: Electroacoustic Music
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ANTHONY PAUL DE RITIS : : Electroacoustic Music in memomorium : DAVID WESSEL WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1710 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. electroacoustic music CD with Albany Records 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2018 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. DeRitis_1710_book.indd 1-2 2/12/18 4:03 PM Forward I perception, and new manners of controlling computers in making music—certainly By Marc Battier has had a strong influence on De Ritis, himself a composer who does not hesitate to The pieces gathered on this CD span over 25 years. Amazingly, the majority are explore and experiment. written either for Western instruments (flute, piano, cello) or for Asian instruments However, this CD is solely about music, and the pieces gathered herein have (the Chinese pipa, sheng, erhu, and the Korean piri), but despite the different choice something in common—probably the result of De Ritis’s proximity with Wessel— of instruments, the music of De Ritis demonstrates a strong understanding of Asian and that is the wonderful balance of tone colors and the mastery of timbre, be it from influences. This is a stylistic trait that is difficult to master. Far from the too common live instruments, their transformations with digital processing units, or from studio “contemporary chinoiserie,” as John Corbett called it, the composer has reached a manipulations. What we hear, then, are elaborate pieces of music which, although state of “musical synthesis,” as described by Yayoi Uno Everett. having been informed by latter day research in digital audio and timbre perception, Listening to the music on this CD is captivating. De Ritis’s music sounds like a are nevertheless created with the listener in mind: De Ritis pays attention to the successful synthesis of East and West, where real-time processing devices transform reception of his music, and this makes his pieces highly enjoyable, while retaining the sound of acoustic instruments into a rainbow of sound colours, often in slowly a high degree of musical thought. evolving but always changing landscapes. Even in the works featuring Western instru- Marc Battier. Composer. Emeritus Professor of musicology at the University ments, one can feel an Asian presence by the way the events evolve. Indeed, this Paris-Sorbonne (electroacoustic music, organology). In early years, he served as a music expresses a unique sense of time—De Ritis has succeeded in creating his own musical assistant to John Cage, François Bayle, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Joji Yuasa. style of music. Worked in computer music at GRM as assistant to François Bayle, and at IRCAM This blend of Asian traits within a Western electroacoustic music context is as computer music instructor and head of musical documentation. Founder of the something that had always attracted the musician who clearly influenced De Ritis, the Electroacoustic Music Studies Asia Network (EMSAN), and Co-founder of the late David Wessel. A researcher and experimental musician, Wessel had an intimate International Computer Music Association (ICMA). knowledge of Asian culture, which clearly showed in his musical tastes and in some of his music, like the computer-generated music Antony (1977). Wessel realized this Forward II work when he first came to IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ By Kyle Gann Musique), the Paris music institute where he stayed before joining the University of I have followed Anthony Paul De Ritis’s career from its inception some quarter- California, Berkeley, to head the then new music research center, CNMAT (Center for century ago. The trajectory—much of which you can hear on this recording—has New Music and Audio Technologies). Although Wessel was mostly attracted to impro- been astonishing. Having studied with the premier postminimalist William Duckworth visation while De Ritis creates elaborately written compositions, it’s Wessel’s sense of (who is paid an homage with the Tine Curve Preludes here), De Ritis retains a touch time that seems like the major influence, as well as the delicate work on timbre. Also, of postminimalist DNA, but only a touch; perhaps just a sense of long-term tonality. the fact that Wessel was constantly navigating between cognitive psychology and Instead, he became one of the most versatile music technology mavens of our time, creation – between the way our brain perceives music, how timbre acts on our and that expertise has infected every aspect of his music. Because of it the music is DeRitis_1710_book.indd 3-4 2/12/18 4:03 PM endlessly fluid, constantly wavering and sliding, moving through pitches rather than