Uploaded May 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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richardbarrettmusic.com
http://www.elision.org.au/
cerenem.org

Richard Barrett: Entoptic (2017-18)
for percussion and electronics [world premiere]

Performed 29 April 2019, St Pauls Hall, University of Huddersfield, UK

Peter Neville | percussion
ELISION Ensemble
Film by Angela Guyton

// Program Note

entoptic for solo percussion with live electronics is the present result of an extended collaboration with Peter Neville. While performing in a succession of improvisational pieces I have written for ELISION and other ensembles (codex I, III, IV, IX, XI, XIV, XVIII, XIX, XX), he has been gradually evolving a percussion setup which combines maximum timbral flexibility with portability, utilising a wide selection of small instruments and other objects. This solo was conceived around Peter’s setup by “systematising” it as a 4x4 grid of principal instruments placed on a table, with an additional 3x3 grid of smaller objects in the gaps between them. The setup is then amplified by microphones at its corners, which allow a “spatialisation” of the grid onto the size and shape of the performing space itself, and for instruments to be picked up and actuated next to a microphone for a “close-up” sound or moved between them for “panning”. Additionally, the microphones are used to pick up percussion sounds for the live electronic part, programmed by Patrick Delges of the Centre Henri Pousseur in Liège. In the first of the three phases of the piece, no electronic sounds appear. In the second, the computer selects certain partials from the (not all clearly pitched) percussion sounds and extends them in time, triggered by a sustain pedal played by the percussionist. In the third, this processing continues but the percussive sounds now also actuate prerecorded electronic sounds and textures which expand the timbral and articulative range of the “instrument” even further.

The title refers to visual phenomena which are generated within the nervous system rather than sensed by the eyes, for example the patterns known as “form constants” which recur in descriptions of altered states of consciousness throughout many shamanistic cultures as well as experiences with hallucinogenic substances. These patterns of dots, zigzags, spirals and so on could be said to form a “map” of the visual cortex of the brain – what is being seen is in a real sense the “workings of the mind”. This music uses such “form constants” as patterns of movement across the two-dimensional array of struck objects, and in the course of its three parts transforms these through electronic processing into new sound-forms, analogously to the way that the transition from waking consciousness into sleep or trance might first involve abstract patterns which the mind gradually “interprets” as the contents of dreams or (in shamanic practices) of the spirit world. In the early 1990s, Daryl Buckley remarked to me that in working with the “grain of the instrument”, as I’d been doing in the context of what I subsequently came to call “radically idiomatic instrumentalism”, I was also working with the “psyche of the musician”, a remark that has resonated more deeply with me as the years have gone by. entoptic forms part of a cycle of interlocking works under the collective title PSYCHE, which attempt, from various angles, to confront that interface between the inner and physical worlds (which may or may not ultimately be two sides of the same thing) that is at the heart of all musical activity. Here I’ve also been strongly influenced by David Lewis-Williams’s book The Mind in the Cave, an exploration of the origins of art and creativity in altered mental states with particular reference to Palaeolithic cave paintings. For me musical activity (composition – performance – listening) is as meaningful a way of trying to understand the world as any other: what it might be thought to lack in specificity relative to science and philosophy might in the end, in some contexts, be an advantage and a way of liberating thought from language and its dualisms.

entoptic was commissioned by ELISION and Peter Neville, and completed in October 2018.