Ensemble Signal: Reich, Romitelli

Program Notes

Fausto Romitelli
Professor Bad Trip, Lesson 1–3 (1998–2000)

My reading of the works of Henri Michaux (L’infini turbulent, Connaissances par les gouffres, and Misérable miracle) on his experience with drugs and hallucinogens, especially with mescaline, led to the composition of this cycle.

In the writings and drawings of Michaux I found a correlation between the ‘depraved perspective’ of mescaline and the sound world that has always fascinated me: the mechanism of appearance, of transformation and disappearance of visions and colors is very close to the forms of my auditory imagination. I therefore found it necessary to work on musical aspects related as closely as possible to the perception of the phenomena Michaux describes. The exploration of the perceptual mechanisms of hallucinatory states was a means to penetrate a world which could not be reduced to the claustrophobic formalism of savant contemporary music. It was a means of escaping far from the Arcadia of a sound which is cultivated, tidy, and dressed with good intentions, but lacking body, flesh, and blood. In the world of mescaline (. . .) manners and good taste are absent.

It is the hypnotic and ritual aspect that prevails in Professor Bad Trip, the taste for deformation and artificiality. There is obsessive repetition, continuous and insistent acceleration of materials and tempi which are bent and distorted to a point of saturation, white noise, and catastrophe. There is a constant driftage towards chaos, objects that are announced and immediately liquefied; unsustainable speed and density; processes that are aborted or interrupted, or on the contrary brutally foreseeable, as the trajectory of a missile; developments that take us nowhere, illusionary trajectories, illusionary movement; unnatural colors, non-physiological tempi; sometimes a sudden, paradoxical silence, filled with enigmatic images and, at large, a hallucinated calm, soundscapes which may be peaceful but are sinister and threatening at the same time. Calculation is certainly present, and it is rigorous, but it aims at organizing the excess of a hypertrophic style that unfolds in hysterical outbursts, unbalanced situations, exaggeratedly foreseeable, thus unforeseeable.

These are the disputable teachings of Professor Bad Trip who, evidently, loves psychedelic and progressive rock music and the avant-garde of the techno music scene.

I think popular music has changed our perception of sound and has established new forms of communication. Composers of ‘art music’, the ‘last defenders of the art’, have for long refused all approaches to ‘commercial’ music. Formalism and the preconceptions of the avant-garde concerning the purity of the musical material have neutralized, ‘castrated’ sound. Today, the necessity for musicians of my generation to reject unfounded abstraction and to look for new perceptual efficacy has convinced some of us to take advantage of the inventiveness, especially in the electroacoustic field, of popular music. The unlimited energy, the violent and visionary impact, and the stubborn quest for new sounds to open the ‘doors of perception’: these aspects of progressive rock music seem to match with the expressive concerns of certain contemporary composers.

I have tried to integrate a particular aspect of rock music’s sound exploration into my music: the complex interaction between electroacoustic treatment of sound and instrumental gesture. I am however not interested in the harmonic and melodic structure of rock, which has never been able to free itself from certain tonal or modal clichés.

Steve Reich
Radio Rewrite (2012)

Over the years composers have used pre-existing music (folk or classical) as material for new pieces
of their own. This was particularly notable from the beginning of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century when over forty settings of the Mass using the tune L’homme armé as its point of departure were written by composers Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, and Palestrina, among others. L’homme armé was a popular secular song, yet writing a Mass was similar in scope then to writing a symphony in the classical or romantic period. Much later in the nineteenth century, Brahms wrote Variations on a Theme of Haydn and in the twentieth century we find Stravinsky reworking the music of Pergolesi for his own Pulcinella. Radio Rewrite, along with Proverb (Perotin) and Finishing the Hat—Two Pianos (Sondheim), is my modest contribution to this genre. Now, in the early twenty-first century, we live in an age of remixes where musicians take audio samples of other music and remix them into audio of their own. Being a composer who works with musical notation I chose to reference two songs from the rock group Radiohead for an ensemble of musicians playing non-rock instruments. The two songs chosen were Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw Falling into Place. The story is as follows:

In September 2010 I was in Krakow for a festival of my music. One of the featured performers was Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead who had prepared all the backing tracks for my piece, Electric Counterpoint, and then played electric guitar live against those tracks in concert. It was a great performance, and we began talking. I found his background as a violist and his present active role as a composer extremely interesting when added to his major role in such an important and innovative rock group. Even Festival Director Filip Berkowitz suggested I listen to Radiohead. When I returned home, I made it a point to go online and listen to their music and the two songs mentioned above stuck in my head.

It was not my intention to make anything like ‘variations’ on these songs, but rather to draw on their harmonies and sometimes melodic fragments and work them into my own piece. This is what I have done. As to actually hearing the original songs, the truth is—sometimes you hear them and sometimes you don’t.

Radio Rewrite is in five movements played without pause. The first, third, and fifth are fast and based on ‘Jigsaw’ and the second and fourth are slow and based on ‘Everything’. It was completed in August 2012.