Richard Barrett’s Barracks

Started by Mandryka, February 07, 2020, 09:38:34 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Mandryka

Just a little place to put anything to do with this interesting composer of experimental music.

I was inspired to start it because I just discovered a complete performance of I open and close on  soundcloud, mediocre sound but it's a masterpiece IMO, so best not to complain. There does seem to be about 10 minutes of it on a recording from Neos, but as far as I can see nothing else.

Richard Barrett's notes for it are also online, here

http://richardbarrettmusic.com/I%20open%20and%20close.htm

Music here

https://soundcloud.com/r-barrett/i-open
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka




The heart of this CD is a really sensuous, gorgeous, piece of music, called (for reasons to do with its construction - not very interesting to me) Negatives. It is, maybe surprisingly, designed to have a narrative content

Quotethe primary image for the cycle is that of voyages over landscapes – landscapes in which geological features predominate, though not to the exclusion of flora, fauna or civilization.


Delta emblematically starts ex nihilo, with a fragmentary, one-note opening that splits up into tributaries; the sitar and angklung are used not to evoke exotic deltaic regions, but to effect an immediate removal from 'normal' new music instrumentations. In colloid-E (the E-suffix denotes the ensemble version of a piece, which can also be performed as a solo) the solo 10-string guitar presents a sort of viscous, part-granular fluid, scanned at the highest possible magnification, as if through an acoustic microscope, while in archipelago the solo mandolin is a traveller drifting past seemingly randomly disposed ensemble 'islands'.

After the elegance of archipelago, basalt-E, whose solo trombone part is a drastic extension of the independence of mouth and slide introduced at the end of EARTH, adopts a deliberately rough-hewn, 'earthy' approach. Finally, entstellt is partly conceived as a traveller's return to the point of departure, only to find that it has become a ruin (and indeed the piece incorporates elements from a so-far incomplete piece called ruin). In each of entstellt's nine sections – separated by 15-second pauses – there is a gradual erasure of pitch content – a sort of excavation to uncover part of delta's framework; one by one, the instruments pick up unpitched percussion instruments, until only the piccolo and cello are left, defiant, but deserted and disorientated.


Anyway, it seems to me instantly accessible, conceived on a scale which fits into a living room, and full of interesting ideas.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

San Antone

#2
You might be interested in a short profile on Barrett I put on my blog.  I normally conduct an interview, but when I contacted Mr. Barrett for the interview, he was too busy, but did not want to refuse entirely.  He suggested that he'd spoken or written about the issues raised by my questions previously and allowed me to find suitable quotes on his website to serve as his answers.



Richard Barrett : creating meaningful alternatives to what we hear around us

Mandryka

Thanks for that, you're making an interesting website there.

Richard Barrett in his writings seems very modest to me, almost funny, I really enjoyed this comment he makes in the essay on Dark Matter


QuoteThis idea evolved out of my view of composition as a means to explore the 'structure of the imagination' and perhaps to discover something about its nature (in a way which might be inaccessible to scientific method) – in other words, could one perceive unsuspected truths hidden in the interstices of the complex web of ideas, associations and evolutions which are the substructure of such a work (and also a physical substructure of the mind which 'produced' them)? and could they be rendered communicable through the medium of sound/form? Unlikely, would be a reasonable answer. Should we be concerned with what is reasonable? Is it not possible that even such a project might at least give access to musical results which might not have been possible otherwise? Is this the real 'matter' at hand?


That combination of self mockery and big ideas makes him sound a very sympathetic person to me.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

#4
I've been listening to this

https://www.youtube.com/v/SzF8JlrzDRA

trying to make sense of the composer's own conception of what he's up to

Quote. . . my view of composition as a means to explore the 'structure of the imagination' and perhaps to discover something about its nature (in a way which might be inaccessible to scientific method) – in other words, could one perceive unsuspected truths hidden in the interstices of the complex web of ideas, associations and evolutions which are the substructure of such a work (and also a physical substructure of the mind which 'produced' them)? and could they be rendered communicable through the medium of sound/form?

