[ANPPOM-Lista] performance historicamente informada em instrumentos eletrônicos?

Qua Jun 13 07:48:05 BRT 2012

Apareceu no sábado, 10 de junho, no NYT um artigo comparando o problema de
interpretar música eletrônica criada para instrumentos obsoletos com
problemas associados à performance da "música antiga":

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/arts/music/new-music-works-with-surprising-problem-dated-instruments.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Electronic Woe: The Short Lives of Instruments
 Columbia University Computer Music Center

Milton Babbitt, Peter Mauzey and Vladimir Ussachevsky, with the RCA Mark II
Synthesizer in 1958.
 By ALLAN KOZINN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/allan_kozinn/index.html>
Published:
June 8, 2012 IN an onstage interview during an evening of music by Kaija
Saariaho<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/arts/music/kaija-saariahos-voix-espace-at-zankel-hall.html>at
Zankel Hall this spring Jeremy Geffen, Carnegie Hall’s director of
artistic planning, asked Ms. Saariaho <http://www.saariaho.org/> a
provocative question, suggested by the nature of the music she was
presenting. Though she writes prolifically for conventional ensembles, Ms.
Saariaho also composes electronic music, and the works performed that
evening not only combined live voices with recorded or electronically
altered live sounds but also had video components, by Jean-Baptiste
Barrière<http://www.barriere.org/>,
that combined live and recorded elements.

 That’s a lot of technology, and several glowing Apple laptops sat on the
mixing desk at the back of the hall, running it all.

But in a preamble to his question Mr. Geffen noted that he had once visited
the old Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where Milton Babbitt,
Otto Luening and other electronic music pioneers composed on the room-size
RCA Mark II Synthesizer, which was state of the art when it was built in
1958. Anyone who had ever worked with electronic music could see where Mr.
Geffen was going: visions of 1960s vintage Moog modules, 1970s Buchla boxes
and 1980s Atari computers passed before your eyes. Mr. Geffen wanted to
know how Ms. Saariaho deals with the technological change that renders an
electronic composers’ tools archaic with alarming frequency.

This, Ms. Saariaho acknowledged, was one of her worst nightmares. Several
works on her program dated to the 1980s and ’90s. The technology behind
them had to be revisited before they could be revived.

Composers and new-music performers, meet the early-music world.
Harpsichordists, viola da gamba players and devotees of wooden flutes,
valveless horns and string instruments set up differently from their modern
counterparts feel your pain, though only to a degree. Specialists in music
from the Middle Ages through the early Romantic era have a thriving support
industry to rely on: a world of instrument builders who use antique designs
to reproduce the timbres and tactile qualities of early keyboards, strings,
woodwinds, brasses and percussion instruments.

The parallels are not exact of course. Everything moves immensely faster
today than it did in, say, 1800, and instruments (the term now including
computers and music-creation programs) that push the limits of possibility
today may well be landfill three years from now. Whether this is a function
of relentless creativity and innovation or corporate profit lust — planned
obsolescence run amok — the bottom line is the same: You have to scramble
to keep your music playable.

That said, period-instrument players can point to times of rapid flux as
well. Anyone who attended the Boston Early Music Festival in 2009 might
have run into a minifestival of pianoforte music in which players
demonstrated a great variety of transitional pianos, each with strikingly
different characteristics of tone and touch. For performers of the
historically informed persuasion this is a complicated issue. Discussing
the pianos, some players expressed preferences for one maker’s style over
another’s, but most agreed that the more pertinent issue was which pianos
particular composers played or owned, and whether their works bear evidence
that they had specific instruments in mind.

Even musicians who take a less fine-grained approach believe that modern
reproductions of period instruments should capture not only the timbres but
also the broader experience that musicians of former times had when they
sat down to play. The transaction involved in performing a bass line on a
harpsichord<http://www.hpschd.nu/index.html?nav/nav-4.html&t/welcome.html&http://www.hpschd.nu/tech/act/jack.html>,
for example, is a complex interplay of tensions and time lags, a result of
a sequence of actions that starts with the player depressing a key and ends
with a quill plucking a string. How that feels, nearly as much as how it
sounds, influenced the way composers wrote for the instrument, and it
inevitably governs the way interpretations are shaped.

