photo by Willie Davis

We’re pleased to bring you this amazing guest post from 2011 ICElab Collaborator Steve Lehman, whose new work Impossible Flow will see its world premiere on Tuesday, April 19th during a FREE ICElab show at (le) poisson rouge in New York City. Enjoy!

-

In my most recent work as composer, expressive timing, compound meter, rubato phrasing, changing tempi, and instrumental gesture are treated as a seamless continuum designed to explore the psychology of musical time and its connection to musical meaning. For that reason, and in anticipation of the world premiere of Impossible Flow on April 19th, I thought it might be nice to share a few thoughts about some of the contemporary composers, performers, and athletes (!) whose ideas about rhythm and musical time have had a major impact on my own work in those areas.
AUTECHRE — QPLAY

I’ve been checking out Autechre’s music for a long time. But, I think this last album, Oversteps, is the one that’s easiest for me to relate to. This track, Qplay (3:00), provides a really clear example of the some of the ways that Autechre uses rhythm and careful timings to blur the perceptual boundaries between ambient sound, noise and pitched sound.

ALLEN IVERSON

It’s really hard to talk about rhythm without talking about the body. And, in fact, the way the human brain perceives musical rhythms is almost identical to the way that we perceive physical movement within our own body. My recent string quartet, Nos Revi Nella,was actually dedicated to Allen Iverson, due to the fact that his virtuosic command of changing speeds and spatial improvisation continues to provide me with a crucial symbolic point of definition in my work as a composer.

ANTIPOP CONSORTIUM + ACEYALONE — HEAT RAYS

I am a huge fan of Antipop Consortium. And I’ve learned a lot about music from listening to their work and through several meaningful collaborations with HPrizm, one of Antipop’s founding members. I’ve listened to this track a lot over the years and tried to get a better grasp of all the things that make it so powerful. Part of what’s so compelling to me is the way that each MC establishes a distinctive and highly complex rhythmic logic while maintaining a profound connection to the underlying structure of the composition.

B.A. ZIMMERMAN — PRELUDE (DIE SOLDATEN)

It’s kind of amazing to me that this video even exists, as it provides a really unique perspective on one of my all-time favorite pieces of percussion writing. This excerpt is taken from the Prelude to B.A. Zimmermann’s 1958/1965 opera, Die Soldaten. I find myself coming back to this passage pretty often, as it exemplifies a lot of the things I try to do in my own writing: (A) creating a sense of ritual through rhythm (B) using silences, ornamentation, and asymmetrical rhythms to create a feeling of disruption and imbalance, and  (C) establishing a continuum of rhythmic stability and instability that is highly expressive.

BETTY CARTER — DROPPIN’ THINGS

It’s hard to know how to begin talking about Betty Carter and her amazing legacy as a composer/performer. Suffice to say that she has a one-of-a-kind sense of rhythm and phrasing that somehow manages to sound futuristic, inevitable, highly sophisticated, organic, and deeply moving, all at the same time! And, of course, those are musical characteristics that I continue to strive for in my own work.

DAMION REID - OF DREAMS TO COME

This is a composition by Robert Glasper that I’ve probably listened to about 100 times over the past couple of years. The drummer on this  track, Damion Reid, is a frequent collaborator of mine, and I never cease to be amazed by the incredible palette of musical colors that he’s able to achieve on his instrument. This track showcases Damion’s amazing brushwork and his uncanny ability to blend percussive gestures, propulsive rhythms, and ambient textures into unified musical phrases.

GERARD GRISEY - VORTEX TEMPORUM

Gerard Grisey is a composer who is important to me for a lot of different reasons. And, certainly, many aspects of his very personal concept of rhythm and musical time continue to inform my own work. The opening passage of Vortex Temporum provides a wonderful example of some of the ways that Grisey uses shifting rhythmic periods to transform musical objects. And, likewise, how harmonic and timbral changes to musical material can have a direct effect on how we perceive the passage of time.

VAL-INC (VAL JEANTY)

Val-Inc is a composer and electronic musician who I have been following for almost ten years. In addition to her preternatural ability to create organic and highly textured sounds within an electro-acoustic setting, Val consistently finds ways to use rhythm and recorded sound to create powerful and otherworldly musical rituals.

FIELDWORK — REQUIEM/RITUAL & GHOST TIME

I have been playing with Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey in Fieldwork since 2004, and it would be almost impossible to overstate the significance of that collaboration with regard to many of my current ideas about rhythm and about music in general. In fact, many of the musical ideas at the heart of Impossible Flow, were first developed in collaboration with Tyshawn and Vijay during Fieldwork rehearsals. This 10-minute video taken from a performance in NYC in August 2009 provides a nice snapshot of some of the work that we’ve done together over the past 7 years.

-

ICE presents the world premiere of Steve Lehman’s Impossible Flow on Tuesday, April 19th during a FREE ICElab show at (le) poisson rouge. Reservations are highly recommended - RSVP by emailing ice@lprnyc.com with the date of the show and the number in your party.