The Wilson Installations

The Wilson Installations Warren Burt . . . Do I have to tell you about the spiritual cannibalism of the culture, our culture, which has been bombarding us with ultrasensory overstimulation aiming to reprocess us into fiilltime consumption machines, stealing above all from us our time (not an inch of time without an imprint of message), and even our very sense of time (to be measured in lengths of no more than one message unit each) under the guise of entertainment, and even of 'art', commoditizing the eternal, hyping the primal? Our time is the sine qua non of our identity. We need to take extreme measures to reclaim it for ourselves and each other. — Benjamin Boretz, Interface, Part V. The wilson installations are a set of three very large-scale live solo electronic music performance installations that deal with extended tuning systems, the relation of tuning to timbre and spatiality of The Wilson Installations sound, concentration of attention for extended time periods, site specific installation and performance, live interaction with algorithmic generation of melody and harmonic choices, and the notion of the artist re-gaining control over the presentation and production of their own works. The works were written between 2000 and 2004, and the initial impetus for each one came from certain music theory articles by Ervin M. Wilson, musicologist and music scale theorist of Los Angeles. The works are The MOSsy Slopes of Mt. Meru: The Meru Expansion (2000-2004) for two laptop computers and two synthesizers; Pythagoras' Babylonian Bathtub (2003) for three laptop computers and three synthesizers; and Saturday in the Triakontahedron with Leonhard (2000-2004) for one laptop and one software synthesizer. Each work lasts a minimum of one hour, and preferably much longer, although shorter versions have been performed. All three pieces have been performed: The MOSsy Slopes in 2003 at the Rechabite Hall, Northcote, Melbourne; Pythagoras in 2003 at Cecil St Studio in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and at the 2003 Sonic Connections Festival at the University of Wollongong; and Saturday in a shortened form at the Sonic Connections Festival at the University of Wollongong in 2004. All three pieces also exist in recorded form, with the entire cycle available (from http://www.warrenburt.com) as a four CD set. I'm still waiting for the right circumstances to emerge where I can put on all three pieces in the ideal way I envisage, as a day long, or several days long, series of installation/performances, where over the course of a day, all three works would be performed. The large-scale nature of the works came about for a number of reasons. Firstly, each work originated in researches into certain tuning systems proposed by Ervin Wilson. Each of these systems: 1) the Meru Prastara, also known as Pascal's Triangle; 2) the Scale Tree of Charles Peirce; 3) and the Euler-Fokker Genus 3579 11 13; has the ability to generate whole families of interrelated scales and harmonies. In my developments of them, in fact, they were even more fertile than Wilson proposed, each one leading to between 60 and 167 interrelated scales. With this large body of resources, it seemed to me that a great length of time was necessary in order to explore the potentials of these scales. But beyond that, I also had clear political reasons for the extreme length of the pieces. As indicated in the quote from Benjamin Boretz that prefaces this text, I, too, felt that extreme measures were necessary to reclaim a sense of time and identity. I had 94 Perspectives of New Music done long pieces in the past—for example, Le Grand Ni, from 1978, was a seventy minute long composition that explored a specific just intonation scale played through specially made loudspeakers—metal signs with transducers bolted to them, hung throughout an exhibition space. Harmonically, these new pieces are different from my earlier long pieces. In Le Grand Ni, for example, I explored one scale for 70 minutes. In each of these new pieces, I have a huge harmonic vocabulary—hundreds of scales—to explore. Even working at the rate of harmonic change of traditional commercial music, it would, as stated earlier, still take hours to explore...