. Still from Inside Out (motion picture]). Distributed by Studios, 2015.

Figure 3-1. Score Excerpt from Nightmare for JACK (a ballet). Natacha Diels 2013.

Figure 3-2. Score Excerpt from Nightmare for JACK (a ballet). Natacha Diels 2013.

Figure 3-3. Notation used for acoustic and electronic vocal garblings in Nightmare for JACK (a ballet). Natacha Diels 2013.

Figure 3-4. Score Excerpt from Second Nightmare, for KIKU. Natacha Diels 2014.

Figure 3-5. Score Excerpt from Second Nightmare, for KIKU. Natacha Diels 2014.

ii

Acknowledgements

My profoundest thanks to Ensemble Pamplemousse for their incalculable support and unmatched joy in creating music. Special thanks to George Lewis for consistently challenging me, and to Fred Lerdahl for making me explain myself.

iii 1. Introduction

1.1 Works

The series of works accompanying this thesis includes 3 works for small ensemble: Nightmare for JACK, Second Nightmare for KIKU, and Child of Chimera. All three works share a dual approach—they embody the concept of the “uncanny valley,” and they are written to describe the personalities of specific performers. During the course of this thesis, I will examine how these two distinct approaches have become mutually exclusive in my work and have largely defined my aesthetic. I will define the uncanny and examine its implications in film animation, design, and psychology. I will then dissect the three works in the Nightmare series and discuss formal elements in each, as well as the technology accompanying each work. I will also briefly discuss notational elements in my work.

1.2 Use of Theatre and Gesture

The use of theatre and physical gesture in my compositions is inspired by two primary sources— amplification, and experimental theatre.

One of my previous interests in composition was the amplification of tiny instrumental sounds—in particular, those typically heard only by the performer. Through the construction of amplification systems designed specifically to address these sounds, I created a body of work using these sounds as primary source material1. The next logical progression in my composition was to “amplify” the subtle visual gestures made by a performer. I catalogued the possible

1 E.g. Ether, for internally amplified piccolo and tape (Diels 2005).

1 gestures of each performer and subsequently notated choreography to act as a counterpoint to the sonic material. Of primary importance was playability—as a performer myself, I predicted the unease that many performers might feel when asked to execute any dance-like or theatrical gestures. Therefore, I only utilized gestures that were already done naturally by performers, but enlarged the movements so as to be visible to the audience. Throughout this essay, I will describe my process of developing this vocabulary and conclude by discussing my future plans.

The other inspiration for using gesture comes from both the practice developed by the

American performance artists of the 60s and 70s (Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, for example), and the European composers working within the field of instrumental theatre (such as

Mauricio Kagel and Georges Aperghis). I will investigate some of these sources in subsequent chapters.

2. The Uncanny Valley

The definition of "uncanny" is understandably vague, as are many such words with powerful emotional attachment--- "beyond the ordinary or normal" and "uncomfortably strange" do not begin to capture the true spirit of the word. There is a skin-crawling, not-quite-repulsive, impractically fearful state associated with the emotion that is impossibly complicated and wholly lost in the translation to language. The 20th century psychologist Ernst Jentsch explains the difficulty of capturing the essence of uncanny--- "the same impression does not necessarily exert an uncanny effect on everybody. Moreover, the same perception on the part of the same individual does not necessarily develop into 'uncanny' every time, or at least not every time in the

2 same way.2 " With this ambiguity in mind, we might still compile a list of factors that can contribute to the uncanny, and the relevant symptoms, borrowing from experts in the field.

The "uncanny" is that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar... [e.g.] when one deliberately removes such a problem from the usual way of looking at it- for the activity of understanding is accustomed to remain insensitive to such enigmas, as a consequence of the power of the habitual- that a particular feeling of uncertainty quite often presents itself. ...doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate [e.g. a prosthetic hand]. ...the uncanny effect of epileptic seizures and the manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the feeling that automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed beneath the ordinary appearance of animation. ...a perceived lack of emotional expressivity in the upper facial region around the eyes in realistic, human-like virtual characters.3

Robotics expert Masahiro Mori cites this excellent example: One had 29 pairs of artificial muscles in the face (the same number as a human being) to make it smile in a humanlike fashion. According to the designer, a smile is a dynamic sequence of facial deformations, and the speed of the deformations is crucial. When the speed is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy. This shows how, because of a variation in movement, something that has come to appear very close to human—like a robot, puppet, or prosthetic hand—could easily tumble down into the uncanny valley.4

The uncanny is a revolving door of terror between familiar nostalgia and uncertain memories. It arises when one begins to doubt the presence of life within an animate being, or the lifelessness of a still object. It surges when a mechanical process juxtaposes with the ordinary imperfection of human life.5

Gaming researcher Angela Tinwell describes the uncanny: “[W]hen one perceives an

2 Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906), translated by Roy Sellars, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1 (1997): 7-16. 3 Tinwell, Angela. "Applying Pyschological Plausibility to the Uncanny Valley Phenomenon." In The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, 1st edition, edited by Mark Grimshaw, 173-186 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4 Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]” (1970), translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki. Robotics and Automation Magazine, vol. 19, no. 2 (December 2012): 98–100. 5 , translated by David McLintock, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 144.

3 atypical diminished degree of emotional responsiveness from a virtual character, it may instill fear and panic as one cannot be aware of that character’s intentions; the uncanny may be exaggerated due to the perceived potential threat of violent behavior or harm.”6

2.1 In Artistic Practice

Conversations about modern composition are often facilitated by an early definition of boundaries. Identifying one's niche discloses a great deal about artistic intent, perhaps most effective as a self-revelatory technique. Of primary interest to me are the niches created by the blurry dividing lines, by the unlikely merging of certain artistic practices that elicit feelings of discomfort and uncertainty in the viewer--- an exploration of the uncanny. I seek to examine possible definitions of the uncanny and their manifestations within my artistic output.

The term “uncanny valley” refers to roboticist Masahiro Mori’s iconic 1970 theory of human empathy towards . The “valley” is the dip where humans are repulsed by the robots’ similitude with humans7 (fig. 2-1). For example, when presented with an anthropomorphized lion character in an animated film, we are easily able to empathize with the lion because of its human-like features, easily overlooking the fact that lions are predators. However, if we are instead faced with a CGI animation of a humanoid creature bearing strong resemblance to a human, we feel a sense of betrayal when the character acts outside of our expectations, however subtle the error might be.

6 Tinwell, 183. 7 Mori, 99.

4

Figure 2-1. The graph depicts the uncanny valley, the proposed relation between the human likeness of an entity and the perceiver's affinity for it.

