VIRTUAL DISCOURSE
 
 Dear Ninh
 
 I understand that recent performances of the piece have generated a bit of
 "controversy."  I think that has a lot to do with the difference in culture
 between France and the USA.  I've been to any number of "recherche musicale"
 events where the electronics sounded considerably less impressive than the
 Quatuor's four small Buchla Lightning-controlled  synthesizers, but one has to
 consider the massive effort that has gone into convincing the concert public in
 France that simple electronics are somehow less good than complex, massive
 electronics--when in fact simple electronics were once complex and massive.
 
 In the USA many computer artists, along with much of the public, regard
 complexity in computer setups with suspicion.  Simplicity is valued and the
 aesthetic is much more toward hiding the details and making a lot from
 apparently simple means.  Also, post-minimal music, hip-hop and jazz, with
 definite rhythms and pulse of the kind found in Virtual Discourse, is found
 much more commonly as a part of US contemporary music.
 
 A second difference is the current emphasis in European computer music toward
 transformation of timbre as a compositional component, something that is not
 going on in Virtual Discourse, which is about rhythm, gesture, the articulation
 of space, and communication.  The manipulation of timbre has become something of
 a dogma in those circles and as a result it is difficult for people to
 understand anything else.
 
 A third problem is that some people don't understand the idea of virtuality,
 confusing it with the idea of simulacrum.  Thus they think that we are
 replacing "real" instruments when we are actually making them hyperreal by
 removing them. I could imagine rethinking the piece, replacing some timbres
 with others, even changing synthesizers at some point in the future.  However,
 this will not change the basic idea.
 
 You asked me some time ago for some notes on the piece that would explain
 it somehow.
 
 Here goes:
 
 These are early notes on the piece when I was at Banff composing it.  The next
 International computer music conference will be there and I will apply to ask
 Helios to come to Banff to play it---
 
 My all-too-brief sojourn at Banff has allowed me the physical space to
 exteriorize my internal discourses, while allowing me the mental and temporal
 space to develop these ideas.  In contemplating the composition of this essay,
 I come to a reassessment of the role and function of certain of my previous
 works. I also began to understand more fully the levels upon which these works
 were related to the piece I am trying to explore during the Nomad residency. 
 What follows are some notes describing that process of reflection and its
 results.
 
 My interactive computer pieces, along with my work in free improvisation and
 various African-American musical traditions, had long been directly concerned
 with exploring the nature, practice and functions of discourse. In computer
 pieces such as "Voyager" (1987-93), for example, an environment was set up
 where an improvising musician engaged in a free musical dialogue with an
 "improvising" computer program.  In this way, modes of discourse in music were
 examined in real time performance, through the apparent anthropomorphization of
 the computer as musician.  Moreover, the fluency and variety of the computer's
 performance, often flawed but in many ways compatible with that of a trained
 musician, obliged one to come to grips with one's idea of creativity itself.
 
 About one year ago I completed the first of my "virtual discourse" pieces. This
 piece was written for a instrumental/vocal music group using conventional (in
 late 20th Century terms) Western classical music techniques.  The text for the
 work was performed by a baritone singer who was called upon to act.  His
 character, a tired old politician, was depicted as lamenting the coming
 changes, the real new world order. He represented that one final attempt by a
 tired old fart to use those heretofore useful racist, sexist, doublespeak
 slogans to rouse his people in one big fat final hegemonic burp.
 
 I noticed that in everyday life, not just in bad political speeches, code words
 had begun to substitute for real, creative expression, just as stock phrases in
 improvised music ("licks") tend to stifle creativity in musicians. People
 were  routinely throwing slogans at each other over dinner, with no real idea
 of their meanings or origins.
 
 I have found useful the term "virtual discourse" as a description of this
 phenomenon, while Douglas Kahn, in one of several highly stimulating
 conversations I had with him during the Nomad residency, termed it
 "ventriloquism."   I began to wonder about how I--we--had become the dummy, and
 what could be done about it.
 
