Enero - Junio 2008. Vol. 3, No.1
Hiram Navarrete
En el otoño del 2005, comencé la maestría en música experimental y composición ofrecida por la Universidad Wesleyana de Middletown, Connecticut. Recientemente había terminado de escribir Negativo, un cuarteto de cuerdas que se convirtió en el tema principal de mi tesis. Obra en la que traté de conjugar dos de las ramas del arte me apasionan más: la música y la escultura.
La universidad me abrió la posibilidad de estudiar ambas disciplinas con la misma intensidad. Fue a través del entendimiento de ambos lenguajes que pude reconocer la importancia de esta composición sobre el desarrollo de mi lenguaje musical.
El propósito de este ensayo es documentar el proceso de composición que seguí al escribir Negativo, además de analizar algunas de la ideas pertenecientes a la música experimental y a la escultura que han influido sobre mi trabajo reciente.
In the fall of 2005, I began a Master of Arts degree in composition and experimental music at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. I had just completed Negativo, a composition for a string quartet, which became the main subject of my thesis. In this work, I was able to connect two of the subjects that I feel most passionate about: music and sculpture.
Wesleyan encouraged me to study those two subjects with equal importance, allowing me to frame Negativo in both languages. At this point, I recognized the importance this work had in the development of my musical language.
In this essay I attempt to document the composition process that I followed while writing Negativo and to outline the influence of sculpture and experimental music on my recent work.
The intimacy of the traditional Korean music that I experienced in Berlin, where I saw two performers play for no more than ten people in a small room, had a strong impact on how I wanted to imagine music. When composing Negativo, I set myself to do the following experiment. I sat down and listened to the sounds inside my room. Most of these sounds were different kinds of noises such as cracks and clicks. I liked to listen to the sparse rhythmic flow in which they occurred. My task was not to transcribe them exactly, but to instantly react to the sounds I heard as I was writing. I started by counting seconds. And every time I heard a sound, I wrote a note. I tried to keep up with this process for as long as I could, but if I got distracted, I waited for a couple of seconds and started the process again. The act of composing was more the act of listening. It came as no surprise to me when Anthony Braxton described my com-positions as an interior space, the space in which I listen.
The idea of sound as an object is fundamental to understand how I organize sound materials when writing music. According to Pierre Schaeffer’s definition, a sound object can be any sound longer than 100 milliseconds. To me, a sound object can be any kind of sound as long as most of its parameters remain fixed in the composition. During the composition of Negativo I constrained myself to a limited number of sound objects -In past pieces, I used to work within a range of twenty-five to thirty different sound objects-, including different types of pizzicati on muted strings, two harmonics (E and A), legno battuto, jeté, and silence. I decided to choose these sounds because they were similar to the sounds I heard while composing inside my room. I also associated them to the sounds of the changoo (a small drum played with a bamboo stick) that accompanies the kayagum in sanjo (Korean improvisational instrumental music). They are dry sounds––sounds with little or no resonance. The two harmonics quote Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light, a gesture that pays homage to the composer’s music.
When I think about rhythm I imagine it as the fingerprint of music. It was not until I set out to write Negativo, that I worried about developing a unique rhythm sense. As an under-graduate, my preoccupations were with issues regarding structure and, to a lesser degree, harmony. My orchestra piece Sueño Hipnótico (figure 1) begins with a series of chords performed every half second for three or four minutes––similar to channel surfing on TV. Rhythmically, I was attracted to these kinds of mechanical movements and their opposites––long sounds. This is the reason why I find the music of Feldman attractive and it is the same reason why I enjoy the sense of steadiness and flow of sanjo music. Though it’s hard for me to create a system out of these ideas, I try to work with both natural times and stillness to create a sense of surprise by projecting or isolating elements into space. In order to write these ideas down on paper, I often move between notated music, approximate notation, improvisation and a mix of all three. The rhythmic flow in Negativo comes from listening to very quiet space, my room, these sections of the piece I have notated. There are other sections in which I wrote patterns that repeat in a semi-controlled way. The difference between both sections is minimal, the purpose is to create zones of less and more energy or movement.
