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NoDeadTrees

An Experimentally Conceptualized,
Multi-Sensory, "OMNIMedia" Symphony,
and (Live) Performance-Art Event
including an Interactive Sound/Light Installation
INFORMATION ABOUT: The Performance Concepts, the underlying Creative Process
(including Story writing, Music composing, Programming, etc.)
Some of the Influences, the Research being done,
ongoing progress being made on the Project
and efforts to find support for the Development Costs
through Fundraising, Grants, Fellowships and Private Donations.
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The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
- Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

Claude Debussy, at the age of ten, was sent to the Conservatory in Paris to study piano, music theory, and composition. In his twenties, he won the Prix de Rome prize with his composition L'enfant prodigue. Debussy continued to compose and in 1894, he completed one of his most famous works Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Much of Debussy's music was written for the piano --- an instrument capable of a wide range of tonalities. From it he drew exquisite nuances, relying greatly on subtle use of the pedals. He also was a masterful composer for orchestra and used a large number of instruments not for loudness, but to give a variety of musical colors. Debussy also worked on other projects like the Suite Bergamasque for solo piano (which includes the famous Clair de lune), and the Nocturnes for orchestra --- Nuages (Clouds), Fêtes, and Sirènes.

Topic:
COMPOSITION VS. IMPROVISATION
Experimenting with the concept of time.

I think of composition and improvisation as two different ways to create music. Composing consists of visualizing something, building the form and structures of that imaginative construct and then documenting them in a written score. However, the improvisational method is where I try to create instant complexity, by manipulating many parameters which are always available, parameters that are also available in composition. To further describe the difference between composition and improvisation, I refer to the different ways that they deal with time. In composition you are way outside of real time, using an abstraction of the linear time sequence; I try to imagine the whole process and then I can jump in at any point by zeroing in on time microscopically - stopping the linear flow, so to speak. In composition I can simulate a time structure that -converted to reality- allows the actual piece to come into existence. But improvisation is completely different than that. I am inside time in the moment, forming time and it's passage through reality; and now, with this unceasing flow passing through the time frame I have to follow a certain path which I may have thought about before this and which may turn out to be negotiable during the improvisation. At the same time I have to continuously be conscious of references: what's happened before, how can I go on working with this. This is no senseless continuous going forward, but the intentional visiting of previously existing conditions in order to further transform them. Again and again building bridges to the past. I think this is very important: that time goes forward, but in improvisation again and again one tries consciously to recur to that which was, so as to create points of reference.