grep – adapt/oppose

This Sonic Arts Lounge will present the results of a course for experimental music held in the summer of 2006 at the castle of Königs-Wusterhausen by Sascha Armbruster, Burkhard Beins and Orm Finnendahl. Starting point for the course were various compositions and improvisational concepts by the workshop leaders, in particular Orm Finnendahl’s grep for saxophone, drums and laptop. In tonight’s concert, individual parts of the composition will be interpreted by Sascha Armbruster, Burkhard Beins and Orm Finnendahl, several sections also by workshop participants.

grep is not a composition in the traditional sense of determining the act of playing and the sounds produced by the musicians. Rather, electronic methods and syntactic contexts are chosen that determine how the sounds played by the interpreting musicians are processed by the computer; the sounds as such are mostly chosen by the musicians. This leads to a modified approach with respect to the process of developing a piece, i.e. instrumental play and programme are developed in a reciprocal relation, which demands of the interpreting musicians to actively take part in the design of the performance. Visualisations and computer transformations that can be produced in real time make things transparent for the musicians. The graphics, which are also visible for the audience, do not represent a score but show how the sounds played live are processed by the computer, giving the interpreting musicians the opportunity to adapt different forms of interaction.

This attempt at new ways of relating concept, composition and improvisation follows the idea of open source forms of cooperative production that can e.g. be found in the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia or in various developments of computer programmes and operational systems.

In addition, own compositions of the participants as well as several compositions and concepts by Burkhard Beins will be performed, in which very consciously only a few particular musical parameters are influenced while all remaining aspects are left open to the choice and creativity of the interpreting musicians. adapt/oppose, for instance, consists of a complex framework for seven instrumentalists that only predefines the course of communication within the group but leaves open the individual choice of musical material, dynamic and duration. The musicians are to act in a specified way in specified places but shall also chose and place own new material. This allows the breaking up of habitual ways of interaction and also the production of a polyphonic transparency that is usually difficult to obtain in larger improvisational groups.