PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 30 April 2023

PASSAGE 8 (2012)
Intermedia Performance by Roger Reynolds

PASSAGE 8: "On Learning, Varèse, Cage, Ashley, Musical Experience, and Intermedia"

The eighth in the series involved:
Roger Reynolds, Speaker
imagE/viola (Solo Viola), John Pickford Richards
Toward Another World Preliminary version (Solo Clarinet), Bill Kalinkos,
(Real-time algorithmic transformation), Paul Hembree
Paul Hembree, Technical support
6 December 2012

PASSAGE is a Performed Event: a non-linear aggregation of original stories, visual images, video clips, live performances, with computer sound spatialization. 

Each PASSAGE event is unique, a new combination of text and events depending upon the nature of the venue.

In 2009, I began a series of presentations meant to offer an engaging way of sharing observations, images, sounds, and the unpredictable resonances across them. A PASSAGE Event is not a lecture “about something,” from which an audience member carries away a particular (and uniform) message. It is rather the case that each individual will make his or her own connections between the elements offered. The intent is associative and inferential, not illustrative or explanatory. My written texts, read live and also pre-recorded, are spatialized in real time by an elaborate computer algorithm carefully tuned to allow a textual choreography where lines of thought intersect and challenge one another in novel ways.

The Oxford English Dictionary on “passage”:

1. The action of going or moving onward, across, or past; movement from one place or point to another, or over or through a space or medium; transit: the extension of a line, string, etc., from one point to another. Migratory flight of a bird.

2. Possibility of passing through; liberty, leave, or right to pass through. Transition from one state or condition to another; death.

II.
A means of passing. That by which a person or thing may pass: a road, a path, a route, a channel, etc. A (narrow) way giving access, especially to various rooms in a building.

III.
A thing that passes or takes place; an occurrence; an event; a proceeding … an exchange of words, actions, etc.
A usually short part or section of a book, speech, etc., considered by itself for a specific reason.

The first PASSAGE occurred in the newly opened Experimental Theater at the Conrad Prebys Music Center, 1 December 2009. Subsequent PASSAGE events have occurred in Los Angeles, Buffalo, Cambridge, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Washington, D.C., Columbia University, at Darmstadt and UC San Diego. I am indebted to Jacob Sundstrom, Paul Hembree, and Jaime Oliver for their supportive interaction with me in this ongoing project.

PASSAGE 8 was performed on 6 December 2012 at the John Knowles Paine Concert Hall at Harvard University, Cambridge.

– Roger Reynolds