sound expanse

I had a general idea of which pieces I would talk about in this next post, but I found it unusually difficult and interesting to figure out a method to my grouping. First I thought I would refer to silence. Then I realized that is really not applicable to all the music I want to talk about. Then I defaulted to American experimental work. But this whole blog is about experimental music, so that’s a given, and national divisions are seeming less and less relevant to me. It may seem ironic, and it’s certainly not a coincidence, that it was a relatively short time after discovering the American music that interests me the most that I started traveling to European festivals. Once I found the locus point of my interest and honed in on the reasons for it, everything around it became interesting for how it did or did not connect to that particular intersection. And as I mentioned in the Huddersfield 2009 (1/5) post, the relationships between these works are multi-dimensional. And easily answered questions like “Where was the composer born?” become much less interesting than “What questions is the piece asking?” I finally realized that all of these pieces are asking questions around the overall topic of intentionality.

Richard Glover’s Gradual Music (played by MusikFabrik on November 28th) has, in Glover’s words, an “uncontrolled surface layer.” The shifts in the sound are subtle, but they occur within a process that is so clear and unobtrusive that the ear is drawn to those subtleties and seeks them out. It is a piece that invites the listener to hear the interactions between the sounds more than the sounds themselves. Though it is otherwise a very different sort of piece, Anthony Braxton did something related to that with his continual use of the sustain pedal in Composition No. 32 for solo piano (played with great involvement and endurance by Geneviève Fouccroulle, who recently released a box set of Braxton's Piano Music 1968-2000). The pages can be arranged in any order by the pianist. The pedal acts as a kind of watercolor wash over them, connecting the harmonic worlds of each page and in that way imposing a relationship between them that may or may not exist otherwise.

On Tuesday, Philip Thomas did a concert called Small Preludes, Aytoods and other new music from America. Joe Kudirka’s fidelity was the result of a single intention. There was no process. There was no chance operation. There was not even (to my perception) an attempt to direct the listener to differences in surface detail. The whole piece sat on one thing [a chord played at regular intervals] for its entire duration of six minutes. I’m not sure if it would have been a different piece if it were much, much longer. In his program note, he writes, “The line itself ... exists in only one dimension - as limited as a thing may be, but also potentially infinite - as long as one wishes to measure; as long as one wishes to uphold this fidelity. In this way, the line is always new. It does not back-track. It simply progresses; unending exploration of one dimension in one direction.” This is one of the few instances in which a program note latches onto and enriches my experience of a piece even long after the fact. It doesn’t refer to the materials of the piece at all: the piano, the chord, the durations. It is purely about intention.

On the same concert was Doug Barrett’s Derivation III, which, he writes, “is part of a series in which a single piece is the result of a transcription of either a field recording, usually made on a city street corner, or a recording of another Derivation piece.” Instrument sounds are “often sparse and easily overtaken by the environment in which they are performed.” The focus is on a different time and place, but there is an intentional transparency to the circumstance of the performance, leading to the experience of being in one place and another, one time and another--and probably more present in both than usual. It is an overlay of the intentional reproduction of past, unintentional sounds with raw, present, unintentional sounds.



Michael Pisaro’s fields have ears involves several different types of overlay. The field recording of a mountain field in (sunny, dry) Val Verde, California had an immediate, almost tangible effect on me for its contrast with what I can only remember as a gray and rainy day in Huddersfield. The 20-minute recording was cut into four five-minute segments which were rotated through the four speakers in each corner of the room. Depending on where an audience member was sitting, they would have a more focused experience of one of those recordings, while the others were still going on. These recordings each include a portion of “a kind of ascending scale” of sine tones. The piano part includes "a very soft harmonic/scalar grid" that relates to the sine tones and an interlude. I have had to rely on the program notes for a description of what went on. It has taken me some time to put my finger on the fact that the play with these various layers and levels of transparency was such that although I have a very clear and wonderful memory of my experience of the piece, I have little to no recollection of how the components of it operated and interacted. I can always look at the score later. I remember having a conversation with another composer and friend and landing on the idea that when you listen, you can be given what the piece (and the performance) has to offer. When you look at the score, you can see what you have been given. In my experience, the two activities rarely coincide.

