Space/Sound: Multichannel Electroacoustic (review)

Roger Reynolds's DVDWatershed IV, released by Mode Records in 1998, was the first contemporary music DVD to feature spatialized sound specifically designed for home 5.1 channel diffusion. Since that time, DVDs featuring 5.1 surround-sound have become an increasingly popular way for composers to release multi-channel music. Space/Sound is a striking 2008 release from Capstone Records that continues this practice. This DVD features music by six composers, Thomas DeLio, Thomas Licata, Agostino Di Scipio, Kristian Twombly, Kees Tazelaar, and Linda Dusman, whose works were created between 2004 and 2008 and represent a broad range of technical and aesthetic approaches. This diversity and the overall quality of each piece make the disc delightful to hear.

The DVD begins with songs Foxrock, near Dublin . . . (2005) and . . . zwischen den Worten (2006), two works by DeLio whose music is surely familiar to many readers. These pieces, like several of this composer's recent compositions, are electroacoustic settings of poetry, specifically poems by P. Inman and Paul Celan, respectively. The sounds of each composition are derived from readings of the poems, and notably, in the case of Foxrock, near Dublin . . . , that reading is by the poet. In the DVD liner notes, the composer articulates his larger approach to text-setting by quoting German musicologist Jürg Stenzl, who writes, "setting a poem means translating it into a completely different medium. In doing so, the text can be broken up, can disappear, or can even be impossible to hear." Indeed, these works are far from linear presentations of each poem. In the setting of Inman's poem, one hears fragments of the poem intertwined with continuously fluctuating, inharmonic textures that seem to reflect the sonic structure of the text while thoroughly blurring the words themselves. At times when Inman's voice is clearly audible, DeLio superimposes multiple readings of the same line of text, thus presenting multiple perspectives on those lines while slightly obscuring the words themselves. Many of these same techniques are observable in . . . zwischen den Worten. In this work the composer incorporates whispered readings of the poem, which sonically reflect the noisy nature of the initial two words of the first Celan poem: schwimmhäute and zwischen. These whispered lines seem to be placed in opposition to semi-pitched, almost bell-like, inharmonic gestures at the work's outset. As the piece progresses, clearly spoken lines of text emerge that eventually seem to merge with the inharmonic sounds, integrating the initially oppositional elements. Notably, both works incorporate periods of silence that allow the pieces to breathe, though not to the same degree found in much of DeLio's earlier work.

Thomas Licata's brief, charming work thinning, and away (2008) comprises a succession of short, noisy sounds that are relatively uniform. Most of these sounds emphasize upper frequencies, though a few occupy lower frequency regions and, because they occur less often, have a punctuating effect. The initial texture is quite active and relatively dense, though this characteristic changes over time. Regarding this dynamic, the composer writes that the work

is comprised of a series of sparsely-layered sound patterns and textures that, over time, are not only separated with increasing amounts of space but, significantly, are treated with diminishing levels of 'presence' in their sonic makeup. Through the juxtaposition of the pairings of connection/presence with that of separation/deterioration, these patterns (but not all) are transformed in a variety of contexts as they progress through the different stages of these pairings over the course of the work.

Most of the sounds are distributed throughout the front and surround speakers, enveloping the listener, though the lower, punctuating sounds are generally concentrated in the front, drawing one's attention forward.

Agostino Di Scipio's untitled work is "the outcome of an improvisation that took place one night in October 2004...