Innova 638
Shape Shifting
Music by Scott Miller
Poetry by Philippe Costaglioli
Performed by Zeitgeist: Heather Barringer
and Patti Cudd, percussion;
Anatoly Larkin, piano; Pat OÕKeefe,
woodwinds, with Philippe Costaglioli, voice, and Scott Miller, real-time
electronic processing.
Transformation can be sudden or slow,
drastic or subtle, proactive or
reactive. In music, the listener is often
in the role of voyeur, witness
to the transformation of sonic materials
defined by the beginning and
ending of a performance. We can
experience such a transformation over
an uninterrupted period of time, like a
film that shows a seedling sprout, grow, flower, wither, and die. We witness
everything, even our constantly changing environment, in a linear progression
through time. But another possibility involves transformation Òout of timeÓ or
out of the range of the voyeurÕs perception. Our experience of the
transformation is fragmented,
akin to viewing a series of snapshots or
film clips of a life from birth to death, perhaps even in a non-linear
progression, leaving us to imagine the events in between. In Shape Shifting,
ZeitgeistÕs individual and collective musical gestures are often subject to transformation,
and how they react to changes in the sonic environment often influences the
process of transformation itself. One approach to Shape Shifting is as a series
of
scenes—sped-up, slowed-down, or
even stills—that document and provide
us with different perspectives on the
state of transformation, which we
can
ultimately only measure at the end of the process itself.
Recorded at Fur Seal Studio
Mixing and Post-Production at Waterbury
Music
Recording and Post-Production by Reid
Kruger
Produced by Scott Miller & Pat
OÕKeefe
Executive Producer: Heather Barringer
Booklet
and CD design by Chad Nestor
Dedicated to contemporary music, in
particular the music of the last twenty years, Zeitgeist has commissioned and performed music by both
emerging composers and
some of the finest established composers
of our time. Zeitgeist has released five other compact discs, including SheÕs a Phantom, music of Harold
Budd; Intuitive
Leaps,
music
of Terry Riley; A Decade, music of
Frederic Rzewski; Eric
Stokes;
and If
Tigers Were
Clouds. Zeitgeist is Heather Barringer
and Patti Cudd, percussion; Anatoly Larkin, piano; and Pat OÕKeefe, woodwinds.
Philippe
Costaglioli,
a native of
Catalonia and Southern France, pursues his creative work in three languages as
an author of poetry, short stories, and childrenÕs books. For the last three
years he has been creating multimedia performance pieces with composer Scott Miller and video artist Ron Gregg. He is a
Professor of Film Studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. His poetry is published in France by Les Editions de LÕArriŽre-Pays and in Barcelona
by Jardins de Sarmacanda.
Scott Miller is a composer of orchestral, chamber,
choral, electroacoustic music and collaborative
multimedia works. He is an Associate Professor at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota,
where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music, and music theory.
Thank you: Philip Blackburn at the
American ComposerÕs Forum, Benny Weinbeck and Joe Johnson at Fur Seal Studio,
and Ron Gregg for the video and still images.
Many thanks to our funders: The Aaron
Copland Fund, The Target Foundation, the
McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts
Board, and the many individuals of the Zeitgeist Commissioning Collective.
Real-time and interactive electronic processing performed with Symbolic SoundÕs Kyma and Capybara-320 Sound Computation
Engine.