Arthur Kampela - Antropofagia for electric guitar and ensemble (2006)

[@orhantorunn]

I'd love to be one of the performers, perfect piece. congrats everyone

[@Artjul]

Amazing performance from an extraordinary group of talented, brilliant interpreters. I am grateful they were so dedicated to grasp my piece together with the precise conductor my friend, Zach Seely. My aim or Insight, when composing this piece was to turn the temporal/sequential unfolding of music on its head, in other words, turning time into space. This strategy (cognitively speaking) implies overloading perception with multiple strands of information at the same time, in such a way that the listener might have to sort out what it is listening at every moment, having almost " to look" at the event to grasp it... Therefore, people sitting next to each other listening the piece, can understand differing trajectories of materials even within the same time-frame. So, you can hear a trajectory of timbres connected in a unique way while somebody else would perceive a distinctive trajectory. It's a kind of opposite to what Pollock did with his action-paintings: in it he surfaced the gesture of painting (seen here as a time 'analogy') to import the dislocation of energy in a static medium, painting. My methodology, inverts this apprehension as I intended to create the contrary effect: listening to loads of information at once generates a perceptual gap between what you have just listened (and is still catching up with) and what you are listening at that very second (receiving as new information). This kind of entropic imbalance, corroborates to exchange the modus operandi of hearing with the one of seeing, so that you start "looking" at the events as they were partitions, chunks, of a spatial whole. BELOW the complete program notes of the piece: Technically (...) "Antropofagia" intends to attach similar ethos to the underlying fabric of compositional tools, questioning from the start, their usage, form, and function. First, with the electric guitar - that polymorphous instrument - as the piece's soloist, its capacity to be an extension and differ from, itself, while affirming its own identity, points already to the deconstructed concept that underlies the compositional act. I take as my first compositional insight the fact that the instruments are mere sonic objects, without preliminary history and work them from "scratch." The traditional aspect is but one side of their (sonic) possibilities. As a referent to the cultural characters of the "week of '22," the guitar can also be seen as my "Macunaíma" (devised as "a hero without character" by Mario de Andrade in his 'poly(a)morphous' romance of the epoch).
Antropofagia is built in one continuous movement. From the beginning, the musicians are employing their voices and pebbles as if "reaching" for their instrument, as if "inventing" their own way into what suppose to be a piece. The intention here is to bring the perceptual output to the idea of grain, white noise, as a pre-instrumental polarity. Slowly, this entropic beginning starts to present more organized and recognizable patterns developing higher compositional strategies. Compositionally, I started to think about a new phenomenology of hearing, one where form acquires an almost 'tactile' quality and creates a kind of quasi-holographic, a truly spatial listening experience. The fast superimposition of materials happening at once slows down our perception and compromise their sequential unfolding. This creates a perceptual gap, a 'short-circuit,' as the time lag opened up by absorbing continuous events while processing what it’s just heard “squeezes” the cognitive grasp to a point where the acoustic output acquires (almost) a 'visual boundary.' This perceptual distortion makes us loose momentarily the sense of temporality (linear musicality) to obtain the sense of spacial apprehension (as if seeing a Pollock painting - which enables us to move at will within the canvases), and thus, freeing us to trace our own distinct trajectories within the music and the amount of information being deployed at any given time.
This underlying 'cosmo(a)gony' of form and content reveals the subjacent battle that happens between motoric /ergonomic instrumental constraints and the surface of pitch and noises interactions. The Ensemble mirroring the distorted sonic 'emissions' of the electric guitar "spills or vomits" back its materials from a 'cauldron' of extended-techniques. My piece is but a residue, a trace of the inherited notion of thematic transparency. By the end, soloist and ensemble return to the initial gesture -- a white-noise 'carnival' that washes away when consumed by its own vortex.
©Arthur Kampela, Composer

[@machida5114]

so delicious ...