Let me close by saying that I’ve never heard a recording like this before. The honing in on them. And yet even so, given that, it is remarkable how well-defined few moments that bring Duckworth to mind are intentional; the bulk brings no other the soundworld of each piece is. One would never mistake one piece for another, composer or even contemporary style to mind. Having received a thorough Western and each movement has its own idea it explores from all sides—perhaps that’s the education and then traveled the world, Anthony Paul De Ritis has come up with a postminimalist DNA talking. music that is far more than the sum of its parts. The other big surprise about De Ritis, following his thoroughly Eurocentric train- Composer Kyle Gann teaches at Bard College, and is the author of Charles Ives’s ing at Fontainebleau and Berkeley, was how worldwide his interests became. This Concord: Essays after a Sonata and six other books on American music. started, as far as I know, with the use of the Chinese pipa in Plum Blossoms (1999), and has since exploded to an amazing array of Asian and African instruments: the piri, In Memoriam: David Wessel the kalimba, the erhu, the sheng. Of course that’s the source of his fluid approach to By Anthony Paul De Ritis melody. The music rarely gives any sense of background grid, and the sense of free- In the summer of 1991 I made my first trip to Europe. I floating chanting is expertly supported by the equal fluidity of electronics. He came was accepted at the American Conservatory in Fontaineb- across the insight, one I haven’t heard in anyone else’s music, that Asian instruments leau, France, where Philippe Manoury and Tristan Murail and high-tech electronic synthesis belong together in their ability to exist outside the were offering master classes in music composition. It was realm of Europe’s notated pitches and rhythms. He can talk spectralism, serialism, in a conversation between Tristan Murail and fellow par- and post-tonal theory as intelligently as anyone I know, but his music has burst outside ticipant and composer Ronald Bruce Smith that I first learned of David Wessel— that world into a place I don’t recognize. Smith had copies of clarinet spectra, which surprised Murail, who wondered aloud Some favorite moments: I love the way, in Shui. Life. the erhu seems to not only how Smith had come across this numeric data—it had been generated by David be played from in the water, but the way the water seems to accompany it, as though Wessel. Later that summer, Smith suggested I apply to the University of California, the piece is a mini-concerto for soloist and Nature Herself. Pizzicatos seem to set Berkeley, where a few years earlier Wessel had established the Center for New aquatic waves in motion. Erhu-Flute conjures up for me a host of Arabic muzzeins Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). chanting together in unselfconscious heterophony. Sheng introduces the fact that I began studying at UC Berkeley in 1992, and did my best to embed myself a cello can sound remarkably like a Chinese mouth organ, something that would in the musical culture of the Department, first as T.A. for the University Orchestra never have occurred to me – and then, as with so many of these pieces, I can rarely (under maestro Jung-Ho Pak) and then as David Wessel’s assistant in his famed quite tell for sure whether what I’m hearing is the electronics or the live soloist. That course “Music 158: Musical Applications of Computers and Related Technologies.” ambiguity was a major goal of electronic music from the 1980s on, and De Ritis has I had taken the course during my first semester, when Georg Hajdu (now head of brought it to a point of perfection. The Tine Curve Preludes bring minimalism back to Multimedia Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg) was its African roots, but with an evocative element of poetry added, as if one is hearing the assistant. At that time I had programmed my own MIDI sequencer in Max, traditional kalimba music in a dream. which made use of Wessel’s MTP—multi-timbral player (I was enamored by the DeRitis_1710_book.indd 5-6 2/12/18 4:03 PM powerfully beautiful yet simple logic of Wessel’s “on-on time” and other objects Thank you, David Wessel, for being a great teacher, inspiration, and friend. embedded within his score-player). Wessel gave me an A+ for my class grade, Thank you for your example of how to celebrate and live life to its fullest. Thank which was a big deal to me, as I had pretty much bombed the rest of my first you for your passion for music and science and your commitment to teaching. And semester at Berkeley, having earned a B+ in composition seminar with Olly Wilson, thank you for making a difference in my life and in the lives of so many others.