March 16, 2016
Object of Desire: A Composer and Writer Collaborate
Sebastian Currier
Artist in Residence, Institute for Advanced Study
Object of Desire: A Composer and Writer Collaborate
Sebastian Currier
Artist in Residence, Institute for Advanced Study
Speaker Sebastion Currier
Minute of the 24th meeting of the 74th Year
President Owen Leach called the meeting to order at 10:15 AM. This was the first meeting held at the new Andlinger Center for the Environment. There were 69 members in attendance.
The invocation was led by Arthur Eschenlauer.
Minutes of the March 9th meeting were read by Keith Wheelock.
President Leach announced that a hard copy of the Spring Program was available, and a handout of the poem cycle for which today’s speaker had composed music was being distributed. The next meeting of the executive committee is March 30, 1:45PM at the Nassau Club.
President Owen Leach introduced his guest, his son-in-law Donald Sanborn.
Our next regular meeting, on March 23, is at the Friend Center, when the speaker will be Scott McVay talking about his recent 2015 book, “Surprise Encounters With Artists and Scientists.
President Leach reminded members that spring weather was no excuse for suspending the traditional dress code of jackets and ties. No comment, however, was made about women’s attire.
Landon Jones introduced the speaker, Sebastian Currier, Artist in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, a contemporary composer who has won many awards and whose work has been performed by renowned orchestras and groups around the world. For further specific information, see Currier’s website
http://www.sebastiancurrier.com/bio.html
Sebastian Currier took the audience on a narrative journey that replayed the developmental process that culminated in his collaboration with the poet Sarah Manguso to create the music for “Deep-Sky Objects,” a cycle of love songs set in the distant future. Currier draws significantly on the sounds retrieved from outer space by astrophysicists and cosmologists for the basic music of the piece.
In a kind of prologue, Currier related the beginnings of the process of creating of a new kind of artistic collaboration; instead of the usual process of working alone to create concert pieces, he began to think of working with other artists, painters, poets and videographers, rather than only with the performers of his compositions. As so often is the case in the course of love and war, things did not always go smoothly. Currier told a very personal story of the trials and tribulations of working with other artists “as headstrong” as himself.
Chapter 1 of this story featured Tom Bolt, an American poet and artist who, like Currier at the time, was working at the Rome Academy. Currier was asked to write an orchestral piece, “something like” a Mass, and the sonority of Latin, as well as the tradition of Renaissance polyphony, had a strong appeal for the musician. Currier thought he would replace the Credo with a 20th-century scientific response to the world, something that would parallel the concept of Transubstantiation, which is the central action of the Mass. He hoped to develop a sense of awe about the world by using stardust as the central notion since stardust contains all the elements of which we and the world are made. Bolt, however, could not work with the idea, so the project was abandoned. Currier still wants to work on it; see Chapter 3 and the Epilogue for further developments.
Chapter 2 is the story of the attempt to collaborate on the creation of a string quartet that would center on a particular place. Currier chose New Orleans, with its rich cultural life centered around water in a variety of contexts, as a port at the mouth of the Mississippi where all sorts of people enter the city, as a place in constant peril from the river’s annual erosion, and as the victim of a destructive hurricane. Working with the sounds of water was very appealing and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art became interested in developing a 360-degree project. Currier worked for a year and a half with a “then” friend and videographer Pawel Wojtasik on the piece which became the music video Next Atlantis. His collaborator, however, then decided to work with another artist, and Currier was “pushed out,” again discovering that collaboration is no easy path to artistic creation.
But Currier had earlier met Sarah Manguso, a poet and memoirist, at the McDowell Colony, and liked her work. So in Chapter 3 the plot turns. Currier read us a short Manguso poem about a friend whom the poet loves until she sees him kissing her roommate and “that was the end of that.” Manguso was a very good cross-disciplinary writer whose short evocative pieces “do a lot with very little.”
Currier asked her to write a short song lyric for which he could set the text, something about longing and desire, a song tradition that goes back to the 19th century. He was interested in writing music for what he calls “intergalactic love songs.” She sent him “Star” in August 2010. Returning the text to her, he asked her to clarify if the speaker was on one planet, her lover on another. She replied with a totally different poem based on a wall of digital numbers and he scored that text. So this became a piano quintet with electronic elements, a more futuristic version to connect to that 19th-century past and that is reflected in the text and the instrumentation. He drew on both a Brahms quintet and on music from the early sci-fi film, “The Forbidden Planet,” but he was now working with two very different sound sources: digital signals and space sounds, that is, electromagnetic waves converted to radio waves. For example, pulsars send out magnetic sounds that can be incorporated into other sounds and “whistlers” caused by lightning are transformed into glissando sounds in a composition. The thruster pulse from the landing gear of the Cassini probe on Titan becomes part of the sound background. That’s what “composers” (think Latin) do, bring things together.
