Getting back to my continuing attempts to get to the bottom of how and when the Diamond Curtain Wall Music system became inextricably linked in the composer's mind with Falling River Music - as seems to have been the case after a certain point - I figured last year that some light could be shed on the matter by getting hold of an actual physical copy of 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012. The music in this giant box is of course available on Bandcamp, but that provides only a shot of the box cover; for whatever reason, photographic evidence of the box's contents just doesn't seem to be available online. A look at the actual liner notes, I thought, could be quite instructive.
- Then of course the PMP box was released, and I wrote a detailed post about the various questions which might be answered there, given that the promotional material made much of FRM in its blurb. Months later, I still hadn't managed to find anyone in the UK selling a copy of this set; and eventually I gave up and ordered a copy from an official Czech retailer - only to discover that the questions remain largely unanswered.
Back in the 2000s, DCWM was DCWM, and performances of it would list a single primary territory (assuming they listed any composition at all*). In 2007, DCWM and FRM were still considered completely separate: B's trio performance at Victoriaville that year listed only Comp. 323c, whilst a foray into something new the same year - later released in digital-only form as Quartet (FRM) 2007** - again lists only a single primary territory for each of the four performances (and does not include any live electronics). Four years later, Trio (NYC) 2011 was a reading of two territories in the 36x range - the same numerical range as the pieces interpreted under the aegis of FRM in 2007 - and although its eventual release in 2013 saw the performance described straightforwardly as a "Diamond Curtain Wall Music trio"... was it? The appearance here of a second listed territory may rather be indicative of a slightly different approach being taken.
2012 and 2013, then, saw an apparent enhancement of this same approach, although I am yet to track down any explanation of what changed, when or why (albeit the last question more or less answers itself: a hybrid strategy pushes the music in new directions, keeps it moving and growing). The PMP set may only have been released last year, but it dates from a full decade earlier, and despite no overt acknowledgement of the music it contains being a mixture of DCWM and FRM, that is pretty clearly implied (indeed it's hard to infer anything else from the liners). Not long before that, the twelve duets were recorded, and of course these performances are ostensibly "just" DCWM: it's right there in the title of the album. However, the track listing - which gives three opus numbers for each piece - rather suggests that the title may not tell the whole story. In every case, the second territory listed is a GTM composition, and the third... well, we already know that opus numbers in the 36x range could represent either DCWM or FRM.
Anyway... I managed to acquire a used(ish) copy of this album last week, and finally got to satisfy my curiosity regarding what it contains (other than the twelve discs, obviously)...
Everyone has seen the front cover, but I certainly had never seen anything else, so let's start with the back of the box***:
- Needless to say, I have no idea what the significance might be of the phrase "mix master" in this context (it seems to be a refugee from a different sort of musical experience altogether), but as you can see from the rest of the writing on there, it is definitely the real thing - nor is there any sign of this having been some sort of promo copy#. The colour-coding for the players, meanwhile, is representative of the contents: the four discs featuring Kyoko Kitamura are white, as are the stiff card folders housing them, whilst those featuring Erica Dicker are turquoise, and those featuring Katherine Young are yellow.
On opening the box... any question about the possible use of FRM strategies here would appear to be cleared up right away, by the cover for disc one:
Painted images of this type only began appearing around the same time as the term Falling River Music was itself first being disseminated, and as far as I know they were not in use before then##. The remaining three discs comprising the first third of the album follow a similar pattern:
- although the pattern is then promptly disrupted when we move on to the second duo:
Readers with sharp eyes, and plenty of familiarity with the NBH catalogue, will no doubt recognise the cover of disc six as being the same image which adorns yet another box, Trio (New Haven) 2013###. We will have to come back to that album a bit later, fleetingly; in the meantime, as regards disc five, this image would appear less likely to represent a graphic title than it does an extract from a portion of the score. (Maybe...) In any case, discs seven and eight display a (partial) return to the previous pattern:
- and if you look very closely at the cover to disc seven, there, you will see a small detail which invites speculation that this could have been the actual graphic title for Comp. 366g - that disc's designated primary territory - although the distinct lack of alphanumeric content still suggests it probably isn't. Anyway, that's two thirds of the box accounted for, at least in terms of the front covers for those discs; discs nine and ten are along similar lines, only the image for disc ten is far closer to those used in the first group:
- whereas the final two discs have covers which recall those for discs five and six:
Some fun was had with these; as you can see from the back cover of the box, above, the graphic design is by one Ben Heller, who presumably was able to draw from a pretty large pool of images in making his choices. Now that we've seen all twelve individual covers, we can group them into four categories: discs one, two, three, four and ten feature possible graphic titles, maybe even combination graphics (representing in hybrid form the three compositions played in each case); discs five and twelve use partial schematics, either extracted from the graphic titles or from portions of the scores (NB the figures in the cover for disc twelve repeat: like I say, fun was had with these); discs six and eleven use complex shapes with simple colouring, three of these in each case (and where one of these covers was immediately recycled^); and discs seven, eight and nine feature painting only, although as noted above, the image for disc seven looks tantalisingly like something which is trying to grow into a full graphic title. (If so, we have captured it here in its "infancy".)
Of course, in between conceiving of this post and starting to write it, I'd already realised how much less clarity I am going to be able to provide here than I had originally hoped. (Sorry about that... it wasn't deliberate!) Without knowing more about who Heller was, how he was recruited and what remit he was given for the job, we cannot even safely assume - though I would really like to think we can - that each disc's cover represents material germane to its musical content. (Discs six and eleven pose the biggest doubt, for obvious reasons.) For all I know, he was simply given access to a huge variety of scores and told to use whatever he wanted; if he had no musical knowledge himself - no knowledge of B's music in particular - he could very easily have just come up with a series which pleased him, and which he hoped would please the purchaser. (But if that was the case, I would say he did at least succeed.)
