Mar 062013
 

 Choreographer Elizabeth Schmuhl & Composer Ariane Miyasaki

I’m very proud of this one, almost paternal: A Numéro Cinq first, an original piece of music by Ariane Miyasaki combined with an original dance choreographed and performed by Elizabeth Schmuhl, commissioned specially for Numéro Cinq. In other words, the first NC ballet. Never before in the annals of art — okay, well, maybe a bit over the top, but this is extraordinary. Ariane is an MFA student in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Music Composition program and Elizabeth is an MFA student in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. They had never met before I put them together and suggested they collaborate on a work just for us. The result was recorded on video, a grainy, fixed-camera production that is itself part of the finished product, an edgy, alienated, even terrifying orchestral composition for female voices based on a text written by Miyasaki when she was seventeen, after she had lived wild for four years on the streets of Seattle. The music is concrete, startling, acousmatic — none of the usual instruments appear, but as you listen the voices create an aesthetic space in your mind, the words become notes. The dance follows the movements of the musical composition, beginning with silence/stillness and moving into the frenzied contortions of the a girl on the run, a girl with no skin inhabited by voices and street sounds.  This is just a gorgeous thing to have.

See the video below. Best watched in the full screen mode. And underneath the video we have brief essays by the collaborators on their compositional process (also choreography notes from Elizabeth). So not only do we get the art, we get insight in the making of art.

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Ariane Miyasaki

RUN FALL RUN

Now there is no Where or Where to.
There is no What or What next.
Only Run.
Run through the panic and the blurry vision,
Through the ringing ears and rattled bones.
Run until the spinning stops.

Two sets of feet, out of sync,
Beat the earth, scattering rocks and debris,
Kicking up yellow clouds of pine dust.
The first is all panicked, mammalian desperation.
The second merely follows, waiting for his prey to fall,
With the predatory patience of experience.

Raw throat, lungs breathing air made of salt.
Run.
Chest creaking, on fire, and full of survival.
Run.
Force clear a dazed brain and
Run.

I lifted the poem directly from my notebooks, written at the age of 17, a week after I had finally “come in” after living four years on the street, mostly in Seattle. I had run away from home in southern California in January, 1999, when I was 13; I left the street in February, 2003. I was, to say the least, a super angry person. My uncle described me as “almost  feral.” Oddly enough, I never lost the certainty that I would eventually go to college. There was a Value Village where people would dump their old books; the store didn’t sell books, so the books got thrown out. I used to dumpster dive behind the store and come up with armloads of books. I ended up with a pretty good background in literature (apparently, people don’t throw out their old science and math books — I still have gaps). I didn’t edit or rewrite the text, though now I know it’s not poetry; at the time, I had no idea of the rules of form. But I thought about it and realized that if these were the words of any other 17-year-old, I wouldn’t change them. I didn’t want to tamper with what I had written, even though my aesthetic has changed; now I have what you might call a “reserved aesthetic.” I decided I would accord the past-ME the same respect I would give to someone else.

The music is acousmatic, meaning that you hear the sound through speakers, the source is unidentifiable. Compositionally, I am really interested in the way the human voice affects the sound and text and the way the sound will affect the perception of the words. Formally, the piece is written in two main sections with coda that goes back to “run;” the first section focuses on “run,” the next part focuses on “fall,” and then “run” comes back again. The texture of the sound begins to change about two and a half minutes in and then again at the five and a half minute mark. The coda is very short, only a minute, and it’s calmer, using vehicle sounds like a train. To get the voices, I basically spammed all of the women I knew on Facebook, asking them to record readings. I asked 42 people; 15 sent in recordings; of those I used only 13, 13 different women reading the text. There were places where the voices become decorrelated, they begin break up, kind of come apart, the rhythms start to change; originally, I was going to use a granular synthesizer but in the end did it the old way, I just spliced it by hand, which isn’t that difficult anymore, splicing them or stretching them out without changing the pitch. What I hadn’t expected was the vocal range, from young girls with high pitched voices to the two older women, in their sixties, who had low grainy voices; I could almost make real harmonies with the voices — they contrast nicely with the sampled sounds and presented me with a nice way of blending the voice-text in with the train in the last section.

— Ariane Miyasaki

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 Elizabeth Schmuhl

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When making a dance, I usually begin with an idea or situation I want to explore through movement. Shortly after, I find music to help give structure to the dance I’m creating. The music serves as a skeleton, often shaping the narrative (if there is one, and for me, there usually is). Collaborating with Ariane Miyasaki was so refreshing to me as an artist, as my process was altered: I directly responded to the song “Run Fall Run’ that Ariane gave me, instead of searching for music that complimented my initial idea for a dance. In order to make a dance, I first listen to the music and then break apart into segments I hear. I use this as the basis for different sections of the dance. Usually I do several recordings of myself improvising to the music and watch the videos over and over again until I can see what type of movement phrases I’m repeating, as they tell me something about what I’m feeling. Once I have several movement phrases, I begin to make floor pattern drawings, and write my movement phrases with counts (especially phrases that are difficult for me to execute).

