The Squid's Ear Magazine


Winter, Michael / Liminar: Single Track (Another Timbre)

Working with Liminar, one of the premier new music ensembles in Mexico, German/US composer Michael Winter wrote this dynamic and extended work pursuing a method of enumerating all ways of articulating a 6-note chord with 7 instruments bound by certain constraints, using the computer science concept of "Gray Code" switches to create shifts within the piece's progressions.
 

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Personnel:



Michael Winter-composer

Alexander Bruck-viola

Omar Lopez-baritone saxophone

Wilfrido Terrazas-bass flute

Jorge Amador-cello

Monica Lopez Lau-paetzold recorder

Antonio Rosales-bass clarinet

Jonnathan Mendez-contrabass


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Label: Another Timbre
Catalog ID: at170
Squidco Product Code: 30024

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2021
Country: UK
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded at Naff, CDMX, by Alejandro Vergara and Andrea Martinez.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Michael Winter's extraordinary composition from 2015, a seven-part canon which starts off fast and gradually slows down over its 45 minute duration. Performed by Liminar, Mexico's leading ensemble for contemporary music. The cover image cover and corresponding caption are reprinted from the book Matters Computational by Jorg Arndt."-Another Timbre



Another Timbre Interview with Michael Winter

single track is a really arresting piece that appealed to me immediately. At one level it's obvious what's happening - a 7-part canon that starts out fast and gradually slows down. But what else can you tell me about it?

In a way, the gradual slow down was an unintended consequence. My original idea was to write a piece that enumerated all ways of articulating a 6-note chord with 7 instruments bound by two morphological constraints: 1) that there was minimal timbral change over time (a permutation where only two elements swapped from moment to moment) and 2) that the voices were cyclic shifts of each other (a fancy way of saying a canon).

At first, I attempted to find a solution myself. It was painstaking and by no means a trivial problem to solve. From genetic algorithms to constraint programming, I tried several methods to no avail. Despite the simple, well-defined idea, the solution proved to be elusive.

So I hit the books searching for an abstraction of my musical problem in the literature of mathematics and computer science. Something I often do. I also had an idea where to start having worked before with minimal-change enumerations of n-ary words called Gray codes which can express permutations. I remembered reading about a Gray code where each position in the words is a cyclic shift of the others. In the computer science literature, this property-which is well-known in music as a canon or round-is called "single track" (hence the title of the piece).

However, knowing something exists still does not translate into an easy way of finding a solution. So the idea laid in wait for some time. Eventually, after putting the idea to rest for a while, I found a computational method that matched verbatim all the morphological constraints that I originally intended in a wonderful book called Matters Computational by Jörg Arndt. There was even a well-documented, efficient algorithm in the book that I could use to program the construction.

To circle back to your original question. One additional property that Arndt's solution had is that when each successive voice enters, the prior voices slow down. As previously mentioned, this was an unintended consequence. But it is those sorts of things and how the piece, in realization, becomes different from and more than the original concept that truly makes it what it is.

How did you come to work with Liminar? And tell me more about the ensemble?

In my opinion, Liminar is one of the premier new music ensembles in Mexico (or the world for that matter). In Los Angeles, I became friends with composer and vocalist Carmina Escobar, one of the co-founders and co-directors of the ensemble. Liminar eventually came to Los Angeles to play a concert of the work of Julián Carrillo at REDCAT. We also organized a concert at the wulf., an organization that I co-founded with Eric Clark in 2008 dedicated to the presentation of experimental music in Los Angeles. That is when I first met all the performers of the ensemble.

Over time, I became very close friends with the violist Alex Bruck (one of the other co-founders and co-directors of Liminar along with composer Carlos Iturralde). Anecdotally, shorty after Alex and I first met, we both went through a break up and decided to distract ourselves by taking a trip to the wine country of Baja California. I drove down from Los Angeles, rendezvoused with Alex at the Tijuana airport, and we continued downward to Ensenada where we met up with Willy Terrezas, the flutist from Liminar. That trip cemented our friendship.

Working with Liminar has been one of the great privileges / opportunities of my musical life. By now, we have collaborated on several projects. They are awesome performers in addition to being very kind and generous people; always willing to try new things and never saying something is impossible. The release of single track, some five years in the making, is a testament to their positive and relentless attitude.