Tinwell writes, “[W]hen one perceives an atypical diminished degree of emotional responsiveness from a virtual character, it may instill fear and panic as one cannot be aware of that character’s intentions; the uncanny may be exaggerated due to the perceived potential threat of violent behavior or harm.”8 Mori cites an excellent example:

One robot had 29 pairs of artificial muscles in the face (the same number as a human being) to make it smile in a humanlike fashion. According to the designer, a smile is a dynamic sequence of facial deformations, and the speed of the deformations is crucial. When the speed is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy. This shows how, because of a variation in movement, something that has come to appear very close to human—like a robot, puppet, or prosthetic hand—could easily tumble down into the uncanny valley.9

8 Tinwell, 173. 9 Mori, 99.

5 The usefulness of the uncanny as a positive artistic tool is apparent. One aspect of the tremendous appeal of great art is its ability to temporarily suspend and exploit one's sense of reality within visual, aural, and written contexts. Working with the uncanny allows for manipulation of the audience from the standpoint of the ego, simultaneously embracing and ridiculing a sense of solipsism. By describing the very familiar and illustrating the blandly normal, one can develop a comfortable situation for the viewer that allows the uncanny effect to take place through subsequent decoration borrowed from the truly strange.

To adapt these ideas to my artistic practice, I begin by creating situations that challenge the viewer's sense of reality—and my own. Because the uncanny effect is heavily weighted towards the visual—movement, in particular—in the Nightmare series I chose to work within several parameters: the conflict between robotic actions and human sounds, the disembodiment of human movement, and the mixture of human and electronic sounds. My overarching artistic objective is to walk the line between humor and macabre.

In these three works, I choreograph the peculiar movements of traditional instrumental technique, particularly in relation to a specific performer’s movements. This calls the audience’s attention to gestures that often remain invisible even to the performer. The unnaturally stiff choreography of these gestures coupled with eerily repetitive vocal sounds, strange juvenile elements of play, and incessant electronic machine sounds devise a fantasy world of the uncanny for the audience, with the hope that a few are lost within.

2.2 Overcoming the Valley

CGI and robotic developers are often seeking ways to overcome the negative affects of the

“valley,” and film animators and video game designers have long examined the causes of the

6 uncanny valley for possible solutions in order to overcome viewer revulsion. While I have an inverse purpose, it is still useful to examine the research.

The genre of action-adventure video games10 calls for the designer to create characters with a high level of realism. The player is engaged through both active and emotional interaction—in other words, he is interested both in the ultimate goal of winning the game and in the particular traits of his “gamepiece”— since a realistic character readily evokes higher levels of empathy in the user. This is easier said than done; complications arise almost immediately when a user is led to the lofty expectation that s/he will relate to a character. Interestingly, as we will see in numerous examples, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the complexity of the methods used for creating the character, and the user’s ability to relate to the character.

There are several key factors present in attempts to invoke empathy through and robotics. These include synchronicity between a character’s appearance and behavior (including language and vocal affect), appropriately timed and styled behavior in human interaction (otherwise known as contingent interaction), and two factors that are particularly relevant to my work: non-verbal communication (NVC), which refers to any information communicated without the use of words,11 and what Tinwell refers to as expression choreography (EC),12 which occurs in any moving facial image. EC is the process by which one expression—for example, happiness—transforms into another—surprise. NVC and EC provide primary clues to discerning empathy or understanding in another human.

According to psychologist Blake Eastman, on average sixty to ninety percent of

10 This genre refers to video games combining elements of the adventure genre (usually involving a storyline and requiring problem-solving tactics) with the action genre (fighting games and shooter games, for example). 11 C.-C. Ho, K.F. MacDorman and Z.A. Pramono, “Human emotion and the uncanny valley: A GLM, MDS, and ISOMAP analysis of robot video ratings,” Proceedings of the Third ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Amsterdam (2008): 169-176. 12 Angela Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation (AK Peters/CRC Press, 2014), xiv.

7 communication is non-verbal.13 Types of NVC include body language or posture, eye contact, haptic communication including ‘personal space’ and physical gesticulation, paralingual speech elements such as prosody, and facial expressions.14 For the purposes of this thesis, I will limit my investigation to physical gesture and facial expressions. Moreover, since I am neither working with nor researching still images, for the purposes of this discussion I will bypass investigation of perceived facial NVC without motion.

2.2a Facial Expression

The subtle muscle movements performed by each human’s 43 facial muscles create approximately 10,000 individual expressions. To capture this information, psychologist Dr. Paul

Ekman spent his life researching universally recognized facial expressions. Ekman created a classification system for these expressions, and subsequently designed a conceptual framework of the facial muscles utilized in creating facial expression. His Facial Action Coding System

(FACS), developed in 1978, is now used widely in facial modeling software.15

FACS is based on six basic emotion types Ekman and his partner Wallace V. Friesen identified as universally perceived—happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust.16

Ekman and Friesen described facial muscles working independently or in combination with other facial muscles to depict these emotion types as “action units” (AUs). In Ekman and Friesen’s

13 Blake Eastman, “How Much of Communication is Really Nonverbal?” The Nonverbal Group, http://www.nonverbalgroup.com/2011/08/how-much-of-communication-is-really-nonverbal/. Accessed August 18, 2015. 14 Paul Ekman and Walter V. Friesen, “Nonverbal Behavior,” in Communication and Social Interaction, edited by P.F. Ostwald, 37-46 (New York: Grune & Stratton. 1977). 15 The FACS system was renamed F.A.C.E in the early 2000s—Facial Expression, Awareness, Compassion, Emotions. 16 Paul Ekman. “Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotions,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, edited by J. Cole, 207-282 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1972). Since this research in 1978, Ekman has expanded the list to include Amusement, Contempt, Contentment, Embarrassment, Excitement, Guilt, Pride in achievement, Relief, Satisfaction, Sensory pleasure, and Shame; however, these are not encoded exclusively in the face.

8 formulation, there are 46 catalogued primary facial action units, another 11 for eye movements, and an additional 20 for behavioral traits, head movements, and emotions resulting from masked facial traits.17

This database of action units has been used extensively by animators and gaming engineers as a reference tool for identifying and recreating facial characteristics and personalities that are convincingly human. One such software is FacePoser, a facial expression tool within the larger game-designing Source Software Development Kit. The benefit of FacePoser is the ability to mock up physical gesture in a fashion similar to using a digital audio workstation (DAW) to mock up a musical composition. While I have not employed FacePoser or similar gesture- simulating software in the compositional process, I plan to do so in future work.

FacePoser has two facial animation types—static expressions and animated Flex events.