 During the Nomad residency at Banff I have continued work on a new piece on the
 topic of virtual discourse.  The work was commissioned by the Quatuor Helios,
 a  French percussion group-once again, a musical group trained in Western
 musical techniques.  Nominally, the work is scored for four sets of percussion
 instruments; however, no percussion instruments, mallets, or sticks will appear
 on stage.  Rather, sampled "virtual percussion" will be employed, via four
 Buchla "Lightning" movement-to-MIDI controllers, which will translate the
 gestures of the four instrumentalists into sound.
 
 The virtual approach to percussion has several advantages, not least in the
 area of cartage fees, which are expected to be much less for the four tiny
 boxes than for the array of heavy, fragile percussion equipment that is being
 replaced.  The advantage of mutability, however, is for me a crucial factor,
 and one that I will exploit further as I move toward my ultimate goal, a
 virtual orchestral improvisor.
 
 Broadly speaking, mutability in the virtual context means that the physical
 location within which an instrument is played can change at any time. The
 number of instruments, the types used, their apparent physical positions, and
 the area from which their sounds emanate--all these can be changed. Moreover,
 in the virtual performance environment, performers are not limited to the use
 of those gestures that have traditionally been used to play certain
 instruments.  The physical nature of the performance gesture can be
 disassociated from the sound nature of  the instrument upon which it is
 performed.
 
 To devotees of electric guitar, this is old hat.  Tiny movements can produce
 jet-engine decibel levels, due to the magic of overamplification. Jimi Hendrix,
 risking personal electrification by playing the instrument with his tongue,  was
 certainly one of the early performer-composers to exploit the value inherent in
 this possibility.
 
 Percussion performance is bound up with the spatial gestures of the hand, one
 of the most important tools that humans use to communicate.  Of course, the
 performer could use the traditional gestures vis-a-vis the virtual instruments,
 appropriating the apparent intention and physical activity associated with
 "playing" such instruments.
 
 For me, however, the virtual environment raises the possibility of using
 gesture directly to represent states of consciousness or modes of discourse,
 accepting the sounds associated with those gestures as a byproduct of that
 activity. This represents a shift of intentionality from the "playing" of
 instruments in that I could associate even cognitively significant gesture with
 sound, a task that is often difficult to perform on physical instruments.  In
 terms of a continuum, this way of working runs the gamut from simple
 non-referential "playing", through sexually suggestive performance motion,
 toward sign language, to a kind of real-time mime-to-sound interface.
 
 So far I have laid out a field of possibilities in the areas of space, sound,
 gesture, virtuality and communication.   At any time I could decide to exploit
 these issues, already quite a bit for a musical work, for the purely formal
 relationships that could be constructed.  All well and good, but is there
 anything more?
 
 While technology makes the piece possible, the piece does not pay homage to
 technology; its hands are grasping for a different grail.  I wanted to use the
 musical hands in the virtual environment to speak about virtual discourse.  For
 me music is a powerful symbolic way of doing philosophy, of doing sociology, of
 manifesting resistance and presenting alternative solutions to our condition.
 Far from being non-referential. pure, or abstract, I see my music as taking a
 direct part in the dialogue about our planetary situation. The hands, capable
 of direct, though no-verbal expression, would be the link between the world of
 sound and the world of humans.
 
 Besides the usual work of structuring sounds in time, this piece has enabled me
 to move into a number of unfamiliar areas.  A system of musical notation had to
 be developed that would mediate between the training and background of the
 musicians, the performance practice of the piece (which, for the most part,
 excludes improvisation) and the idea of dual intentionality embodied in the
 approach to gesture.  This system had to include a (perhaps choreographic)
 means of communicating gesture and spatial location. The study of Noh drama and
 early Indian music has been of benefit in this regard.
 
 Other issues of space include staging, blocking, lighting, and stage
 appearance, issues traditionally suited to a theater or mime environment. One
 approach that I have been considering is the creation of metatexts, storyboards
 that define the basic modes of discourse and the issues I want to examine. These
 are then transformed into sections in the composition.
 
 I feel that this piece, when completed at the end of August, may be seen as
 reflecting the nomadic condition.  Far from reifying the philosophy of the
 state, the work depicts the consequences of adopting a language not your own,
 or having one forced upon you.  Despite the influences from ancientmusical
 traditions of Japan, Africa and India (and these are more a matter of function
 than of form or content), the piece depicts, not a ritual, but a family in
 crisis.
 