Experimental music continues to be Euro- and North-American- centric. Liminar does just as much if not more than their counterparts in Europe and the US, often with significantly less resources. Something special is happening musically in Mexico and across the Americas south of the US border. Liminar is a reflection of and ardent contributor to that vibrancy. For many (colonial) reasons, musicians in Latin America have to work harder for their voices to be heard. That dynamic is starting to change and no doubt Liminar is one of the many driving forces behind a more global recognition and support of music from Latin America, which is very well-deserved and long overdue.

Tell me about your own background - how did you come to experimental music, where do you live and so on.

I started my musical life as a guitarist, but could never get over my stage fright. As a performance major at the University of Oregon, I began taking electronic music and composition courses. I also bought my first synthesizer (this was before personal laptop computers were ubiquitous). I had a wonderful teacher, composer Jeff Stolet, who exposed me to the European canon of avant-garde music and to some extent parallel trends in the US. At that time, I identified considerably with the music of György Ligeti and still acknowledge him as a significant influence of mine. It was actually through Ligeti that I was introduced to the music of Jim Tenney. I would go on to study with Jim at CalArts and we became close friends in the last few years of his life. That is really just the tip of the iceberg. I have had the great fortune of knowing and working with many of my musical and intellectual heroes from prior generations to my immediate contemporaries.

Just as much as I learned about music from Jim, he also imbued in his students a great sense of responsibility for fomenting their own musical community and being in charge of one's own musical life. In many ways, this led to the creation of the wulf. After 8 years, we lost the lease of the loft where we lived and hosted events. At that point, I decided to travel and have lived a rather nomadic life since. I spent over a year traveling in South America and then did a couple of longer stints in Mexico (where I lived with Alex) and at a residency in Stuttgart, Germany.

Currently, I am living in Berlin partly as result of circumstances induced by the pandemic. I was living in Mexico City about to move to Rio de Janeiro for a visiting teaching position at UNIRIO when the pandemic started spreading throughout the world. Because the situation was so nebulous at the time, I returned to the US to be closer to my family and hunkered down for 6 months in a somewhat secluded, family-owned apartment at the foot of the Smokey Mountains. In Tennessee, I was extremely isolated and for some time, I saw more black bears than people! But I tried to be productive. Between jaunts to a swimming hole I found in the national park, I started composing one of my most recent pieces which can also be attributed to my friendship with Alex and his extensive book collection.

Shortly before the pandemic, I found a curious book at Alex's apartment called Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut by Kenneth Scott. I started writing a piece titled after the book itself, which sets readings of early counterfeiting cases found in the compendium. I had no intention to reflect the current, tumultuous situation. That changed when the virus began circulating globally and when the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd started. Because Floyd was being arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill, the use of texts about counterfeiting in colonial America had undeniably acquired a whole new meaning and gravity. I decided to add the possibility of complementing readings from the Scott compendium with readings of texts I had written commenting and reflecting on the current situation and civil unrest. While I was reluctant to connect Floyd with counterfeiting and colonialism, his murder and the pandemic clearly demonstrated that inequalities accepted in colonial times have persisted.

That was my main focus throughout the isolation. The time was productive, the mountains were beautiful, and returning to the US proved to be a good temporary solution. But the isolation was getting to me so I started considering other options. Family and friends in Europe encouraged me to move to the EU but that seemed impossible because of the lockdowns. Despite this, I pursued the possibility only to find out that I was a dual US and German citizen all along. Of course, I knew my parents emigrated from Germany to Nashville, Tennessee where I was born and raised. What I did not know, is that Germany establishes citizenship by descent and my parents only naturalized after I was born. So I decided to say goodbye to my bear friends, got my German passport, and moved to Berlin where I have human friends, a musical community, and if necessary, could get health care without being financially destroyed, as is often the case in the US. In both Mexico and the US, my health insurance coverage was mediocre at best, which was also a consideration throughout even though I am in good health. I feel fortunate to be in Berlin and still have hope to eventually make it to Brazil for the visiting professorship.

