A rare Bay Area performance from the noted composer Arnold Dreyblatt, who is visiting from Berlin. A pre-concert lecture will immediately precede the performance.
Program:
Nodal Excitation, 1979
Spin Ensemble, 2011
Dreyblatt has been composing music for his own and other ensembles for over thirty years. Often characterized as the most rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground fan base for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his "Orchestra of Excited Strings".
Notes from Arnold Dreyblatt
"The performance of Nodal Excitation is a careful consideration of the location and influence of the acoustic Nodal Regions as identified on #12 and #11 unwound Music Wire stretched on a double bass (40.5" speaking length). The integrity of a fundamental vibration is maintained for both strings at all times; all movement of pitch occurs in the overtone structure. A shorter speaking length is never created through "stopping" or "fretting" techniques. Rather, harmonic, partial vibrations are calculated, coaxed, and are occasionally isolated at the nodes of the string." - from program notes, 1979
Spin Ensemble:
In Spin Ensemble (2011), Arnold Dreyblatt has created a palette of acoustic signals and patterns derived from a recording project involving a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanner (specifically the "Siemens Magnetom Symphony Maestro Class") in the Martin- Luther-Hospital in Berlin. Dreyblatt understands this device as a giant Tesla coil, in which the alignment and resonances of a powerful magnetic field are gradually altered by rotating radio frequencies. Under Dreyblatt’s direction, Siemens technicians operated the machine especially for these recordings, searching for software settings generating a desired sonic output rather than as an aparatus for scanning particular body areas, as this machine is normally used. The audio segments were analyzed, deconstructed and grouped as by pitch, rhythm and density. For the resulting composition, these files have been combined and fused, yet they have not been digitally treated or altered in any way. The recordings were originally utilized as the acoustic element of the audio-visual installation 'Turntable History” which was installed at the Singuhr Gallery in Berlin in 2009. Recordings of ”Turntable History" and the later composition “Spin Ensemble” were issued by Important Records as: CD Imprec322 and SAUNA14, respectively.