 As the attempt to drown out alternative voices goes on (through sheer volume in
 some cases), I have seen people begin to resist, to find alternatives.  At the
 same time, frustration, fear and anger can turn inward, causing
 self-destructive behavior.  The contradictory adoption (emulation) of the
 oppressor discourse causes shame, guilt and internal division.  Serres'
 "parasite" situates itself between you and your own mind, your own expression,
 and refuses to move.
 
 The major issue of our time is the movement of people across borders in search
 of needed, lost or stolen resources.  I wish to explore the consequences of the
 dissolution and reformation of culture that occurs as nomads attempt to create
 the means of telling their own story.  As the nomad comes face to face with
 power, namely that power which disinforms, divides, confuses and alienates,
 disorientation can be a natural result.
 
 The piece poses the solution of personal vigilance in the service of creativity
 as a partial response to this dilemma.  The necessity of constant personal and
 societal reformation as a means of resistance is one that African-Americans
 know well, and that I feel competent to deal with in a piece of musico-spatial
 art.
 
 Virtual Discourse is absolutely not "absolute music."  The piece is not really
 a "work" in the modernist sense--heroic, visionary, unique.  Rather, I choose
 to explore allegory and metatextuality, the programmatic, the depictive--and
 through embedded indeterminacy, the contingent.  One ongoing theme in my music
 is interaction and communication.  Virtual Discourse employs technology to
 explore this theme, but its stance toward computer technology is neither
 celebratory or hostile, but utilitarian.
 
 The work is in three movements, each of which takes a specific attitude toward
 physicality as an intentional act, that is, an act embodying meaning.  My own
 view is that gesture announces emotional and mental intention. Thus, the notion
 of the uselessness of the body, a trope going back to the Greeks, is definitely
 not a part of the world view expressed by the piece.  Rather, an Africoid
 notion of the body as temple, a notion going back to the Egyptians, is at the
 center.  In such a context, virtuality should enhance, not interfere, with
 communication between humans.
 
 This runs counter to current trends in "virtual reality", where one sees that
 the primary creators have retained the classical Greek notions of body,
 rejecting it in favor of nonphysical experience.
 
 In most computer music, loudspeakers are used to make sounds and articulate
 space.  Virtual Discourse differs from many recent works in terms of
 spatiality, in that the performers and the speakers inhabit the same physical
 area.  This allows the performers to articulate the sonic space locally, as
 instruments do, rather than imposing upon the public a stereo stage or
 enclosing the audience within a quadraphonic box.  This reduction of distance
 between the virtual instruments and the source of their control reduces for the
 audience the distance between the performers and the sounds.  The intention here
 is to allow the audience to empathize with the performers' physicality.
 
 Percussion performance is bound up with the spatial gestures of the hand, one
 of the most important tools that humans use to communicate.   In Virtual
 Discourse, the hands, capable of non-verbal directness, are the link between
 the world of sound and the world of humans.  In the first two movements, the
 piece uses gesture directly to represent directly states of consciousness or
 modes of discourse, accepting the sounds associated with those gestures as a
 byproduct of that activity.  This amounts to a kind of post-indeterminacy,
 where the virtuality of the instruments creates the virtuality of the score.
 
 For important sections I have fashioned code references.  The opening movement
 recalls the situation in the novel "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban, where a
 post-(in this case, nuclear) holocaust people attempt to find out where they
 come from and what their true language was.  This world is much like our own,
 where people are spiritually isolated from one another.  The opening "calls"
 represent an attempt to fashion a new language from the remains of the old.  At
 a certain point, for a brief moment, the joyful lilt of the sounds indicate that
 this language has been found.  However, the moment does not last, and we return
 to the search.
 
 The second movement is a blues at zero degrees Kelvin:  very slow, frozen, out
 of all time.  The calls here announce ritual, evoking the spirituality of the
 blues form.   In this movement it is discovered that these post-holocaust
 people could be post-slavery African peoples.
 
