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Richard Felciano
Richard Felciano
In Celebration of Golden Rain*
*In Celebration of Golden Rain was commissioned by the 12th World Congress of the International Musicological Society for it's 1977 meeting in Berkeley in on "Interdisciplinary Studies East and West." The work was written for a magnificent 100 year old double Japanese gamelan (given to UC Berkeley by Samuel Scripps) in combination with a Western pipe organ. Gamelans have proper names, like children, and the name which had been given to this one was Golden Rain. The "Celebration" was to welcome Golden Rain to Berkeley on the occasion of the Congress.
Richard Felciano grew up in
California's wine country, went to Paris to study with Milhaud and Messiaen,
then on to Italy to work with Dallapiccola. His music has been
performed on the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the
Berkshire Music Festival (Tanglewood), the Holland and Avignon Festivals,
Tage fûr Neue Elektronishe Musik Live (Basel) and the Foro
Internacional de Musica Nueva (Mexico City). His An American
Decameron, on texts by StudsTerkel (Cambria CD 8814) and
commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation was recently performed in the
Library of Congress. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of
California, Berkeley, and Founder of the University’s Center for New Music &
Audio Technologies (CNMAT), an interdisciplinary facility linking music,
cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science and architecture –
disciplines which have informed much of his work. Mr. Felciano likes
to quote Picasso’s remark that “Beauty is not the problem in painting; the
problem is the materials’” In music, the material is sound itself, and
Felciano became fascinated with acoustics and the way in which traditional
instruments and voices, as well as new electronic resources – if better
understood acoustically – might yield newly beautiful composite sonorities
in expressive forms appropriate to them. Richard Felciano's
fascination with sound led him, inevitably, to the English horn. "I
was grateful for Julie's willingness to work with me," Felciano says, "but
had no idea she would approach the issue of multiphonic fingerings and
variety of sonority with such detail and dedication." Felciano's
recent activities include a performance in the Library of Congress, service
on the International Jury for the Dutilleux Prize, and completion of
Contraltos, a duo for Julie Ann Giacobassi and SF Symphony violist
Adam Smyla.
Richard Felciano writes about his work with CNMAT:
My work in electronic music began in the early sixties, as a part of the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros. Possibly the most formative experience came in 1967-8 as the composer-member of a resident five-artist group at the National Center for Experiments in Television, established by the Rockefeller Foundation to explore the possibilities of television as a logical extension of each artist's craft. It was a heady time, with major figures such as Charles Olson, James Rosenquist, and Robert Creely passing through to participate in our debates (Is television unique or simply a means of broadcasting film- or theatre-like experiences to other parts of the community? What is the cognitive difference between television's direct light and the reflected light of virtually all other visual experience?) and our creative work. As a part of the Center, I composed Linearity--a Television Piece for Harp and Live Electronics (1968), in which the television system's extensive processing and memory capacities were employed. Incorporating instructions for cameramen and control room, the score is composed in two passes, the first of which lays cues for the second, which overlays it. The result can be broadcast but not performed on a concert stage.
Around the same period, I wrote Glossolalia for baritone voice, percussion, organ and tape, a work which attempted to use the electronic medium with the same fluency and musicality of gesture as acoustical instruments, while addressing cognitive questions by employing "documentary" sounds as the material to modify (organ bellows, singer's voice) and phonemic deconstruction of the Latin text for timbral transfer to the instruments. Most of my music for the next decade and a half involved electronics.
Acoustics and architecture are my two other passions. In the early seventies I wrote Galactic Rounds, an orchestral work which used rotating trumpets and trombones dispersed throughout the orchestra to create Doppler shifts. Interest in acoustics led to an interest in non-Western instruments (In Celebration of Golden Rain for Indonesian gamelan and organ; Opus One CD #155 which addressed the problem of multiple simultaneous tunings) and my encounter with David Wessell and cognitive psychology during a year at IRCAM in the eighties led to my efforts to create CNMAT after my return to Berkeley. In the nineties I developed a seminar in advanced orchestration based on psychoacoustics.
Architecture is a field to which sound can contribute creatively just as light does, but it is not studied with this in mind and architecture/music combinations are rare as course topics. An exception is my colleague Marc Treib, who has repeatedly asked me to participate in his studios when he has devised a music-related problem for his architecture students. Those collaborations led to his book, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavillion, Le Corbusier, Varèse (Princeton University Press), to which I contributed an analysis and commentary on newly discovered manuscripts of the Poème éléctronique.
Richard
Felciano
1326 Masonic
San Francisco, CA 94117
email: felciano@cnmat.berkeley.edu