For now, I am just trying to stay safe and work on music and related ideas. Guitarist Elliot Simpson and flutist Gemma Muñoz are recording Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut along with a piece called a lot of tiles (trivial scan) written for Omar López of Liminar (who will also participate in the recording). I am currently writing a new piece for Rebecca Lane (microtonal bass flute) and some other friends here in Berlin while collaborating with mathematician Felipe Abrahão of Brazil. We aim to prove conjectures I recently made in a book chapter proposing a digital phenomenology based on the work of our mutual friend and mentor, the mathematician Greg Chaitin. Greg is married to an expert on digital philosophy, Virginia Chaitin, who is working with us to formalize the phenomenology and address any wider philosophical implications. Basically, I am focusing on those aspects of my artistic life that I can do during pandemic lockdown: primarily composing, recordings, and research. I look forward to things getting better and returning to a more social life; sharing and playing music together with people as opposed to separated from them.



This album has been reviewed on our magazine:

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The Squid's Ear!

Artist Biographies

"Michael Winter is a composer, music theorist, and software designer. He co-founded and directs the wulf., a non-profit arts organization that presents music free to the public in los angeles. Michael is a firm believer in music making as an exploratory process and free information; e.g. open source code, free music, etc.."

"My work often explores simple processes where dynamic systems, situations, and settings are defined through minimal graphic- and text-based scores that can be realized in a variety of ways. To me, everything we experience is computable. Given this digital philosophy, I acknowledge even my most open works as algorithmic; and, while not always apparent on the surface of any given piece, the considerations of computability and epistemology are integral to my practice. I often reconcile epistemological limits with artistic practicality by considering and addressing the limits of computation from a musical and experiential vantage point and by collaborating with other artists, mathematicians, and scientists in order to integrate objects, ideas, and texts from various domains as structural elements in my pieces.

I have performed across the Americas and Europe at venues ranging in size from small basements to large museums to outdoor public spaces (some examples of more well known festivals and venues include REDCAT, Los Angeles; the Ostrava Festival of New Music; Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival, Valparaiso; the Huddersfield New Music Festival; and Umbral Sesiones at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca). In 2008, I co-founded the wulf., a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to experimental performance and art. As a laboratory and hub for exploring new ideas, the wulf. has become an experiment in alternative communities and economies. Similarly, my work subverts discriminatory conventions and hierarchies by exploring alternative forms of presentation and interaction."

-Michael Winter Website (http://www.unboundedpress.org/)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Alexander Bruck is a violist, violinist and improviser based in Mexico City. A longtime member of the Mexican National Symphony Orchestra, he studied in Mexico and in Paris with Garth Knox. He has been a freelance musician for the last four years, and as such he is involved in a wide spectrum of new music.

Bruck is a founder and artistic director of Liminar, a teacher at the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City and curator of the tonalÁtonal series at the Goethe Institut in Mexico City."

-CTM Festival (https://archive2013-2020.ctm-festival.de/archive/all-artists/a-e/alexander-bruck/)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Omar López, saxophone. (Mexico City, 1975)

Recognized as one of the main promoters of the contemporary saxophone in Mexico, he has presented more than 60 premieres of Mexican works. As a soloist or member of various groups, he has performed at forums and festivals in Mexico, North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. It is part of Liminar."

-http://musica.unam.mx/pasasincalle/artist/omar-lopez/ (CulturaUNAM Translated by Google))
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Wilfrido Terrazas (Camargo, 1974) is a Mexican flutist whose career spans 27 years of performance, commissioning, collaboration, improvisation, composition and pedagogy. His recent work has been focused on finding points of convergence between notated and improvised music, and in exploring innovative approaches to collaboration and collective creation. He is a founding member and Herald of the Mexico City-based improvisation collective Generación Espontánea since 2006. As an interpreter, Wilfrido has performed over 330 world premieres, and has been a member of Liminar ensemble since 2012. As a composer, his main interest is the exploration of dialogues between composition, improvisation and performance. As such, he has written over 40 works for diverse instrumental forces. Other current projects include Filera, Trio D'orizzonte, Escudo (Torre), and the Wilfrido Terrazas Sea Quintet. Since 2014, Wilfrido has been co-curator of Semana de Improvisación La Covacha, a week-long festival dedicated to improvised music in Ensenada.

Terrazas has been a committed educator since his adolescence. He currently has a flute studio at the Conservatorio de las Rosas in Morelia, and teaches experimental music at the Escuela Superior de Música in Mexico City. He is also in demand as a coach and workshop leader throughout Mexico.

