![]() ![]() ![]() Trueman is keenly aware of how differently fiddlers and laptops deal with time, and these songs highlight the differences. An array of digital drum machines surrounds the drum, also using feedback in unusual ways, while a real-live drummer attempts to survive what amounts to a brutal, accelerating, digital blender.Īround and in between these two pieces are three fiddle pieces that sound as though they flew in from long ago. In "Feedback," the concert bass-drum becomes a speaker that is caressed (by speaker drivers taped to its heads) rather than struck, and its output is fed back to the computer with hand-held microphones. The laptops provide a constant click at 120 beats-per-minute, but the humans can reset the metronomes at any time by striking a handy piece of wood. In "120 bpm," machines and humans duke it out. ![]() What is this 'tool' we call a computer? It is surely not really about computation, and what does it offer us as musical beings? Are there musical places we can travel to or musical buildings we can construct with this tool that were impossible - even for us to imagine - with its predecessors?" Trueman's own description places neither Anvil nor Pulley in context: "Unlike the anvil or the pulley, the computer hides its purpose - to strike or yank will only break. Composed by Dan Trueman, a Princeton music professor who co-founded the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and is a master of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, the work was commissioned by So Percussion and calls for a "laptop/percussion quartet with turntable." It was first performed in Austin, Texas in March 2010, and eventually made its way to Carnegie's Zankel Hall in New York City, where the New York Times lauded the "dazzling results" of mixing "George Crumb's knack for unearthly timbres, Alvin Lucier's infinitesimally fine gradations of tone and the fierce creative audacity of Jimi Hendrix." ![]() Neither Anvil nor Pulley is, in short, a wordless musical epic that explores the man/machine relationship in the digital age. ![]()
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