I staged this in a rectangular space, in the city of Benton Harbor. I had a deadline nearing and there was snow on the ground; the temperature was hovering above 10 degrees Fahrenheit. I decided to dance anyway, with boots on, no less. The cold gave me a new energy that I never experienced during my studio rehearsals of the piece. The weather was bewitching, and I was able to get into character quite well. It’s also important to note the importance of the sky, and how it created a feeling of limitlessness while I was dancing. Not only did it create this for me inside, in my interior, I believe it is expressed in my focus throughout the dance. If and when the piece is performed indoors, the dancer must make a huge effort to dance beyond the walls, something that is possible, but never quite the same as dancing underneath the sky.

For me, the feeling invoked in my body when listening to the music was one of claustrophobia. I envisioned a girl who is in turmoil, desperately trying to get herself through a difficult situation. She experiences reprieves, moments of rest, but ultimately, whatever situation or life-phase she is in is affecting her deeply. In the beginning of the piece, the threat of falling is present. The girl acknowledges the possibility of falling and ties a string around her middle, to keep herself up (see 3:59). It doesn’t completely work, because she still experiences moments of great sadness, when her body feels almost not her own.  However, throughout the piece, there is a force running through her; this force is what I believe to be the human spirit, which gives her the ability to get up and persevere, despite her situation.

— Elizabeth Schmuhl

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Elizabeth Schmuhl is a modern dance instructor, performer, choreographer and writer. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied dance and earned a BA in Creative Writing and Literature. Currently, she is an MFA in Writing candidate at VCFA. She has won an Avery Hopwood Award and recently published a story in Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, put out by Wayne State University Press.

Ariane Miyasaki is a composer based in Schenectady, New York. She is chiefly interested in electroacoustic and acousmatic work, though enjoys writing acoustic music as well. Her piece “she said” for hand bells and stereo fixed media was premiered in 2013 by Cassandra McClellan as part of the 2013 I/O Festival in Williams, Massachusetts. Miyasaki is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in composition at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also holds a Bachelor of Music from State University of New York at Potsdam, where she studied music theory and history, an Associate of Science and an Associate of Arts from Schenectady County Community College, where she majored flute performance and humanities and social science. While attending classes at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, she studied electronic composition with Paul Steinberg. She is currently studying electroacoustic and acousmatic composition at VCFA. Miyasaki remains active as a flutist. She regularly plays with the SCCC Wind Ensemble and Capital Region Wind Ensemble, and frequently can be heard in other area ensembles and in the pit  orchestras of local musical productions. Miyasaki studied flute with Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart, Norman Thibodeau, and Kenneth Andrews.

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Aug 022012
 

Ariane Miyasaki played flute a little in middle school but managed to ditch high school completely (see explanation below) and ended up at Schenectady Community College studying music with very little conventional music background. She took a course called Music Lit and Style that started with Pythagoras and swept up to the 20th century, and everything she studied was new and delightful. There’s a moment in “Ruthie-Ruthie” in Frank Zappa’s album Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore when Zappa quotes an audience member who shouted: “Freak me out, Frank! Freak me out!” Those words are Ariane’s aesthetic touchstone. When she got to the 20th century — concrete music, electronic music, collage and acousmatic music — she found a freak-out home. Subsequently, she transferred to the Crane School of Music at SUNY Postdam, and now she is one of the first class of composers to attend the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Music Composition program.

This is a first for Numéro Cinq, original compositions by a new, young composer. We have two pieces with a short introduction by Ariane and excerpts from the score. They are both strange and beautiful and deeply touching. They will, yes, freak you out in the best way possible.

Ariane works mostly with what’s called fixed media — pre-recorded and edited material (using a program called Logic) — and combinations of fixed media and live instruments, also the human voice.  “I tend,” she says, “to be very influenced by narrative in my composition, and voice lends itself to that very well, so I am sure that that is part of it. Most of the pieces I have written so far involve some sort of narrative, even if it is entirely internal and I used it only as a starting point to get an idea for form, feel, gestures, etc.”

