Other Minds Records to Release SFCMP Album

Composer Brian Baumbusch (photograph by Melati Citrawireja, courtesy of Other Minds)

The good news is that tomorrow Other Minds will release a new album of performances by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Bandcamp has already created a Web page for the album and is currently processing pre-orders for impatient listeners. The ensemble performs a twelve-movement suite composed by Brian Baumbusch entitled Polytempo Music.

Baumbusch cites the interlocking rhythms of Indonesian gamelan music as his primary influence, along with Conlon Nancarrow’s experimentation with hand-punched player piano rolls. By way of full disclaimer, I should confess that this is a domain that occupied my interest as a graduate student. My EUTERPE software allowed me to program six polyphonic voices, each with its own rhythm. “Variations on a Theme of Steve Reich” allowed me to take the prevailing interest in repetitive structures and “warp” it by shifting the tempo for each of the different voices. I have a vague (possibly distorted) memory of Reich having visited the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I demonstrated my software to him. He was, of course, more interested in composing for performing musicians; but he appreciated that the software could adjust the ear to complex polyrhythms.

Unfortunately, Baumbusch is nowhere near Reich’s league. For that matter, on the basis of my exposure to Indonesian music when I was living and working Singapore, his perception of gamelan is not much better. Thus, while each of the twelve movements explores its own approach to the superposition of contrasting rhythms, there is little to draw attention to either an individual movement or the entire cycle, let alone sustain it. Those interested in the technique will probably draw far more satisfaction from available recordings of both Nancarrow and Reich.