Elana Hedrych
Research paper on composer Joshua Fineberg Joshua Fineberg is an American composer born in 1969. He began his musical studies at 5 years old. In addition to composition, Joshua has experience on violin, piano, guitar, harpsichord, and with conducting. He completed his undergraduate studies at Peabody Conservatory studying with Morris Moshe Cotel, and completed his doctorate studies at Columbia University. He has won many prizes and scholarships and is a published author. Joshua’s book asks the question Classical Music, Why Bother? He has composed chamber music, orchestral music, theatre music, solo work with and without live electronics and a large variety of instrumental combinations. Joshua moved to Paris in 1991 and studied with Tristan Murail, the French spectral composer. The two connected very well and found parallels in their experience as young composers. A year after coming to Paris, he was selected by the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and Ensemble InterContemporain panel for the course in composition and musical technologies. He then worked for several years as a free-lance composer in Europe and became a part of IRCAM, working as a consultant researcher. IRCAM is a research institute started in the mid-1970s to provide tools to musicians working within the space between science and art. Computer assisted composition techniques that IRCAM was developing required them to bring in spectral composers to work with the innovative tools. Below is a quote from Joshua’s biography regarding his research and work with IRCAM:
“He actively collaborates with computer scientists and music psychologists to develop tools for computer assisted composition, acoustic analysis and sound modification and in music perception research.”
Elana Hedrych He taught at Columbia for a year, Harvard for seven years, and is now teaching at Boston University. He is a professor of composition and directs the electronic music studios at BU. He is the founding director of the Boston University Center for New Music (CNM). The BU Center for New Music encourages awareness and attention to new music. CNM hosts lectures, demonstrations and performances that are open to the public. The idea is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary involvement and involving a broader audience to learn and talk about new music. Joshua works to bring established composers to the university and have BU musicians play their music to be workshop’d and critiqued. In discussion with Joshua, he made it clear that he would like to make music a more public, collaborative field, rather than music being a private, even secretive occurrence. As a sophomore at Peabody Conservatory, Joshua had a personal revolution realizing he did not relate to the music he was studying in school, and did not feel comfortable assimilating to what he was being taught. At this time, he found Iannis Xenakis, Gyorgy Ligeti, and others. This realization helped him understand the music that he wanted to create – music that makes use of textures and masses, yet with a form. He is a creator a multi-faceted music. The sound worlds in his compositions can be described with many contradictions… active and hectic, gentle and contemplative. To understand Joshua’s music, one must understand what spectral music is. The compositional movement began in Paris in the early 1970s and is in part a reaction to the “artificiality” of serialism and 12 tone music, which Joshua feels can lose it’s roots in reality. By understanding the physical and psychophysical principles of sound, one can understand the possibilities and methods best adapted to modify sound over time. Spectral music draws on acoustics and computer technology to explore the fundamental nature of sound. The name, coming from “spectrum,” is a representation of sound in terms of the amount of vibration for each of the individual frequencies that make it up.
Elana Hedrych A self-described project driven composer, Joshua Fineberg has a greatly different process for each composition. He calls his style of composing a design process. Fineberg’s overall approach is reminiscent of Romanian-born French composer Iannis Xenakis. An architect and engineer as well as composer, he rejected the trend of serialism to build his own aesthetic founded in the concepts of abstract mathematics. He was interested in stochastic processes, game-theory and computer programming in music. Shochastic music, a method of composition primarily developed by Xenakis, arose from his critique of serialism. His point of view was that serialism substituted the natural causality of tonal music with the stricter abstract causality of serialism in order to create “non-tonal” music. Stochastic process is random and non-deterministic, with music that is ideally natural and logical to the ear. The next state of sound environment is not fully determined by the previous state, and Xenakis used probability theory to determine what should happen next in much his music. This often results in slowly evolving mass of sound, as in Xenakis’ Metastasis. Much of Fineberg’s music utilizes live electronics, which originally meant synth or taped play back or fixed media played for performance. Now, sounds can be generated or triggered in real time and are reactive to live music. Fineberg’s La Quintina is a string quartet (2 violins, viola and cello) with live electronics. When discussing this piece with him, Joshua told me he is interested in the concept that people interact with things presented as fiction differently than we interact with things presenting themselves as real, yet are clearly fictional or supernatural. According to Joshua, “You can’t forget that the thing is fake,” therefore you can engage with the thing instead of judging it. The piece is inspired by Sardinian vocal music from Castle Sardo. It’s religious 4 part male vocal music, where the singers sing with their arms around each other, heads close together, they sing loudly and modulate their voices, tuning themselves to produce the impression of a fifth ghost voice. Joshua
