Strings and Machines

Hugh Livingston - Strings and Machines

Cellist Hugh Livingston performs contemporary music. He has given over four-hundred performances of new works, with many premieres. He has explored new areas of electroacoustic music, adaptation of Asian musics to the Western practice, and many frontiers of cello technique. Hugh received a DMA in twentieth-century cello performance practice from the University of California, San Diego.

headingsouth composed by Mark Danks

headingsouth is normally performed with three elements: graphics, sound processing, and the cellist. In this recording, the graphics are not present, forcing the composer to create a modified version of the audio to compensate for their absence. Even though the graphics are not visible in the recording, they still have a presence because they influence the audio processing. The performer is the only one without any free will. The visual and sonic elements in headingsouth are manipulated as two cooperative and independent entities. While the cellist is usually in nominal control of the computer, all of the components try to work together as equals. At times, the cello modifies the processing; at other times, the graphics are in control. Sometimes, everyone ignores everyone else. (Mark Danks)

Interactions III composed by Guy Garnett

Interactions III was written in 1995 and received its premiere at University of California, San Diego in May of 1996. It is the third in a series of works exploring different techniques and modes of interaction between a solo instrument and real-time electronics. In this case, the electronics consist of digital processing and mixing controlled by the performer using foot pedals to trigger various responses in a Max patch that in turn controls an outboard effects processor and a MIDI mixer. (Guy Garnett)

Stryx composed by Sean Griffin

Stryx, Mythological Associations: This work is the continuation of a piece I wrote several years ago called Lillith. Lillith was originally associated with Assyrian demonology. She is later referred to by Festus as Stryx - hence the name of the second incarnation of the piece. According to Talmudic legend, she was Adam's first wife and bore him thousands of demonic children. In several descriptions she haunted cities, castrating men and devouring newborn children. Ovid depicts her as "wont to utter a shrill cry in the fearsome night." In book IV of Virgil's Aeneid, Dido wanrs of her coming, "you shall hear the earth groan underfoot." She is frequently described as having the power to "turn the constellations off course and perverse fixed laws of nature." In several poetic fictions, she assumes the form of a man. She is often described as being barefoot with long, disheveled hair. Hearing "the earth groan underfoot" and the concept of "perverting fixed laws of nature" were attractive compositional goals to me. In an attempt to explore these rich sonic possibilities, I began working with the natural phenomenon of the overtone series.
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This is the examination of a "fractured" or "perverted" overtone series. Stryx also exploits Hugh's special talent for articulating complex and beautiful sounds with bow pressure and placement and intonation minutiae; the devil is, of course, in the details. (Sean Griffin)

Qwfqg (after Italo Calvino) composed by Mark Danks, Hugh Livingston and Michael Theodore

Qwfwq is a group improvisation between the performer on the stage and the computer. A sound processing program written in Max can capture and manipulate the live sound, based on the input from the operator. One of the fundamental transformations of the cello sound is granular synthesis, so that the original sound's pitch is divorced from the playback time. A number of other processes are also available, including reverb, delay lines, and frequency shifting. All of these effects can be used simultaneously and fed into one another. Another sound operator controls a tape playback, which consists of previous performances and layered sound processing of the cello sound. The entire system is a feedback loop, where the performer hears notes which he played before, yet have now been transformed; the computer operators record the new cello sounds and then transform them again; and the tape is a time-delay from a previous performance, while the current performance will be incorporated into the next concert. (Mark Danks, Hugh Livingston and Michael Theodore)

This composition takes its name from the primordial creature that Italo Calvino imagines as the first instance of observational thought in his novel Cosmiccomics. Qfwfq examines his world, just after the Big Bang, and considers what things will come to be, and what they will be called, when words are invented. An ascent to the moon, with ladders and attempted jumps which fall short, is reflected in the scalar nature of the musical material, as the electronics also serve to shift the sound upwards. (Hugh Livingston)

Tracklisting:

1. headingsouth {14:30}

2. Interactions III {11:10}

3. Stryx {12:24}

4. Qwfwq (after Italo Calvino) {10:31}

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