David Rosenboom

This video document shows a hand writing on parchment paper some solitary musing about key challenges in the evolution of humans and and their response to the nature of illusions, possibly pertinent for our time. It was made for a concert, "Battle Hymn for Insurgent Arts," that I presented in collaboration with filmmaker Lewis Klahr in 2018 at REDCAT in Los Angeles. The soundtrack contains a solo I played while the video was being projected on stage. I used a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano, some subtle electronics, and my own interactive music transformation software. The video was shot by Nicola Voss.

I developed a unique software tool for improvisation in the early 1990s, called Hierarchical Form Generator (HFG), which I used in many compositions and performances during the following decades. This video documents the very first performance ever given with HFG. The location is The Western Front in Vancouver, Canada, where I participated in a summer workshop sponsored by Simon Fraser University. HFG was partially developed during this workshop. HFG is an early example of software that "listens" to unpredictable input from a performer and employs a partial model of perception to parse this material into chunks, which the performer may recall later and transform while developing an emerging musical structure, often via disciplined improvisation. The underlying software platform on which HFG was developed is HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language), created earlier through collaborations with Phil Burk and Larry Polansky. This performance is titled "Predictions, Confirmations and Disconfirmations," partly because HFG allows the performer to play with aspects of anticipation, surprise, and recall in a formal way while creating a spontaneous musical form. It is an example of what I call "Propositional Music," building a propositional model, perhaps inspired by something in the natural universe, and then proceeding to make music with that model as if it were a musical instrument. In this performance I played a MIDI Grand Piano connected to HFG, and HFG's output was played on a nearby Disklavier, both generously provided by Yamaha. I also gave an explanation of how HFG works to the audience, which is included in this video. (DR 2018)

Propositional Music was a three-day concert series presented by ISSUE Project Room in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, celebrating fifty years of pioneering work by composer, performer, conductor, author, and educator David Rosenboom. In this series, Rosenboom and many long-time collaborators presented a selection of his major works of experimental music spanning a half-century, from Continental Divide (1964) through Ringing Minds (2014).

As the series title suggests, his disparate artistic practice is connected by a relentless inquisitive nature, which has often placed Rosenboom outside the narratives of avant-garde composition, minimalism, and free-improvisation, though he has fundamentally contributed to and collaborated with these artistic communities. His work distinguishes itself by drawing from scientific, artistic, social, and cosmological thought, gleaning the potentials for music to apply and advance interdisciplinary organizing principles and research in revealing the collective knowledge that connects us to our universe.

Program: Day 1 of 3: May 22, 2015

Zones of Influence (1984-1985)
a propositional cosmology activated in music

Part I: The Winding of a Spring
a) The Stochastic Part
b) The Tripartite Structure

Part II: Closed Attracting Trajectories
a) Melody Set 1
b) Melody Set 2

Part III: Given the Senses the Real Pregeometry

Part IV: Epigenesis, Ontogenesis, Phylogenesis, Parthenogenesis

Part V: The Buckling of a Spring

Performers: William Winant, percussion; David Rosenboom, electronics, piano/Disklavier™, violin; Jinku Kim, live video

The words "champ vital" and "life field" are meant to stimulate our imagining a global morphogenic field in which all living phenomena are manifested as individual singularities. As is also the case with gravitational and electromagnetic fields, it is meaningless to ascribe specific qualities to individual entities in the champ vital. Rather these qualities acquire meaning only as descriptions of dynamically evolving relationships among the entities. From this, a particular way of viewing history, evolution, and dynamics underlying possible futures for life ensues.

Evolutionary processes are reflected in the means by which musical shapes, heard in melodies and other parameters, are transformed. Sometimes they converge toward seemingly inevitable finalities, sometimes they emerge from unpredictable beginnings into surprising new textures and rhythms. In Champ Vital (Life Field) some of these surprises come from resonances among the interacting musical materials, which can lead naturally to images of harmony. These arise, though, only in the qualities of the emerging field.

The outer scaffolding of Champ Vital (Life Field) consists of an introduction by the violin marked “Espressivo, ad libitum, solo intro, like an ‘alap’, cadenza,” a short Adagio making a harmonic wind, and a series of transformations of hidden, primary and secondary themes that provide genetic musical material, but are never heard alone. Original computer algorithms, now as common as pen and paper, that emphasize techniques for nonlinear transformation of melodic shapes, were part of the composer’s toolkit. The results were combined and orchestrated through exploratory listening.

