A Voyage of New Music

From the Musical Vault Dept.: Long before Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute installed it shiny new performance centr (EMPAC), experimental arts were humming in RPI’s halls. Neil Rolnick taught there from 1981 to 2013, where he started the nation’s first MFA program in Integrated Electronic Arts. Now based in New York City, he’s an Adjunct Faculty member at NYU’s Department of Music Technology in the Steinhardt School of Music and Performing Arts Professions.  And he remains busy as hell. Check out his website for more information. Here’s a piece I wrote about his activity in 1987.

                                                                                       

YOU EXPECTED THE PERFORMERS to clone new life or at least travel through time and space. The setup included computers, mixers, amplifiers, keyboards, speakers and lots and lots of twinkling lights And, yes, in a way they did clone new life and move through time and space.

Neil Rolnick. Photo by
Gisela Gamper

Neil Rolnick, director of electronic music at RPI, presented a concert in the Electronic Arts Performance Series Monday night at the RPI Chapel and Cultural Center in which three works that used electronic sampling techniques were featured.

Sampling is a process by which any sound or sequence is recorded (“sampled”) by a synthesizer that can then reproduce it identically or with variance in rhythm and pitch.

And so we began with Rolnick’s own “A Robert Johnson Sampler.” Contemporary classical composers too often lose their senses of humor and musical heritage as they get too academic. Rolnick, on the other hand, affirmed his link with American jazz by sampling the distinctive sound of this blues pioneer and weaving it into a weird texture that began by isolating the matter of the sound itself from the Johnson’s process of making music.

A meditative slow section examined the link between the blues chords and their antecedents in church music; for a finish, the rhythm of the chord-strokes themselves was the subject.

Richard Lowe Teitelbaum, known for his work with synthesizers since the ‘60s, presented “Golem I,” a look at the concept of creating an artificial being as it might be interpreted through the modern-day use of artificial intelligence.

Teitelbaum and Rolnick were the performers (and performance was a key concept in this concert, in which all of the pieces used recorded material in a spontaneous manner), working with a synthesis of sound and speech.

In a straightforward beginning, the sounds of spring peepers were the bed on which this man of clay was built, using chanted Hebrew letters. Teitelbaum worked from a microphone to utter phrases into the mixture, phrases amplified and overlaid into a dramatic chaos (the image of the soft-spoken composer at the console with his voice booming from the speakers was amusingly reminiscent of Frank Morgan murmuring his “Wizard of Oz” decrees behind the screen in the movie).

To break up a sound is to reinterpret its pieces: thus a term for the Creator (“Yahweh”) has at its heart assent or affirmation (“Ya”).

At the heart of this piece is a tension rhythmic in nature; harmony is used sparingly, to illustrate certain musical segments in the brew.

Teitelbaum describes the work as the first step in an eventual theater piece, which will be fascinating to see in its entirety.

“Child and the Moon-Tree,” by Julie Kabat, certainly was a theatrical work, if the term can be understood to encompass music, theater, dance and poetry without short-shrifting the integrity of the components.

It begins with solo, unseen, unaccompanied female voice (always an arresting beginning for anything) singing wordlessly. Kabat enters, masked and garbed in black and, with stylized movement inspired by Japanese Noh tradition, acts the part of a child who is herself acting out frustration and hostility ever more pronounced through successive parts of the piece.

The “Moon-Tree” is a puppet figure supported by stilts. Through the use of costume, mask and cellophane kite, the performer sketched a poignant picture of a child’s anguish and eventual rebirth, using the puppet-moon as a puppet-child.

The text alternated among nonsense syllables, Kabat’s own lyrics, and a poem by Shinkawa Kazue (“An Event Which Makes No News”), affectingly set by Kabat.

A theatrical work also requires more audience participation than something purely musical; this is a piece that will benefit from repeated exposure to streamline the dramatic pace.

Rolnick performed Kabat’s music, which also utilized sound sampling; costume and mask were by Rose Scavullo, the puppet was by Ruth Barenbaum, and Kabat did the choreography in conjunction with Karen DeMauro.

– Schenectady Gazette, 22 April 1987