Bryce Dessner, David Sheppard, Evan Ziporyn: Propolis, 2008
Duration: 40 minutes
Propolis is the resinous wax produced by bees to fill up spaces in the hive. Its medicinal uses and healing powers for humans are myriad and mysterious, and the substance itself—what it's made of—varies considerably from hive to hive. In The Morning Line—which, like the hive, is built using hexagonal geometry—sound becomes the propolis, the connective tissue of the structure. Propolis explores the idea of The Morning Line as a sonic instrument and live performance environment by combining prerecorded spatialized sound and generative MAX/MSP software patches with composed and improvised live bass clarinet by Evan Ziporyn. Propolis was developed through close interaction with artist Matthew Ritchie and architects Aranda/Lasch and a collaborative compositional process among the three composers. The work uses the scaleable 8:3 ratio applied fractally in the architecture to generate several different rhythm devices, as well as the cyclical thematic basis of the structure as formal inspiration. Propolis is a multilayered, nonlinear composition with a palindromic form based around the order/chaos continuum. Six interchangeable movements, each with different sonic and spatial properties and different software patches, migrate from recognizable sounds (bass clarinet, drones, sine waves) and clear musical relationships (rhythm, phrase, spatial counterpoint) to dissociated and heavily processed sounds and chaotic/threatening sonic activity. Propolis exists in two versions: a prerecorded sound work, diffused within the installation and sampled by Ghost Net, the permanent sound work of The Morning Line, and a live version, in which the three composers interact with the sound work on instruments ranging from bass clarinet to mixing board. As with its apiary counterpoint, this propolis is thus altered by its environment, reflecting not only the work of the collaborators but also the specific physical location of each performance.

Mark Fell and Roc Jiménez de Cisneros:
A very short proof of Forester's rigidity result, 2008
Duration: 40 minutes
When asked, "why doesn’t your sound move from speaker to speaker?" prominent sound artist Yasunao Tone replied, "why is this necessary when the audience can move around the sound?" A very short proof of Forester's rigidity result develops this position: rather than moving around the audience, as is typical of multispeaker pieces, here the sound itself is rigid. The listener is placed within and moves through a complex matrix of digital oscillators, each producing one component of the overall sound: a series of precisely synchronized and desynchronized pulses, each one static in a spatial dimension but evolving in a harmonic one. This reversal of roles undermines the traditional placement of a static listener and frontal stage that originated in Italian Renaissance palaces, a paradigm comparable to the invention of one-point perspective in the visual arts. This "first-person" model of musical performance is still evident today in nearly all electro-acoustic and computer music—complete with all the baggage of its visual counterpart. (MF / RJC)

Bruce Gilbert: ab intra, 2008
Duration: 30 minutes
Bruce Gilbert describes his work for the pavilion as an almost living, breathing organism—or at least that's what it sounds like. Sculpted from a multitude of sonic miniatures in Gilbert's unique editing style, ab intra eschews a linear narrative structure. Instead he employs a placement of sound where multiple perspectives and multiple possibilities are the rule, not the exception, arranged in situ in the pavilion. Musical structure can exist, in a sense, “outside” time (Xenakis 1971, 1992), in the sense of abstract structuring principles whose definitions do not imply a temporal order. A scale, for example, is independent of how a composer uses it in time. Myriad precompositional strategies and databases of material could also be said to be outside time. Through association and dissociation, in musical production and theory, ab intra questions the reconfiguration of a space through a singular composition and introduces a swarm of pieces. As Gilbert’s contemporary Cerith Wyn Evans stated when asked about a basic tension in his works—which have been described as isolated and referential, reductionistic and layered, factual and metaphoric, cold and dense—the work may be perceived by some as unnecessarily complex and perverse, but that's what forms its proportions. (FH)