Champ Vital (Life Field) was composed originally in 1987 for the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio from the San Francisco Bay Area, an ensemble then in residence at Mills College. Later, the work was vigorously reenergized by the California E.A.R. Unit in performances like this one and in a recording released on a 2012 CD: Life Field, Tzadik, TZ8091.

The performers are: Eric KM Clark, violin; Vicki Ray, piano; and Amy Knoles, percussion. Videography is by Richard Hines.

This video documents a concert that took place at REDCAT in Los Angeles on 21 April 2018: Music by David Rosenboom with films by Lewis Klahr and performances with a Virtuoso Ensemble of Collaborators. “Wake up, the world’s on fire!” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti). Aesthetico-political music for contemplation and empowerment. Post-genre sounds for vigilance against the commodification of ignorance and the barbarization of democracy. Evocative, virtuosic performances with instruments, electronics, and voices. Prescient, prophetic lines by socio-political seers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michel Foucault, Pythagoras via Ovid, Sun-tzu, Mark Twain, and others, interlacing music and words by Rosenboom and images by Klahr. “With my burnt hand, I write on the nature of fire.” (Gustave Flaubert) Aesthetico-political music for contemplation and empowerment. Post-genre sounds for vigilance against the commodification of ignorance and the barbarization of democracy. Evocative, virtuosic performances with instruments, electronics, and voices. Prescient, prophetic lines by socio-political seers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michel Foucault, Pythagoras via Ovid, Sun-tzu, Mark Twain, and others, interlacing music and words by Rosenboom and images by Klahr.

Musical Intervention 1979 (reversing totalitarian usurpation of peoples’ music) (electronics);
Hymn of Change (1998) (pensive slow gospel waltz with words of Pythagoras and musical transformations) (actor and brass quintet plus piano/Disklavier™/algorithmic instrument);
The Right Measure of Opposites (1998) (2017 algorithmic expansion from Bell Solaris—the Sun rings like a bell, emanating subtle portents of change—incorporating excerpts from War Prayer by Mark Twain) (actor and solo piano/Disklavier™/electronics);
Music for Analog Computers (1968) in soundtrack of Lewis Klahr’s film Virulent Capital;
Earth Encomium (2017) (delicate natural sounds in harmonic orbits for a stressed planet, with interlacing lines from Sun-tzu’s Art of War) (solo piano/electronics);
Battle Hymn of Insurgent Arts (2018) (new musical updating of Mark Twain’s Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)) (Singer and Virtuoso Ensemble of Collaborators);
Out of Truth (Don’t Motto) (2018) (performed live with new filmic rumination on contemporary life by Lewis Klahr) (piano/electronics, electric guitar, tabla);
Fanfare for (R)Evolution Arts (2017) (with selected lines from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art) (Speaker/vocalist and Virtuoso Ensemble of Collaborators).

This video documents a concert that took place at REDCAT in Los Angeles on 21 April 2018: Music by David Rosenboom with films by Lewis Klahr and performances with a Virtuoso Ensemble of Collaborators. “Wake up, the world’s on fire!” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti). Aesthetico-political music for contemplation and empowerment. Post-genre sounds for vigilance against the commodification of ignorance and the barbarization of democracy. Evocative, virtuosic performances with instruments, electronics, and voices. Prescient, prophetic lines by socio-political seers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michel Foucault, Pythagoras via Ovid, Sun-tzu, Mark Twain, and others, interlacing music and words by Rosenboom and images by Klahr. “With my burnt hand, I write on the nature of fire.” (Gustave Flaubert) Aesthetico-political music for contemplation and empowerment. Post-genre sounds for vigilance against the commodification of ignorance and the barbarization of democracy. Evocative, virtuosic performances with instruments, electronics, and voices. Prescient, prophetic lines by socio-political seers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michel Foucault, Pythagoras via Ovid, Sun-tzu, Mark Twain, and others, interlacing music and words by Rosenboom and images by Klahr.

