Descripción del programa

Memoryscape was written for the German ensemble musikFabrik and premiered at their WDR concert series in Köln on the 27th February 201063_{. A 32 minute work} scored for 15 instruments, soundtrack and text-film, based on the concept of early memory.

As opposed to the often disorientating speed at which text appears in Mnemonist S, Memoryscape, another work which deals with the idea of memory, utilises video in which the appearance of the text is rather slow and non-linear.

Around the time that I began working on the piece I had started collecting the early memories of close friends. I would ask them to recall their earliest memory and immediately make an audio recording of them recounting it. Early memories are one of the most personal windows onto a person's psyche, and it is a question most people respond to with a great deal of uncertainty. Not only because of the intimacy that this question exposes, or because the memories often describe a situation of significant emotional impact, but because these memories are elusive and unclear;

63 _{Link to Premiere performance recording by WDR: https://vimeo.com/226623184}

Figure 45 Screenshots from Memoryscape, showing four memories. The difference in the

brightness/contrast of some words shows various stages of the projection, as the words randomly fade in or out.

and it is sometimes impossible to ascertain if things indeed happened as one actually remembers them.

It is, at times, very difficult to pinpoint what is exactly the earliest memory we have. Often the date has to be inferred by some facts that we know about our life. Nevertheless, there are usually a handful of memories from the ages between 3 and 7, which remain accessible to us into adulthood. I was fascinated by the fragility of these memories, and also the reason why we have access to some memories and not others. It is not so much the fact that we do not have the capacity for memory at an early age, but that much of what we retain in our minds as children, is lost as we move into our teens. Psychologists call this 'childhood amnesia'. (Bauer 2008: 1). For memories to survive into adulthood, sensory information encoded by synapses between our brain cells must be regularly accessed for consolidation purposes. Thus it is no surprise, that most of our earliest memories do involve an event, which has left a significant emotional response, positive or negative.

The underlying backbone of Memoryscape is formed by 15 solos, one for each of the instruments of musikFabrik, which are directly based on 15 of these early memories. These solos are influenced by either the narrative content, the speech rhythms or speech melody, or the timbre of the voice recounting them. Thus, an imprint of the rememberer's voice ends up in the contour of the solo material. This ranges from the more direct melodic transcriptions of the voices of, for example, the various string solos, to the more abstract ones, such as the trombone, piano, or clarinet, where the speech has been filtered or reduced in some way. Below is an extract from one of the violin soli, which is more closely derived from the melodic contour of the voice:

My fist memory is when I was two years old almost three - I was lying on the top of my bunk bed - I was sick - I was usually sick because it was just after the Chernobyl disaster - and we were always sick then - and I was lying on my bed - and asking my mum every morning 'is it my birthday? Am I already three years old?' - because I wanted to grow up very fast. (R.V's memory from Memoryscape)

The idea behind the characterisation of the solo material was to create some personality or identity connected to the instrument, that would relate, in some metaphorical way, with the memory material. So for instance, the clarinet solo, which is based on a memory of a bee, takes on the character of a circling, buzzing pattern, that shifts to the contours of the speech.

I remember the sun is shining - it felt summery because I could hear my dad outside mowing the lawn - and then this bee started buzzing around my head - and I remember just listening to it and wondering what was it - and what was it going to do - a very distinct memory of this bee buzzing round my ears. (B.E's memory from

Memoryscape)

In another more traumatic memory, the piano solo, takes the contour of the voice quantized into 32nd notes, where the melodic contour expands into different registers, hardly leaving an audible trace of voice, which is only apparent in its structure. The solo tries to depict in the way the pianist has to constantly reach out to the extreme registers, mirroring the sense of panic depicted in the memory.

Figure 48 Piano solo from Memoryscape [at 9:25].

My first memory is when I almost drowned - I remember being on a lake on a campsite at my aunt's camping ground - and I was floating on an air mattress - the air mattress tipped over - and I was sinking towards the bottom of the lake -looking up and seeing the sunlight playing through the water - when all of a sudden I felt somebody grab my arm - and yank me out of the water - it turned out to be my dad- who saved me (P.S's memory from Memoryscape)

A different type of virtuosity is required for the tuba solo, where the score, based on a close transcription of speech, does not necessarily sound as written, because the Tuba player is required to play using a baritone sax mouthpiece, which entirely alters the logic of the valve system. The grotesque nature of the sound in this solo relates to the subject of the memory:

I think I would have been around three - it was a birthday party either mine or my sister's - I went to the living room - I might have just gone to have a pee - and I then watched TV and there was this weird programme on - never forget it - this is where this black weird character comes from - in these recurring dreams I had when I was a kid - there was a programme on TV - and it had Big Daddy the wrestler on it - and I remember watching Big Daddy and he was against this guy - who was totally black and skinny like Spiderman - and there was this horrible scene and it stuck with me for ages - where he's back stage - and he lifts this black mask of his face - and underneath is just what can only be described as crunchy peanut butter - and I had this recurrent nasty dream based on this character for about four years. (A.C's memory from Memoryscape)

The electronics in Memoryscape play an ever-present role in framing the ensemble, and also taking some of the sonic identity of the solo material and transforming it. Sound particles that emerge at some point in the work appear then in others, as if an imprint remains on the sonic fabric, which is sustained for the duration of the work. These temporally and spectrally transformed imprints of acoustic sound form the basis of the electroacoustic landscape. Memories of the ensemble heard at different points, are stretched into slowly evolving layers of sonic matter, creating an immersive field of sound, that is somehow meant to represent the polyphony of reminiscing voices, an omnipresent landscape, that steadily grows throughout the piece. Similar to Mnemonist S, there is a relation between live acoustic sound and soundtrack in an ever-changing dynamic. There is a three-fold figure and ground perspective created between solo instruments, ensemble and soundtracks, which share similar material, that is passed between the levels in different scales of magnification. The soundtrack stays mainly in the background, though in the opening and closing passages, and at various times throughout, it comes to the fore and blends with or alternatively swamps what is being heard live.