Chapter 4 tells how he set the text of “Deep-Sky Objects” to music. The first poem, “Satellite,” is a subtle introduction of the premise that, far out in space, “I am not alone.” Currier described how he adapted sounds from the Sputnik satellite and a mixture of film scores with electronic sounds, and then incorporated the vocal section. He explained how difficult the timing for such a piece is for the musicians performing it, so he often creates cues for them to keep them on track. He then played the finished piece so the audience could hear how the final integration sounds.
Initially we heard sounds and then the spoken title: the poet had written one word titles for each poem and those are not usually set musically. He then played the soprano’s rendition of the piece. He also played the opening spoken sections of the second poem, “Clouds,” and the third, “Storm,” each set with electronic but not musical sounds. The shortest section, “Light,” allowed him to create a very special kind of electronic music for a sustained voice part. He explained that that short text allows for the creation of “melismatic” music, the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession, as in Gregorian chant or as in contemporary R&B (think Whitney Houston in “I Will Always Love You”), rather than creating notes for each syllable of a word as in more conventional song. The song moves “across the black world forever, which is how I love you.” The composer then played the section “Light” for the audience.
The Epilogue gives us a description of a choral project Currier is working on involving a college student’s dreams and sleep. This piece draws on material he wrote for the unfinished project years before in Rome. So, as in the principle of conservation of energy, little is ever lost and much is converted into a new form. Clearly, his residence and association with the cosmologists and other scientists at the Institute, including a current project with the Director Robbert Dijkgraaf, a mathematician and physicist as well as a painter, is creating a universe of rich musical expression and accompanying artistic work.
Q and A;
The meeting adjourned at 11:25 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Marue Walizer
The invocation was led by Arthur Eschenlauer.
Minutes of the March 9th meeting were read by Keith Wheelock.
President Leach announced that a hard copy of the Spring Program was available, and a handout of the poem cycle for which today’s speaker had composed music was being distributed. The next meeting of the executive committee is March 30, 1:45PM at the Nassau Club.
President Owen Leach introduced his guest, his son-in-law Donald Sanborn.
Our next regular meeting, on March 23, is at the Friend Center, when the speaker will be Scott McVay talking about his recent 2015 book, “Surprise Encounters With Artists and Scientists.
President Leach reminded members that spring weather was no excuse for suspending the traditional dress code of jackets and ties. No comment, however, was made about women’s attire.
Landon Jones introduced the speaker, Sebastian Currier, Artist in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, a contemporary composer who has won many awards and whose work has been performed by renowned orchestras and groups around the world. For further specific information, see Currier’s website
http://www.sebastiancurrier.com/bio.html
Sebastian Currier took the audience on a narrative journey that replayed the developmental process that culminated in his collaboration with the poet Sarah Manguso to create the music for “Deep-Sky Objects,” a cycle of love songs set in the distant future. Currier draws significantly on the sounds retrieved from outer space by astrophysicists and cosmologists for the basic music of the piece.
In a kind of prologue, Currier related the beginnings of the process of creating of a new kind of artistic collaboration; instead of the usual process of working alone to create concert pieces, he began to think of working with other artists, painters, poets and videographers, rather than only with the performers of his compositions. As so often is the case in the course of love and war, things did not always go smoothly. Currier told a very personal story of the trials and tribulations of working with other artists “as headstrong” as himself.
Chapter 1 of this story featured Tom Bolt, an American poet and artist who, like Currier at the time, was working at the Rome Academy. Currier was asked to write an orchestral piece, “something like” a Mass, and the sonority of Latin, as well as the tradition of Renaissance polyphony, had a strong appeal for the musician. Currier thought he would replace the Credo with a 20th-century scientific response to the world, something that would parallel the concept of Transubstantiation, which is the central action of the Mass. He hoped to develop a sense of awe about the world by using stardust as the central notion since stardust contains all the elements of which we and the world are made. Bolt, however, could not work with the idea, so the project was abandoned. Currier still wants to work on it; see Chapter 3 and the Epilogue for further developments.
Chapter 2 is the story of the attempt to collaborate on the creation of a string quartet that would center on a particular place. Currier chose New Orleans, with its rich cultural life centered around water in a variety of contexts, as a port at the mouth of the Mississippi where all sorts of people enter the city, as a place in constant peril from the river’s annual erosion, and as the victim of a destructive hurricane. Working with the sounds of water was very appealing and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art became interested in developing a 360-degree project. Currier worked for a year and a half with a “then” friend and videographer Pawel Wojtasik on the piece which became the music video Next Atlantis. His collaborator, however, then decided to work with another artist, and Currier was “pushed out,” again discovering that collaboration is no easy path to artistic creation.