That being said, there are two more pieces to talk about in which the construction is described in a fairly complete and very helpful way in the program notes. Pisaro’s pi was performed by Philip Thomas over the five consecutive weekdays of the festival at 11am. These performances appeared to be so self-similar that all of the micro- and macroscopic differences between them took on increased weight. The first 2,954 decimal places of pi are presented. Each digit appears within a five-second unit. Each unit of each decimal place occupies half a second, on a single pitch that remains constant for the whole piece. (There are 15 pieces in the collection.) Whatever remains of the five-second unit carries over as silence. Each piece has a different pitch and a different duration, ranging from 5 minutes to 54’10”. These performances became a kind of home base for me, a resting point--even more so than the brief time at the guest house between the last event of one day and the first of the next. I started to be alert both to how well I was listening and to how much I was hearing. Some registers of the piano were more audible than others. Some revealed small differences--what Pisaro calls “the subtle shadings of piano timbre created by minutely different patterns of repetition”--more than others. The performances all took place in the atrium of the Creative Arts Building, which offered plenty of its own sounds. Wind turbines were banging, coffee was being ground, people were (hardly ever quietly) going in and out of the building. And yet this other thing was going on in the same time and place, and there was no boundary set up between the sounds that were part of the piece and all the other sounds that were happening around it.

In A Few Silence (performed on Monday as one of the hub shorts) Doug Barrett drew in those kinds of incidental, other sounds as the actual content of the piece. For five minutes, the audience watched and listened as the six performers transcribed what they were hearing. No sounds were placed deliberately for those first five minutes. As the audience (including me) became more aware of what the performers were doing, I sensed an increased alertness, a collective keying in to whatever sounds were occurring. I think it was around the four-minute mark that someone coughed rather loudly. By then, most of the audience, as far as I could tell, knew to landmark that sound. In the second five minutes, each performer played his or her own transcription. There were points (like that cough) where their performances lined up. Most of the time they did not. I found that really wonderful. Since they were spread across the front of the room, and they were tracking sounds that had no built-in hierarchies, they each had and were performing a different listening experience. The sounding result made those differences clear. It made an enormous difference that the audience was present for both the transcribed event and the performance of it. We were very much a part of the whole experience. I'll put one of two available performances below. You can watch the other one and download the score here.

Now I need to backtrack for a moment. Four paragraphs of this post are about pieces that were played by Philip Thomas, and I haven’t yet said anything about his playing. That’s not a coincidence: it does have something to do with him. But I mean that in the best possible way. His whole approach revolves around presenting the music as effectively as possible, and really being an advocate for it. All of the work I have talked about here is best presented as transparently and as unobtrusively as possible. Thomas made it very clear at the end of each pi performance that no applause was expected or wanted, as he gathered his music and made a very directed exit to the stairwell and up the stairs. It became clear to me by the second day that if we had applauded, it would have placed a kind of temporal boundary between the event and the non-event which was very foreign to the piece. Many of these pieces seem quite modest in their technical demands. They are not. To play them well requires tremendous sensitivity, consistency of tone, a solid mastery of time, and a clear conception of the ideas and possibilities intrinsic and extrinsic to the work. Thomas achieves all of this with a calm focus. He explains his own approach quite elegantly in this video, which is embedded on the hcmf site. I’ll include a brief quote from it and then let you see the rest for yourself.

What I’m most interested in is somehow having an experience which somehow changes me, changes my understanding, the way I relate to the world around me.... I wouldn’t want to advocate one sound or another. It’s just music that invites me in some ways to listen with fresh ears.

One of the big reasons that I went to the Huddersfield festival this year was to finally have the chance to see and hear the Australian ensemble, ELISION. For one thing, I've heard a number of compelling recordings. And then there is always this electricity that seems to attach to the idea of the group. I wanted to see and hear what they do for myself. Here's the thing, though. That electric current is only partially explained by the skill and excitement and focus they bring to their work. And it's not something that anyone could adequately represent in words, recordings, or videos, even if they tried. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of seeing and hearing them live. So I've set myself up for failure. But it's worth trying to relay what I can about these three concerts.

