BEAUBOURG TO BROOKLYN Blog 2/3

24 February 2012 — Accordion legend Bill Schimmel dropped by the Computer Music Center at Columbia University today to try out the electronics for the two pieces he'll be playing on March 8th. First we took a look at Irish composer Ann Cleare's piece I am not a clockmaker either. The title is a quote from Morton Feldman—an unusual muse for Ann's jagged, rhythmically driven, visceral, and loud sound palette. The four speakers that surround the audience hurl chopped-up snatches of pre-recorded accordion sounds at listeners from all directions. "The piece sets into motion a physical force which dissects the instrument into acute shards of material and reconstitutes it in a completely reconstructured manner," Ann writes, "as if one were to take the pieces of a broken egg and glue them back together in such a way that the original oval shape is hardly recognizable." Here's a brief clip form today's rehearsal:[youtube id=64bVF-Zd_9s]Ann and I worked simultaneously on our pieces for accordion and electronics back in the early spring of 2009, while studying together at IRCAM. Back to back however, they sound like polar opposites, negative impressions of one another. My piece Recession moves much more slowly, through multiple layers of synthesis and returned accordion samples that float and swirl around the audience. The title refers less to the contemporaneous economic collapse than to the word’s original meaning, ‘the act of receding or withdrawing.’ This idea of outward movement and continuous distancing is heard throughout, as melodic fragments are echoed in varying degrees of distorted transposition. This musical transformation is mirrored in the spatial movement of the files: the further they are distorted from the original statement, the further away they sound as they spiral away from the center of the hall—an effect accomplished with IRCAM's Spat system for real-time spatialization.[youtube id=eKgyUBqghpM]While writing these pieces in Paris, Ann and I kept ourselves amused with our unusual instrumental assignment by sharing accordion jokes, developing quite a repertoire. So I ended by asking Bill to share his favorite (which happens to be my own as well):[youtube id=5v0PXK5jn20]