Michael Pisaro realised by Greg Stuart
A wave and waves

This piece began as an idea about confounding the small and the large.

Small sounds.
Many different kinds of them.
Very soft.
On a large time scale.

This idea had existed in my mind for a long time. I thought that if I ever got the opportunity to write a large-scale piece for orchestra, this would be the way I would approach it. But it was my work with percussionist Greg Stuart on the many-layered recordings of ricefall and an unrhymed chord that started me thinking about it again.

I realized that the figure of the wave combined two things that had arisen in this work: the collective action of granular sounds, making shapes of great mathematical complexity, and the nature of an event. To my mind this seemed analogous to John Ashbery’s great poem: “A Wave.” Re-reading it as the breaking down of the event into its molecules without mitigating its collective force, was a revelation.

The first section of the piece is created by the gradual accumulation and subtraction of sounds. Each occurrence of a sound is conceived as a single atom and as a point in a continuum. The sounds are then placed within the statistically conceived parameters of a generalized wave shape. The highest density reached is approximately fifty simultaneous events (approximate because the starting and ending points of the sustained sounds are not to be precisely coordinated).

On a camping trip to Big Sur, I had noticed not only that the waves came in nearly regular intervals of fifteen to twenty seconds, but that there was a larger pattern in which every seventh wave would be a “big one.” (I have no idea if this happens anywhere else or whether it only happened in this location when I chanced to be there.) Nevertheless it was something I could have listened to for hours. The second section of the piece is a series of one hundred waves, cresting every twenty seconds. (The waves themselves last thirty seconds—there is a ten second overlap from one wave to the next.) The first six waves of each group are composed of collections of ten instruments and the seventh, of forty instruments.

The ensemble of one hundred instruments was formulated over the course of about a year. This work would have been inconceivable without Greg Stuart’s willingness to consider anything as a possible percussion instrument. The recording is a painstakingly assembled orchestra of one person.

—Michael Pisaro

 

The one hundred percussion instruments used in A wave and waves are what they are; they have characteristics, they have qualities. Each instrument’s sound creates its own geometry, which corresponds to a particular intensity registered by the ear. Some of the sounds are centered around a single pitch (or multiple pitches), others create bands of noise, and still others produce cloud-like collections of percussive attacks or oddly tuned chords.

In the first part of the piece the first thing we hear is a single tone (a bowed vibraphone bar) followed by a band of noise (two stones rubbing together). This change, from tone to noise, is something akin to a large jump on a timbral number line. As this section progresses and solos turn into duos, duos into trios, etc., the movements on this line become smaller and more refined. These changes also start to occur more rapidly as each sound is, on average, playing more often. At the crest of the wave the collective action of the sounds starts to produce something like, to slightly modify Ashbery’s phrase, the timbral equivalent of a real number, ceaselessly expanding off to the right of the decimal point.

In the second part of the piece the process of the first is compressed. What was heard once in detail, is now heard in miniature through one hundred evenly spaced repetitions. Each instrument, starting from silence, crescendos steadily for twenty seconds and then decrescendos for ten seconds back to silence. The period between successive crests is twenty seconds, which if you ask any surfer, is solid groundswell. Add to the situation a constantly changing collection of instruments for each repetition, an instrumental bathymetry of sorts, and a variety of different kinds of breaking waves is the result.

From a technical perspective, A wave and waves is a quasi-synthesis between an unrhymed chord and ricefall (done with friction and dropped seeds respectively). In addition to further experimentation with these two techniques, a new, third category of sounds arose in the score. Things like the tearing of paper or the slow turning of a maraca proved to be fantastic sounds, at times functioning like noised-based glues for larger collections of sounds. Taken as a whole, the various techniques used here comprise an ongoing interest of mine and Michael’s in excitation strategies that (to greater or lesser extents) diffuse the intentionality of the stroke in percussion playing.

—Greg Stuart

 

[...]Like many a great piece of music, that's in large part what these are about: coaxing the listener to really use his/her ears and mind, to integrate both the large and the small, to hear the patterns within patterns, to hear and see the world a bit differently when next one steps outside. - Two incredible pieces of music, of thought. "

—Brian Olewnick

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