Form meant a lot to me when I was an undergrad, it was the medium in which I thought I could be most creative. Part of it was due to the influence of my then professor German Romero, but another part was due to the work I was doing with sound objects. I thought of form in terms of architecture where every part (object) of the whole has a structural function. While looking for alternatives to this method of thought I glimpsed in sculpture and painting an opportunity to experiment. The fundamental difference I saw in those mediums was that I could find form in an outline, or a shape, or even a gesture, rather than in a complete structure. As I visualize it, the form of Negativo is a block or a space that contains sound objects. ‘Space’ is the keyword for how I think of form in my music now.
While researching about sculpture, I read that the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi said, “The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence.” (1994, p, 23) His words struck me in such a way that I started to think that by listening to a space, I could depict a better representation of my aural perception, one of the reasons for which I became a composer. Negativo is the sound of a space (my room, my listening) put into a new space (con-cert hall). Max Neuhaus, who coined the term sound installation, describes them as “continuums in space.” For him, “The difference is that the sound is not the work. The sound is the material I make a work out of...the material I use to transform the space into a place.” 1990, p. 73) Experienced as sculptures, sound installations can change the way we perceive space––the sounds and objects of our life. Negativo is a composition and a sound installation because it posses a flexible form that allows it to work in both contexts, which I feel is the natural product of mixing music and sculpture. As a composer, I still feel more comfortable writing music than doing sound installations, but inevitably sculpture will influence my work. Negativo is a composition about listening in the context of a performance as much as is about sensing the space through that listening.
This composition and its principal components were the center of my graduate thesis, where this essay originates. Through my research, which included studies in sculpture and experimental music, I was able distinguish the implications of Negativo in my subsequent work. This essay serves both as a description of my composition process and as a statement of my creative work.
Referencias
NEUHAUS, Max. (1990). Elusive sources and ‘like’ spaces. Torino: Giorgio Persano.
NOGUCHI, Isamu. (1994). Eessays and conversations. edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona y Bruce Altshuler. New York: Abrams in association with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation.
HIRAM NAVARRETE. Estudió composición con Germán Romero en el Conservatorio de las Rosas y atendió brevemente el seminario de composición impartido por Walter Zimmermann en la Universität de Künste en la ciudad de Berlín, Alemania. En el 2005, se traslada Middletown, Connecticut para comenzar la Maestría en Música Experimental y Composición en la Wesleyan University donde tiene la oportunidad de trabajar con Alvin Lucier, Ron Kuivila y Anthony Braxton. Su interés por la escultura y su intersección con el sonido lo llevó a estudiar con los artistas Jeffrey Schiff (escultura) y John Slepian (escultura interactiva). Ha sido becario del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (2002) y del Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Michoacán (2001 y 2004).
Su música ha sido editada por las Ediciones Mexicanas de Música e interpretada por el Flux Quartet, BSC Ensemble, Wilfrido Terrazas, Jonathan Zorn, Joshua Rubin y Kyle Brenders en Alemania, los Estados Unidos y México. Además de su trabajo como compositor, formó parte de un ensamble, compositores en su mayoría, que se dedicó a la interpretación de obras pertenecientes a la música experimental incluyendo el estreno de Honored Guest(s) de Alvin Lucier y la realización de un homenaje a James Tenney. Actualmente radica en Saint Michaels, Maryland.
hiramnavarrete@gmail.com
Cómo citar el texto:
NAVARRETE, Hiram: “Negativo for String quartet” en Revista redes música: música y musicología desde Baja California; Julio - Diciembre de 2007,Vol. 2, No. 2 / Enero - Junio de 2008, Vol. 3, No. 1. [Documento electrónico disponible en: www.redesmusica.org/no3] consultado el ??/??/ 200?
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