Elana Hedrych describes that the projection of the fifth ghost voice is an “epiphenom,” not a first degree model. He uses electronics to do what the singers of Castle Sardo do, modulating the shape of the overtone spectrum and using filtering to create the ghost voice. Another aspect that interests him about the singers of Castle Sardo is that they do a very intimate thing publicly in a church, and it is naturally voyeuristic. The four string players playing La Quintina sit in a circle facing each other, with led practice mutes so they can hear each other, and close microphones to pick up the sound. The mic’s pick up the 4 streams and project a transformed version of the live sound through a ring of 8 speakers around the audience, incorporating the “live-electronic-ghost-voice.” This piece is truly “concert music” because the listener cannot receive the composition as it is fully intended without being present during a live concert performance. La Quintina begins with the players purposefully pretending to tune, though they already tuned off stage. I’ve theorized that the reason Joshua has this as the first measure of the piece is to comment on the idea that “you can’t forget the thing is fake.” The piece features the cello taking on a thick, low repetitive 2 note motif that makes it’s way into the piece at bar 18. After three mentions of the motif, the live electronics enter. Later on in the piece, the motif develops to higher harmonies, I associated the appearance of the live electronics in this piece as similar to hearing strong overtones produced in music and those “ghost” tones becoming representative of that piece of music. I named Steve Reich’s Piano Phase, both for it’s intimacy of two people with close visual contact, and it’s prominent “imaginary melodies,” which play a major part of the piece for me. Joshua described how La Quintina, and other pieces manipulating live electronics, take this idea a step further in actually controlling what notes appear in reaction to the score and the music played. The piece uses microtones on the strings in order to achieve desired frequencies. At measure 275, the strings begin to take on a muted approach with no pitch, still
Elana Hedrych triggering the electronics, which take a sparkling, ethereal feature at the forefront. Joshua explains that the piece becomes less and less “real” as you listen, with more and more added unphysical elements (the electronics) added to the piece. As the listener leaves the “real” behind, they have a fictional experience. The familiar cello motif prompts the very end the piece, as the group follows up playing with their strings muted.
“For me, music is about bodies and breathing.” - Joshua Fineberg
Rene Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe No representation is the thing.
Joshua’s piece Empreintes, from 1995, is a 14 instrument ensemble with live electronics. Empreintes means “imprints, impressions, woodblock prints” according to Joshua. The electronics utilized were very high-tech at the time, but with fast-progressing technology they are now old fashioned. He wanted to avoid the confines of tape playback or fixed media playback, and posed a question… Musicians are already good at following one another – isn’t the point of the computer to do what people cannot do? Joshua wanted the richness of tape playback but wanted the program to listen to the players and breathe
Elana Hedrych with them, to actually play chamber music with them. In real time, the piece has set up algorithms to analyze and look at what the players were doing, and figure out what the loudest frequencies were at a given moment in the piece. This would tune the electronics, which were a premade template that was adjusted, or tuned, to how the musicians were playing. In real time, this was risky, so the piece had a pre-existing tape that it would play as back up in case the program did not understand something being played. Joshua estimated that 80% of the time, the piece was playing with real time data, and 20% of the time was playing pre-stored data. The sonic language of the piece is mysterious and slow moving, with unexpected short bouts of loud rhythmic chaos, sinking back into slow moving, quiet, metallic textures. Joshua Fineberg’s music is thought provoking and diligently crafted. I love music with a tangible theme, story, or concept lending itself to the composition, and I care about understanding the ideas behind the music. It’s also important to me to draw connections between pieces or composers to gain a greater understanding of them. Learning about Joshua has opened my view to a sound world and subgenre that I was not previously familiar with. I have a greater understanding of the positive and meaningful role technology can play in composing. I am also thrilled to have been able to connect with Joshua and directly learn about his experiences, musical lineage, and his music.
Elana Hedrych
http://joshuafineberg.com http://www.bu.edu/cfa/arts-lab/research-centers/boston-university-center-for-newmusic/ http://www.furious.com/perfect/xenakis.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/05/arts/iannis-xenakis-composer-who-built-musicon-mathematics-is-dead-at-78.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/Stochastic+Music/ http://www.britannica.com/biography/Iannis-Xenakis http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~dej/Ewha%20Materials/TIMBRE/GRADUATE%20STUD ENTS/Fineberg.Basic.Concepts.Spectralism.pdf