Having got this far, let's have a look at some of the back covers for the discs:
Everyone can draw their own conclusions at this point - or not..! (I have not shown all of them here, of course - some of them are more interesting visually than others. Oh, and I apologise for the poor reproduction of the bright yellow theme for discs nine-twelve.) It would seem inescapably obvious that here, the schematics used must be extracted from the actual respective scores - but since they don't all follow the same pattern, even that is not a safe inference; again, we don't know what the designer's familiarity was with the music, and should probably just not assume anything.
Liner notes which appear on the Bandcamp page for the album are reproduced here, too:
- so that, overall, the purchaser need not miss a booklet at all in this case. Sure, a few photos from the sessions would have been great - but in all honesty, such loving care went into the production of this album that it would just feel greedy to ask for anything more. The set is almost as much of a treat for the eyes as it is for the ears; just let's not break our brains over trying to unpack and make sense of all the various imagery.
Is that it, then? Did I really learn nothing new at all from this, as it turns out..? Possibly not, but - regardless of the provisos above, I cannot help but see the presence of here of some of these images as confirmation that FRM strategies were deployed alongside the stated DCWM; and I am more inclined than ever to conclude that this hybrid approach became typical, some time between 2007-8 and 2011-2. It really feels as if I missed a crucial announcement, somewhere along the line; in addition to the various albums already cited above, we might consider Quartet (Warsaw) 2012 to be significant, with its teasing rubric Comp. 363b+ (even though the group is described as a DCWM quartet)^^. By August 2014, things have become so inherently complicated that two quartet sets utilise five compositions each. But, in terms of narrowing the dates down a bit, we can also observe that not only were 2008's Moscow and Mestre concerts based around readings of a single composition, the same was also true of the Mannheim quartet in October 2010. Whatever development seems to have happened, it presumably took place no earlier than 2011.
I don't know about you, but the lesson I am getting from all this is to stop worrying at it quite so much: naturally, I can't help trying to figure it out, little by little, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that unless I get the chance to talk at length and in depth to the composer himself, or to someone like Taylor Ho Bynum or James Fei - or to one of the duettists cited above, for example - I am probably never going to get to the bottom of this. Let's not forget that in some recent(ish) cases, music is released without being described as belonging to any strategy at all: I have observed before that this was true of the Knoxville 10+1tet, but it applies equally to Trio (New Haven) 2013 (I said we would need to come back to this one!). The track listings - for want of a better term - on there look to have been patterned the exact same way as those in 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012; but whatever the superficial similarities, it is worth pointing out the very obvious difference between the two releases: the New Haven set includes no electronics at all. Just listen to it... stop trying to make sense of it.
After all, I am no nearer to being able to tell the various systems apart by ear, DCWM from FRM, or either of them from the recent Lorraine system; but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the music. Indeed, I never get tired of it, and yet I'm happy to admit that I am years away from really understanding it. Assuming there are years remaining to me, I am content to spend at least some of them immersed in this music. In times such as these, we may all need reminders of what humans can do when they work together, rather than compete against each other...
* Numerous audience boots appeared during the blog's first year of activity, featuring concerts which had only just taken place; several of these were of DCWM. Obviously, not all bootlegs come with any sort of track listing - and the ones which do often have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
** NBH042-5 inclusive: the four are considered one "album", but with separate catalogue numbers. There is of course also a double digital album, Sextet (FRM) 2007 (NBH046-7), featuring an expanded version of the same band - and where no compositions are listed at all (something I have grumbled about before).
*** However much I indulge my artistic tendencies - such as they are - with my photography, this does not extend to simple pictures for illustrative or explanatory purposes: photos of album covers or liners, etc, will generally have had minimal effort put into them. I get everything I need into shot, and make sure it's focused, and that's about it. No apologies, therefore, for the crappy quality of the pictures from here on down...
# If those existed at all, I would guess they featured greatly simplified packaging - but of course I don't know.
## The graphic score, on the other hand, is something with which B. first experimented at least forty years previously. An example of this - a fully-graphic score with a colour element - was examined last year; not quite the same thing, of course.
### Identical, actually, except for the background: the brushwork on the three painted shapes is precisely the same in both cases. (They may or may not have been painted, but they were coloured in manually, one way or another.) What is this telling us, exactly..? The same image could have been used without much thought; or, the use in two different contexts of the same cover art might indicate that no inferences should be drawn from any individual use of any image - this has occurred to me.
^ Per their respective Bandcamp pages, both 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012 and Trio (New Haven) 2013 were released on 10th June 2014, although I would never take those dates as being completely reliable. (Indeed, in this case it seems more likely that at least one of those dates is wrong: two box sets released on the very same day? - Why?)
^^ I had completely forgotten this, but the booklet for the Warsaw album includes a photograph of a music stand, presumably used in the performance: on it are two sheets of paper, one of which contains those same three hand-coloured shapes which adorn the cover to disc six shown above - as well as the cover for Trio (New Haven) 2013 - but with numerous alphanumerics attached. Does that mean that this sheet is somehow specific to the multiple sub-variants of Comp. 363? It could do, since the primary territory for disc six here is 363f, whilst disc three of the New Haven album includes the same variant as one of its secondaries, or tertiaries. Or... it might be something else altogether, for use under specific circumstances during any number of performances around this time.
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