Contemporary composers and performers may not entirely share that concern.
Even granting that a work like Babbitt’s “Philomel” (1964), for a live
singer and a taped electronic part, owes its sound and perhaps even aspects
of its structure to the setup at the Columbia-Princeton center, the moment
the electronic element was completed, the synthesizer was beside the point.
Does it make a difference whether a singer performs the work to the
accompaniment of Babbitt’s four-track open-reel tape — something many halls
are unequipped to handle — or the same recording played on a laptop?
Probably not.

Still, many electronic works today involve far more complicated
electronics. Interaction now works both ways: Composers can ask singers and
instrumentalists not only to respond to electronic sounds but also to
trigger fresh sounds with their live contributions. And the devices that
govern that kind of activity change rapidly.

More conventional instruments do too. Consider the early (pre-“Satyagraha”)
music of Philip Glass. The characteristic sound of the Philip Glass
Ensemble was the acrid whine of a Farfisa electric organ<http://farfisa.org/>,
a staple of 1960s garage bands. Mr. Glass adopted the Farfisa almost by
accident. As he put it in a 1980
interview<http://books.google.com/books?id=tykImG0WAsAC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=farfisa+glass+knotty+pine+basement&source=bl&ots=-vhhMyQ5W1&sig=ixHThvV_9lheq6t2zXmfv-KNW2M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HIpnT4SRCaK10AGv9qWmCA&sqi=2&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA>,
he needed a portable keyboard and found some used Farfisas, “all in Queens,
in knotty-pine basements, under stairwells.” The instrument was already a
relic when he began using it. And when finding working models or parts
became too time consuming, Mr. Glass’s sound crew switched to more reliable
synthesizers that could sample and more or less reproduce the Farfisa
timbre. But you can tell the difference, and I, for one, miss the raucous
tone of the old Farfisas.

Sometimes when technology changes, you cannot replace it with a digital
approximation.

Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” for 100
metronomes<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCp7bL-AWvw&search=ligeti>(1962)
should be the easiest of his scores to perform: all you have to do
is wind up the 100 metronomes, start them at exactly the same time (O.K.,
that is not so easy) and let them wind down until the last one stops.

But try finding 100 windup metronomes these days. I used to have one, but
that was a few lifetimes ago. I replaced it with a battery-operated device
that kept time more accurately, and now I use an iPhone app that can be set
to the finest gradation of tempo I need and maintains it accurately until I
turn it off.

Jenny Undercofler, the director of Face the
Music<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/arts/music/face-the-music-teenage-alt-classical-ensemble.html>,
a student ensemble at the Kaufman Center, had her group perform the “Poème
Symphonique” at Merkin Concert Hall in 2008. The Kaufman Center, near
Lincoln Center, has two music schools, so you would think that metronomes
would be plentiful. But the students use newfangled ones, and Ms.
Undercofler had to find a rental house that had the foresight to stockpile
them.

If I were a period-instrument maker looking for expansion ideas, I would
keep an eye on this. I’d buy up and recondition old-fashioned metronomes,
Farfisa organs, Buchla and Moog units, Atari computers and every generation
of Mac I could find. I’d warehouse spare parts and archive hardware
schematics and software code. I would probably stop short of rebuilding the
RCA Mark II Synthesizer, but who knows where the line should be drawn?

Someday specialists in 20th- and 21st-century music may decide that the
sampled sounds of antique technology just aren’t good enough. And someone
should be ready to supply the real thing.

    A version of this article appeared in print on June 10, 2012, on page AR
12 of the New York edition with the headline: Electronic Woe: The Short
Lives Of Instruments.
  --
carlos palombini
www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011
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