nocturne series: 4

Written for Michael Pisaro’s Experimental Music Workshop and the performance duo anteroom.

• Performed at the Experimental Music Workshop concert, the Wild Beast Concert Hall, May 12th, 2012.
• Performed at The Reading Room in Dallas, Texas by the performance duo anteroom on May 27th, 2012.

Anteroom performance:

Nocturne Series: 4 – Chaz Underrinner (2012) from anteroom on Vimeo.

program note
     nocturne series: 4 is a composition for two or more people involving 10 sound files of field recordings and sine tone arrays as well as sustained pitch instruments to create a shifting sonic environment. The sound files have been created as a meditation of the original field recording of the dry Blanco riverbed in Wimberley, Texas, which serves as the inspiration for the nocturne series as a whole.

This soundscape contains a subtle mixture of synthetic sounds with the original field recording, creating an abstracted portrait of a specific time/space. My goal is to vividly present the riverbed soundscape by enmeshing it into the atmosphere of the performance environment. This is an attempt to transcend artificial representation and capture the moment’s true reality in sound, much like Japanese landscape painters capture the essence of a place by using mostly negative space.

The live pitched instruments will both activate the performance space and blend into the field recording in order to stimulate the overall sonic assemblage. This will be achieved by the edges of human perception, the very quiet, in order to draw attention to ignored sounds in the environment. nocturne series: 4 is an exploration of “in-between-ness”: sounds in between music and environment, in between representation and reality, in between nothingness and the contingency of silence.