What became completely clear to me during the unremittingly intense performance of Richard Barrett’s Opening of the Mouth was that this piece would not exist if it were not for ELISION, their players, and their focused commitment to music that is highly charged on every level. This reaction was at least partially confirmed (and not at all contradicted) by Barrett’s response to a question along the same lines, saying that he wrote the piece as a member of the ELISION ensemble who happened to be a composer. The few changes in personnel since the original production of the work did not alter that impression for me. There was an unmistakeable, fiery commitment to the work across the entire group. The playing was incredibly virtuosic and soloistic, but there was a clear awareness of the context of the piece. For me that was underlined by Carl Rosman’s change of roles. He was the clarinetist in the original production, but this time he conducted. He knows the work, inside and out. This concert will be broadcast on BBC3’s Hear and Now on January 23rd (and available for the week following). I'd suggest marking it down now--it's not to be missed.

Tim O’Dwyer curated an event called For Braxton (described in this interview) in which a number of Braxton scores were overlapped with one another by subgroups of the ensemble, joined by John Butcher. There were some great moments, including Graeme Jennings' awe-inspiring performance of O'Dwyer's transcription of a Braxton solo for violin, and when Rich Haynes and Carl Rosman and Tim O’Dwyer all played contrabass clarinets in unison. Other members of the ensemble were looking on with huge smiles, obviously enjoying it every bit as much as the rest of the audience. I don't expect to see a moment like that again, ever.

Daryl Buckley (the artistic director of ELISION) came out at the start of the Thursday concert to give a brief introduction and announce some changes to the program order. He went on to say that it was a concert of student and faculty works at the University of Huddersfield, "but we think it's a lot more than that." It absolutely was.

The concert opened with Liza Lim's Invisibility, for solo cello. I'm at a loss to describe the intensity of those eight minutes, though I remember them vividly. It would have been apparent even without reading the program note that the piece was "written for and dedicated to Séverine Ballon." Ballon went far beyond meeting the substantial technical requirements of the piece and completely immersed herself in it. Lim describes the piece as part of an "ongoing investigation into the Australian Aboriginal 'aesthetics of presence' in which shimmering effects both reveal and hide the presence of the numinous." It opens with the use of a serrated bow: the hair is wrapped diagonally around the wood of the bow. When the cello is played with the normal bowing motion, the string reacts according to the constantly changing position of the bow hair in relation to it. It's a very clear example to me of an extended technique being used to advance a much bigger idea. Along similar lines, the four strings are each tuned to a different tension, also affecting the intensity of the meeting between bow and string, as Lim says, "to give an impression of forces flowing at different depths." A second, regular bow was used after the serrated one, exploring more of the subtleties of the differing string tensions. And then Ballon used both bows simultaneously. I knew that sounds were shifting in ways that I could not hear (and in ways that I could), that things were happening that I could not understand, and that the entire experience--from the quality of the intensity to the sounding result--was unrepeatable. Knowing all that brought my senses further alive.

Tim McCormack's Disfix for bass clarinet, piccolo trumpet, and trombone had a very different quality of intensity, to say the least. I think of it as multiply embedded explosions. I don't even know if that is possible, let alone accurate, but it's how I remember it. The performances by Rich Haynes, Tristram Williams, and Benjamin Marks were hugely energetic and truly stellar. Einar Torfi Einarsson's Tendencies was a set of nine short pieces. He wrote, "The division in movements depicts the appearance of difference, the faulty differentiation and fragmental tendencies of perception." I had difficulty finding enough similarity between one piece and the next to feel a real sense of difference or fragmentation.

The program included two solo pieces by Aaron Cassidy. Ben Marks played Because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking (or, Second Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). The silences in this piece grew increasingly tense as they interacted with the sounds around them. Just looking at this brief score sample, I am only partially surprised to find that the silence I see notated there is as long as 15-21 seconds. And watching the youtube video, it's clear that others are longer. During the performance, it felt like time was awkwardly suspended for those silences. (This is coming from someone who has sat through many performed silences that are much longer than that.) The whole piece sets up these contradictions between what is sounding and the amount of physical and mental energy required towards that result. Marks holds the slide position of the next sound for the duration of the silence. Often the slide is moving but no sound is produced. The answer is always "more"--more energy, and an effect that, if not heard, is perceived otherwise. But you can watch the video and draw your own conclusions.

Tristram Williams then performed What then renders these forces visible is a strange smile (or, First Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion). Though it's part of the same set and uses many similar techniques, it's a very different sort of event, with a wild, visceral, and overt intensity. (Watch for Williams' own reaction to the performance as he bows.) You can see something of the level of activity in this score sample as well.

