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MP3 R.D.Jansen - Symphony Dionysius
8 MP3 Songs
AVANT GARDE: Classical Avant-Garde, CLASSICAL: Symphony
Details:
Symphony Dionysius is projective music.
I have tried to put my fascination with randomness, contingency and chance into the sounds of Symphony Dionysius. What I produced is a cross between a strange attractor on the chaos of my life and a projective test using sounds instead of inkblots. Dionysius includes hard-to-predict melodies, random tone rows, musical koans, tonal superimpositions, tempi simultaneously slow and fast, contradictory keys. The themes are introverted, tentative, questioning, irregular and fragmented. Sounds are occasionally charming or grand but as often strident and incoherent, reflecting events which sometimes seem meaningful and sometimes not.
Randomness is essential to modern mathematics and physics: science evaluates valid causal effects by comparing them to “chance”. And (even though, by definition, there are no artistic patterns in randomness), it may be that chaos is just as essential to art and music. It is certainly a useful neural component of human perception and cognition--- our brains and nervous system actually use chaotic pulses to control, to insulate or reset neural activity.
Experiencing objects as engrossing or beautiful just because they exist in the moment could be called projective, psychedelic, enlightened, or even autistic, depending upon your orientation. Ask questions full of information and you can find answers in random noise. In fact, the more structure in the question, the less need be in the answer. It is never clear whether we are “extracting” patterns from random noise or creating them by means of projection, by merely reversing the structure of our question. We may be “seeing” mostly our own perceptual brain activity when we peer into random or ambiguous stimuli.
It is common knowledge that expectation can influence and shape our perceptions. There is Maslow’s famous saying that “when the only tool you have is a hammer, all the world becomes a nail”. We experience the world through our models, through our paradigms, through our beliefs and expectations. There is no other way, they are the lenses on the camera of consciousness.
Although a synthesizer keyboard resembles a piano the composing experience is completely different. To begin, the composer is often dealing with utterly new sounds and is sometimes playing improvised duets with himself or with several previous selves, creating the sounds and, in another sense, discovering them. Some sound “fonts” are simply recorded traditional orchestral instrument tones. Others are disembodied sounds created purely by mathematically inventing waveforms. Because the recording-engineer-player-composer is only a few minutes older and just influenced by the previous track, themes tend to transfer when recording a new track. When adjusted with varying degrees of lag tracks seem to mesh surprisingly well, considering that they were not played simultaneously or ordered in any conscious way. Mental influences may act like an implicit stanza, a river bed shaped such that successive melodic flows follow similar paths. Varying the lag time between tracks, sliding one across the other until they correlate, is an analytic trick used in waveform analysis to combine data to average several response waves when you don’t have the same evoked starting trigger point. I often use such lagged track autocorrelations in my music to create a composite “melody” out of several superimposed independent but similar lines. It is a kind of non-interactive collage polyphony that is, I believe, unique to this form of composition.”
This music is dedicated to my recently deceased brother, Dr. Dennis Jansen, 1940-2008. His namesake, Dionysius, was the ancient Greek god of wine, also known for liberating a person from one''s normal self by madness or ecstasy. The divine mission of Dionysus was to bring an end to care and worry using the aulos, an ancient woodwind instrument.
Robert D. Jansen, Ph.D. Austin, Texas, 2008
People who are interested in Philip Glass Steve Reich John Adams should consider this download.
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