Sony G90 - Manual (Page 55)

Surrounded!
Roger Reynolds: Watershed (Mode 70, DVD)
. . . . . . . . .
Jargon
ere we have a first that needs
attention – “the first music DVD
[the package says] designed to
totally utilize the medium’s full 5-channel
capability.”
I just wish it were better, and less pre-
tentious. The composer, Roger Reynolds,
is (as he probably won’t forgive me for
saying) one of the earnest, gray mod-
ernists of a past generation, a specialist in electronic music
who teaches at the University of California in San Diego.
One problem with modernist composers is (I’m tempted to
say “was,” but they’re still with us, even if their influence
has waned) that they over-intellectualize. They tend to over-
value things in music that can objectively be analyzed, and
then they turn around and insist that
everything in music can or should be ana-
lyzable. One mistake they make is to
think that music is a language – not
metaphorically (as when someone tells
us “music is the universal language”), but
literally. They think musical sounds are
or should be connected by grammatical
rules, like words in a sentence. That’s an
academic preoccupation, if anything is.
On this DVD are extensive conversa-
tions with Reynolds, with Steven Schick, a
percussionist who plays the longest piece on the disc, and
with Peter Otto, a computer sound specialist who’s responsi-
ble for (jargon alert) the “spatialization” of sounds in one of
Reynolds’ works. Now, we could argue over whether there’s
too much conversation, and whether it ought to be sand-
wiched around the actual compositions, as it is on the DVD,
or placed in its separate section, for
G R E G S A N D O W
Experiment in a New Medium
Because I’ve been exposed to far too much featureless mod -
ernistic music, and might be jaded coming anywhere near
what looked to be new example of it, I thought I’d ask Barry
Rawlinson to listen to this, too. A non-professional ear’s
reaction would be worthwhile, I thought, especially since
music like this shouldn’t just appeal to specialists. Maybe
Barry would hear something in it that I didn’t. We heard and
watched the DVD together, both of us for the first time. We
d i d n ’t discuss our reactions. Here are his, refreshingly more
evocative than mine. GS
first played Watershed IV, in which the listener is placed at
the center of a circle of percussion instruments. I found
the “Raindrops” section a particularly engrossing piece as
the surrounding forest of percussion is chaotically stimulated
to reveal an imaginary landscape radiating outward into far
darkness. I soon discovered that a mild elevation of rear- c h a n-
nel levels centered this sonic landscape
in my room, at which point I ignored
the visual image in favor of the hemisphere of sound projected
far beyond the walls, stretching into the distance all around –
full immersion. The larger drums seem to ripple the floor as
percussive wave fronts pass, smaller
sources hang in space around you,
B A R R Y R A W L I N S O N
I
The performance you experience
will be defined by which sounds
you choose to listen to, and your
choice can vary from moment to
moment, implying that you can
never experience the same
performance twice…