(seepings)

(seepings) (2017) for ensemble and sampler

commissioned and premiered by, and dedicated to, defunensemble (Helsinki, Finland, EU)

Since I’m a huge music nerd, associations to past plague my creative work striving for freshness and new contexts. Music from my score/audio file collection try to seep into my scores, leaking over to the sounding world via the porous substance that is my creative brain, actively hypersensitive to sounds and their connections. In (seepings) (2017), I let these echoes seep through rather concretely, using ‘their’ instrument, the loudspeaker.

My compositional task was to react to this… ‘electroacoustic.’ I did it in four stages, or commands: Ignore. Imitate. Develop. Embody. Whereas the third refers on score-level to spectral processing, the last reaction type focuses on the materiality of sound – listening to sound’s ‘habitus’, or ‘body.’ Instead of merely matching abstractly shared, standardized Western black-and-white pitches, musicians’ tones react with concrete physicality of their sound production, in an embodied, empathetic translation in sound, so to speak. (Birthing metaphor?) This ‘four-chord theme’ of reactions is composed into a recurring chaconne, with repetitions, (row?), while the overall form is that of a ‘psychological’ sonata-allegro… I digress.

From a half-second of sound, we typically recognize only the decade and the genre, according to studies in mental chronometry. So if you cannot fathom these identities, do not worry. It’s predominantly white, Western, male, and personal/cultural. Not too much appropriation/contact going on. Sprinkles of Shabazz Palaces, Kaija Saariaho, touch of Gagaku maybe. All lived through, for whatever reason, and now seen (heard? – composed?) for what they are. In about 14 minutes total. Works best live 🙂

© 2018 Jarkko Hartikainen

The Helsinki-based 1981-born composer’s favorite colleagues (to listen to) at the time of writing the above were Chaya Czernowin, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Rebecca Saunders, Michelle Lou, Ahsley Fure, SOPHIE, Jean Grae, Lucrecia Dalt, St. Vincent, Anne Imhof, Yaeji, and Liza Lim. More info at www.jarkkohartikainen.net