Eine generative Klang- und Videoinstallation von Ramón González-Arroyo (Sound) und Karlheinz Essl (Visuals) zur Ausstellung TAPIES / RAINER

24.06. - 23.10.2005
Sammlung Essl - BlackBox

In der Ausstellung TAPIES / RAINER tritt das Werk zweier sehr unterschiedlicher Maler in Dialog. Der Blick hinter die sichtbare Oberfläche, den die Komponisten Rámon González-Arroyo (Madrid) und Karlheinz Essl (Klosterneuburg) unternommen haben, förderte interessante Zusammenhänge zutage: Das Verhältnis zwischen Abstraktion und objet trouvée, zwischen Geste und Malgrund, zwischen Hintergrund und Vordergrund. Dies hat die beiden Musiker zu einer Gemeinschaftsarbeit inspiriert - einer Hommage an Antoni Tàpies und Arnulf Rainer -, die auf Kompositionsprinzipien fußt, die aus der Analyse der Bilder herausgelesen werden konnten.

In einem intensiven Diskussionsprozess zwischen Spanien und Österreich entwickelte sich allmählich die Installation Through the Curly Rain-Taps, die sich aus zwei autonomen, aber miteinander in Beziehung stehenden ästhetischen Ebenen zusammensetzt: einer Klangebene, die Ramón González-Arroyo komponiert hat und einer Videoprojektion, die vom Komponisten Karlheinz Essl gestaltet wurde.

Diese Multimedia-Installation präsentiert sich als unendliche Abfolge von Klang-Gestalten und damit korrespondierenden Bild-Bewegungen, die sich strukturell unterscheiden und deutlich voneinander getrennt sind: wie ein Spaziergang durch eine unendliche Ausstellung, die immer neue ästhetische Erlebnisse bietet.

Für die Bildebene wurden aus prototypischen Werken von Rainer und Tàpies charakteristische Details herausgelöst: Ausschnitte von übermalten Fotos bzw. konkreten Objekten, plastische Hintergrundtexturen, expressive Pinselgesten, enigmatische Zeichengebilde. Dieses Material wird mithilfe von Zufallsoperationen kombiniert und in ein eigens dafür geschriebenes Computerprogramm eingespeist, das aufgrund spezifischer Kompositionsalogrithmen bewegte Bilder generiert.

Ähnliche Kompositionsprinzipien verwendet Ramón González-Arroyo bei der Generierung seiner Klangwelt, die ebenso die Dialektik zwischen Geste und Hintergrund (mit all ihren möglichen Zwischenstufen) aufgreift und als Klangbewegungen umsetzt, die wiederum von einem Computerprogramm in Echtzeit erzeugt werden.

Through the Curly Rain-Taps is a collaborative auto-generating piece comprising image and sound to be installed in the Essl Museum in the context of an exhibition dedicated to Antoni Tapies and Arnulf Rainer. This phrase serves to describe what the piece is, but it also states clearly the main particular aspects governing the composition of the piece : collaboration, combination of image and sound, infinite flow, relationship to the work of the two "different and similar" painters. I will briefly try to explain how some of these questions have been considered in the composition, mainly from the point of view of the music, which has been my particular responsibility. The collaboration has been conceived as a combination of communication and autonomous, independant work on the basis of a network of structural and generative principles. To hint what communication meant let us simply mention that this network of principles, real pillar on which the whole conception of the piece rests, has had a promethean nature, growing or shrinking, and readapting itself, in as long as the piece was a work in progress. The concept of an infinite flow of sound seems to escape from the realms of musical composition. Form, in music, unfolds in time, and it is as hard for the sound-flow-maker to transmit a feeling of coherence and multi-dimensionality of relationships when not knowing when the listener will step in and out, as it would be for a visual artist when ignoring what limited region in the total space of a certain piece will be explored by an observer. One would need to build a perfect fractal! In order to address this question, one of the ways has been to consider the piece as an infinite flow of smaller forms, with durations between a fraction of a minute and a few minutes. A huge range, but one which enables to shrink the time-scale to partly cope with the problem. Let me signal, in any case, the parallelism existing between this flow of forms and the museum situation, where a set of paintings, wholes in themeselves, are exhibited along the walls of the different rooms. Finally we can briefly outline the question of the relationship to the work of the artists presented in the exhibition. Two main aspects have been underlined; the refined treatment of matter and texture of an almost tactile nature, and the importance of objects, big and small, sometimes prominent, sometimes almost hidden -s ymbols and re-readings of concrete material. I have, therefore, built a dialectic between "backgrounds" - textures, colours - extended in space and time, and gestures - the object seen as an event. Rámon Gonzalez-Arroyo