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Roboterinner Lied

This is a short, entirely acousmatic, piece from (I think) 2008 that really started out as an experiment in sound editing, but I still have sort of a soft spot for it. I guess I think it’s cute. All of the sounds in it, with the obvious exception of the synthesized bells, are derived from a single sampled tongue stop, played on flute. The title means “Robot inner song,” literally, though I guess I like to think of it more as “Robot’s inner song.” There isn’t really any meaning to the piece, but when I was sketching it out, I was imagining this robotic widget, not a cool robot, just an element– maybe one of the suction cup robots that fills egg cartons, or one of those big arms that sprays paint on car parts. From somewhere, it finds this simple melodic idea (maybe somebody left a radio on?), which it tries to emulate, with varying success. At the end of the day, it’s still just a robot, but it remembers this little idea that it had once, and it can keep that forever, or until it is decommissioned and scrapped.

 

Click the button to hear Roboterinner Lied.

 

The House my Grandfather Built

This is a piece for violin, percussion, and two-channel fixed media. The musicians are Ethan Woon (violin) and Jeffrey Means (percussion). Rather than having an audio track that the musicians play along with, I made 23 individual audio files that are triggered separately, live, and are designed to overlap. This allows the players some liberty with the pulse, and avoids having to hook them up to click tracks. This means that on each play through the audio files will be a bit different, but I tried to make them such that that is not a problem. The audio is made from samples I took around my grandparents’ home.

To explain why I wrote this piece and what it means to me, I need to make it clear what my grandfather meant, and still means, to me.

I was born in Buffalo, NY. We moved to LA when I was nine months old, and I grew up there, in Culver City. My mother and paternal grandmother were both killed in a car accident when I was eight. The accident also left my father critically injured and knocked me out for a while. Once my father and I were both back from the hospital, my relationship with him steadily deteriorated. Five years later, when I was 13, I left home for Seattle. I have not been back since.

About when I was eighteen, I moved from Seattle to my maternal grandparents’ home in Schenectady. After over four years of living out-of-doors, I was, needless to say, not at my best. I was very angry, and angry at everyone and everything. My grandparents took me in. They barely knew me, except from brief summertime visits when I was a child.

My maternal grandfather was like a father to me. Last August, the day before the first MFA in Composition residency at VCFA, we discovered he was ill. A few days into the residency, my husband informed my that he was terminally ill and that I should expect hospice to be at my grandparents’ home when I returned. My grandfather died five weeks later.

I wanted to do something FOR them. For my family. Almost sixty years ago, my grandfather and his brother and brothers-in-law built the house in which my grandmother lives to this day. That house is an outgrowth of the family and life that they built and gave to their descendants.

I have always been interested in small, personal noises. The sounds that are particular to any given person’s life. The pre-recorded sounds in this piece are samples taken from and around the house. Prayers of my grandmother, because for them, Catholicism was so important, the lathe at which my grandfather worked sharpening knives, right up until his last weeks, baseball, the kitchen, the washer and dryer, even the creaking floors. Any house makes similar sounds, but each one does that in its own way — like a sonic fingerprint. I wanted to make an homage to their home that would have a very real and concrete meaning for my family. Naturally, I hope it also is pleasing to an outsider.

 When I say “The House My Grandfather Built,” I really mean the world he and my gran built; the family they dragged out of the Depression, through World War II, through sending all three of their children to college and my mother to dental school, through my uncle’s leukemia, my mother’s death, my own disappearance and reappearance. I am half Japanese and half Italian by descent. I grew up with the Japanese side. When a Buddhist dies, there are these memorial services at certain amounts of time past the death. At several of these that I attended when I was young, I remember the priest saying: “It really doesn’t matter — this stuff about what happens to me when I die? Where do I go to? Do I live forever? — because either way you live on through what you did. Your life and you actions don’t die.” THAT is the house that my grandfather built, and it is my hope for this piece — more than anything else — that it is enough to say “Thanks for that,” albeit inadequately.

 

Click the button to hear The House My Grandfather Built.

 

— Music and Text by Ariane Miyasaki

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Ariane Miyasaki is a composer based in Schenectady, New York. She has written for a wide array of instrumentations, voice, and electronics, but at the moment, she is chiefly interested in electroacoustic and acousmatic work. Her piece “Bad Call Drink Me Bottle” for flute and fixed media was premiered in 2011 by Norman Thibodeau as part of a series of performances sponsored by St. Jude the Apostle Church in Wynantskill, New York. Miyasaki is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Composition at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also holds a Bachelor of Music from State University of New York at Potsdam, where she studied music theory and history, an Associate of Science and an Associate of Arts from Schenectady County Community College, where she majored flute performance and humanities and social science.

 While attending classes at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, she studied electronic composition with Paul Steinberg. She is currently studying electroacoustic and acousmatic composition with John Mallia at VCFA.

Miyasaki remains active as a flutist. She regularly plays with the SCCC Wind Ensemble and Capital Region Wind Ensemble, and frequently can be heard in other area ensembles and in the pit  orchestras of local musical productions. Miyasaki studied flute with Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart, Norman Thibodeau, and Kenneth Andrews.