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In​/​Completion (incl. Booklet)

by Daniel Barbiero

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PadraigC
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PadraigC Coming from a visual art background I love experimental music and how sound and the visual interact. This release reminds me of our local art gallery, LCGA, the curator used to play similar music over the PA system. This 'pairing' has always stayed with me & now directly influences my own work! Favorite track: 4. Cristiano Bocci (IT): Paths.
Elysian Fields - KXCI 91.3 FM
Elysian Fields - KXCI 91.3 FM thumbnail
Elysian Fields - KXCI 91.3 FM I would be lying if I said I ever heard of this type of composition methodology. The liner notes beautifully explain what is going on in each piece and brings the idea that no matter where you look, there is music to be made. Daniel Barbiero really nailed this one - there isn't a bad piece in the litter. Give it a few listens and I'm sure you will agree. Favorite track: 7. Patrick Brennan (US): 5 Points 4 Directions.
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about

In/Completion

At their best, graphic compositions are both beautiful and provocative. Beautiful in that they can, when artfully done, stand as independent works of visual art. Provocative, because they ask the performer to act as a kind of co-composer—they provoke him or her to make musical choices that, in the absence of specific instructions encoded in standard notation, somehow will translate the markings on the page into concrete gestures producing real sound. Mutatis mutandis the same observation can be made of verbal scores, many of which approach poetry in their use of condensed, evocative language. Both types of scores provoke and inspire by creating an atmosphere in the way that an abstract painting or a poem might create an atmosphere: suggestively, through connotation rather than denotation.

Diverse as they are, all of the compositions in this collection have one thing in common. All of them, by leaving crucial musical and structural parameters undefined, are as much situations or events as they are works--situations to which the performer must respond with an ongoing series of decisions based on significantly discretionary, interpretive judgments. Consequently, the marks on the page (and in one case, the wall) may be thought of as enabling constraints that, in their refusal to fully prescribe a course of action, invite the engaged choices that will realize them as specific sounds and gestures.

In the works performed here, a significant aspect of the meaning inheres in the concrete procedural or technical choices through which the performer, in concert with the initial conditions set out by the score, completes the work. Before performance the work is in a state of incompletion; the performer acts in completion of the work. Hence the title of this collection.

I think of these performances as collaborations in which each of us—the composer, who creates a set of initial conditions or parameters expressed as more or less open variables, and I, who must interpret the implications of those conditions and realize them with concrete values—has an essential part to play, even if at a distance of space or, as in the case of Root Music, of time.

My thanks go to the composers represented here, some of whom composed works for me and others who encouraged me in my interpretations of previously composed work.

Daniel Barbiero, Silver Spring MD, September 2020

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About the Compositions

Root Music by Makoto Nomura was a temporary sculptural installation created when Nomura was a resident artist at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center for three months in 2012. The composer planted a vegetable garden in shallow soil in five lines; because the ground was so shallow, the roots of the plants spread out horizontally rather than reached down vertically and consequently resembled blotches of ink or stars exuding rays in irregular patterns. Nomura dried the roots and arranged them along two walls of the gallery; the work’s five undulating, diverging and converging lines suggested the five lines of a musical staff. Thus composed, the sculpture served as a score in three dimensions. The positions of the roots on the lines suggest pitches and harmonies; barlines, indications of duration and the clef signature are absent. I worked from a photograph of the installation and chose to interpret the staff as being in the tenor clef.
www.makotonomura.net

Traces (2017), a project of Sardinian pianist-composer Silvia Corda, is a series of graphic scores that shows how organizational constraints and the performer’s conditioned choices may fruitfully interact. The composition comprises eight individual pages of similar elements laid out in a variety of ways. These elements include discontinuous fragments of Morton Feldman’s 1952 Piano Piece; three-dimensional diagrams of geometric figures; blurred architectural images; and snippets of language. These elements and their distribution across the page, suggest various interpretive strategies the performer can take up in realizing them. For example, the scattered notes and measures from Piano Piece can function as readymade phrases—played as-is or transposed--or as pitch-class sets the performer can draw on for melodic material or more abstract series. Geometric forms may suggest horizontal or vertical organization of sounds. Determining what musical parameter will be affected by what visual element in the score may depend on an initial choice made by the performer, but once made, subsequent choices will be constrained by a consistency of correspondence between mark and sound.
www.silviacorda.com

Spotting Nowhere (2010), by Alexis Porfiriadis, is a multi-part verbal/graphic score originally composed for four string players. The graphic sections contain symbols calling for various extended string techniques as well as for notes of unspecified pitches, the order and combinations of which are to be chosen by the performers. The performers also choose values for other musical parameters as needed. For my solo reduction, I selected three pages of graphic parts, transcribed their symbols and arranged them into a sequence on ordinary staff paper.
alexisporfiriadis.blogspot.com