Biographies

Ramón González-Arroyo Born 1953 in Madrid. Musical studies at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid. Composition with Luis de Pablo and C. Bernaola. Courses on composition with Franco Donatoni and electro-acoustic music with Horacio Vaggione. Studies in Electronic and Computer Music at the Instituut voor Sonologie of the University of Utrecht (Werner Kaegi, Gottfried Michael Koenig) and The Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Seminars on computer music at IRCAM and GRM in Paris. In parallel to his compositional work, he has been active also in the domain of musical research, particularly in the fields of computer aided composition and the musical control of sound synthesis. Projects, realized at different european institutions such as ZKM (Karlsruhe), IRCAM (Paris) and the Sonology Department of the Conservatory of The Hague. Important to first mention the intensive collaboration with Gottfried Michael Koenig in his different computer music projects PR1, PR2 and PR3.

Later, in 1993 at ZKM, came FOO, a software package for the composition of music with sound synthesis, designed and developed with Gerhard Eckel. FOO was further developed thanks to an institutional collaboration between IRCAM and the ZKM, and has recently been implemented in the Linux and the OSX platforms with the incorporation into the project of Martin Rumori.

During the last years he has intensely collaborated in LISTEN, an European research project, comprising the collaboration of different institutions (GMD, IRCAM, AKG, the Kunst Museum Bonn and the University of Vienna), and aiming at the design of a tool for the creation of immersive audio augmented environments. In 2003, Raumfaltung, a multidisciplinary installation created in collaboration with Gerhard Eckel, Oswald Egger and Beat Zoderer, was presented at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, as the final public presentation of an artistic project realized with the developed tools.

His music, embracing both the instrumental and the electroacoustic worlds, has been programmed at different international festivals such as the Bartok Festival, Wien Modern, Multiphonies, Musiques en Scéne, Multimediale or Berliner Inventionen. His latest works include Philía-Neikos for piano and electronics, comissioned by the GRM; 'Twixt tinged twining threads for instrumental ensemble, commisioned by the Essl Collection; Streams, Extremes & Dreams, a 24-channel electronic piece commissioned by ZKM; and A Media Luna, a 16-channel electronic piece commisioned by the GRM and premiered at the Maison de Radio France in May 2004.

Karlheinz Essl Born 1960 in Vienna. Austrian composer, improviser and performer. He attended the Vienna Musikhochschule (1979-87), where he studied with Friedrich Cerha and Dieter Kaufmann, among others. He also studied musicology and art history at the University of Vienna (doctorate 1989; thesis published as Das Synthese-Denken bei Anton Webern). Active as a double bassist until 1984, he played in chamber and experimental jazz ensembles. As a composer he has contributed to the Projekt 3 composition programming environment of Gottfried Michael Koenig at Utrecht and Arnheim (1988-89) which later transformed into his own Realtime Composition Library for MAX. Essl also served as composer-in-residence at the Darmstadt summer courses (1990-94) and completed a commission for IRCAM. In 1995 he accepted a position in computer-aided composition at the Studio for Advanced Music & Media Technology (SAMT) at the Anton Bruckner Private University, Linz.

Essl's compositions result from confrontations between ordered, abstract models and original tonal, expressive structures. He has frequently sought to combine music with other genres and has collaborated with the graffiti artist Harald Naegeli (Partikel-Bewegungen, 1991), the writer Andreas Okopenko and the artists' group Libraries of the Mind (Lexikon-Sonate, 1992-98), the architect Carmen Wiederin (Klanglabyrinth, 1992-95) and the video artist Vibeke Sorensen (MindShipMind, 1996, a multimedia installation for the Internet). During the 1990s he carried out many additional projects for the Internet and became increasingly involved with improvisation. In 1997, Karlheinz Essl was featured at the Salzburg Festival with portrait concerts and sound installations. In 2003, he was artist-in-residence of the festival musik aktuell, and in 2004 he was presented with a series of portrait concerts at the Brucknerhaus Linz.

Besides writing instrumental music, Karlheinz Essl also works in the field of electronic music, interactive realtime compositions and sound installations. He develops software environments for algorithmic composition and acts as a performer and improviser. Most of his compositions are published by TONOS (Darmstadt).

Updated: 22 Aug 2005
essl@eunet.at