Knowing something about Bryn Harrison's music and about the focus of ELISION's repertoire, I was very curious to see what meeting point they would find. You can tell from what I wrote last year about a piece by Harrison and from this post so far that I have enormous respect for both. But they seemed to me to come from very different aesthetic places. Stasis, repetition, and temporal disorientation are common in Harrison's music. On ELISION's "about" page is a prominent reference to its "complex, unusual and challenging aesthetics." I like Tristram Williams' characterization on his own website: "ELISION has been at the pointy end of New Music Internationally now for over 20 years." surface forms (repeating) was a wonderful meeting point (not a compromise) between Harrison and ELISION. The players were in perpetual, rapid motion for the full ten and a half minutes. The dynamic level always stayed low. There was a tremendous tension sustained throughout. And for me, part of the complete focus that it commanded was the continual asking of the question, what is it? The sound world seemed to me to be either microscopic or cosmic in its dimensions. Finally I landed on the image of a tiny nucleus controlling the action of an entire planet of water. The form of the whole is constant and unchanging, but everything within that form is constantly changing. There is a very useful interview with Harrison in the new book edited by James Saunders: The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Without quoting too extensively, these couple of sentences about his working process shed some light on the piece I heard on Thursday: "I began to see each bar almost as an area of compression, in which I could subtly contract, expand or in some way distort the rhythms. I would then overlay, combine or link material into longer chains of note values to form whole sections of music or even entire pieces." It was awe-inspiring to watch any one of the players, but there was no way to get away from the fact for more than a moment that they were operating as a collective unit.

That is one of the interesting and really effective tensions about ELISION for me overall now, having seen and heard them perform live several times now. They are some of the best soloists in the world, and much of the writing for them (in Opening of the Mouth, for example) is highly soloistic. But they interact with one another at a fundamental level. It is not just about doing a job, or playing their part. They listen, and interact, and engage with the music in such a strong and clear way that I can hardly stop thinking about it a week later.

During the final weekend of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, someone asked me what my favorite event was. I told them that it was not any single event (though I can and will point to several truly stunning events) but the way that different aesthetics/approaches pushed against each other. Part of what pulls me back to the Huddersfield festival year after year (this is my third year running) is that it does not rotate around a single aesthetic or national identity, but presents compelling work at the very highest standard. What I’m trying to get at is that it is the opposite of provincial. But there is no single useful single antonym of provincial. Dictionary.com offers me citified (no), liberal (okay, yes), metropolitan (anyone who’s been to Huddersfield, I invite your reactions), modern (this one is obvious). Actually, there is a part of the definition of metropolitan that applies: “culture, sophistication ... accepting and combining a wide variety of people, ideas, etc.” In an interview with Graham McKenzie on the second weekend of the festival, Richard Barrett responded quite intelligently to a question about his label as a “new complexity” composer. He made the point that the effort to place every piece on a spectrum from simple to complex is in itself very simplistic. “There is an enormous complexity in the interaction that goes on between any music and one or more people listening to it.” He could have been speaking directly about my own vastly different experiences on five successive days of a piano piece by Michael Pisaro that involved single, repeated notes. (I’ll speak about that more in a soon-to-come post.) Barrett opens up from a historical attempt to categorize (/separate/stratify) composers or works to a three-or-more-dimensional relationship between works, performances, and experiences. The festival offered a great opportunity to do just that.

I kept a sort of journal during the CANAL event performed by Frozen Music as it developed over the night of November 7th (as part of Miami Beach's Sleepless Night), from 6pm-7am. Frozen Music's members are Gustavo Matamoros, David Dunn, and René Barge. This was the group's first performance, and it was very exciting to be there to hear it. (Their second and third events, titled Autonomous Sounds are tonight and tomorrow night, as part of Miami Beach's Art Basel.) I'll include their description of the event:

Canal is an exploration of an outdoor environment in Miami Beach using specialized audio devices capable of hearing the hidden sounds that occur underwater, inside the ground and surrounding plant life, and above or below the normal human hearing range. In addition to the sounds of everyday life, these sounds are amplified, mixed, and processed before being combined with a diverse array of other synthetically produced audio signals. The result is a constantly changing auditory fabric—heard through a state-of-the-art, multi-channel sound system—surrounding a section of the Dade Canal. The audience is free to wander within and around this sonic cloud or to come and go over several hours of continuous performance.