Wilfrido has given concerts and participated in projects in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, and in over 40 cities in Mexico. He has obtained support from FONCA and several other Mexican institutions, has been an artist in residence at Omi International Arts Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts and Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture; and participated in the recording of more than 20 albums, three of them as a soloist: Open Cages (Umor, 2007), Bóreas (Shival/CONARTE 2010) and Bug/ge/d (Mandorla, 2010).

Wilfrido Terrazas studied music initially in Baja California and California. He later graduated from the Conservatorio de las Rosas. Among his most influential teachers are Damian Bursill-Hall, Tom Corona, John Fonville, Roscoe Mitchell, Guillermo Portillo and Germán Romero. Wilfrido grew up in Ensenada, and has lived in Mexico City since 2003."

-Wilfrido Terrazas Website (https://wilfridoterrazas.weebly.com/bio.html)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Monica Lopez Lau - Recorder Player. Mexico City, Mexico

She started her music studies in the 'Faculty of Music' at the NationalAutonomous University of Mexico with Horacio Franco. After that she studied the "Bachelor degree" at the 'Conservatorium van Amsterdam' (Holland) with Walter van Hauwe. In 2007 she concluded the master degree "Diplome de Concert" at the 'Conservatoire de Lausanne' (Switzerland) specializing in contemporary music with Antonio Politano. In 2008 she finished her studies of Electronic music "Triennio sperimentale di primo livello" (cum laude) at the 'Conservatorio di Musica di Venezia - Benedetto Marcello' (Italy) with Alvise Vidolin.

She plays repertoire from medieval, renaissance, baroque till contemporarymusic. Furthermore, she has performed in several countries such as:Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, Germany and UnitedStates.

She has collaborated with composers from all over the world as: MauricioRodriguez, Federico Costanza, Davide Sibilla, Alessio Rossato, Carlos Cruzde Castro, Javier Jacinto, Oskar Lissheim-Boethius, Anders Forslund,Daniele Gugielmo, Alejandro Romero, Hilda Paredes, Roberto Girolin,Matthias Kranebitter, Carlos Iturralde, etc.

She is member of the Medieval Music group "Perfectas Anónimas", theearly music ensemble "Settecento", the contemporary music ensemble"Liminar" and the recorder consort "Consortando".

At this moment, she teaches recorder and chamber music in the "EscuelaSuperior de Musica" at the National Institute of fine arts (INBA) in MexicoCity. In 2013 she got the prize of "best original music" at the 6th Rally ofindependent theatre at the "Centro Cultural el Foco" with the performance'The Falling Love' in Mexico City."

-Monica Lopez Lau Website (https://www.monicalopezlau.com/biografy)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

" "Dal Niente" by Helmut Lachenmann, "Itou" by Pascal Dusapin, "Échange" by Iannis Xenakis, "Konzertstuck No 2 op 114" by Mendelsshon and the "Concerto in F Major for Corno di Bassetto" by Alessandro Rolla, are some of the numerous titles that have been performed in Mexico for the first time, under the initiative of Antonio Rosales. Since 2016 he specializes in Basset Horn performance. He has performed in Mexico as a soloist with the Orquesta de Cámara de Bellas Artes (Rolla's Corno di Bassetto Concerto), Camerata de Coahuila (Mendelssohn's Konzertstuck 1 and 2) and the Tempus Fugit Ensemble (Xenakis' Echange). He has performed chamber music concerts in Mexico, Argentina, the United States of America, Germany, Netherlands and France. In March 2018 he made the recording of Trio No. 5 for bass clarinets by Maurice Verheul at the City of Rome, Italy, along with the bass clarinetists Sauro Berti (Orchestra of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma) and Jason Alder.

He is the first Mexican clarinetist to realize a professional recording of Arnold Schoenberg's masterpiece, "PIERROT LUNAIRE", performing on both soprano clarinets and bass clarinet. His main interest is on chamber music and soloist repertoire written for basset horn and bass clarinet, from classical, twentieth century and contemporary repertoire. He is experienced for more than 15 years, as a substitute at the main symphony orchestras of Mexico. He is currently Artistic Director of QUARTZ Ensemble and member of Low Frequency Trio. He was member of the General Headquarters National Navy Wind Symphony of Mexico between 1994 and 1996."

-Antonio Rosales Website (https://clarsmx.wixsite.com/antoniorosalesbcl/full-biography)
3/27/2024

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Track Listing:



1. Single Track 45:53

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