Extreme Multimedia from C4NM

Late yesterday afternoon the Center for New Music (C4NM) live-streamed the world premiere of a 22-minute acousmatic video entitled Women in Parallel Empires. For those unfamiliar with that adjective, the second definition on its Lexico Web page is:

Of, designating, or characterized by sound produced without a visible source, or a visual component or association; audible but unseen.

This certainly describes the result of the joint effort of Jane Rigler and Tessa Brinckman, since any relationship between the rich imagery of the video and its soundtrack never seemed to be anything more than accidental.

Women in Parallel Empires now has its own Web page on the C4NM YouTube channel. The video itself is accompanied by a prodigiously long program note, which, among other things, describes the composition as a “space opera,” created “in posthumous collaboration with Cécile Chaminade’s Sérénade aux étoiles (Serenade to the stars, 1911),” scored for flute and piano. Given that almost the entirety of the soundtrack involves rich electronic synthesis, the few sonorities of acoustic instruments clearly define Chaminade’s presence in the overall score.

The work is one of those pieces that I sometimes like to call “agenda composition.” As the program note puts it, that agenda “explores how we might reclaim flute compositions by women composers dismissed from the Western canon, by re-assembling them within contemporary contexts, and addressing (and/or subverting) the concept of Empire, genius, and extraction in Western ‘art’ music.” Personally, I found little by way of connection between this mini-manifesto and what I was viewing on the screen.

To be fair, I think that it is just as well that this was my experience. The imagery was highly imaginative and even a bit witty from time to time. The soundtrack consistently provided an audio context that encouraged the viewer to look for details among those images, rather than distracting that viewer with media overload. As a result, my patience flagged only once: I checked my watch about two-thirds of the way through what I knew would be a duration of 22 minutes. Most importantly, I made it a point to watch this piece in full-screen mode, because I really did not want to be distracted by trying make sense of all the verbiage in the program note!