Static expressions are single-frame images created by the manipulation of AUs, each assigned to a unique slider. For example, AU9 refers to the muscles that cause the nose to wrinkle, and AU4 refers to those that lower the brow. The designer might increase the amount of nose wrinkle and lower the brow heavily to simulate an expression of anger. Animated flex events are used to create full . In this setting, all the information from the AU sliders in expression mode is copied to a timeline. The animator uses keyframes to move between states on the AU sliders.18

While it might be relatively straightforward to create convincing static expressions using the FacePoser tool, adding movement brings considerably more complications. Of course, the primary problem in using any tool to replicate human mannerisms is the inherent imperfections in a body’s movements—there is no one mathematical function that will even come close to

17 Paul Ekman, Facial Signs: Facts, Fantasies, and Possibilities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 18 See https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Choreography_creation/Creating_Events/Facial_expressions for screenshots of the software.

9 approximating the shift from one AU to another, much less between a series of four, the average minimum quantity of AUs needed to create a convincing facial expression. Attempting to imitate human motion in the FacePoser program reveals subtle discrepancies when compared to a human’s expression choreography; because we are so highly attuned to NVC, we recognize these errors almost immediately and cry foul. When we know what we see is not human, we are happy to project human characteristics onto it. But when we think it may really be human, we become much more critical.19

Another method that is frequently used to capture the intricate motions of the face is the motion-capture system, or mo-cap. Using precision placed markers on the subject’s face and body, digital cameras capture the divergence from the points. These movements are subsequently recreated in a 3D modeling animation software.20 However, achieving realism using the mo-cap system has been problematic, ranging from an early attempt at using this system exclusively to create a feature-length film (The Polar Express, 2004) to the more recent The Adventures of

Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (2011). This latter film not only used a highly upgraded mo-cap system to capture the actor’s movements and facial expressions, but also employed Maya’s

Tissue plug-in for realistic fat and muscle appearance behind the skin of the face. Unfortunately for Steven Spielberg and his team of 60 animators, the result was the same—viewers felt creeped out by the contradictions they perceived between Tintin’s situation (running from bad guys) and his facial reaction—one of placidity, as though reading the paper.

In addition, the difficulty in resolving Tintin’s vacant appearance with Jamie Bell’s highly expressive voice was too much for many viewers to handle. This vacant expression can largely be ascribed to the lack of movement in the upper part of the character’s face; animators

19 Steve Theodore, “UNCANNY VALLEY,” Game Developer, vol 11 (2004): 43-45. 20 Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation, 13.

10 and cartoonists have known the eyebrows to be the window to the soul long before empirical research into capturing emotion began. Tinwell’s Uncanny Modality study showed that

characters were perceived to be more uncanny when there was a lack of human- likeness in the character’s facial expression, particularly in the upper facial region, with the forehead and brows being of particular significant (xix)….The human face communicates not only how someone is feeling but also processes unrelated to emotion such as mental effort, mental fatigue, concentrating on a given task, anticipation of events and startle reflexes. Without these understated facial movements to help communicate a person’s inner conceptual, affective and physiological states, it is as if the person does not have the capacity to think, feel or respond to events around them. In other words… it sometimes seems that the lights are on but no one is home.21

This is relevant to my own practice in that it provides an insight into what the specific physical components of a “bland” expression are. This “blandness” is, for me, extremely useful in providing a mismatch in performance between the emotive qualities of the music and the visuals presented to the audience. While I have primarily employed this bland expression in the performance instructions to my compositions, I have recently begun to branch out to other expressions (pain, for example), with varying degrees of success.

2.2b Physical Movement

There has been little research into the specifics of uncanny physical movement, beyond vague identifiers of “jerky,” “stiff,” or “unnatural.” Much of the research described above with regards to animation techniques has also been applied to larger bodily gestures, with the same low percentage of success.22 Rather than rehash the studies, I will discuss situations where the uncanny valley has been enhanced for terror, to create antipathetic characters.

As previously suggested, anthropomorphizing a non-human character can increase the

21 Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation, 20. 22 In this context, “success” refers to an approach to realism.

11 viewer’s empathy for the character. Usually, these anthropomorphic traits are positive and endearing, such as Donkey in DreamWorks’ Shrek or Remy in Pixar’s Ratatouille. The characters are generally helpless to some degree and portray only a handful of clear emotions, all equally supported by screen action in order to eliminate the possibility of emotional trickery or deceit. To anthropomorphize a character with the intent of enhancing uncanny-provoking qualities, the designer must create a conflict between expectation and outcome. The ease of creating an uncanny effect by establishing these sorts of conflict situations provides a tremendous amount of appeal for designers of horror characters. We are particularly attuned to such discrepancies—once we expect a character to behave according to rules we construct (or are manipulated to construct by the film director or game designer), a departure from these rules is almost unforgivable, hence the creation of the antipathetic character.

This is particularly relevant to my work because one of the primary functions of a composer is to establish the rules for the listener—if one is able to establish trust with the listener, this trust can subsequently be harnessed or violated to great artistic effect. A truly compelling piece of music leads the listener into a particular bit of the human consciousness, and then shifts the lighting to change the viewpoint entirely. This is all quite abstract in musical terms— returning to film terms, one can imagine the character who has been established as a trustworthy, amicable figure—father of two, works a 9-5, forgets to get groceries, etc.—who turns antipathetic the moment his normalness is shaded by a darkening of the music, a skipped beat in his otherwise smooth movement, or an overly sustained frozen facial expression. The psychology of seeing such unexpected movement is examined further in the following section.

12

Figure 2-2: Still image from the 2009 movie Splice, picturing the hybrid character Dren.

Another method of anthropomorphizing to create an antipathetic character is by combining elements of the human form with another animal. The chimerization method opens the door for discontinuity of movement—by combining the human form with that of another animal, the animator may choose to impose the movements of the other animal on the hybrid form, furthering the uncanny experience. This is utilized to great effect in the 2009 movie Splice, where a genetic experiment gone wrong creates a squirrel-like human hybrid. The scuttling rapidity of the character’s rodent-like movements lend as much to her creepy appearance as the pointed tongue, cloven feet, affinity for raw meat, and stinger tail (see Figure 2-2). However, the story of the movie requires the viewer to feel some sort of empathy for the character; for this reason, the director chose to use a combination of CGI and a real actress for the part, reducing the potential for uncanniness—in my opinion, an unfortunate decision.

13 A similar missed opportunity occurred in Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie HER, depicting a romance between a man and his operating system. For me, the straightforward performance of

Scarlett Johansson as Samantha (the voice of the OS) would have benefited from a little uncanniness through the partial use of any text synthesis technique. All of the currently available techniques use either physical modeling (of the human vocal tract) or samples of varying durations to resynthesize speech. Even an extremely limited use of this—for example, using the same sound sample every time Samantha sighed (a highlighted character trait)—would have deepened and complexified the movie’s plot and implications. Although Samantha was a sympathetic character, the movie did revolve around machine intelligence—a topic of both great excitement and uncertainty—and the moral implications of love without physicality. For me, the power of the movie was reduced by its normalcy.

