david simons - prismatic hearing

.:: David Simons composes music for theater, dance, film, installations, and concert ensembles. His unusual collection of sounds from self-built and non-European instruments combines with digital sampling technologies to create a unique pan-cultural music. He has devised his own method of using the Theremin as a Midi controller. David is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, studying composition with Earle Brown, Morton Subotnick, James Tenney, Harold Budd; percussion teachers include John Bergamo (Cal Arts), Paul Price (Manhattan School Of Music), and Alan Dawson (Berklee).

David has researched and performed music from many of the world’s cultures, and furthered his music studies in Bali, Bangkok and Seoul. As a founding member of the FUTURE PRIMITIVE ENSEMBLE his pieces were heard live on radio and in concert throughout the U.S. He has also performed on tour in Java, Bali, Korea, Japan, Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, Cuba and Hawaii. For many years he has been a member of Gamelan Son of Lion and Music for Homemade Instruments in New York, both of which regularly premiere his works.

David has received numerous awards and grants, including a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio, Italy to compose music for NEWBAND and their collection of Harry Partch instruments. In 1998 American Composers Forum and Jerome Foundation funded the Gamelan Son of Lion’s commission for David to write Music for Theremin and Gamelan, and an Arts International travel grant and Asian Cultural Council grant enabled him to perform it in Bali (2000); other awards include Harvestworks Artist-In-Residence (‘95 Project Residency, ‘89 computer music Programming Residency); Canada Council Visiting Foreign Artist (‘92) for sound installation at Art Metropole in Toronto; Composer-in-Residence at American Dance Festival (‘91); NY Foundation for the Arts Composition Fellowship (‘90, 2000); ASCAP Special Awards (1987-02); and several Meet the Composer commissions.

The American Music Center’s recovery grant ‘Music Liberty Initiative for NY’, was awarded in 2002. The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation sponsored a teaching and instrument building residency in 2005 with artist Ken Butler, Lisa Karrer and David Simons at the Avampato Museum in Charleston, West Virginia.

In collaboration with Lisa Karrer, David has received Artslink and Arts International awards for projects in Estonia (95-03), and the Mary Flagler Cary Commissioning Grant to compose their chamber opera "The Birth of George" (‘96). This opera was produced by Harvestworks and American Opera Projects and had its workshop premiere at La Mama in ‘97, supported by the Jerome Foundation and Greenwall Foundation, and an Aaron Copland Recording grant was received in ‘98 to make a CD, released on TELLUS in 2003. David’s CD on TZADIK "Prismatic Hearing" was released in 2004.

.:: Of the ten diverse pieces on Prismatic Hearing, only two share the same instrumentation. That the CD is nonetheless cohesive is due to the characterful nature of David Simons's compositions. He's a longstanding member of two very different ensembles, Music for Homemade Instruments and Gamelan Son of Lion, both of which play on Prismatic Hearing. He's also worked extensively in film, theater and dance, and the longest piece here, "Picasso/Rossinirape", composed in 2003 for BAD Co in Zagreb, Croatia, was written to accompany a dance in which a woman relives her rape in excruciating detail while contorting herself in the manner of a Picasso portrait. The source material is, as the title suggests, sampled from Rossini, his Messe Solonelle, but the music is fractured into new rhythmic and melodic shapes and rendered distinctly ominous, benefitting from Simons's virtuoso use of sampling technology.

The earliest of the compositions, written in 1974 while Simons was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, is "Crown of Thorns", for harpsichord, guitar, harp, cello, vibraphone, marimba and gongs. It plays for a mere 36 seconds. This is the only piece on the CD that's strongly reminiscent of another composer: the Frank Zappa of his most accomplished album, Uncle Meat.

Most of the other pieces on Prismatic Hearing were composed during the 1990s and the current decade, and by then Simons had a sure grasp of his materials and the ends to which they could be put. One of his innovations is to use a theremin both as itself and as a MIDI controller of sampled sounds. Theremin-triggered samples feature on "Information" and Dematerialized". The latter very effectively illustrates how orchestral sounds and voices, modulated electronically, can be shaped into a composition that transcends its source materials. During the final couple of minutes the intense drama of the piece is undercut by humour, as interleaved and patchworked voices recite phrases such as "A burgundy suede spider is humping an oil slick".

According to Simons, prismatic hearing is the process by which our minds reconstitute sounds while we're actively hearing them, filtering them according to our tastes and prejudices, etc. He points out that, in many cases, "this results in a more interesting phrase than the original". Something similar could be argued about his use of sampled material on Prismatic Hearing. The Wire, Brian Marley - 1995

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