MUSICIAN AND COMPUTER: CONGENIAL MASTER & SLAVE 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Feb. 16-23, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 63
          STANFORD---Contemporary music has a way of breaking down boundaries between widely scattered constituencies. An intimate concert here brought together performers from three continents and four shores, al speaking a universal language. And, as so often happens, the importance of a good concert is proportional neither to the size audience nor the ticket price.
            It was free, in fact, when the experimental music group at Stanford Univ. known as CCRMA (say “karma”) presented bracing blends of live-cum electronic music via the veteran Parisian composer Jean-Claude Risset, 70, and the quite incredible Japanese violin virtuoso Mari Kimura, two figures of admirable vitality.
            Risset already achieved international attention some four decades ago as the creator of anh electro-musical paradox that goes on forever: You hear a sound ascending and ascending, without end. But it never lapses into inaudibility, because lower-frequency components are continually and surreptitiously added (without your noticing). So while ascending ad infinitum, this soundscape  is also quite static. Risset’s talents showed early, so early that when the electronic studios of IRCAM were launched in Paris in the mid-1970s by Pierre Boulez, Risset was immediately tapped to head the computer department. Lately, he has been similarly engaged in Marseille.  
            Among his more recent inventions was a set of “duets for one pianist,” in which  a ghost appears to depress a great many keys that Risset  himself is not playing, but doing it with both a hand-spread and a speed that are beyond belief. In “Three Etudes” (1991)  heard here in the Risset program Feb. 14, a view of the keyboard of the “two” pianists was enlarged on a giant screen, enabling hearing and seeing this close-harmony duo---Risset’s, plus the phantom hands nos. three and four.
            I would gladly listen to a whole evening of contemporary sounds with such a pairing that constantly puzzles, bewilders and fascinates the listener.
            It wasn’t grandpa’s piano that was harnessed, of course, but rather a Yamaha programmable Disclavier grand piano that had been instructed to respond to certain notes played, and to certain degrees of pressure applied, then to hit other programmed keys and sound other notes consonant with Risset’s play.
            This system has countless pluses, both visual and acoustical, not the least of them avoiding lengthy arguments over interpretation between hot-blooded duo-pianists.
            Visiting from the Juilliard School faculty was violinist and former Stanford scholar Mari Kimura from Japan, a diminutive figure with a stratospheric technique on a plugged-in violin. She stunned the crowd at the CCRMA concert space with her sheer velocity throughout the Risset-Kimura program, which included not only the Bach Prelude to the Partita No. 3, but also her deconstruction of that work with electronic tracks.
            Amidst a lot of craggy music there was also the ethereal Risset “Variants II” for solo violin and signal processing, with a lot of added sound components like consonant harp arpeggios. But the night’s dazzler was Kimura and the preprogrammed piano performing Conlon Nancarrow’s Toccata for Violin and Player Piano, where notes fly faster than the ear can see or the eye can hear.
            The event, as perceived by audience of 75 gaining free admission, was quite overwhelming, surely the most unusual Valentine’s concert I could imagine.
            CCRMA NOTES---CCRMA, a component of the Stanford Music Dept. often viewed as semi-autonomous, has its own historic hilltop building on campus called The Knoll, where students, composers and signal-processing scientists do research in computer music and acoustics, producing some extraordinary collaborations of live musicians (the masters) with electronics  (the slaves) featuring novel computer programming. Among other things!
            CCRMA at Stanford University in occasional concerts. For info: (650) 723-4971, or go online. 


        ©Paul Hertelendy 2009
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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