In my own work, I use text and vocal synthesis techniques both to enhance the uncanny effect of the electronic sounds, and to aurally join the acoustic and electronic sounds. Because humans are incapable of the precise repetition of any vocal sound (or any sound, period), I find that careful coupling of synthesized sounds (varying slightly with each repetition) with incessantly consistent samples creates an excellent cyborg counterpart to the human performer. I will examine this and its human counterpart further in subsequent sections.

On the flip side of the movie HER’s normalcy lies some of the most terrifying moments in horror film, emergent from the overly realistic. In his autobiographical novel Danse Macabre, horror writer Stephen King judged the 1999 blockbuster The Blair Witch Project and Tod

Browning’s 1932 Freaks as two of the most chilling movies of all time.23 The success of both of these movies in terrifying the viewer lies in their blatant raising of the human mirror, showing

23 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (Simon and Schuster, 2011), 35.

14 the viewer very real human experiences. Blair Witch follows a team of students as they slowly descend into madness—“what is that, really, except getting lost in the woods that exist even inside the sanest heads?”24 Interestingly, a paragraph from Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny depicting a uncanny-inciting scene describes Blair Witch (and innumerable other horror flicks) almost verbatim: “One may, for instance, have lost one’s way in the woods, perhaps after being overtaken by fog, and, despite all one’s efforts to find a marked or familiar path, one comes back again and again to the same spot, which one recognizes by a particular physical feature.”25

Freaks portrays a quite different, but equally powerful, uncanny situation. Browning sets the stage with sympathetic characters from a circus freakshow, played by actors with real-life physical deformities. The two evil protagonists (physically-abled Cleopatra and the circus strongman) cause a character pivot, resulting in the freaks’ sudden gruesome personality change.

As literature scholar Rachel Adams explains in her chronicle of the freakshow’s history, “[T]he cinematic apparatus in Freaks assumes a didactic function by training the viewer to recognize the humanity of the disabled body, then violating its own assumptions by showing the freaks’ capacity for murderous violence.”26 By providing an alleyway for empathy with the freaks,

Browning pressures the viewer to recognize the isolation brought to the freaks by the extreme marginality of their position in society, and its potential consequences. As Adams observes,

“Once a figure of absolute difference, the freak becomes an aspect of self... the deviant Other is taken up as the embodiment of the awkward and fragmentary experience of subjectivity.”27 This subjectivity is what leads the viewer to the realm of the uncanny—a psychological battle between imagination and conscious, peppered with reflections of the self as seen through the

24 King, 36. 25 Freud, 144. 26 Rachel Adams, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 18. 27 Adams, 18.

15 manipulative eyes of the director. The psychology of this and other aspects of the uncanny are examined further in the following section.

Figure 2-3: Two images of the Grand Theft Auto IV character Hellboy. The left image is the original drawing by

Mike Mignola. The right is the hyper-realistic version appearing in GTA IV.

2.2c Stopping short of the Valley

Masahiro Mori lacked the optimism many designers wield today—he believed the Uncanny

Valley was insurmountable for realistic human characters (in robotics).28 Indeed, some of the most successful forays over the valley have, in hindsight, stopped short of the valley. Success has been achieved only by reducing the humanity of the character—either by exaggerating features, thereby approaching a cartoon-like appearance; or by taking away the human qualities entirely and subsequently anthropomorphizing the character. Another successful method is to forgo

28 Mori, 100.

16 realism entirely and even diminish the fidelity of the graphics, as happened with the action- adventure game Grand Theft Auto V after gamer Knott sparked a debate about the use of high-fidelity graphics and the “ugliness” of over-realism. Referring to two images of the same

GTA IV character Hellboy, one a 2-D older version and one a hyper-realistic 3D version, Knott ranted: “The first GTA IV image is punk rock. The second is a punk rocker trying to sound like the Beatles. It’s a fart sound in the middles of “Silver Bells.” It’s a video game attempting to look like a movie with real actors. And it’s failing. Hard.”29 (See Figure 2-3)

I argue that the valley has in fact been crossed by the methods described above—realism does not necessarily equate humanism. According to a recent op-ed piece in the New York

Times, empathy is a choice.30 It follows that a fictional character’s steadily increasing proximity to human realism will not necessarily provide a proportional increase in empathy. To take it a step further, psychologists have identified that an overly realistic view of the world is connected to depression—the inverse being that an unrealistic, or optimistic, view of the world makes people feel good and perform better.31 Perhaps in realization of this phenomenon, recent film creators have used fancy new CGI technique to great empathy-provoking effect. Rather than using the techniques to create fake humans, producers instead use the techniques to simulate real camera work—and yes, to create complex expressions on the faces of animated characters, but not necessarily with the intent of trickery. In doing this, they are able to create situations so emotionally intense that the human-ness of the character is completely irrelevant. Who, in watching Pixar’s Inside Out, did not cry when Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong (a creature

29 Tron Knotts,, “GTA IV, the Uncanny V, and ‘Good Graphics,’” Destructoid, August 20, 2007. http://www.destructoid.com/gta-iv-the-uncanny-v-and-good-graphics--39172.phtml. Accessed August 18, 2015. 30 Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham, “Empathy is Actually a Choice,” , July 10, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html. Accessed November 19, 2015. 31 Joanna Starek and Caroline F. Keating, “ ,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology (Vol 12, Iss. 2, 1991): 145-155

17 self-described as being primarily cotton candy, part-cat, part-elephant, and part-dolphin) disappeared into the forgotten memory pit? (See Fig. 2-4) Crossing the uncanny valley, then, may come in fact from replicating that most-human trait of a shifting perspective. The viewer is allowed his/her natural human ability to see beyond the surface rather than feeling forced into a suspicious empathy for a character.

Figure 2-4: Still from Inside Out: Bing-Bong, disappearing into the forgotten memory pit.

2.3 The Psychology of the Uncanny

The uncanny defies singular definition. It arises from a broad spectrum of situations, ranging from an epileptic seizure, to meeting one’s double, to misplaced sexuality, to futuristic surrealism. Many of these situations (although not all) revolve around the concept of subverted expectation, a highly exploitable topic in art and music.

I believe the underlying uncertainty behind most uncanny-provoking situations lies in their ability to bring to light the ambiguity of life and death—“doubts as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not

18 perhaps be animate.”32 Under this broad definition, Jentsch places the uncanniness of wax figurines, automatons, manifestations of insanity, and epileptic fits. Freud believes that these last two medical conditions reveal to the viewer a hidden potential within his/her own personality.33 I believe we can go a step further by considering certain elements unnatural to humans, and whose presence might therefore incite the feeling of uncanniness.

