ashbery tunings for 10 / Antoine Beuger

work
ashbery tunings for ten

author
Antoine Beuger

year
2005

description
For this version of Ashbery tunings for 10  -a Beuger piece we had already performed-  we decided a few things: the musicians, their location in the room and an order for the pages included in the score; namely, there are thirty “tunings” or “attunements”. One per page. The musicians were located in five different spots within the room, two musicians in each spot: violin and clarinet, bass and cello, guitar and flute, accordion and melodica, melodica and sine tones. The audience could sit in two parallel rows of chairs with their backs to each other. The order of the pages: 17, 25, 5, 4, 18, 12, 27, 2, 8, 23, 21, 9, 14, 19, 28, 6, 3, 10, 11, 16, 1, 7, 13, 15, 20, 22, 30, 29, 24, 26.
The first nine pages were performed from this pre-order. Unlike when we performed jankelevitch sextets, this time we did not decide a fixed time with which to consummate each page, but we wrote a situation where hearing and performing would attune a formal rhythm, a sort of breathing pace, so to speak. An interesting comparison regarding this “formal rhythm”: our first realization of ashbery tunings for 10 was at a rate of six pages during fifty minutes; whereas now, we had a rate of nine pages during one hundred and sixty five minutes. A possible name for that “rate” is “serenity”: a strong lack of urgency made the hearing always faithful to the precise indication in the score:
“Tones: very soft, long or very long.”
Along with this, the execution fought the cold of the night with the limited but focused audience.
NCD

the players
victor rondón 1 recorder
álvaro pacheco 2 violin
sebastián jatz 3 accordion
santiago astaburuaga 4 double bass
álvaro ortega 5 melodica
mauricio barraza 6 clarinet in Bb; bass clarinet in Bb
nicolás carrasco 7 sine waves
diego aguirre 8 guitar/ebow
fernanda ortega 9 melodica
paulina wiehoff 10 cello

place
AFA Gallery, downtown Santiago, Chile

date
Saturday 18th of June, 2011

time
from 18:00 to 21:00

duration
planned duration: 180 minutes
time taken: 165 minutes

the audience
general audience

audio – 40′ excerpt of pages 04 and 18 (recorded on a 4 channel Zoom H4n)

photographs
Nicole L’Huillier