The Terrain of Possibilities (review)

The Terrain of Possibilities brings together six computer music works from the mid to late 1980s by composer Bill Alves, a professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Mr. Alves has been simultaneously investigating the seemingly unrelated worlds of indigenous world musics and music with computers since that time, bringing them together in a series of works involving computer and instrumental resources as well as specially designed tuning systems. All of the pieces on this compilation were created using a Synclavier II computer music system. The disc offers an example of a mode of making music that served as a steppingstone to our present-day digital audio workstation-based composition environments. The Synclavier II offered a compositional world in a package, including an attractive hardware performance interface, sound and sequence editing features, and a host of sampling and synthesis options. Having worked on a similar system during the same time period, I felt moments of nostalgia in listening to many of these pieces, as well as being reminded of some of the compositional and stylistic tendencies that the Synclavier's facilities sometimes too easily accommodated.

Mr. Alves's works offered here range from pulse-driven essays and graceful ambient forays to the exploration of a variety of tuning systems and rhythmic procedures. The opening piece, Redundant I (1985), uses a recording of a soprano voice as its point of departure. The composer isolates individual phonemes of a sung text to provide the timbral element of the piece. Rhythmic animation and the permutation of pitch-order are generated by the technique of change-ringing. A noteworthy aspect of this pulse-driven essay is the gradual introduction of consonants from the voice recording resulting in a gradually revealed vocal origin for the melodic and harmonic materials of the work. An appropriate concluding passage fully reveals the solo voice and a punctuating laugh provides a conclusion.

Bending Space (1988) is one of several works on the disc that were written in collaboration with robot choreographer Margo Aposotolos. A non-tempered tuning system is used in this drone-based work with various harmonics of the spectra drifting in and out of focus. A fabric of rich sonic clouds are gently nudged forward from time to time by the interjection of contrasting sounds as well as changes of gestural speed and movement. A second dance collaboration, Time Auscultations (1987) refers to the "act of listening to internal organs," and this serves as the point of departure for Mr. Alves's compositional strategy: the recording of the internal motors and joints of the robot used in the dance work with subsequent modifications to these sounds. It is perhaps the most successful of these three dance works in terms of proportion, exhibiting a well-designed sense of structural evolution and sonic transformation. A third "robot dance," Spectral Motion (1988), draws its thrust and energy from the polyrhythms of West African drumming ensembles and employs a tuning system favored for many of the works on this disc. All three of these dance pieces undoubtedly served as fitting canvases for choreographic exploration, but fare less successfully as engaging solo audio works.

A range of sampled Indonesian and Korean percussion instruments in addition to human voices are shaped by a just tuning system and propelled via Mr. Alves's characteristic pulse-driven musical style in the title track, The Terrain of Possibilities (1987). The composer's fascination with (and later studies as a Fullbright Scholar in) Indonesia are foreshadowed in this piece. The broader range of sound sources expands both the sonic and expressive palette in this work, but the piece remains somewhat constrained by the repetitive structures and timid harmonic language.

The Question Mark's Black Ink (1986) is the most extensive and explorative work on the disc. It involves live performers on piano and percussion in synchronization with an electroacoustic...