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Christopher DeLaurenti
Of Silences intemporally sung: Luigi Nono's fragmente-stille, an Diotima
CAT. No 4
5'' CD
1. Preparatory silence (00'18'')
2. OF SILENCES INTEMPORALLY SUNG: LUIGI NONO'S FRAGMENTE-STILLE, AN DIOTIMA (38'13'')
Credits:
Recorded Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, Hamburg, Germany December 1983. |D|D|D| Soundscape found and excavated, Seattle, USA April 2009. Published by reductive music, 2011.
Artist Note:
My found soundscape series finds and excavates unintentionally captured environments lodged and lurking inside recordings. (The first in the series is "Open Carrier: Citywide One Manhattan" and no. 2 is "C-SPAN Presidential Inauguration,January 20, 2009" released by and/OAR). "Of silences intemporally sung" is a 38-minute found soundscape which extracts and amplifies otherwise inaudible residues of the LaSalle Quartet performing and recording Luigi Nono's only string quartet, "Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima."
CD Note:
Of “silences ‘intemporally’ ‘sung’” Luigi Nono’s only string quartet still shocks: Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima unbraids time into anguished, eruptive passages and silence that startles, gasps, and freezes. To shepherd performers towards the “many moments, thoughts, silences, ‘songs’ of other spaces” as indicated in the score, Nono filigreed the staves of Fragmente with passages by the poet Hölderlin; the performers must not recite anything aloud but should, according to the composer’s instructions, murmur (or think) the lines to themselves while performing. Live, an audience seldom remains still. Bodies move, bodies breathe. So when the string quartet was recorded in 1983, the inaudible noise floor and then-unparalleled dynamic range of the compact disc charted an ideal aural geography for the crevasse-like pauses of Fragmente-Stille– intentionally unique silences which Nono hoped would vibrate into “silences ‘intemporally’ ‘sung.’” In my series of found soundscapes, I peel away residues and excavate unintended field recordings lurking in the studio, or within other ostensibly stable, routine, or overlooked environments. Here, I have inverted Nono’s quartet by muting the audible passages played by the LaSalle Quartet and then elevating room tone, discreet ambiance, and other assumed silence high above the threshold of audibility. You will hear on-the-fly tunings, annunciatory gasps, hurried breaths, sul ponticello bowings, and creaking chairs; these eruptions and outcries fuse with ambient sounds (a distant plane, moving equipment, and room tone) and artifacts of the recording process (especially digital glitches and dialed- in echo). While listening, the silence is yours; together, I hope we find a singing, intemporal mirror of Nono’s desired “dreaming spaces” and “tranquil breaths” hidden within Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima.Reviews:
Ed Pinset (The Sound Proyector) ... DeLaurenti’s record features these ambient sounds, amplifying them to a very heightened degree, and also reveals “ghosts” of the original performance – echoes of strings and dying chords. Even the “tone” of the concert hall ends up on this record. “The silence is yours,” declares the creator in his notes; how’s that for a 21st-century update on the ideas of John Cage, and a significant democratisation of same? It’s an impressive piece, even if it is very bitty to listen to; the fragments of musical information are quite startling and disturbing as they jump unexpectedly out of the silences 1, making the work a true “inversion” of the original, as intended, and every bit as shocking as Nono probably had in mind in the first place. I’m very taken by this radical reworking and repurposing approach, as it seems to me it’s a true advance on the modernist cause and feels like the way culture is supposed to develop. Perhaps more musicians and conductors should be as imaginative and interpretive as this, instead of fossilising past glories in the mausoleum of the concert hall. While I remember, I should also mention this release is a clear progression from one of DeLaurenti’s previous works, Favorite Intermissions, which comprised secret field recordings of audience ambient noise between performances in a concert hall. Richard Pinnell (The Watchful Ear) " I have a particular, quite personal affiliation with today’s CD that I should probably explain a little before writing. It is my intention, probably in the new year, to undertake a long-term writing project that will be, in part, centred around Luigi Nono’s only string quartet; Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima. I have gradually obtained copies of every recording of the work there has been, and have spent quite a bit of time reading and researching the composition. Those that know my musical tastes well will recognise that this piece of music investigates on one of my favourite elements of music- the silences and negative