A Word About the Performance of This Work at an ASA Convention

The performance of this work at an ASA convention is “not what the composer intended.” Aside from issues of editing and channel reduction to meet the constraints imposed by the event organizers, the performance setting is entirely too closely related to “the concert hall” and too distant from “private listening for fun in a private space.”

The single most troubling technical issue is the one of audience size and listening position. As I noted in my other paper for this convention, the optimum listening area can seat only about nine listeners, seated so that the “time offset” and consequent rhythmic error between speakers is no greater than 10 ms. This means that, unless the attendance is quite poor, most of the listeners in the audience will not be able to hear a reasonably accurate rendition of the work.

The second troubling aspect (for me) is the ceremonial social time pressure inherent in such public performances, a pressure that constrains both time and attention. Concerts are highly ritualized and come with an elaborate overlay of expectations and demands for the attendees. In contrast, there is a luxurious and leisurely quality to “private listening for fun” that is almost impossible to obtain in a concert setting a quality of free spaciousness and timelessness that is particularly pleasurable and valuable in our overly time-stressed world.

Therefore, the presentation here must be understood to be an out-of-context example of music that will have a great deal more effect and make a lot more sense when heard properly and in its own context.

Summary and Concluding Remarks

Power Chords, Polyphonic Trains and Plain Old Phase is a minimalist loudspeaker music composition that utilizes extremely simple sonic materials in a monochromatic modal structure that depends heavily on reverberance, patterns of phase shift and the sonic evolution of macrostructures. It is intended for private listening in a high-quality listening environment.

It needs for the following conditions to be true in order to be fully experienced:

• the listeners are at leisure and present at their pleasure and convenience, and they have essentially unrestricted and uninterrupted time;
• the listening room is quiet and has a comparatively short decay time;
• the seating is extremely comfortable and within 11’ radius listening zone;
• the loudspeakers have very low distortion, high output capability, matched level and (extended) frequency response and are approximately equidistant from the listeners.

It is worth noting, in closing, something about the exhibition conditions and problems that the minimalist sculptors I have referred to encountered and struggled with. In Judd's case, he came to feel that the conventional museum or gallery context was incapable of fairly representing his work, due to its own constraints in terms of light, space and (I assume) noise and social turbulence. Judd's solution was to acquire a decommissioned Army base in west Texas and to convert the base warehouses into buildings of appropriate size and ambience to house his work.

Michael Heizer has taken over a remote desert valley in Nevada and is sculpting it in monumental scale (it is not yet open to the public), a scale so large that it can probably never be fully perceived by any but the most dedicated viewer, willing to spend days or weeks, on foot and by air.

Cronhammar's Elia (a large alien-appearing black steel monolith) is in a difficult and constrained placement on the edge of an art park and residential area near a small city (Herning) in rural Denmark. Given its singular monolithic quality and direct engagement with nature (it attracts lightning by design and also erupts flame volcanically, randomly, perhaps once a month on average), it seriously calls for a more spacious and remote placement.

From this, it seems clear to me that minimalism in general demands a very large frame, an outsize context, and through the presence of that frame reveals to us much of what minimalism has to offer, which is a revelation of scale, spectral and dynamic depth and complexity, and a non-egocentric vision of our relationship to the nearly infinite universe in which we exist.

Interestingly and fortuitously, I have found that a high-quality surround listening space with its home theatre array of loudspeakers coupled with the loudspeaker music genre may be, in comparison, an extremely compact, inexpensive, accessible and powerful vehicle for expressing these things. It certainly can be beautiful.

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