Novars (1989) Was My Favorite Piece of The Night, Blending The Practice of Musique

Vivian Chuang
DXARTS 200 AB
October 30, 2019
DXARTS Concert Review
Out of all the DXARTS concerts I have attended, this one is my favorite out of three - for
me it was the most immersive, the pieces that were chosen went very well together. It felt like
three distinct soundscapes that I experienced that night, each with my eyes closed and imagining
locations, visuals and sensations of the sound. The first, Poéme électronique (1958) was first
exhibited at the 1958 Brussel World’s Fair, while the sound quality had a distinct difference from
the consumer standard of today the more low-fidelity recordings added to the overall tone of the
performance. The piece to me, consisted of the sounds of breaking, creaking and movement -
explorations of new timbres and sounds, of finding “music” beyond what we have typified as
designated sources of sound. It reminded me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, where the space
between humans as individuals and the lonely collectivism that industry implies clash - this can
be seen in his 1962 and 1964 films L’Eclisse and Red Desert respectively. It also reminded me of
Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Waking Up of a City, the layering of the chaotic timbres and tones made
more sense as it went on longer, presenting itself as simply a fact of life.
Novars (1989) was my favorite piece of the night, blending the practice of musique
concréte with computational technologies. The piece sounded much more contemporary
compared to Poéme électronique, the computer generated noise evoked a similar sensation but
felt different in a tactile way, Novars was much “smoother” in comparison, with less artifacts left
in the audio. In other words, it felt like a much more controlled experience compared to Poéme.
While the first reminded me of films tackling concepts and sensations of modernity, this piece
for some reason, felt a lot more like “music” we hear in a less experimental context. It honestly
made me think of contemporary experimental electronic music by Blank Banshee, which can be
described as danceable, abstracted ambience with influences from modern hip-hop. The pieces
are similar in that it invokes the part of my brain that immediately accepts what I am listening to
as “music” but constantly works to subvert that through disruptive creative decisions. While this
1
was my favorite piece of the night to listen to, it was not as interesting as the other two, simply
more listenable in a way.
The third piece, The Other (1992) by Richard Karpen was not my favorite experience of
the night, but it was definitely the most interesting. As a 27-minute experience, it goes pretty fast
when enjoyed meditatively - I felt like I was sleeping on a moving ship, letting the dissonant
rearrangement carry me as I closed my eyes and laid back into my chair. In the program, Karpen
talks a lot of dreams and hallucinations, and that is exactly the sensation I had gotten while
listening to it. I felt like I was listening to the idea, a facsimile of what used to be a song. Many
people I talked to right after the show thought of the work as reminiscent of a soundtrack of
sorts, which I completely agree with. It feels untethered, yet conceptually totally rooted in a very
well known and influential work of music, this adds to the sensation of strange familiarity and
offset for me, a lot of the abstraction that others I talked to found unpleasant. I was constantly
wondering which “direction” the piece was going to head in, fully knowing that it was a
meandering dreamscape - I accepted every turn, distortion and rearranged sound as it was, from
the imaginations of the artist. It reminded me of the work of Bill Viola, (particularly 1983’s
Anthem) who focuses on amongst other themes, the idea of consciousness and all that comes in a
state of “being”. Karpen’s piece reminded me of the concept of dualism through Viola, where the
distance between two opposites ares is explicitly explored through a metaphysical lens. For me,
in this work, Karpen was bridging the hallucinatory reality of his internal world as a musician
with the physical, aural reality of our “real world” through this piece - and each distortion is
meant to take the listener deeper into its fever dream, if they choose to accept the conceptual
approach to noise-making he has taken.
Again, this particular DXARTS concert was my favorite that I have been to during my time
in the program, I felt like the performances lined up extremely well conceptually especially with
the chronological order of them. I felt like in a way I was experiencing a tangent in musical
history in one session.

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Vivian Chuang

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