At the time I wrote this piece, I was experimenting with a compositional process that had some resonances with the way memory is shaped and transformed into sensory information. I would begin by trying to recall a sound pattern that would come to mind. I would then encode it as musical information, either in notation for instruments, or by compiling layers of electronic sound. Later I would constantly revisit this pattern by placing it in a temporal frame and repeating it, reassessing and updating this memory and transforming it, until it either disappeared, consolidated into something static, or evolved into another state entirely. This would happen in an intuitive rather than a formal process, where focus would rest on a particular detail, which might become magnified, or where a particular subjective way of seeing a pattern would be exaggerated. At times this transformation would be very minor, at others it would turn into something entirely different from where it began. Sometimes it might even split into contrapuntal branches, by exploring various possible variations of an idea simultaneously. This latter multi-layered approach,

suited my musical preferences at the time, for a type of polyphony, which encompassed radically different time scales, though originating in one musical idea. For example, a material developing very slowly in one direction, while another, could be moving rapidly and almost imperceptibly in an anterior direction. Another example could be the way of combining electronic and acoustic sounds, which at first merge, and then diverge. Below is an example of the piano, percussion and string parts near the beginning of the piece, with phrases slowly evolving over the first solo (viola), articulating the memory: 'coming down the stairs…' (see figure above)

Coming down the stairs crying - because I'd just been playing with this neighbour - we were very good friends - a boy my age - and I just told him that his father is shit - and he'd gone to his father immediately - and told him what I'd said - and I think - the father walked into the room in which we were playing and told me to go home

which I did of course (A.H's memory from Memoryscape).

Figure 51 Continued excerpt from the piano, percussion and string parts [2:16-3:18] of

Memoryscape.

There is an added theatrical element in Memoryscape, in that the musicians only enter the stage at the moment just before they play their solo. They take one of two positions at the front of the stage, and then proceed to take their proper place in the ensemble, which is placed in a diagonal formation. They remain there until almost the end of the piece, when gradually, one by one, they exit the stage. The piece, therefore, begins and ends with an empty stage, amid the backdrop of the sonic landscape. It was my intention that this action would reinforce the transience of the moments described in the memories. A collective remembering, which emerges for a short time and then collectively vanishes.

The text-film in Memoryscape, always appears as one slide (as shown in the figure at the top of the section). The words fade in gradually (the speed depending on the length of the solo), in a random order, and then fade away again, in a random order. Because the text is a transcription of something that was spoken spontaneously, it does not tend to fall into formal sentence structure. I chose therefore to highlight the sequence of phrases by putting them each into a single line, and changing the font size and spacing to accommodate the different sizes on each slide. This makes it easier to read, as the eye picks up single phrases as they appear on-screen, though

because of the random order of build-up, the whole memory is probably not read at first in a linear fashion, the mind, perhaps only later, piecing these parts together. The gradual materialisation of text, as read by the inner voice of the audience, could be said to exist in a space between ensemble and electronics; between the solo instruments, which represent the voice of the rememberer, and the soundscape which, in my mind, represents their embodied thoughts and feelings. Because the first person narratives in this piece are understood as being voiced by the soloists, sonified in instrumental form, the audience one can easily project the voice that is being read onto the instrument that is soloing, especially as in most of the cases they are at the front of the stage. The focus is relatively clear: one narrative, one instrument. What is less clear, and hopefully adds to the poetry of the piece, is what happens to the traces of these voices, and their reflection in the virtual space of the electronics, once the individual soloists enter the collective of the ensemble. This is the 'memoryscape' that is referred in the title of the piece. A hypothetical collective space, made up of traces of people's earliest memories - transitory, disordered and raw.

The three pieces cited above, dealing with narratives of dream and memory, highlight an aspect of inner voice discussed in Chapter 1, and a form of narration described in Chapter 2. These are essentially first-person narratives that toy with a sense of the 'focus' potential of the voice. This is because there is always some ambiguity in how the words on the text-film shift between the ensemble, the electronics and the audience's own inner reading. Each of the three works utilises different correlations between electronics and instrumental music, in which the relation is never static, resulting in an ever-shifting focus. The 'asymmetrical balance' between the media helps generate this dynamic shift in perspective.

From an analytical point of view, what becomes apparent in describing the relation of text to music in these works, is that there seems to be an important three-way correlation. Not necessarily between text, music and image, but between text, soundtrack and ensemble. The narrative voice that is summoned by the projected text, seems sometimes to align itself more to the electronics and at other times more to the ensemble. This has a huge effect on how the voice is eventually perceived by the audience. The voice moves and attaches itself to different aspects of the sonic environment, thus defining its character and becoming alternatively distant or immersive (depending on how much it connects with our own voices). Whether the text correlates to either sound medium on a metaphorical or a perceptual level, influences the 'what' and the 'how' that is being communicated.