By the way, in the notes to Khasma Barrett tells us that he was inspired by some ancient quasi-platonic ideas " the universe's eternal unchangingness" and "'upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow"

The idea seems to be about communication and elucidation.  We're being asked to envisage a composer with a rich imaginative life, so rich that some of it is obscure even to himself. Contemplation of various texts prompts him to put together sounds in a certain way, and create Khasma, for example. His hope is that listening to his creation will help him elucidate the nature of his own inner life, and will allow a listener to access that inner world.

This seems to be a sort of egocentric romanticism. The composer has a privileged inner life which is special enough to share  . . . Beethoven reborn. As soon as you say it you see how dubious it is. This is the modern world, we don't have heros any more, we don't believe in gurus, in the enlightened ones.

Oh no . . . . kill me now.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Richard Toop's Four Facets of "The New Complexity" This seems as good a place to put it as any

https://www.academia.edu/887987/Four_facets_of_the_New_Complexity
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

#7
Richard Barrett's Close up

https://livestream.com/uol/events/8038731/videos/171315780

Some information here

https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2018/march/richard-barrett

In the book he says it was inspired by a sort of polyphony he discovered in Stockhausen's Licht, which he calls a polyphony of time levels. But I don't understand what he's saying.



Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Quote from: Mandryka on August 30, 2020, 09:43:22 AM
Richard Barrett's Close up

https://livestream.com/uol/events/8038731/videos/171315780

Some information here

https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2018/march/richard-barrett

In the book he says it was inspired by a sort of polyphony he discovered in Stockhausen's Licht, which he calls a polyphony of time levels. But I don't understand what he's saying.

It's a fabulous bit of music this. I mean you have to be in the mood and be open to this sort of thing, but still, if you are it's full of good things. I'm not sure if it's a structured improvisation or whether it has been composed more conventionally.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

#10
Lecture at Verband für aktuelle Musik,  Hamburg

https://vimeo.com/34360413

In the book he comments that while c20 music was about taking things apart which had previously always gone together (like melody and timbre in Klangfarbenmelodie I guess), c21 music is about putting them together again in fresh ways.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

https://www.youtube.com/v/gADa-hFLCNA

This is Dying Words II, where a musician is asked to sing and play flute at the same time. It's the sort of polyphony  Ferneyhough explored in, for example Time and Motion Study III (Ferneyhough called it interference form, Barrett in his book just talks of heterophony.)
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

#12
Two 2020 releases, both seem to me to mark an interesting evolution in style, for the good!

.   
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

Mandryka

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

T. D.

Quote from: Mandryka on January 08, 2021, 10:06:02 AM


This is sensational.

This got reviewed on one of my favorite review sites (with several other fairly recent recordings): https://www.lafolia.com/ea-bucket-31-with-instruments/
I've never been much into Barrett, but listened on Bandcamp. I find the final (and longest) piece Disquiet excellent; much of the other material is less to my taste.

One question: The bandcamp page https://richardbarrett.bandcamp.com/album/strange-lines-and-distances specifies 5 electroacoustic compositions for binaural listening. My impression is that binaural recordings are meant to be listened to through headphones. The lafolia review oddly doesn't mention the binaural aspect. I don't own headphones and have no intent of acquiring any. Am I wasting my time or missing the point in major ways by listening sans headphones?

Mandryka

#16
I don't know and I've wondered that myself. Disquiet makes me think of the Partie D'extension in Jean Claude Eloy's Shânti.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

orchestrion

Quote from: T. D. on August 02, 2021, 05:55:53 PMOne question: The bandcamp page https://richardbarrett.bandcamp.com/album/strange-lines-and-distances specifies 5 electroacoustic compositions for binaural listening. My impression is that binaural recordings are meant to be listened to through headphones. The lafolia review oddly doesn't mention the binaural aspect. I don't own headphones and have no intent of acquiring any. Am I wasting my time or missing the point in major ways by listening sans headphones?
Most of the pieces on the album were originally written for 8-channel surround sound (apart from eye-blink which was composed for binaural playback from the start). If you listen to the binaural versions on headphones you get some impression of the sounds surrounding you. If you listen to them on speakers this spatial effect is lost. Conventional stereo versions of all the tracks (again with the exception of eye-blink) can be heard on the composer's Soundcloud page.