Two of the most interesting such elements to consider are interrelated—the drive for pattern recognition, and the human compulsion to repeat. In finding unexpected patterns in our day-to-day life, we construct an order and understanding of our surroundings while simultaneously reinforcing our subconscious self-constructed micro-patterns. These micro- patterns—for example, the morning ritual of brushing teeth, washing face, drinking coffee— establish routine and reliable regularity in an otherwise chaotic system. This habit of routine is also tied up in the human compulsion to repeat—through repetition, we create patterns and subsequently order. In music composition, a primary element of form is repetition of varying scale. On a very basic scale, large-scale repetition causes the listener to recall material from his/her memory, causing a feeling of satisfaction or fulfilled expectation, depending on the music.

Repetition is comfortable. It is a series of reliable points along the timeline of the future, and a line of helpful buoys for memories. Yet when timing or circumstance is altered, repetition can become a thing of terror. Many years ago, I was driving around downtown New York and I was stopped at a light. A tall, handsome man stood in front of the flower stand at a deli. As I watched, he stood calmly for a moment, and then his body began a series of tense-and-curl, and relax; tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed, until the convulsions became so strong that he fell down, still seizing. I can still visualize the experience today, and the countless others I have

32 Jentsch, 8. 33 Freud, 150.

19 witnessed around the city. These moments, of the human body and brain malfunctioning, both define the uncanny for me, and are strongly present in my work. Contrasting this sort of repetition with the sort that we rely on for order reveals the disparate element as the timeline.

Compressing the time with which a repetition occurs can transform it from comfortable to scary—I use this tool heavily in my compositions.

To return to the literature, Nicholas Royle explains the above effect, masterfully combining Jentsch, Freud, and his own writing.

Uncanniness occurred when objects or situations evoked a sinister revelation of what is normally concealed from human experience. In other words, we experience the uncanny when we identify something hideous or unsettling that we or others may have been attempting to hide. Furthermore, the uncanny exists as a revelation of the repressed that should remain out of sight (and one’s conscious awareness) to maintain one’s psychological health and emotional stability…. Importantly, the uncanny exists not only as a revelation of what may be hidden in others but also what may be repressed or hidden in oneself. In this way, one is led to question not only whether an object is real or not but also the reality of one’s sense of oneself, for example, one’s personality traits, and how we may be perceived by others (or not) in the real world.34

3. My Work: Nightmares

I attempt to create uncanny situations in my current work through a variety of tactics, many of which have been introduced in this text. Through an analysis of three recent works of mine, I will execute an in-depth investigation of this pursuit. I will identify my use of an amplified expression choreography that is specific to musicians; I will discuss formal elements, including my particular approach to repetition; and I will explain the intent behind my use of electronics.

I submit that the uncanny is strongly rooted in the eye, experiences and personality of the beholder—what is uncanny for one is foolish superstition to another; what causes revulsion in

34 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 4.

20 one is ho-hum to the other. Therefore, during the viewing of these pieces, I ask the reader to suspend his/her sense of reality and permit the temporary re-construction of an exquisite Atlantis of the consciousness.

The title of the series—“Nightmares”—requests explanation. Clinical psychologists and nightmare experts Geneviève Robert and Antonio Zadra defined the nightmare as “a very disturbing dream in which the unpleasant visual imagery and/or emotions cause the person to wake up.”35 While this is compelling in its own right, my artistically-licensed definition follows more in the vein of Tim Burton’s interpretation in Nightmare before Christmas—playful, slightly disturbing, strange and spectacularly unbelievable imagery, quite imaginable in the unconscious realm, solidly placed in the land of fairy tale.

I attempt to create a similarly fantastical world where the line between human and puppet, mechanical and human, real and imagined, is ambiguous and left to interpretation.

These pieces are also my love letters to the performers for whom they are written—their unique mannerisms, personality, and approach to music both physical and sonic satisfies my creative thirst and inspires my joy in composing.

3.1 Nightmare for JACK

This piece was written for the JACK quartet in 2013. Because of the tremendous history behind the string quartet—a medium in itself—I felt a distinct weight when presented with the task, and spent long hours trying to decide What To Do. In the end, I took inspiration from many sources, but my primary influences were the performance of the group itself and my relationship with them as people.

35 Geneviève Robert and Antonio Zadra, “Thematic and Content Analysis of Idiopathic Nightmares and Bad Dreams,” Sleep 37.2 (2014): 409–417. PMC. Web, accessed August 18, 2015.

21 a) Uncanniness

The uncanny aspect of Nightmare for JACK comes primarily through the choreographed physical gestures and the repetitive electronic sounds. In this and my other works in the series, I create uncanny situations by amplifying a sort of expression choreography that is specific to musicians. By cherry-picking subtle gestures of transition that result from a musician’s natural expressivity, developing a disparate movement counterpoint for the music, and subverting the viewer’s expectation of the concert hall environment, I am able to create a musical and theatrical situation that is at turns humorous and unsettling.

I arrived at the concept of writing a “nightmare” for string quartet after many hours of watching videos of the JACK quartet perform. As with most ensembles, each musician’s unique movements dictate certain information to the group—dynamics, cues, and tempo changes, for example. Smaller gestures are made unconsciously as a result of the particular training each musician received, and of the normal idiosyncracies of the human body.

In Nightmare for JACK, small gestures are elevated to primary importance through exaggeration, repetition, and militaristic structure, creating a visual counterpoint to the musical material. Three elements in particular fulfill the purpose of uncanniness: the performers” head movements, the vocalizations, and the bow gestures. The performers’ head movements serve two purposes— to imply engagement with the audience by looking towards them, and to detach the human performer from the process of playing a musical instrument. In typical performance, a musician moves his or her head in small, subtle gestures in response to various factors—for example, the energy being exerted on the instrument, an itchy nose, or to give a nearly invisible cue.

The composition of Nightmare for JACK is deliberately paradoxical— the performer

22 must have a heightened awareness of his every movement in order to accurately execute the desired theatrics, yet because of the strict directions it is impossible for the performer to execute them perfectly. The four resulting robotic performers are at turns dark and comical, incapable of losing their human natures completely to the piece’s stiff demands—the audience reads a human who is slightly “broken.” Assisting in this perception is a repeated section on page 6, one of my first attempts at creating an interruption through the use of incessant repetition. The performers appear to get ‘stuck” in a series of small movements for some time. I utilize this method more extensively in my subsequent nightmares. b) Notation

Throughout the course of composing my Nightmare series, I have developed a notation system that I believe is reflective of my artistic intent. In all three works, there are three primary non- traditional notational elements: bow angle, head choreography, and auxiliary sounds.

Throughout the work, players read indications for three distinct bowing actions: the placement of the bow from tip (bottom line) to frog (top line), the position of the bow on the violin from tail (bottom line) to scroll (top line), and the angle of the bow to the violin. The placement of the bow is notated on a secondary staff, and is graphically notated. This simplified and intuitive notation allows the performer to focus primarily on the top staff while viewing the bow motion in his periphery— much of the piece is without bow motion, and a change is easily seen in the staff. In complex sections—when for example the head and bow are both performing actions, as well as sounding pitches—I supplemented the bow indications with traditional upbow/downbow notation.

The bow movements are represented by images relating to the angle at which the bow is placed to the instrument. In general, these are executed without normal bow motion—the intent

23 was for this choreography to be performed with the same intensity as sounding material, in order to enhance the theatricality. For example, a motion from a turned head position to a normal one is sometimes accompanied by a decrescendo (see figure 3-1). These “inaudible” dynamics are vital to the success of the performance—the visible effort of the performers without the expected resulting sound represents the conflict that is at the core of the composition, and is intended to be both comical and strange.

Fig. 3-1: Score excerpt—bar 32, violin 2.

Head choreography is indicated with pictures of heads above the staff. I chose this notation versus a more simplistic arrow notation in part because as a performer I delight in seeing the composer’s personality in her scores. Notation is a dreary process, and for me spending the time developing personalized elements is often the silver lining. But perhaps more importantly, the heads easily convey to the performer the stiffness of the motion. At the first rehearsal with the JACK, all performers attempted the head movements stiffly and robotically, with no instruction from me. I believe this is a simple demonstration of the system theory— when we see a human perform an action, we subconsciously mimic that action.36 A similar action occurs when we see an image—if we see a still image of a crying person, for example, we subconsciously frown and feel a little sad. In Nightmare for JACK, the performer

36 Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (MIT Press Scholarship Online, August 2013, 188-189.

24 sees a neutral face and is inclined to mimic that expression.

Page 10 of the piece is all head movements and vocals, with no instruments (see figure 3-

2). The notation changes to represent a change in mood and to evoke an interruption of the rest of the piece. This represents the part of one’s nightmare that always seems to elude explanation and accurate remembrance—that bleary few minutes in the ice cream/tattoo/dentist parlor before the fluorescent muppet monster starts chasing you down the endless downward collapsing staircase.

Fig. 3-2: Score excerpt—bar 83, violin 1.

Non-string sounds present in this Nightmare include vocals, whistles, electronics, and bells. The notation is mostly standard—text indicates bell-hits, whistles, and spoken words— with one important exception. The notation used to indicate the vocal electronic sample is the same as that used for the performers’ vocal garblings (see figure 3-3). I found this to be an effective way to help the performer naturally discover the desired sound.

Fig. 3-3: Notation used for acoustic and electronic vocal garblings.

25 c) Electronics

The sonic outcome of the above notation is an acoustic sound palette that is quite low in volume; therefore, heavy amplification is used (DPA mics). The amplification permits the audience to hear the sounds typically heard only by the performer, and adds to the careful mismatch between the visuals and the sounds. The electronics are fixed media, and triggered by pedals operated by three of the four performers. The fourth uses a pedal to step through a sequence of events– each event holds a bank of samples. Some of the samples are synthesized in a patch I created in a graphical programming environment (Max/MSP), and some are samples taken from a personal bank of recordings.

As previously mentioned, I have found that mixing straight sampling—that is, a sample that sounds exactly the same each time it is played back—with synthesis results in an electronic sound palette that is at turns expressive and decidedly stiff. This complements the performers’ actions quite well. The stiffness of the samples couples with the stiffness of the physical gesture, and the synthesis couples well with the instrumental sounds.

All the electronic sounds in Nightmare for JACK are relatively high-pitched, and many of the samples are a man’s voice pitch-shifted upwards several octaves.37 I have found that this particular technique contributes greatly to the spirit of uncanniness—the disembodied vocals coupled with the surreality of a too-high male voice imply an eerie underlying dialogue to the composition.

3.2 Second Nightmare, for KIKU/2.5 Nightmares for Jessie

Originally written for violinist Kiku Enomoto, circumstances compelled me to transcribe this

37 That man is composer Bryan Jacobs.

26 piece for cellist Jessie Marino. The gestures and nuances of the piece were composed with Kiku in mind but the cello version has higher quality documentation. a) Uncanniness

The source of uncanniness in Second Nightmare for KIKU is founded on two primary sources: robotic gestures executed by all three performers with varying degrees of synchronicity, and the underlying dialogue that is strongly a product of Kiku’s personality. Even so, this will most likely not be evident even to her closest friends. My intent was not to create a biographical piece, but rather to develop a palette of gestures from her unique movements and personality that then forms the character at the core of the composition.

Many of the gestures that appear in Nightmare for JACK are repeated in this work, with additional gestures and new nuances expanding the palette. In Second Nightmare, the physical movements are elevated to a higher importance than in the previous work. I intended to place them on par with the resulting sonic material, and I believe that this work was successful in that regard—the piece can neither be listened to without the accompanying visuals, nor watched without the accompanying sound. My overarching intent was to imply a situation where the two groups of performers (violin and assistants) executed sonic and physical gestures repetitively until the other “learned” them. The repetitions start out long. 35 bars are overlapped between the three parts, and nearly imperceptibly, eventually shorten to just three bars in total synchronicity near the end of the work. This hypnotic system of rote that is so familiar to performers serves a dual purpose of luring the audience into a strange delirium, and highlights the discrepancies between movement and sound as the gestures of the performers are necessarily offset from one another. My hope is that this discrepancy helps one experience the journey through the nightmare.

27 b) Form

As introduced above, the form of Second Nightmare for KIKU is a rather simplistic overlapping of steadily complexifying material, peppered with interruptions comprised of differing sonic and rhythmic material, eventually getting stuck in a short synchronicity before culminating in a

“normal” musical section. The elements of the large-scale repetition, which runs from bar 42 to bar 67, cumulate in small pieces from the beginning of the piece to bar 42. New material is introduced in either the violin or the assistants’ parts, and is then taken up by the other. For example, the violin’s behind-bridge nail pizzicato 32nd notes in bar 23 are taken over by

Assistant 1 hitting a metal measuring cup in bar 29, whereupon it becomes primary material until it is re-adopted by the violin as a nail pizzicato in bar 42. Likewise, the introduction of the bow gestures in bar 31 becomes primary material in all three parts during the repeated section.

The repeated section is comprised of an A and a B section, which are treated as the same material for the purpose of the evolving repetition. The section begins in bar 42 with a sort of reverse coda of 6 bars, presenting the skeleton of the material. There are many elements intentionally missing in this opening bit—for example, there are no head movements yet—but hints at the upcoming synchronicity are sprinkled about. The hocketed bow movement in bar 42 between the violin and assistant 2 and the unison vocals between assistants 1 and 2 in bar 44 are two such examples (See figure 3-4).