Paths, which was composed for me by my friend and frequent collaborator Cristiano Bocci in 2017, is a circuitous score that sets out several possible sequences of gestures—each one a path—from which the performer chooses three in order to create a sonic interpretation of a seaside walk in autumn. Paths is something like a more elegant and visually pleasing variation on a flow chart or multiple choice scenario; it invites the performer to evoke the sounds of wind, water and seabirds after negotiating a path that may lead through different registers and methods of sound production. For the opening gesture, which repeats at the beginning of each path, I composed a brief autumnal theme which I varied with each route.
cristianobocci.com

Bruce Friedman’s O.P.T.I.O.N.S. scores—OPTIONS stands for Optional Parameter to Improvise Organized Nascent Sound—were among the very first graphic scores I attempted to play. The scores are generated by a computer program that creates random combinations of modules drawn from a closed set of fragmentary musical notations. Like a novel sentence in spoken or written language every score is a unique configuration of elements from a fixed vocabulary. These elements can be played in any order with repetitions, durations, pitches and timbres chosen by the performer. I’ve always found OPTIONS scores to be conducive to eliciting highly intuitive creative responses, and they continue to be part of my working repertoire. OPTIONS No. 3 is a composite of a few generated scores I arranged on a single 11” x 17” sheet of paper; I performed the same score in two different versions for double bass prepared with alligator clips, binder clips and a cardboard tube. The preparations added a level of indeterminacy into the sound of the performance, since they subjected both pitch and timbre to unpredictable distortions and fluctuations.
www.brucefriedmanmusic.com

Wilhelm Matthies’s GC 1 (2-9-17) resembles a Japanese ink brush drawing in its simplicity and elegance. The score is divided into four groups or modules of rising and falling curved lines of varying thicknesses and lengths, suggesting relative pitch and phrasing within a framework of an overall rhythmic flow broken by pauses of greater and lesser lengths. The relative densities of the lines were interpreted to suggest dynamic levels and bow pressure. The score is to be played as a cycle of variations and calls for the performer to be conscious of structuring the performance with a sense of internal coherence.
darkpebble-bluewave.bandcamp.com

5 paths 4 directions was composed for me by alto saxophonist/composer patrick brennan in 2018, as part of an exchange of graphic scores we wrote for each other. A star-shaped path at the center offers choices among specified ways of producing sound from the instrument with fingers and bow; stations outside of the star provide pitch and phrasing material. The performer is free to choose paths and directions in which to proceed and is challenged by patrick’s dare: “How fast can all this be done?”
www.patrickbrennansound.com

Projection 1 is Morton Feldman’s famous graphic composition for solo cello, here arranged for double bass. Originally written for cellist Seymour Barab, the score is notated on graph paper and is laid out as boxes or cells on three levels representing the relative ranges of high, middle and low registers. The cells contain symbols indicating articulation and relative duration; pitches and dynamics are left to the performer to choose. Projection 1 was inspired by the stillness Feldman saw in the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko and Philip Guston; consequently, my interpretation attempts to project points of sound into an encompassing space of palpable silence.

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Daniel Barbiero

Daniel Barbiero (1958, New Haven CT) is a double bassist, sound artist and composer in the Washington DC area. He has been active in improvised and experimental music and dance in the Baltimore-Washington area as a performer, composer and ensemble leader since the early 2000s. His music is informed by a substantial conceptual orientation and reflects his background in modal and free improvisation as well as an interest in the chromatic vocabulary, open-form compositional structures, and extended performance techniques of mid-20th century Modernism. He has released work under his own name and with such artists as electronic composer/bassist Cristiano Bocci; percussionist/electronics artist Massimo Discepoli, If, Bwana (Al Margolis); Ictus Records percussionist Andrea Centazzo; Blue Note recording artist Greg Osby; and electronic composer/sound artist Steve Hilmy. His compositions have been performed by The Subtle Body Transmission Orchestra, the Greek ensemble 6daEXIt, the Lower Mid-Atlantic Improvisers’ Orchestra, and others. In addition to purely musical projects he has collaborated with filmmaker Chris H. Lynn on experimental film soundtracks both recorded and live and was Music Director for the Nancy Havlik Dance Performance Group. His writings on music and other arts appear in Avant Music News, Arteidolia, Percorsi Musicali, Perfect Sound Forever, and other online publications, and he served as an editor of the online arts journal Bourgeon.
danielbarbiero.wordpress.com

credits

released October 31, 2020

Double bass and prepared double bass by Daniel Barbiero
Recorded 2018 in Silver Spring, Maryland
Mixed and mastered by Dennis Kane, An Moku
Liner note by Will Robin
Photo by Daniel Barbiero

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EndTitles Zürich, Switzerland

EndTitles is a micro label from Zurich focused on exploring fusions of genres of contemporary music. Founded & curated by An Moku.

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