spaces found between musical gestures. It was then, with great delight that I recently found out that the Seattle-based musician and composer Christopher DeLaurenti was to release an album named ‘Of silences in temporarily sung: Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille an Diotima’ For this work Delaurenti has taken the LaSalle Quartet’s recording of the work, and has “inverted” the music- removing the passages in which the musicians make a deliberate sound with their instruments, and then significantly amplified what remains- so that we do not actually hear any of the notes Nono wrote, just the silences between his fragments. Nono’s original score contains, as you might expect, traditional, if quite complex notation for the four musicians. Between musical gestures however, along the stave lines he has also written fragments of verse by the German poet Holderlin. Nono notes that “under no circumstances (should these poetic fragments) be taken as programmatic performance indications” and that the words should never be spoken aloud during the performance. Instead, he states that “the players should “sing” them inwardly, in their autonomy”. By taking the apparent silences in the Lasalle recording, making them the only remaining part of the piece, and then bringing up the noise floor of them so that every tiny, before unheard detail of these “silences” can be heard, DeLaurenti is maybe bringing a voice to those unspoken fragments of poetry. Nono’s quartet was written with the negative spaces between the sounds as much in mind as the sounds made by the musicians. DeLaurenti has recognised this, and has chosen to invert the way that the composition is usually approached by listeners. As Nono wanted the silences, the ‘stille’ to be as big a part of the work as the ‘fragment’ traditional listening approaches will centre mostly not he instrumental sound. The spaces in between are merely considered as pauses before the next note, rests perhaps, that dictate the pace of the work, but rarely would a listener listen as closely to the spaces between gestures, or rather, rarely would they listen to a sound while waiting for the next silence. The traditional approach is the other away around. Here, on DeLaurenti’s great CD, where there was instrumentation there is now digital silence. Every so often then we get a burst of activity- the grey hum of the recording space, little gasps of breath from the musicians or others in attendance, bits of unintentional string sounding either when a note takes a long time to decay or when a bow is rested against a string in preparation for the next pass. DeLaurenti has gone through the work with scalpel-like precision. Plenty remains in the spaces between the new digital silences. there is a world of activity in there that normally we would ignore, or dismiss as “silence”. Its impossible to not draw comparisons witht he composition of radu Malfatti, and in particular those works in which he inserts digital silences between his quiet, hushed sounds. The difference here of course is the intention- while Nono wanted the silences to be heard, the LaSalle quartet never meant for the whispers between gestures to be amplified and focussed upon. The ideas behind this CD are really very simple, Cagean in tone, turning the way we listen inside out, showing us what we are missing. In his brief liner notes, DeLaurenti states that as we “listen, the silence is yours. Together I hope we find the singing, intemporal mirror of Nono’s desired “dreaming spaces and “tranquil breaths”. Tonight, after listening to this album very carefully some four or five times, I then went and took the original LaSalle quartet recording down from the shelves and played it through. Strangely, this piece of music that I thought I knew so well suddenly revealed a lot more, and felt so much more familiar. I don’t know who to recommend this CD to, other than those, like myself that find this sort of exploration of sound and silence thoroughly fascinating. for me at least its a wonderful release, both quite aesthetically beautiful in its own right, but also quite fascinating and revealing despite its very simple premise. Released on the rather fine, and on this occasion aptly named Reductive Music label."About:
Christopher DeLaurenti is a sound artist, improvisor, and phonographer based in Virginia and New York. His albums include N30: Live at the WTO Protest (mimeograph), 57 Minutes to Silence with Artemiy Artemiev (Electroshock), Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven-Holst-Stravinsky (GD Stereo), and Bleed the Capacitors with Stefan Tcherepnin (DRAFT). Christopher is a co-founder of the Seattle Phonographers Union. Live, his recent solo performances include Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2011), Chapel Performance Space (Seattle, 2011), INSTAL 10 (Glasgow, 2010), Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival (2009), and the Seattle Improvised Music Festival (2008).
Reference: www.delaurenti.net