But Currier had earlier met Sarah Manguso, a poet and memoirist, at the McDowell Colony, and liked her work. So in Chapter 3 the plot turns. Currier read us a short Manguso poem about a friend whom the poet loves until she sees him kissing her roommate and “that was the end of that.” Manguso was a very good cross-disciplinary writer whose short evocative pieces “do a lot with very little.”
Currier asked her to write a short song lyric for which he could set the text, something about longing and desire, a song tradition that goes back to the 19th century. He was interested in writing music for what he calls “intergalactic love songs.” She sent him “Star” in August 2010. Returning the text to her, he asked her to clarify if the speaker was on one planet, her lover on another. She replied with a totally different poem based on a wall of digital numbers and he scored that text. So this became a piano quintet with electronic elements, a more futuristic version to connect to that 19th-century past and that is reflected in the text and the instrumentation. He drew on both a Brahms quintet and on music from the early sci-fi film, “The Forbidden Planet,” but he was now working with two very different sound sources: digital signals and space sounds, that is, electromagnetic waves converted to radio waves. For example, pulsars send out magnetic sounds that can be incorporated into other sounds and “whistlers” caused by lightning are transformed into glissando sounds in a composition. The thruster pulse from the landing gear of the Cassini probe on Titan becomes part of the sound background. That’s what “composers” (think Latin) do, bring things together.
Chapter 4 tells how he set the text of “Deep-Sky Objects” to music. The first poem, “Satellite,” is a subtle introduction of the premise that, far out in space, “I am not alone.” Currier described how he adapted sounds from the Sputnik satellite and a mixture of film scores with electronic sounds, and then incorporated the vocal section. He explained how difficult the timing for such a piece is for the musicians performing it, so he often creates cues for them to keep them on track. He then played the finished piece so the audience could hear how the final integration sounds.
Initially we heard sounds and then the spoken title: the poet had written one word titles for each poem and those are not usually set musically. He then played the soprano’s rendition of the piece. He also played the opening spoken sections of the second poem, “Clouds,” and the third, “Storm,” each set with electronic but not musical sounds. The shortest section, “Light,” allowed him to create a very special kind of electronic music for a sustained voice part. He explained that that short text allows for the creation of “melismatic” music, the singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession, as in Gregorian chant or as in contemporary R&B (think Whitney Houston in “I Will Always Love You”), rather than creating notes for each syllable of a word as in more conventional song. The song moves “across the black world forever, which is how I love you.” The composer then played the section “Light” for the audience.
The Epilogue gives us a description of a choral project Currier is working on involving a college student’s dreams and sleep. This piece draws on material he wrote for the unfinished project years before in Rome. So, as in the principle of conservation of energy, little is ever lost and much is converted into a new form. Clearly, his residence and association with the cosmologists and other scientists at the Institute, including a current project with the Director Robbert Dijkgraaf, a mathematician and physicist as well as a painter, is creating a universe of rich musical expression and accompanying artistic work.
Q and A;
- Were you aware in composing “Light” that you were remembering the piece from the Mass when you wrote the melismatic section? Well, I wasn’t but I want to address that aspect in the piece I am working on now with Robbert Dijkgraaf. The universe is the ultimate sublime.
- Fifteen years ago Robert Taub, Milton Babbitt, and James Levine gave a symposium at the Institute on artistic creativity. You have individually accomplished what three world-class musicians did together!
- How is the music scored? Most of the scoring is standard except for the electronic portions. For this, I often create a different one-line score, a kind of road map of cues, because it is so hard for the musicians to follow a non-human player.
- Please play “Star” so we can hear how the binary numbers are sung. He did.
- In Philip Glass’s opera “Einstein on the Beach,” strings of numbers are also used. Can you say what issues are involved in setting music to that kind of thing? Terms from science and numbers like 0 and One often have expressive sounds to work with. Even corporate names like Google and Amazon have this and I want to write a piece using these expressing the relationship of capitalism to the environment.
- How do you begin a collaboration? I (Currier) initiate all of them but I have learned that somebody needs to be the boss. I want to do an opera, which is such a huge and hard collaboration.
- Who is the singer in the piece? Her name is Karol Bennett. She belongs to Musiqua, the group from Rice University that commissioned and performed the work. Composers don’t get to audition the performers.
- How do you view writing for an audience? The truth is the audience represents such a multiplicity of views that, as an artist, it is not a helpful concept. Beethoven probably never thought about it. I write what I like and hope it appeals. In Pop music, which appeals to a mass culture, many listeners are indifferent to Beethoven. I hope for a healthy niche, finding the unexpected and what works. Audiences are changing. The difficulty is that audiences hear this music for the first time and sometimes only once. This music lacks the familiarity that classic and popular pieces have. So the question is, how do you get audiences to come back?
The meeting adjourned at 11:25 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Marue Walizer