MP3 Patricio da Silva - Hyper-Counterpoint
Classical music meets technological singularity: the age of musical machines. Composed between 2000 and 2009, these works reveal incredibly detailed sonic images, where the tradition of instrumental counterpoint is extended to new dimensions.
11 MP3 Songs in this album (52:00) !
Related styles: ELECTRONIC: Electronica, CLASSICAL: Contemporary
Details:
Solar Flare (2001)
A large, dramatic curve driven by a rich but transparent texture, made of hundreds of glissandi (a glide between two different notes), covering the entire frequency range that can be represented on a typical CD. The original version of Solar Flare was composed for an eight-channel surround sound system.
Radio Communications (2003-09)
The idea for this cycle of pieces came when I noticed with compositional interest the “tunes” the stereo in my car would produce when driving through areas with poor reception. The resulting tunes would vary from a heavily filtered broadcast to pure noise patterns. The three movements of Radio Communications are essentially three fictional broadcasts, where the first movement suggests a folk-like tune heavily filtered, the second movement, the shortest of the set, brings an increased fragmentation of the radio signal translated into delicate granular counterpoint patterns, and the last movement, a rhythm based piece using colored noise as the only sound material.
Artificial Life (2007-09)
Artificial Life (2007-09), a two-part cycle of compositions for computer, describe how I have imagined the music of future machine societies. This cycle portrays the “before and after” of music traditions among intelligent machines. To underline such generation gap, a few symbols were emphasized: the first part, Artificial Life I-III, comes to life with sounds that will remind the listener of early computer sounds; the second part, Artificial Life IV: The New Generation unfolds a single movement featuring a larger ensemble of sound qualities, and employing, in contrast with the first part, a wide frequency range. Underlining the cultural gap between different eras, the conceptualization of time was also observed from contrasting angles. In the first part, different sections are outlined by sudden, abrupt changes in the rate of events: the flow of one time-line interjected and punctuated with the discourse from a different time-line. In the second part of the cycle, the concept of time has evolved and is now dynamically poly-metrical, run by multiple independent clocks, each with its own notion of time-unit (the tic of the clock). However, these clocks are somewhat unusual as the time-unit is in fact always progressively changing, either speeding up or slowing down to a target new tempo, thus allowing an object to be composed slowing down in time while another object, following a different clock, can actually be heard speeding up. This same time-flexibility is observed in multiple time-scales.
Sound gestures and textures have throughout this cycle an unusual plasticity. This plasticity reflects the counterpoint weaving of every gesture, where figurations reflect the combined behavior of thousands of short events choreographed in space, each with it’s unique spatial position, and unique loudness. These gestures are often heard crossing over different perceptual boundaries of sound in the time-continuum, where the rate of events and each event’s duration determines the experience of sound as rhythm, pitch, or color.
Granular Sketches (2001)
Granular Sketches echoes how I''ve imagined the sounds of a mechanical world, sonically describing the tunes of a large array of gear (i.e., round wheels with linkages or teeth, as found from watches to agrarian equipment).
Animated Sound (2000)
Copies of a short fragment of original material are set up in an array, very much like a wall of sonic tiles. Once this wall was set up, further patterns of transformations were imposed on the original array, similar to stop-motion technique in animation. As result, some of these tiles have been carved out from this conceptual tile-like structure, some enhanced with sudden hard-panning, or different types of filtering.
Rain Drops (2005, revised 2009)
The harmonization of a storm with multiple layers of counterpoint, all of which consist of independent variations of the same original material (which is actually never heard during the piece) now juxtaposed and heard as one single entity.
Biography
Patrício da Silva (1973) received formal musical training at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa where he studied piano with Jorge Moyano and composition with António Pinho Vargas (B.M. in piano, 1995). He then pursued his composition studies in the US, first as a recipient of the Betty Freeman Foundation Scholarship in Composition with Morton Subotnick, Stephen L. Mosko, and Mel Powell at the California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 1999), and later, with support from the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Portugal), he completed the Ph.D. program in composition at the University of California (2003), having studied composition with William Kraft, computer music with Curtis Roads, and algorithmic composition and music with Artificial Intelligence with David Cope. Further studies in the US include work with Michael Gandolfi, John Harbison, Sydney Hodkinson, Augusta Read-Thomas and Bernard Rands, and seminars with Helmut Lachenman and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany. His post-doctoral work as invited researcher at IRCAM in France was followed in the UK by a research grant for computer music by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology. Awards include the International Barto Prize, the Gould Family Foundation Composers Award, the Ojai Festival Music for Tomorrow, the Otto Eckstein Family Fellowship, the Susan and Ford Schumann Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. His music has been recently heard at Ruhr Festival, Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal, Bayer Erholungshaus, Tanglewood, Ojai Music Festival, Aspen, London Festival of American Music, Piano Spheres, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Zipper Hall, Cistermúsica, International Music Festival Póvoa do Varzim, Yamaha''s YASI, SCRIME, and Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey. His music has been played by notable soloists and ensembles including the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, California Ear-Unit, Lontano, Memphis Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Piano Quartet, New Century Players, New Fromm Players, Orquestra do Algarve, Shakespeare & Co., Stefan Asbury, Tzimon Barto, Gloria Cheng, Joana Carneiro, Cesário Costa, William Eddins, Lorenz Gamma, David Gutkin, Paul Haas, Brian Pezzone, José Rodilla, Mark Robson, Ming Tsu, Laurent Wagner, and Lei Weng. Following the International Barto Prize, American pianist Tzimon Barto has toured with da Silva''s piano music to enthusiastic audiences in Europe, including a special fund-raising concert for the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn in 2008 to acquire the manuscript of Beethoven''s Diabelli Variations.