Score: Tran(slate)
Felipe Lara – [email protected]
New York University
My second string quartet Tran(slate), similarly to my first work for the medium, explores issues of media and translation. In its original version, with live electronics, the work suggests a communication between the instrumental and the electronic mediums. The work is divided in eight section, each representing a metaphor of an electronic treatment: chorus/phasing, ring modulation, spatialization, filters, pitch-shifting, delays, loops, and time-stretching. The larger of these sections are assigned sounds/harmonies derived from simple throat singing, singing and whistling simultaneously (cheap ring modulation?), and inharmonic guitar harmonics. The sections employing vocal sounds are treated in more legato/sustained manner and the ones employing guitar sounds are presented mostly as pizzicato passages, but also as distorted electric guitar sounds. Each of these allegoric sections is furthermore subdivided proportionally by all of the other sections of the piece in a fractal (or self similar) manner, thus creating counterpoints of rather vague metaphors. In the climax (about 6. minutes into the piece) there is a global structural interruption in the form of a déjà vu, where all previous and fore coming sections, harmonies, and textures are condensed in a short section that lasts less than a minute. This interruption also reflected in the micro form of the piece as it is employed in the local sections at the same point, and for the same duration, proportionally, as the global déjà vu. There are also other perhaps still more abstract strata taking place such as the juxtaposition of more rhetorical moments, where the found-sounds are manipulated in more discursive fashion, with moments of “Parrheisia”, where there is a stronger attempt to present them as truthfully as possible, without activating them ornamentally or expressively.
Once these general pre-compositional series of constrains were laid down the composition became specific answers to the questions created by the structure. How does one activate a guitar harmonic with one’s own creative language? How does a guitar sound translate to the string quartet? Once translated, how does a guitar sound adapts to the “loop” section, and furthermore to its “filter” subsection? The process of the composition also generates residues, side effects, and byproducts, all of which are welcomed to the work and become (hopefully) recognizable objects.
The title plays with the artist’s impossible desire/obsession of starting from a blank slate and attempts instead a situation where the work creates unique contexts from transitions across more general states.
