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 O’Keefe, 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 “out of time” or out of the range of the voyeur’s 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, Zeitgeist’s 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 O’Keefe

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 She’s 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 O’Keefe, 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 children’s 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 L’Arriére-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 Composer’s 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 Sound’s Kyma and Capybara-320 Sound Computation Engine.