Suite: down in this cistern
Nov 13, 2020, 12:10 PM
Traitors to guests created by Joseph Chaves.
Down in this cistern employs two sources: Rafael Gamo’s voice reading from the 33rd canto of Dante’s Inferno and a kind of ‘wind’ sound derived from an analogue noise generator. The principle of composition for this piece is, first, to produce the sound of a section of the Canto, and then to loop the voice, working towards ever smaller units of sound.
The improvisation takes place in two successive modes. First, during repeating loops of a section, the sampler drifts towards phrases and snippets of text that I wish to interrogate or emphasize. So the piece performs a very elementary kind of literary interpretation (quotation, selection, stress). While I seek to render this transition musical, I’m also simply ‘feeling in the dark’ to locate certain specific phrases within the sample. Second, however, I seek to tighten the loops beyond the unit of the phrase and even the word, so that the voice remains identifiable as such, but conveys less and less semantic information. Finally, as the loops eventually shrink towards “microsound,” the sound often becomes less identifiable as voice. This manipulation of the voice takes place against repeated washes of noise, which I vary slightly to accommodate the evolving patterns of the voice. As I make clear below, the noise broadly represents an identifiable sound—a source of “wind” or “vapors” that emanates from the bottom of the pit of hell—although its degree of realism varies quite widely.
The suite’s movement among listening modes accords with and comments on the particular ring of hell to which Dante assigns traitors to guests—those who abuse the responsibilities and privileges of the host, in order to do ill. These souls of these particular sinners, one explains to Dante, come to hell before their bodies appear dead on earth. (As a quoted passage explains, devils maintain the appearance of life by animating the body.) The musical improvisations all play with this problematic of real and fake, living and dead, here and not-here. They do so first of all in the very nature of the sounds: rather than a recording of wind, for example, the piece simulates wind through the manipulation of noise—sometimes with a fair bit of verisimilitude, sometimes not. Conversely, the human voice at first encourages us to follow its linguistic meaning, but often is manipulated in such ways as to appear as an inchoate voice, or not a voice at all.
Even my focusing in on particular phrases foregrounds the ways that the poetry itself echoes the themes of dislocation, the truth and falsity of sensation, and equivocal modes of being. In one passage, for example, Dante asks Virgil where the wind comes from; Virgil puts him off, suggesting that Dante wait until he not only hears the sound but can see its source with his “own eye.” Indeed, it will be revealed later that the ‘wind’ emanates from the flapping of the leathern wings of Satan. As can be seen from the passages I quote below, the piece addresses several different ways that the Canto takes up these themes.
Also, the circumstance of the piece’s performance and recording recapitulates the setting, theme, and form of Canto 33. The suite was recorded during a session of a few hours at The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank echoes the shape and therefore the resonant and reverberant qualities of Dante’s hell, which in this Canto Dante refers to as a “cisterna.” (The Tank is indeed an empty cistern.) While the sonic characteristics of the space foreground for the listener that the piece was made in a particular kind of setting, the piece also when through much after-the-fact editing. While editing was limited to cuts, pastes, fade-ins, and fade-outs, I was careful to leave in some of the artifacts of editing, so that the listener is pulled back and forth between absorption in the piece’s putative ‘setting’ and dislocation from that setting.
Each “section” of the suite employs a series of lines selected from Canto 33. Each time, the sample plays first all the way through the section of the Canto that it will use. During repeating loops of this section, the sampler drifts towards phrases and snippets of text that it seems to find interesting. (This is partly dramaturgy—the sampler is ‘directed’ very precisely by me—and partly what’s really happening. Sometimes, that is, the sampler seeks out a particular passage through mechanical, random procedures.)
Synthesizer & Sampler: Joseph Chaves
Voice: Rafael Gamo
Engineers: Michael Van Wagoner & Samantha Wade
Down in this cistern employs two sources: Rafael Gamo’s voice reading from the 33rd canto of Dante’s Inferno and a kind of ‘wind’ sound derived from an analogue noise generator. The principle of composition for this piece is, first, to produce the sound of a section of the Canto, and then to loop the voice, working towards ever smaller units of sound.
The improvisation takes place in two successive modes. First, during repeating loops of a section, the sampler drifts towards phrases and snippets of text that I wish to interrogate or emphasize. So the piece performs a very elementary kind of literary interpretation (quotation, selection, stress). While I seek to render this transition musical, I’m also simply ‘feeling in the dark’ to locate certain specific phrases within the sample. Second, however, I seek to tighten the loops beyond the unit of the phrase and even the word, so that the voice remains identifiable as such, but conveys less and less semantic information. Finally, as the loops eventually shrink towards “microsound,” the sound often becomes less identifiable as voice. This manipulation of the voice takes place against repeated washes of noise, which I vary slightly to accommodate the evolving patterns of the voice. As I make clear below, the noise broadly represents an identifiable sound—a source of “wind” or “vapors” that emanates from the bottom of the pit of hell—although its degree of realism varies quite widely.
The suite’s movement among listening modes accords with and comments on the particular ring of hell to which Dante assigns traitors to guests—those who abuse the responsibilities and privileges of the host, in order to do ill. These souls of these particular sinners, one explains to Dante, come to hell before their bodies appear dead on earth. (As a quoted passage explains, devils maintain the appearance of life by animating the body.) The musical improvisations all play with this problematic of real and fake, living and dead, here and not-here. They do so first of all in the very nature of the sounds: rather than a recording of wind, for example, the piece simulates wind through the manipulation of noise—sometimes with a fair bit of verisimilitude, sometimes not. Conversely, the human voice at first encourages us to follow its linguistic meaning, but often is manipulated in such ways as to appear as an inchoate voice, or not a voice at all.
Even my focusing in on particular phrases foregrounds the ways that the poetry itself echoes the themes of dislocation, the truth and falsity of sensation, and equivocal modes of being. In one passage, for example, Dante asks Virgil where the wind comes from; Virgil puts him off, suggesting that Dante wait until he not only hears the sound but can see its source with his “own eye.” Indeed, it will be revealed later that the ‘wind’ emanates from the flapping of the leathern wings of Satan. As can be seen from the passages I quote below, the piece addresses several different ways that the Canto takes up these themes.
Also, the circumstance of the piece’s performance and recording recapitulates the setting, theme, and form of Canto 33. The suite was recorded during a session of a few hours at The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank echoes the shape and therefore the resonant and reverberant qualities of Dante’s hell, which in this Canto Dante refers to as a “cisterna.” (The Tank is indeed an empty cistern.) While the sonic characteristics of the space foreground for the listener that the piece was made in a particular kind of setting, the piece also when through much after-the-fact editing. While editing was limited to cuts, pastes, fade-ins, and fade-outs, I was careful to leave in some of the artifacts of editing, so that the listener is pulled back and forth between absorption in the piece’s putative ‘setting’ and dislocation from that setting.
Each “section” of the suite employs a series of lines selected from Canto 33. Each time, the sample plays first all the way through the section of the Canto that it will use. During repeating loops of this section, the sampler drifts towards phrases and snippets of text that it seems to find interesting. (This is partly dramaturgy—the sampler is ‘directed’ very precisely by me—and partly what’s really happening. Sometimes, that is, the sampler seeks out a particular passage through mechanical, random procedures.)
Synthesizer & Sampler: Joseph Chaves
Voice: Rafael Gamo
Engineers: Michael Van Wagoner & Samantha Wade
Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno