The Institute for Curiosity

Description

Last update: 30-10-2022

Composed for: The Torch Collective

Instruments: Trumpet, Clarinet, Double Bass, Vibraphone/Percussion.

Added to the Map of Miracles: Institute for Curiosity.

Location: Circle Zone 1, Fountain Island.

SCORE DOWNLOADS WILL BE HERE WHEN FINISHED

About the piece

The Institute for Creativity is an interesting initiative by Brian Kai Chin. Brian planted a Torch on the Map of Miracles, but this project didn’t turn out to be ‘just a piece of music’. I wrote a new blog “What is Creativity” , it explains how the institute influenced my creative world. I combine music, textile art and illustration to keep the creative flow going. My wish is to inspire composers to literally drag materials into their studio for inspiration. Now I am combining different art-forms in my studio, I named it the Institute for Curiosity. I put that as a new location on the Map of Miracles.

I love the instrument combination that the Torch Collective offers. There are so many ways to mix those sound-colors, that I wanted to extend my way of thinking about orchestration. I designed a hand-felting project with this composition, to explore whether new materials in my studio would influence my orchestrations, my soundcolors, my #Paints

Experiment: Imagery with felt & illestrations

 

 


The music is inspired by ‘La Voz del Viento’, haiku’s by Alejandra Darriulat . The composition will be a musical quilt made out of 5 – 7 – 5 haiku’s featuring important years for feminism: 1919, 1956, 1971.  Alejandra and I discussed that selecting poems from her book and putting them in a different order will make a different story. I discovered that my selection in my order told my own story, it became very personal to me, but didn’t express the story written in the book. When I write music, I also put parts in a specific order to express my own story. There are a lot similarities that I never thought of before. We decided not to reveil the haiku’s I selected, nor the order I put them in. Please read the book in its original form and experience the beauty of Alejandra’s poetry.

The ever-changing-capacity of the location and the notion that you can make your own story by putting existing haiku’s in a different order, inspired me to make the composition will be an unfinished quilt. The (hand-felted) pieces can be put together in a different way by the musicians every time, so they can tell their story by picking pieces and putting the pieces in a different order. Inspired by ‘in C’ by T. Riley, I wanted to give the musicians the freedom to participate in the compositional proces, so they can add their own personal story to the music.

I’m currently studying Schönberg’s ‘Models for Beginners in Composition’, especially the notes used by Schönberg to teach Alban Berg. These nots will inspire the theory used. Schönberg emphasizes the use of variations, which will work well for this project.I have made variations with the felted fabrics to experiment in a visual way.

Below the notes and an interview with Schönberg about his paintings and his idea that a composer should have a feeling for measurements.

A few pages of Schoenberg models for beginners in composition


To prepare this composition, I experimented with other pieces first, to get to know the instruments better.

  • Dog Paw Fanfare for trumpets and barking audience: to learn more about (piccolo) trumpet and audience interaction.
  • Margina for windband: to learn more about Asian persuccion and marimba.