 My name for the third movement is "Santeria Gamelan" or "Polytonal Pelog." This
 section of the piece is based on the "llame", or call, characteristic of Cuban
 music from Santeria to salsa.  These calls also function as announcements,
 indicating presences and essences.  In this movement the Santeria concept of
 llame is used directly, though actual llames are not used.  Respecting the
 spiritual basis and tradition of Santeria means that appropriative misuse of,
 say, Babalu Oye, could be dangerous and foolish.
 
 The third movement is the only one that appropriates the apparent intention and
 physical activity associated with "playing" percussion instruments.  In this
 movement, a group of musicians, trained in percussion techniques, becomes a
 metaphor for itself.  In this way the musicians themselves become virtual.
 
 An ongoing theme in computer music concerns its scientism, which the improvisor
 and anthropologist Georgina Born has remarked upon in her groundbreaking book on
 IRCAM, Rationalizing Culture. Virtual Discourse presents an implicit critique of
 this kind of "science envy."  In one sense, magic, meditation and prayer are
 technologies, right along with the infrared controllers and digital recordings
 that Virtual Discourse exploits technically.  In dealing with magic in its
 references to playing invisible instruments, the piece allows different
 concepts of magic to exist in the same environment.
 
 In this essay I have so far sought to contradict the notion that the piece is
 primarily about the technical replacement of "real" percussion instruments with
 their virtual counterparts.  It is obvious that the timbres used in the piece
 evoke rather than imitate percussion instruments. Now that the old magic of
 "synthesize any sound" has been exposed as chimerical, some segments of the
 computer music community have chosen timbre as the metaphorical nexus of
 composition itself.
 
 In fact, some of the commentary about the work embodies this notion, assuming
 that "recherche des sons" is the main raison d'etre for the use of computers in
 music.  The particularist nature of this critique is clear to anyone familiar
 with the direction of live interactive computer music over the last fifteen
 years.
 
 In computer his notion of the central function of timbre draws at least part of
 its power from commercial culture and its concept of "high fidelity."  On this
 view, sound synthesis and reproduction technologies are merely neutral carriers
 of meaning--a notion that Virtual Discourse explicitly rejects.
 
 The assumption that with "real" instruments a composer could "do more"  are
 based in ideas of authenticity and virtuosity that Virtual Discourse uses
 performer virtuosity to critique.  The assumption that cheap imitation and
 wizardry are at the heart of the work is therefore based in a reification of
 the very attitudes that are critiqued in the work.
 
 The reality of the moment is that even "bas de gamme" synthesizers  (to quote
 one review) now feature 16-bit sound recorded digitally at the standard CD
 sample rate.  Such equipment,  in many cases the progeny of research performed
 in the major computer music studios, such as CCRMA and IRCAM, produced by large
 corporations, often prove superior in sound quality to equipment found in many
 computer music studios.
 
 This fact has proven to be a bitter pill to swallow for those who have claimed
 high-culture legitimacy for musical research projects based largely upon their
 expense.  Because these instruments are often used by commercial musicians, the
 spectre of "mass culture" hangs over them.  Thus their lack of suitability for
 "serious" music is asserted.
 
 The timbres used in the piece reflect my preference for real-world timbres over
 synthetic, nonreferential ones.  In this way I assert my traditionalism, or
 rather my affinity with popular culture, which for the most part has found
 abstractly conceived, algorithmically synthesized timbres unappealing.  For the
 same reasons I abandoned video synthesis and transformation techniques.  The
 dulling sameness of the mathematically regularized pixel transforms eventually
 paled, as they have in rock videos. The effects took on an aura similar to that
 of now-dated 1960s light shows, which proved to possess the intellectual
 half-life of a Budweiser.
 
 Widespread recent resistance to the insistence in some quarters on sonic
 abstractions as a sine qua non of computer music is amply demonstrated by the
 sales of sampling technology.  This parallels a similar shift in visual art in
 the 1960s, when abstract expressionism was supplanted by the
 recontextualization of familiar forms.  Virtual Discourse uses absolutely
 recognizable timbres in a fashion that allows them to recontextualize
 themselves.  Using "the wonder of technology" to transform them
 Disneylandically would be infinitely more banal than any sound emanating from a
 cheap synthesizer.