Florian Hecker: Rotating psychoacoustic tuning curves, 2008
Duration: 40 minutes
The pastiche of an outdoor pavilion, an acoustically permeable and open formation, and the loudspeaker groupings as a quasi-“enclosed” arrangement interests me in addition to the paradigms of sound / pavilion dualities by Iannis Xenakis, Billy Klüver and E.A.T., and Bornemann / Stockhausen. The piece starts with an emission of a superabundance of complex noises, synthesized by an “improved” version of the Xenakian technique of the dynamic stochastic synthesis and rapid sequences of pulsars and Gaussian-shaped grains. In a synchronistic prelude these streams of sounds penetrate the open cell structure of the pavilion before a slowly evolving shift of audible perspective embarks and the movement of sound is structured by patterns shaped in the style of Heinrich Klüver's form constants. The spatialization of sound will mutate once more with crescendos of threshold-equalizing noise (TEN) noise bursts. TEN, a novel from of noise developed by Brian C. J. Moore and the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, is "designed so that, when it is present, the level of a sine wave required for it just to be detected is the same for all frequencies. In other words, all frequencies are equally detectable (or undetectable) in the noise" and thus will mask the high-pitched streams of Gaussian-shaped grains preceding this event. The final part of the piece offers a drastic restructuring in sound and spatial movement with a short sequence of nonmusical tones, as employed in the perceptual psychology experiments of auditory scene analysis, characterized by a grouping process in which sound energy that is likely to have arisen from the same source is packaged together to form a perceptual whole. (FH)

Lee Ranaldo: Maelstrom, 2008
Duration: 30 minutes
mael·strom n
1. an exceptionally large or violent whirlpool
2. a situation marked by confusion, turbulence, strong feelings, violence, or destruction
Maelstrom is a multi-channel soundscape that, following on the heels of my 2005 DRIFT project in collaboration with Leah Singer, utilizes elements extracted from that work to create a wholly new piece. I have taken some sonic details—tonal clusters created with electric guitar—from that much larger project and used them as the basis for a sprawling, seemingly static state of guitar bedevilment. While there are many subtle shifts going on within the sound field, the overall effect is meant to be a rather sustained, monolithic sonic cloud—indeed, a maelstrom—real brain-eraser type stuff. I intend to erect a series of loud chambers within Matthew Ritchie’s work, within which one might think silent thoughts. (LR, NYC, September 2008)

Jónsi & Alex:
All Animals, 2008
Duration: 30 minutes
Faraway melodies floating in and out from places we feel are familiar but do not recognize. Is it singing? Is it piano? Is it the animals and trees creaking about in the wind? There is magic within the stillness …We long to start over, use all that is around us to build new beginnings. For some this is the end, but for us it is a second chance, a hope to create harmony and endless possibilities … All Animals is a piece of music composed for The Morning Line. It was written and recorded during September 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland, with acoustic instruments, primarily piano, voice, and animal sounds. (JTB / AS)

Chris Watson: Snᴂfellsnes, 2008
Duration: 32 minutes
Enter the Snᴂfellsjökull crater, which is kissed by Scatari's shadow, before the first of July, adventurous traveller, and thou wilt descend to the centre of the Earth. (Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth)
Recorded on location in Iceland, this composition, which resonates throughout the structure of The Morning Line, captures the atmosphere, mystery, and elemental forces of the remote Snᴂfellsnes Peninsula, home to the Snᴂfellsjökull volcano. The audience is invited to enter and browse within this unique acoustic landscape, which was recorded in surround sound at the time of the midnight sun, before being drawn up the mountainside into the crater and transported toward the center of the earth. (CW)

Thom Willems: Das Gewicht von Licht, 2008
Duration: 35 minutes
“A conductor-composer coaches three trombones-composers through a maze of composer-composed improvizations. This rich flux beam stream of sound is refracted through the artificial gravity lens of digital-composer evolutionary process.” (TW) Beginning with Arnold Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic transformation of harmony, which removed the narrative reliance on a tonal center and the tempered variations thereof, the concept of music as a dynamic field of changing forms and densities rather than a linear, point-to-point, harmonically driven narrative refers back to early twentieth-century shifts brought on by machine-age technologies. Demanding an end to common practice music’s reliance on melody and harmony and instead celebrating the incorporation of new, unheard machine sonorities, already Luigi Russolo’s (in)famous 1910 Futurist treatise, “The Art of Noises,” suggested the dissolution between noise and sound. The compositional framework in detail is to illustrate both the creation and the extension of new instrumental sonorities by way of technology as a fundamental compositional strategy as well as how such technical processes help in directly structuring the piece’s dramaturgical evolution. Indeed, acoustic technologies built from abstract, formal engineering principles permeate and organize many moments of the thematic canvas of absence, disappearance, haunting, the body as subject and site of memory, and the experience of recollection itself. Moreover, the embodied interaction or coproduction takes place among the human players, acoustic instruments, and computational systems. (Chris Salter)
Composition consultant, digital instrument design and performance: Joel Ryan