Introduction
My title - Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging - relates to a tendency I find in myself. I'm continually foraging into the deep past in efforts toward mapping meanings into an imagined future. Cathartically, It's a kind of "unburying" of the subconscious. A Jungian way of being in the world, and what we might call a process of individuation. Moving between conscious and subconscious, wakefulness or dreaming, we hover within liminalities. Having been consumed by these states, I find myself slowly emerging. How does one communicate a soundtrack to these experiences? (Journal entry, May 2022)
This "foraging into the deep past in efforts toward mapping meanings into an imagined future" relates to an organismic rather than mechanistic existential orientation which grounds my being in the world. I take inspiration from the process and time-focused philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson as well as Physicist David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate order.
For me, an organismic or holistic world outlook psycho-scientifically views the cosmos as an interconnected web of probabilistic ecologies where actors within their entangled non-linear space-time environments are granted orders and degrees of concious or cognitive capacity.
Alhtough it is beyond the current scope of this paper, It would feel dishonest to not provide a mere footnote to this pervading sense of holistic existential grounding. For I intuitively I feel that my creative capacity, or agency, whether in wakefulness, dreaming or in between, transforms and finds greater meaning within expanded empirical and metaphysical paradigms.
My artistic research from the period of 2020-22, stems from the curiosity of moving beyond the fixed pitches of western tuning (12 edo) and into a sound continuum of extended sound possibilities.
I ask questions like: can an acoustic grand piano be sonically-reimagined as to re-negotiate specific core axiomatic assumptions around tuning and timbre? why should the piano continue to be so accustomed to only one tuning system? In contrast, how can “pure sounds” (ratios found in the harmonic series) overlap or co-exist within microtonality of ethnically diverse origin? Dialoging with a newly invented tuning system, what emergent properties might we find when magnetic piano preparations are used to evoke specific timbral effects from Balinese Gamelan and Indian Karnatik music? Collectively, how can this expanded notion of “piano” merge with spatialization to facilitate expanded perceptual experiences for audiences? How might a distillation of these musical elements get communicated through a post-Jungian psychological dream narrative?
My research has resulted in a microtonal prepared piano. In the process I’ve created my own tuning system, the Justly-Intonated Sedeng. Using this tuning I’ve contextualized the microtonal prepared piano for three settings which has resulted in three album-length recordings.
Postcards of Nostalgia: microtonal prepared piano and sound design
Unburying, From Liminals, Emerging: microtonal prepared piano, saxophone trio and percussion
Juniper Fuse: two microtonal prepared piano, two percussion and soprano saxophone
***You can listen to all three works for free HERE or on the streaming platform of your choice.