28

Figure 3-4: Score excerpt from Nightmare for KIKU: Bar 42 and 44 (respectively) demonstrating hocketing and synchronicity.

In the subsequent sections, elements that were a beat off from one another align and missing elements are filled in, eventually resulting in the “complete” section between bar 63-67.

One prominent example is the 6/4 bar that appears at the end of both the A and B sections—in bar 67, the figure is finally “together,” whereas previous iterations presented a confusion of synchronicity and “mistake” (Figure 3-5).

29

Fig. 3-5: Score excerpt from Second Nightmare for KIKU: Bar 67 demonstrating synchronicity.

c) Electronics

The primary function of the electronic sounds in Second Nightmare is to create an antinomy: counterpoint that both mixes with the violin sound, and adamantly refuses to do so. All of the sounds are fixed samples, meaning they sound exactly the same each time. They are in the same octave as the violin’s highest notes—around C7, where C4 is middle C. The violinist is instructed throughout to play sul ponticello, sul tasto, unevenly, and with wild glissandi in both directions in order to highlight the differences between the parts. Yet because of their similitude

30 in timbre and pitch, the parts create a perfect union of human/robot imperfection.

The only other electronic element is a sample of a pile driver, which is sounded when the assistants play the sandblock in the beginning of the piece. The regularity of the machine sound is a stark and intentional contrast to the violinist’s slow and uneven sinking into stupor. This sound was a result of my obsession with construction equipment—specifically, cranes.

3.3 Child of Chimera

This piece was written for Andrew Greenwald, Jessie Marino, and Dave Broome. The personality of this work is primarily attributed to Andrew, as the “soloist” of the work; however,

Jessie and Dave’s characters are heavily represented and similarly essential to the composition. I feel this has been my most ambitious work, both in its duration and in its proximity to my personal artistic goals. With Child of Chimera, I felt I broke new ground. a) Uncanniness

I developed a number of physical and musical gestures for this work, taken from Andrew’s repertoire of normal physical movement both while performing and while engaging in the act of listening, and from Jessie and Dave’s idiosyncratic methods of composition and performance.

When placed in the context of a chamber work, these gestures create an environment that is by turns desolate and lush, shifting rapidly between disparate personalities. The uncanniness emerges from this unique combination—the strangeness inherent within each performer easily manifests through their soloistic moments, and the musical anticipation created in between these sections is quickly subverted. My hope is that this slippery slope of unresolved expectation places the listener solidly within the fantasy world of nightmare.

31 b) Form

I imagine this work to combine three individual nightmares, each driven by one musician, colliding and transforming one another throughout.

There are two primary sets of unison drumset material—Andrew plays big [i.e., conventional] drumset, and Jessie and Dave play miniature drumsets. Each section is marked by two primary physical gestures—the rocking back-and-forth gesture, and the gasping-for-air gesture. The first of these is taken from an unconscious movement that Andrew often makes when listening to active music; the second is taken from the drummer Jim Black.

The A section is very sparse. In its first iteration it is 9 bars long (bars 0-9). The A section appears again in full trio form one more time, in bar 190. It is otherwise present throughout the piece in fragmented form. The B section is 5 bars long and appears in full trio form in bar 10, bar

130, and bar 235. It is otherwise sprinkled throughout the piece. For example, the B material forms the skeleton for the section between 58 and 84, although it only appears in Jessie’s part.

The remainder of the material in Child of Chimera is taken from the compositional and performance repertoire of the three musicians. The drum part is largely improvised, within certain guidelines—many drummers, including Andrew, learn to play by fastidiously studying other drummers’ technique. Therefore, rather than transcribing the material, I indicated the names of certain drummers—Joey Baron, Art Blakey, and Steve Jordan, to name a few—to emulate during some adlib sections. The most prominent example of this is the section from bar

208 to bar 234. During this section, the drummer must switch between styles of playing constantly, almost always after an odd number of beats (typically 7).

The cello material emerged both from Jessie’s absurdist approach to pop culture within

32 her compositional output,38 and from her approach to cello performance. One example of this is in bar 113, where Jessie reads a text taken from a video on How to Perfectly Fry an Egg.39 The piano material is taken from Dave’s dual approach to music—spectacular instrumental virtuosity, and over-simplicity. For example, bar 17-35 is a rapid, rhythmically difficult but notefully simple section that highlights Dave’s forceful technique, where bar 175-183 is a simple ascending chromatic scale, performed on melodica.

Child of Chimera combines the three seemingly disparate approaches listed above to form a composition that I find very satisfying.

4. Historical Context

Much of my inspiration has come from composers choosing to incorporate theatrical elements in their compositions—commonly referred to in Europe as instrumental theatre. I will discuss the work of Mauricio Kagel and Georges Aperghis within this context, and compare elements to my current work. My other primary source of influence is the performance art of the 60s and 70s. I will discuss Charlotte Moorman’s career and identify elements within her work that have motivated my own artistic practice.

4.1 Instrumental Theatre

The work of Argentinian/German composer Mauricio Kagel embraced chaos and surrealism, and evaded rules and classification at all cost. Influenced by both the European serialists and the

American avant-garde, Kagel refused to declare devotion to either faction. Instead, he cherry- picked his favorite elements from these and innumerable others—dadaists, surrealists, fluxists, to

38 See Endless Shrimp, Jessie Marino 2015. https://youtu.be/pYmFPJ88TKQ 39 Rousbe Online Cooking School, Fried Eggs—How to Perfectly Fry an Egg. https://youtu.be/Z1wjhJaAC4Y

33 name a few—and created a new subgenre that he dubbed instrumental theatre after hearing John

Cage casually mention the term in a post-concert lecture at Darmstadt. The development of this genre reset the concert stage for composers, encouraging the use of theatrical and dramatic elements within a non-operatic classical context while simultaneously encouraging a multimedia approach to composition.

Nearly every Kagel work written since 1959 used theatricality to raise issues of semantic vs. aesthetic listening; to comment on traditional instrumental performance practice; and to question the very validity of the concert stage itself. His first such work, Sur Scène (1959), is a chaotic collection of instrumentalists wandering about the stage, providing musical examples for an absurdist text read out loud by a pompous speaker, while an actor sits in the audience and ridicules the performance. This raises the question of aesthetic vs. semantic listening—is the performer singing, and we like it? Or emulating a singer, thereby creating a storyline?