Musical Intervention 1979 (reversing totalitarian usurpation of peoples’ music) (electronics);
Hymn of Change (1998) (pensive slow gospel waltz with words of Pythagoras and musical transformations) (actor and brass quintet plus piano/Disklavier™/algorithmic instrument);
The Right Measure of Opposites (1998) (2017 algorithmic expansion from Bell Solaris—the Sun rings like a bell, emanating subtle portents of change—incorporating excerpts from War Prayer by Mark Twain) (actor and solo piano/Disklavier™/electronics);
Music for Analog Computers (1968) in soundtrack of Lewis Klahr’s film Virulent Capital;
Earth Encomium (2017) (delicate natural sounds in harmonic orbits for a stressed planet, with interlacing lines from Sun-tzu’s Art of War) (solo piano/electronics);
Battle Hymn of Insurgent Arts (2018) (new musical updating of Mark Twain’s Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)) (Singer and Virtuoso Ensemble of Collaborators);
Out of Truth (Don’t Motto) (2018) (performed live with new filmic rumination on contemporary life by Lewis Klahr) (piano/electronics, electric guitar, tabla);
Fanfare for (R)Evolution Arts (2017) (with selected lines from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art) (Speaker/vocalist and Virtuoso Ensemble of Collaborators).

DAVID ROSENBOOM: PROPOSITIONAL MUSIC was a three-day concert series presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room, celebrating fifty years of pioneering work by composer, performer, conductor, author, and educator David Rosenboom. In this series, Rosenboom and many long-time collaborators presented a selection of his major works of experimental music spanning a half-century, from Continental Divide (1964) through Ringing Minds (2014).

As the series title suggests, his disparate artistic practice is connected by a relentless inquisitive nature, which has often placed Rosenboom outside the narratives of avant-garde composition, minimalism, and free-improvisation, though he has fundamentally contributed to and collaborated with these artistic communities. His work distinguishes itself by drawing from scientific, artistic, social, and cosmological thought, gleaning the potentials for music to apply and advance interdisciplinary organizing principles and research in revealing the collective knowledge that connects us to our universe.

Program: Day 2 of 3: May 23, 2015

Ringing Minds (2014)
listening as performance; composed in collaboration with Tim Mullen and Alexander Khalil

Choose Your Universe
a set of pieces including:
In the Beginning: Etude III (Keyboard & Two Oranges) (1980)
Tango Secretum (2006)
Music for Unstable Circuits (1968 and later versions)
Kicking Shadows (2007)

Bell Solaris (Twelve Movements for Piano)—Transformations of a Theme (1998)
Part II: In Contemplation of Transformation
Part VI: Argus’s Eyes See the Code of Small and Large

Systems of Judgment (1987)
Part 7: Meaning in Context

Performers: Tim Mullen, hyper-brain analysis; Alexander Khalil, lithoharp; Daniel Rosenboom, trumpet; David Rosenboom, electronics, violin, piano/Yamaha Disklavier™; Volunteer Brainwave Participants, hyper-brain; Matt Wachter and Glenn Snyder, Ringing Minds visualization

Music from: On Being Invisible II (Hypatia Speaks to Jefferson in a Dream) (1994-95)

Over many years of researching, performing, writing, and producing recordings of brainwave music, the components of such neuromusical feedback systems began to remind me of characters in a mythological drama, the spontaneous forces of creativity, the drive to converge upon ordered relationships in society, the counterbalancing tension of divergence from order as our consciousness loses its focus on orderings from the past, and the fundamental uncertainties regarding forces in nature that are only partially knowable. Eventually, I began to thinking about all this in theatrical or narrative terms, which raised the following question. If music combined with theater can be loosely termed opera, how then does one go about creating a self–organizing opera?

On Being Invisible II (Hypatia Speaks to Jefferson in a Dream) is an experiment with this question. The setting is a dream in which Thomas Jefferson hears the voice of the Greek woman, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Hypatia, traversing the centuries of time and the space of continents, mingling with his own internal voices as he is writing one of his later to be famous political documents. The components of ideological conflict that emerge from this scene remind me of the tension associated with performers in some of my earlier neuromusical works, who must always negotiate a thin dividing line separating being part of something larger than one's self and trying to willfully direct a naturally evolving process.

In this piece, shifts of attention among two active imaginative listening brainwave performers—representing Hypatia and Jefferson—influence three multi-media elements: 1) an emerging electronic music form, 2) an assemblage of sampled voices speaking texts representing Hypatia, and 3) a sequence of projected visual icons. A Narrator’s voice provides connecting textual threads.

In a live performance of the original version, visual icons were stored on laser discs and accessed dynamically under computer control, responding to event-related potentials (ERPs) detected in the brainwave performers EEGs. In this presentation, what we see is a scan through the image bank, which is intended to serve as a form of non-real-time documentation.