Bits of Gongs, Sitars, Pianos, Tuvan Throat Singers, Rhodeses…

The Stone, 8 p.m. ($10)
Michael Clemow, Performing Granular Synthesis

This guy promoted his show to the list serve for ChucK, this musical programming language developed in Princeton that I’ve been using for a while, and when I responded to his e-mail with a confirmation that The Stone is an awesome place he was pretty excited.  I missed the first part of his concert/lesson, but apparently he explained what granular synthesis was and had participants/audience members demonstrate by clapping their hands to make some music.  He had this innovative method of analyzing recorded sounds, breaking them down into their constituent parts, and manipulating those parts to reach new timbres and rhythms.  So, it was interesting from a technological standpoint (actually, from a ChucKist’s standpoint, very interesting) but not exactly artistically visionary.  The entire process of breaking something down into its individual parts–analysis and reconstitution–is so interesting, both artistically and philosophically, that it seemed conspicuously absent from the artistic vision of the performance.  That said, there were definitely parts that caught me off-guard, especially toward the end when he forsook explanation of the art for performance of the art and just went for it.