5.5.5.5.5 CHANCES, by Inma Pavon, was inspired by a previous collaboration between Inma Pavon and Carolyn Collier as part of Helen Horgan’s LFTT Library project at The Guest House.
The LFTT (Legs Foundation for the Translation of Things*) Library is a four hundred year old library, which was rescued from near abandonment and reinvigorated as an independent traveling art space. It was once the private library of a group of Franciscan Monks. Items in the library range in subject matter from theology to mysticism, poetry, literature, science, and an array of Irish ‘rebel’ writing, and represent a striking snapshot of Irish history which was about to be lost. http://thelfttlibrary.com/what-is-the-lftt/
For this piece, Inma asked Helen to close her eyes and randomly choose a book from the Library. Helen presented Inma with a book by Photographer Cecil Beaton, Chinese Album. Inma then chose the project duration, the number of performers, and the date of the piece according to chance methods such as throwing a dice, drawing pieces of paper out of a hat. After choosing her artists, she tasked us to each create a piece in our respective mediums based solely on a picture that she randomly chose from the book for each performer. The combination of artists per piece was chosen at random, but the visual artists and performers were given time to prepare together with the music before performing. For the performance, the audience was divided through random selection, and directed to the different rooms rooms in a random order.
This is the image that I was given:
Because of their prominence in this image, I decided to base this piece on the brush strokes of Chinese characters. Looking for inspiration of what text to use, I searched for Chinese poems, and landed on “Grasses”, by Bai Juyi.
I created a synthesizer which used a Wacom tablet to transcribe the horizontal and vertical coordinates of each character to left and right panning and pitch, spanning two speakers and one octave. The pressure of the stylus determined volume.
The main synthesizer in this piece is the sound of me tracing the the poem’s characters on the tablet.
After importing this into Ableton Live and adjusting it to fit 10 minutes through layering and re-timing, I added viola and cello to provide structure and melody. The viola and cello were tuned to a pentatonic scale derived from the harmonic series, consisting of the Just intonation ratios 1/1, 1968/1630, 1771/1311, 3/2, and 5905/3277 with a base frequency of 400Hz. The bowed viola parts were sampled, and the plucked cello was created with a MIDI synthesizer in Ableton.
Source poem and translation:
Grasses — Bai Juyi
离离原上草，
一岁一枯荣。
野火烧不尽，
春风吹又生。
远芳侵古道，
晴翠接荒城。
又送王孙去，
萋萋满别情。
Boundless grasses over the plain
Come and go with every season;
Wildfire never quite consumes them —
They are tall once more in the spring wind.
Sweet they press on the old high- road
And reach the crumbling city-gate….
O Prince of Friends, you are gone again….
I hear them sighing after you.
http://www.chinawhisper.com/