Many Times. . . (review)

Joel Chadabe, one of the founding fathers of interactive electroacoustic music, has been active worldwide as composer, performer, and writer since the late 1960s. A student of Elliott Carter, Mr. Chadabe is a very busy man: Professor Emeritus at State University of New York, Albany; Director of the Electronic Music Studios at Bennington College and Manhattan College of Music; Adjunct Faculty member at New York University; and founder and President of Electronic Music Foundation (EMF).

Mr. Chadabe's compositions and articles are published by EMF Media, Deep Listening, Lovely Music, Opus One, Folkways, Computer Music Journal, Leonardo, Electronic Musician, and others. His book Electric Sound, a comprehensive historical survey of electronic music, is published by Prentice Hall. He has been involved in the development of several seminal musical-processing programs, including M, Max, and TouchSurface, a touch-sensitive computer input device. In 1977 he co-authored Play, the first software-based sequencer. In 1967 he and Robert Moog co-designed CEMS (coordinated electronic music studio), a programmable analog music system.

Mr. Chadabe's approach to musical composition is process- and performer-oriented:

When people ask me what I do as a composer, I explain that I do not compose pieces, I compose activities. A "piece," whatever its content, is a construction with a beginning and end that exists independent of its listeners and within its own boundaries of time. An "activity" unfolds because of the way people perform; and consequently, an activity happens in the time of living; and art comes closer to life.

("A Statement," www.chadabe.com/statement.html)

The album Many Times . . . is very much in keeping with this approach. It consists of a set of five solo interpretations of the composition Many Times . . . , the ellipsis being a place-holder for the name of the performer: Many Times Chris (for Chris Mann), Many Times Jan (for Jan Williams), Many Times Esther (for Esther Lamneck), and so on. Many Times . . . is thus a kind of compositional template to be filled in by the sounds and personalities of the performers: spoken voice, percussion, woodwind, slow and dreamy, upbeat, kaleidoscopic, etc.

The title Many Times . . . contains a double entendre. It refers both to the succession of many performers who will interpret the composition and to the central techno-musical issue the piece addresses: that of a live performer interacting with several processed-sound images of him- or herself. Mr. Chadabe uses computer-driven electronics to realize this solo-driven polyphony. The performer sits at a microphone, and the sounds generated are modified by a Kyma System (Symbolic Sound Corporation) in real time and are then distributed throughout the room through a matrix of loudspeakers.

Along with the notion of the individual being expanded electronically into an ensemble, two themes inspired Mr. Chadabe's composition of Many Times . . . . The first is the transformation of acoustica to electronica: playing an acoustic instrument, the performer effectively plays an electronic instrument. The second is the interactivity of this meta-electronic instrument: to use the composer's words, the original (acoustic) and processed (electronic) layers are "mutually influential."

The soloist in the first track, Many Times Benjamin, is percussionist and video artist, Benjamin Chadabe. Through virtuosic bowing of cymbals and gongs, he manages to achieve a fluid study in complex, noise-rich timbres. Lines are long, as expected with bowed metal, and there is no counterpoint, no pulse. The result is oceanic and outside the strictures of metronomic time. The audible boundary between acoustically generated (bowed) sounds and computer-processed versions of same is minimal; in fact, it's often difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. This is a hauntingly beautiful, if somewhat icy, piece (due to the bowed-metal timbres).

Many Times Chris is performed by Chris Mann of Machine for...