A Tissue of Quotations began as a solo piano piece composed for pianist Benjamin Martin in 2002 and titled Rondolletto Remix. A year ago I found this piece amongst some old files and decided to add to it and form a suite. A Tissue of Quotations contains pieces ranging in difficulty and musical depth so as to appeal to a broad range of pianists and listeners. The selection of eight pieces I will perform tonight are my favorites and present a number of different applications of the sampling and remixing processes (typically utilised by DJ's and electronic music producers) that are the foundation of my compositional technique.
It is an ongoing preoccupation of my work as a composer that my music is made from quotations of other music. These are edited, cutup, rearranged, recombined and remixed to form new pieces. A kind of musical recycling, or if one prefers a more academic analysis, a literal expression of Roland Barthe's notion in The Death of The Author (1999) that
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture ...
Where in my previous works the "innumerable centres of culture" have included environmental sounds, classical music from the baroque to new complexity genres, and various popular, industrial and noise music styles, in A Tissue of Quotations each piece is composed of quotations from only one source. Thus each piece presents an atmosphere infused with the world view (in sound form) of a particular composer, albeit heavily moderated through the filter of my compositional technique.
It should be noted that it is not my intention to engage in any kind of retelling of familiar musical stories. Through the technique of sampling and audio editing processes such as pitch-shifting and time stretching, the often very short phrases quoted are recontextualised to the present. Harmonic, rhythmic and textural narratives embedded in the musical styles of the various quoted composers are routinely contradicted, subverted and ignored so that these musical elements start to make sense in a new way. Therefore, beyond informing the audience that A Tissue of Quotations is created from quotations of the music of J.S.Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, it is not relevant to be more specific. The irony of identifying a particular reference is not an essential component to understanding these works and my acknowledgement is simply a matter of protocol.
I am aware of the implications of what I do, one of which is to question whether it is musical composition in the usual sense of the term. Indeed, a point of my aesthetic is to call into question notions of authorship and ownership. Perhaps I'm more properly called a coordinator/facilitator/director of musical ideas. Or maybe a collaborator with history, distilling notions from the past via the medium of musical composition. Ultimately I feel that the creation of works of art is much more prosaic; when faced with terrifying decisions I simply do what it takes to make the music that I like.
Sasha Stella, September 2009
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