Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Killing Time (Empty Time in Music)

There is so much unnecessary notes in music. Composers has followed this long tradition of using sound subjects and notes that doesn't have any other function than just killing time and making connections between the other notes. I prefer pure sounds instead of making connections with them (like in hierarchical systems of music tradition). The question about killing time, filling the empty time, is close with the concept of Horror Vaccui ("fear of empty space").

Why composers doesn't trust on empty time? It is because our western tradition has supported the idea that construction made by human hand is the first. There is no room for empty spaces, empty time, in our tradition.

[I wrote the above text in 28.10.2005 (and completed the text in 21.12.2005).]

It was in 2000 when I composed a short piece called There was nothing in a room. The piece was composed for the CD Zero (Audio Research Editions ARECD103, England). When the work was finished I realized that there were more silence than sounds in the piece. When I composed the work, I remember that I concentrated on measuring the time dramaturgy of silences, not the time of the sounds.

Another example of the use of time in my works is the pieces on my CD Momentum (2004). At first I searched these unnecessary moments from recorded music, which were very short sound clips, and created new compositions from that basis. In the authentic compositions nobody notices these quickly passing moments. The Four Notes, for example, is based only on four notes which was taken from a classical piece where were originally used thousands of notes. The four notes that I selected mean almost nothing in the original work. The notes were taken from an ascending scale run before the first bar of the piece. I took these four individual tones out from the 'meaningless context' and wanted to try if I could give some meaning for them.
 

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