the bitKlavier Commissions: Bora Yoon
A micro-opera in three acts, without words
Bora Yoon is difficult to keep up with!! She is a remarkable composer and performer, with many irons in many fires, and I was delighted that she made time to create these lovely pieces for bitKlavier. Before we get to those, check out these excerpts from a new work of hers:
Her three pieces for bitKlavier are also the final additions to the bitKlavier Commissions album, which will be released this coming summer. In a way, these pieces feel like sound-scenes from a micro-opera in three acts; there are characters (the organ and harpsichord, the Rhodes piano, the bowed and reversed vibraphone, the glitchy Blendrónic machines), a sense of narrative, scenery, interaction, and sudden mood swings with scenes within scenes. The first—“Discipline”—is full of these contrasts, and even has a kind of curtain closer, with the piano exiting backstage as the curtain comes down, accidentally leaving its hammers banging away downstage center. Scene 2—“The Wreckoning”—is quieter, more introspective, almost a kind of meditation, with the firing of neurons constantly chirping away, a perpetual sign of life and thought in spite of efforts to become silent; this one also fades and exits. And the last scene—“Blue Smoke”—seems innocent enough, but the pump organ begins to go off the rails, transforming into a mad calliope with a wild grin that suddenly vanishes upwards, into the lighting grid. This is all of a piece with Bora’s larger work, which is often theatrical and full of imagery.
Bora has this to say about the project:
bitKlavier is such an expansive instrument — not only in (historic, custom) tunings, but in timbres, aftereffects, and growing library of plug-ins that Dan is dreaming up, laughing lowly, and eyes twinkling, excited and delighted by nefarious and fun ways one could reframe and innovate the contexts of creating and composing — with these exciting new constraints in mind.
The instrument can bring to life dynamic aspects of storytelling in timbral and narrative ways: playing with a sense of time / memory / flashback (i.e. Blendrónic: chopping up time in uneven groupings with glitch factor); to capable of transmuting and morphing mid-song, to life (featuring the audible mechanism of the hammers with heavy piano, even within a digital environment); to Spring tuning (derailing the center of tonality through action / velocity), to paint these liminal worlds and capacities. Cross-fading and jumping btw the digital and analog realms of piano became the exciting feature and threshold to exploit within this software instrument, and wanted to ‘carpe diem’ all the new and advanced / extended features Dan was rolling out with his team, within a trilogy of etudes and interludes.
I am ever thankful to Adam Sliwinski, Cristina Altamura, and Davis Polito — for helping translate these works from performance, into software, unto the page, and into the world, and to Dan for founding, creating, ever-evolving, sharing, and propagating such a marvelous instrument capable of such subliminal, subconscious, foregrounded, and backgrounded world-building and song!
Here are the recordings, the first and last by Adam Sliwinski, the middle by Cristina Altamura:
“1. Discipline,” by Bora Yoon, performed by Adam Sliwinski
“2. The Wreckoning,” by Bora Yoon, performed by Cristina Altamura
“3. Blue Smoke,” by Bora Yoon, performed by Adam Sliwinski
And here are the bitKlavier galleries if you are interested in looking more closely or trying them.
Stay tuned for album release announcements, coming soon!