A brief excerpt has been posted online. I'll include that now so that you can have some sense of the sound world I am referring to.

It’s a completely different experience depending on where I place myself in relation to the speakers. I found myself interested in a spot out of the direct range of all of the speakers. I feel like I am having the most complete experience of the sound production there, though it is more diffuse. But then I hear something specific going on and I move back to it. One of the first sounds to draw me in is a metallic, reverberant sound, like a glow, or a gritty majesty. I followed a fish that was swimming along very very slowly near the surface of the water. I swear he was saying, what the hell is going on? At some point a receipt floats by, reminding me that not everything in the canal is natural in the first place. For me, that adds to the relationship between the sounds.

I come back about an hour later and it’s like a different piece. It’s as if the canal has gotten more pliable, and the water has opened up to the sound. And I was surprised to see, at the point when everything seemed loudest and most active, that none of the trio was playing at all. What I am hearing are interacting processes. I’d been trying to pick out what was what. David Dunn mentioned how interesting it is that you so often can’t tell. And that suggested a new way for me to listen. The sounds are not separate elements, but a complex relationship, an interaction. Listening in that way, I find that it’s coming alive. I don’t know what or how, but there is percussion, impact, and outcome. But the outcome just keeps going, propelled by the water. It’s growing and interacting. Processes are set in motion and continuing. It no longer seems to matter which are real and which are more synthetic. It just matters that they are all there.

I try lying down, and lose the effect of the sound almost completely. I continue sitting for a time until a worm crawls onto my arm. I get a little freaked out by that, but I guess it’s his territory more than mine. Time to move on. The best way to take in the sounds, I realize, is by walking up and down, moving with them. I can grab at more of the dynamism of what is going on, and there is no illusion of fixity. I try lying down, and lost the effect of the sound almost completely. I find a wonderful spot on a stone bench. Sounds are radiating and reflecting off the water. At the further end of the bridge, the sounds are distilled and ambient. I hear them as delicate strands, some thicker, some thinner. Some swoop down, and others stay on a constant pitch. Others skip around. They are periodic, like gentle waves, but they sound nothing like waves. I return to the performance area and find much more sound and detail. It has clearly been there all along. This music is like a scene that can only be photographed at certain angles, but never experienced in its entirety. My spot on the further bridge is a wide angle shot. On the way to it, or slightly on the side, mostly sound is completely lost. Once I center myself, the sound is a little less clear than before, but I like it that I have to strain to hear it.

I return to the performance area, and the substance of the sound is growing. I hear an intense whistling, which may well be the wind, which is incredibly strong tonight. The sounds are building and reverberating, and forming a kind of counterpoint between sounds and textures. As the sun is rising, the overall sound is gentle and peaceful. Light, sustained tones are most prominent. I am hearing harmonic relationships between parts. There is a cadence on repeated notes. Is it already over?

I was pleased to see so many casual passers-by engaging with the sound and responding to it. They did not seem to know what they were entering, but it drew them in and fascinated them--and me.

I've taken my time to write about the Peter Ablinger events in New York in late September. I needed some time to let my reactions sink in and develop. In any case, this is not a body of work that will become any less interesting over time.

The central event was a Wet Ink portrait concert on September 23rd. Verkündigung (Annunciation), a trio for flute, tenor saxophone, and piano was constructed with what I thought of as undersounds, or unvoiced sounds. You can hear a selection from this performance on the Wet Ink site. At the time I'm writing, it's the third excerpt on the sounds page. The mouth and fingers of the flute were often decoupled. The pedal on the piano was made audible in its attacks and releases. There was an under-the-radar intensity to it, which requires endurance and delicacy and carried well with the commitment and virtuosity of the players. It was a tremendous performance. The piece was one continuous, amorphous thing that seemed to travel a great distance within a very small space. In the Friday Q&A session, Ablinger referred to the attractive surface of the piece, saying that the listener has to "get over it" to get used to the piece. He said the piece itself is constant, but changes to the listener. (That was certainly my experience.) It is designed to be impossible to perceive it in just one way. When Ablinger spoke of the awareness of differences in perception from one's neighbors in the audience, and the dance between composer and listener, I was reminded of Lucier’s quote in Reflections (p.44): “I love to watch a person the moment he or she figures out what is happening in Music on a Long Thin Wire.” These pieces are invented in such a way that they revolve around the listener experience. Neither Lucier or Ablinger has attempted to fix or predetermine when or how the listener will react. They wouldn’t. But they are interested in acclimation, increased alertness, and shifting perceptions.