Sonant (1960) is a staging of a rehearsal, where the performers execute extremely difficult gestures while producing very little actual sound. Like many of Kagel’s compositions,

Sonant is a self-referential comment on musicianship, demonstrating the absurdity of composition within the context of a composition.40

Kagel’s artistic practice as a whole has influenced me more strongly than any singular piece. Throughout his career, he remained staunchly independent, experimenting with schools of thought as he pleased. His boundless devotion to the absurd is immediately apparent in his music and his films, and continues to be tremendously relevant. Often, the viewer is left puzzling over the sanity of the composer, the performer, and him/herself—for me, this is the golden egg of composition.

40 I often use similar self-referentiality in my work. However, that is beyond the scope of this paper.

34 Georges Aperghis is a composer compelled by the chaotic and the absurd. His compositions are potions thrown onto personalities to see what phenomena might erupt, and his interest in any particular formula lasts only as long as the length of the representative work. His rapid movements from one piece to the next are haphazard, barely paying mind to the possible continuation of any work’s life, always focusing instead on his next project or game. Fragments of text and motion are treated as unifying wholes, willfully embracing incoherence and distortion of linearity and leaving the listener confused, unsettled, provoked, and excited.

My reaction to this volatility is as both willing audience member and suspicious judge. I see my own impatience in much of Aperghis’s works, and this sometimes leads me to the irrational conclusion that I have little to learn from him. Yet in studying Les Guetteurs de Son— the process leading me to discard the piece from my catalogue of love—I rediscovered my attraction to freedom within the compositional process. As a performer, I always impose my own personality and creativity on a composition, perhaps more than some composers might appreciate. Aperghis goes one step further, by declining to fully complete any composition but instead allowing the performer that tedium/honor.

Often in theatre the personality is specifically dictated, and the personality of the interpreter disappears. In solo works, sometimes the composition imparts no personality to the performer, and the performer is permitted to “wear” the composition, imparting her full personality to the piece. In ensemble pieces, however, the relationship between the performers is tremendously important to the successful execution of the work, and this is heightened in works involving theatre. This can be complicated in Aperghis’s works, where so little information is divulged about the composer’s wishes that the process becomes a fully collaborative one. As anyone who has participated in a truly collaborative compositional process has experienced, this

35 is a tricky battle of wills for even the most open-minded musicians. That being said, this piece and a number of others I have studied since evoked in me a desire to discover a platform for improvisation within my own works that was satisfying to me and to my performing collaborators—and for that I am thankful.

The other obvious element that I have taken from Aperghis is his haphazard but extremely effective construction of simple, absurd physical gestures. Many of these gestures are idiosyncracies of the performer, and there is no corresponding score instruction—yet the composition is the force that compelled the performer to act. For example, François Rivalland rolls her eyes skyward while executing vocal clucks in Corps à corps, a gesture that is neither notated in the score nor present in any other performer’s gestural vocabulary for this piece that I have seen. Another example of absurd gesture is the air-drumming and gaping open mouth in a number of his works, including Les Guetteurs de Son and Récitations. These, among others, have inspired me to explore the palette of physicality available to performers, without crossing over into the realm of “true” theatre.

4.2 American Avant-Garde

Charlotte Moorman’s work encompassed not only cello performance and concert production, but also the volatile energy behind her unique, freewheeling, and sometimes completely dysfunctional approach to life. This approach—creating art of her own unique, sometimes unpopular flavor to the absolute exclusion of everything else, including money and other practicalities—is hugely motivational to me in a country where “art” is generally viewed more as a transitory phase of youth, than an essential quality of life. Moorman’s total refusal to conform to any existing or developing schools of artistic thought—not unlike Kagel in this regard— reflected her absolute creativity and passion for strange art. In America there is no more

36 honorable way to transgress than to be a nonconformist, and in this sense Moorman’s fall from nearly everyone’s grace can be understood as proof of her utter originality.41

Charlotte Moorman produced an annual festival of the avant-garde in New York City for

15 years. She single-handedly cultivated support from the parks commissioner, the mayor, the police department, and countless corporations in order to fulfill as many of her outlandish goals as possible, and in doing so jump-started the careers of hundreds of young artists. This collaborative approach to art-making is an element I find essential to the advancement of my own practice—the resulting whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. While I admit that

“collaboration” is a relatively abstract term, I find that the position it implies as the inverse of the individual genius—a mythical creature that is still revered by many—is a forward-thinking philosophy that is the only logical approach in the chaotic field of new art.

4.3 Summary

While the musicians/artists described above have quite different nuances in their approach to producing work, I find that the shared quality most relevant to my own work is the sheer joyfulness that is conveyed in its presentation. As most artists do, I struggle with the social importance and relevance of my work, and often wonder if I would not be serving my generation and my field better if my compositions delivered a clear political message, or could be placed more strongly in the evolution of a better humanity. Yet if there is no art created for joy alone, political art loses meaning and devolves into public media. Conversely, without political art,

“simple art” (for lack of a better term) exists as mere fluff to entertain the bored. They are mutually exclusive. I create art for the sheer joy of process and sharing—from my perspective, this places it in the “simple art” camp. My artistic forays into the uncanny valley are not

41 Joan Rothfuss, The Topless Cellist (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 349.

37 attempting to reveal or comment on technology’s negative or positive impact on humanity. I use the uncanny valley as the building blocks to my artsy fantasy world, enamored by its strangeness and attraction.

5. Conclusion

The uncanny valley is a rich environment for artistic investigation. There is great potential for emotional manipulation in music by deliberately harnessing its effects. We can learn a great deal about these potential effects by examining the accidental descent into the valley pursued by animation techniques in film and gaming. As technology advances in these fields, a steady approach to realism is inevitable, yet the valley remains. The results remains to be seen—will this approach to realism ever yield favorable results, i.e. will the highly realistic animated character ever evoke empathy in the user? So far, the answer has been “no.” Yet this same failure is a success story both for the creation of the antipathetic character, and for experimental studies and practice in music and art.

To further capitalize on this knowledge, we look to psychology, from the earliest known research into “the uncanny” to the latest forays into the unconscious mind. Much of our understanding of the uncanny is still taken from Ernst Jentsch’s and Sigmund Freud’s writings of the early 1900s. One reason for this is the ambiguity of the word “uncanny” itself. Most of us can visualize the emotion brought about by uncanny situations, but are left speechless when asked to define the feeling with words. Therefore it is more useful to envision scenarios giving rise to the feeling as a method for definition. This can also be a useful method for emotional manipulation within an artistic work.

38 The series of compositions accompanying this thesis is largely a foray into the uncanny valley. The three works utilize visuals as a counterpoint to the music in an effort to maximize the emotional effect, and the music combines acoustic and electronic sounds to imply a cyborg performer. The hope is that these techniques, in concert with the composition and the performance, place the listener in a surreal environment, similar to a nightmare. This environment is intended to be playful, slightly disturbing, strange and spectacularly unbelievable.

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