• Text: W.H.Auden
• Paintings: Alexander Polzin
• Genre: 4 channel electronic Installation
• Duration: 2 hours 40 minutes (and looping thereafter)
• Date of composition: 2006
• Shows: April 8th to April 26th 2006 - Goethe Institute, Manhattan, New York; July 16th to July 25th - Bard College Exhibition Center (CSS), Red Hook, New York.

Notes: 

Earlier this year, Alexander Polzin – an artist from Berlin, asked me to compose music for his upcoming exhibition in the Goethe institute in New-York. Alexander has created a series of 99 paintings after the poem “The Age of Anxiety” by W.H.Auden. In the exhibition, he was going to hang only 79 of the paintings since 20 were already sold.  We decided that I would compose music only for those paintings that were sold and therefore not to be displayed at the gallery. The paintings were hung in a sequential row leaving empty spaces in places of the missing paintings and a pair of headphones were hung there instead. The music coming out of the headphones was created using a computer program that I made which transforms image data into audio. I had scans of the paintings in my computer and was able to analyze them in different ways such as RGB data, hue, saturation, FFT, contour, etc. This data was extracted from the scans as lists of numbers that I imported into my audio application and transformed into sounds.
I was not satisfied with the results of that endeavor. The sound, although being interesting, had very little to do with the poem itself. I wanted the music to be influenced by both the poem and the paintings. I therefore set to work on it again this time using a recording of the poem as the source material for the sound and at the same time keeping an eye on the paintings and being inspired by them. The process used to make the music is described below.

About the poem:

In Auden’s lengthy poem, The Age of Anxiety, he follows the actions and thoughts of four characters that happen to meet in a bar during the Second World War. Their interactions with one another lead them on an imaginary quest in their minds in which they attempt, without success, to discover themselves. The themes and ideas that The Age of Anxiety conveys reflect his belief that man’s quest for self-actualization is in vain.

The Age of Anxiety is, in general, a quest poem. Unlike the ideal quest, however, this quest accomplishes nothing. The characters search for the meaning of self and, in essence, the meaning of life, but because their search is triggered by intoxication, the quest is doomed from the start. Throughout the quest, the characters believe themselves to be in a kind of purgatory, gradually descending toward hell. They fail to realize this due to “the modern human condition which denies possibility but refuses to call it impossible” (Nelson 117).

About the paintings:

Alexander Polzin's series of 99 paintings based on Auden's poem grew out of the artist's fascination with  "...the unusual mixture of poetic quality, clear meaningful sentences and rich images." The series was made in 1999, which is one of the reasons the artist decided to paint 99 paintings. The other reason being his strong desire to accomplish the nearly impossible task of composing 99 paintings simultaneously.
Polzin divided the text into 99 segments after reading the poem over and over again developing his own "melody" of the text. He also wanted to highlight some of the sentences in the poem by disconnecting them from their surroundings.
The anxiety in the poem, for Polzin, is hidden under several layers of meaning and so in his paintings he decided to use a technique of layering. At the bottom layer of each painting he pasted a segment of the text and painted the number of that segment corresponding to his own subdivision of the text. He then created layers of paint and images on top of that sculpting out the parts he wanted to emphasize. Through this process most of the text and numbers became invisible.

About the music:

The sound source for this installation is largely based on a recording of five actors (four characters and one narrator) reciting the poem in a bar. During this process the actors were encouraged to drink as much as they wanted so as to recreate the mood of the original poem. The bartender was generous enough to turn off the background music during the recording and so the only background sounds are bar noises made by people drinking, conversing, laughing, playing pool, etc.
Different layers of sound are created by transforming the bar recording electronically. These layers become alternately ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ by fading them in and out.
One of the electronic sound layers is created by analyzing 12 peaks from the recorded voice and connecting these peaks to 12 oscillators. The result is a sort of a modified reproduction of the actual voice recording.
Another layer that is present is the sound of a quartet of wind instruments – tuba, trombone, trumpet and clarinet. Each instrument corresponds to a different character in the poem. These instruments are actually very high-quality samples of real instruments. Each note was recorded several times in different dynamic levels and different modes of attack. Extended playing techniques were also recorded and used. The actual notes that these instruments play are generated by a quasi-random process that uses a phrase, instead of a single note, as it’s basic point of departure. The first thing that is determined on this level is the phrase duration. Since we are dealing with wind instruments, it has been taken into consideration that in normal situations the player of a wind instrument should have time to breathe after about 20 seconds of continuous playing. For each phrase the program decides: 1) What permutation and transposition of the row to play from a twelve tone matrix. 2) The durations of the notes in the phrase. 3) The dynamic range of the notes (for example, mp is not a constant level but a range). 4) The style of playing – staccato, legato,  flutter-tongue, trills, etc. 5) The instrumental register – high, medium or low.
What creates a relationship between the voices of the different instruments is that the phrases they all play are derived from the same source – the 12-tone matrix.
Another layer is made out of percussion sounds that are triggered by the recording of the actors. The program picks out the ‘attacks’ of the recorded voice and these attacks trigger the percussion samples.
Other transformations of the bar recording include pitch-shifting, delaying and spatializing. All of the sounds that are used in this piece are spatialized around the room by using four speakers that are placed in the four corners of the room.

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