A long term example of such a shifting perception is my own experience of 1-127 guitar, which was also on the Wet Ink concert. I had heard sections of it several times before. In fact, one of my first light bulb moments about Ablinger’s work came on reading Evan Johnson’s liner notes for Seth Josel’s CD release of this piece on Mode. Seth played it extremely well, but the first time I had little to no idea what was going on. I went specifically to hear it at the CD release in the Diapason gallery and was obviously interested, but the space was quite small (as it had been the first time, at the Renaissance Society at University of Chicago) and I think as a result I put up some barrier to tracking what was going on with the sound. This time, parts 6-18 were played in a fairly large church, and I realized that at least to my (somewhat delicate) ears, it works much much better when the noise has room to be what it is. After all it is Berlin street noise, which of course takes place outdoors. When it was in the larger space, I was better able to engage with the noise and with how the guitar maps onto it. And then I had a rich experience of the piece. I confirmed this for myself on hearing the same player, Matthew Hough, perform it in a smaller venue, Café Orwell, two days later. I found myself wanting to hear it in a church again. I even wonder now how it would work if it were performed outdoors--not in a noisy place with a lot of background noise of its own, but in the open air.

I’m at a loss to say anything about Weiss/Weisslich 22, other than the fact that it is like nothing else, and you can read about it and listen to excerpts at Ablinger’s site.

The performances of several pieces from the new and ongoing Voices and Piano set started with a recording of Ezra Pound speaking. The piano part, played with the recording, not only mapped the voice onto the keyboard, but colored and expanded it. In Carmen Baliero, he traced the melodies of her voice. The Feldman piece was the first time I have experienced a successful bridge crossing all the incongruities between his loud speaking voice and presence and his fragile music. I asked Ablinger about that later and he said yes, it’s like a loud Feldman piece. The chord constructions mapped to both Feldman’s voice and his harmonic language. Amazing. The Hanna Schygulla piece was more literal, tracing the pitch, melody, and breath in her recording. That night was the premier of the Cecil Taylor piece, which included complex and rapid chords and was unmistakably informed by Taylor’s style and technique. The pianist was set in relation not only to the work or character of the speaker and his or her speaking voice, but also to the type of background noise in each recording.

I wrote down some descriptive elements of Regenstück, which included the amplification of water dripping onto drums, sustained string tones, and other instruments in staccato textures. But my most powerful impression was that Ablinger takes an idea and sees it through, and that leads to some compelling places. In fact he has pointed to the one overarching idea of his work as rauschen, or noise. The angles he approaches that idea from are numerous, and the specifics of how he probes it are rich and vibrant. In the Q&A session on Friday, he described it as constant noise, white noise, a musical or acoustic everything, the waterfall, the totality of sounds, the closest sound to a real plain surface. It resonated especially with me when he said it is more silent than silence. In the performance of Weiss/Weisslich 17C for snare drum and noise, I had made a note to myself that my experience of the intervals of noise was quite similar to my experience of a silence in the music of many of the wandelweiser composers. Whether a composer completely fills or totally empties an interval, it becomes a single unit. The listener may take in a succession, but that is based on shifting thought or perception, rather than anything inherent to the work itself.

In Quadraturen IV, Self-Portrait mit Berlin, the self portrait is what the viewer sees, rather than what is seen of the viewer. The ensemble is processing reality in a way that is complex for itself, but a simplification of reality, which becomes clear through the juxtaposition of the live playing with the recording. One of my favorite scenes was in what sounded like a restaurant. The ensemble was working harder and harder to keep up, playing faster and more complex figures, but they were getting submerged in the sound. I love the inversion of it--demanding more of the players in order to show the limits of what can be reproduced. Performance and reality are presented side by side, and quite often, reality dominates. But the greater the effort--both by the composer and the players--to represent it, the more rich the recorded reality becomes in the perception of the listener.

I'll include here the video of a piece that was done in Venice, after the New York events. It can speak for itself.