Uploaded February 2014 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Annette Vande Gorne - Tao: Métal (1983)
Composer: Annette Vande Gorne
Premiere: December 18, 1983, Café-théâtre Stalcker (Brussels, Belgium)
To Violette Beaujeant and André Van Belle
•• Abstraction: Perhaps it is here that we come closest to what is 'musical' in the sense of an abstract writing (fourth step of knowledge), a voluntaristic writing, pre-existing to sound. Also abstract is the écoute réduite [Schaefferian term, in French, for 'sound object perception'] of the allures [Schaefferian term, in French, for 'sound behaviour'] or vibrato, their amplitudes, their speeds.
•• Energies/vibrations: Percussions/decreasing free resonances (allures).
Percussions/resonances kept constant (itérations [Schaefferian term, in French, for 'constant retriggering']).
Percussions/penetration of resonance (vibrations). Smooth rubbing.
Free bounces. Controlled bounces. Swaying. Rolling.
•• Form: Starting out in silence, contemplation of a still line on an asserted tonic axis — pipe 3: Chang —, the form moves towards the diversified and the complex. The first part of Métal deals with the sustain of resonances; the second deals with their spectral content, before gradually returning to the original line and ending with the same material already encountered in Eau (but transposed a fifth above the pipe 4: Yu).
•• Anecdote: As with fire, metal inverts the perceived object depending on whether sight or listening filters the stimuli. A solid matter, it becomes, after impact, pure vibration.
•• Spatialization: 'Ambiophonic' spatialization: let the public settle in an atmosphere of meditation, of inner contemplation, by an almost still diffusion on a set of 12 or 16 loudspeakers placed in a circle. Tésseral blocks of gold and enamels radiate a light that bathes the darkness of Byzantine domes; similarly, the loudspeakers here are "radiators" — term taken from French composer François Bayle — of vibrations coming from all over and from nowhere.
Métal was produced at the Métamorphoses d'Orphée studio (Ohain, Belgium) and premiered at the Café-théâtre Stalcker in Brussels (Belgium) on December 18, 1983. Under the title Énergie / Matière, Feu and Métal were awarded the 1985 SABAM Special Prize of the Year of Music. Many thanks to Violette Beaujeant, instigator and performer of the zheng version of Métal, and to André Van Belle who so generously allowed me to explore his vast collection of extra-European percussions.
Annette Vande Gorne - Tao: Métal (1983)
Composer: Annette Vande Gorne
Premiere: December 18, 1983, Café-théâtre Stalcker (Brussels, Belgium)
To Violette Beaujeant and André Van Belle
•• Abstraction: Perhaps it is here that we come closest to what is 'musical' in the sense of an abstract writing (fourth step of knowledge), a voluntaristic writing, pre-existing to sound. Also abstract is the écoute réduite [Schaefferian term, in French, for 'sound object perception'] of the allures [Schaefferian term, in French, for 'sound behaviour'] or vibrato, their amplitudes, their speeds.
•• Energies/vibrations: Percussions/decreasing free resonances (allures).
Percussions/resonances kept constant (itérations [Schaefferian term, in French, for 'constant retriggering']).
Percussions/penetration of resonance (vibrations). Smooth rubbing.
Free bounces. Controlled bounces. Swaying. Rolling.
•• Form: Starting out in silence, contemplation of a still line on an asserted tonic axis — pipe 3: Chang —, the form moves towards the diversified and the complex. The first part of Métal deals with the sustain of resonances; the second deals with their spectral content, before gradually returning to the original line and ending with the same material already encountered in Eau (but transposed a fifth above the pipe 4: Yu).
•• Anecdote: As with fire, metal inverts the perceived object depending on whether sight or listening filters the stimuli. A solid matter, it becomes, after impact, pure vibration.
•• Spatialization: 'Ambiophonic' spatialization: let the public settle in an atmosphere of meditation, of inner contemplation, by an almost still diffusion on a set of 12 or 16 loudspeakers placed in a circle. Tésseral blocks of gold and enamels radiate a light that bathes the darkness of Byzantine domes; similarly, the loudspeakers here are "radiators" — term taken from French composer François Bayle — of vibrations coming from all over and from nowhere.
Métal was produced at the Métamorphoses d'Orphée studio (Ohain, Belgium) and premiered at the Café-théâtre Stalcker in Brussels (Belgium) on December 18, 1983. Under the title Énergie / Matière, Feu and Métal were awarded the 1985 SABAM Special Prize of the Year of Music. Many thanks to Violette Beaujeant, instigator and performer of the zheng version of Métal, and to André Van Belle who so generously allowed me to explore his vast collection of extra-European percussions.
![Ludger Brümmer - The Gates Of H [1993]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ea4USmvezl0/mqdefault.jpg "Ludger Brümmer - The Gates Of H [1993]
The Gates of H. is generated out of a 120 second sample containing a folk song sung by a female choir. Algorithmical structures are applied to the sound by changing pitch and time-position to portions of the source sample so that a granular-synthesis structure is generated. The idea of modifying a sound image in this way is to apply a new structure to an already existing image and place it like a mask above the sound, while this mask is in time and pitch instead of space and colour.
The result is a sound which exposes either the algorithmical structure while the sound image becomes unrecognisable or the sound image when the duration of the grains is long enough and the pitch is not extremly modified. I was especially interested into the transient states of the grain, where dependant of the lenght of the sounds timbre or voices become audible: The listener seem to hear events which create an association to a human voice but it does not really sound like a voice. This keeps the perceptive process of the listener toggling between the context and the content of the sound grains.
The tension between the source sample and the algorithms gives a lyrical or a dramatical effect to the resulting sound while the recognisable voice images seem to create surrealistic scenes with strong associative power. Since I passed the Rodin Sculpture la porte de l enfer the gates of hell nearly every day on my way to the studio in Stanford a connection between the bronce plastic and my piece was unconciously drawn.
The sound processing techniques are restricted to sampling-rate conversion and pointer operations. The piece was created exclusively digitaly on the NeXT-Net of the CCRMA using Bill Schottstaedts Common Lisp Music synthesis language, Rick Taubes Common Music score/composition language and Paul Lanskis RT mixing program. It won the Prix Ars Electronica 1994. The piece was made possible by a scholarship of the DAAD by the German Government.
Ludger Bruemmer lives in Essen, Germany and teaches currently at the electronic studio of the Folkwang Hochschule Essen and at the Studio of the Technical University of Berlin. He holds a masters in psychology/sociology and a masters in composition, which he studied with Nicolaus A. Huber and Dirk Reith in Essen. Mr Bruemmer worked with the Nederlands Danstheater in Den Haag and choreographer Susanne Linke and the Susanne Linke group for 2 internatiolly performed dance productions. He also worked with several solo dancers for solo productions. For his works he was awarded with the Busoni Award/Berlin, the Folkwang Award/Essen and the WDR broadcasting Award/Cologne, Prix Ars Electronica Austria and got a honorable mentioning at the Luigi Russolo Award/Italy and Stockholm Award 1995. His pieces are performed in South America, US, Europe, Asia and Mid East.
Video created with Sonic Visualizer and Vokoscreen on an OpenSUSE 12.3 Linux System.")
![Ricardo Mandolini - Microrreflexiones [edited] (1987)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fMpGfSCwDJY/mqdefault.jpg "Ricardo Mandolini - Microrreflexiones [edited] (1987)
Microrreflexiones, version radioophonique – Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) , Paris – SYTER – SYTER (1987)
the total length of this composition is 1804.
Video created with Audacity, vokoscreen and Sonic Visualizer on an Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Linux System.")
