3.12.2012

Distortions that organize

Sometimes distortions are used to intensify expressions and sound qualities. For instance, a musical segment can be stretched to intensify, even when (or exactly because) it breaks the musical symmetry. Other distortions are created to fragment musical objects, and it allows you to discover new musical designs, especially when musical objects are fragmented in non-symmetrical places (that is the reason a bit of brutality is needed sometimes).






However, there are cases in which distortion is used to create coherence and consistence. The general believe is that symmetry organizes (A-B-A, mirror forms, Fibonacci series and fractals are some of the known cases). However, I have seen some cases in music in which organization is not reducible to any known kind of symmetry. In some cases I agree that this lack of organization is an imperfection. However, there are a few cases in which this imperfection is the very law that gives coherence to the work. Distortion, in these cases, organizes. Why? How it works?

Perhaps we should consider other kinds of relations. I will mention three cases. One: some past references might distort the meaning of what you are listening to. Two: perhaps the formal distortion will absorb the sound material irregularity, and in this case distortion is a kind of adjustment. Three: perhaps the distortion will organize only in the future!!! I mean, the action, thought or feeling that a set of musical objects is able to produce distorts all the set towards a final state. The work we listen to is not the final state but it points to it. This pointing organizes, and when we grasp this point we distort the sound objects and give to them a new meaning. Case Two is the easiest to find. Case One is a kind of post-modernism. Case Three… this one is really new, and I have tried it in some of my works, as in Da Vinci, an electroacoustic work I composed this year. I will comment on that in the future.

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