Program Notes:
Aaron Edgcomb (drums/composition)
Anna Webber (tenor saxophone)
Phillip Golub (piano)
Eva Lawitts (acoustic bass)
“Centripetal Grid Myth #1” takes its title from Rosalind Krauss’ seminal article “Grids”. In the article Krauss analyzes the role the grid plays in establishing the modernist aesthetic in visual art, and in particular analyzing its “indecision about its connection to matter on the one hand or spirit on the other” a binary that is ever present in the dichotomy between the skill of an art and the art of an art. As a drummer, percussionist, and composer I have obsessed over aspects of the musical grid for the better part of my life – how precise is my playing relative to the grid? what are ways to interpolate different grids? how do I subvert or even deny the grid? “Centripetal Grid Myth #1” is based around a simple drum figure that is stretched through various temporal grids. After exploring these stretches and resulting polyrhythmic structures, the material is developed in a stream-of-consciousness fashion conceiving of the grid as myth a la Krauss’ article, “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)”. I saw the development of the piece as both extremely materialistic (based on the very concrete rhythmic idea) while the various tonal aspects, almost like doodles or abstract drawings evoke a mythic and spiritual quality in the cave painting to ab-ex Twombly-like paradigm.
The piece is not teleologic, it is not narrative myth that we tell, aligning with Krauss’ sentiment “although the grid is certainly not a story, it is a structure, and one, moreover, that allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism” In music the temporal grid is often a source of logical structure or explanation – non-gridded sounds (whether that be the temporal grid, the tuning grid, or the material grid of the instrument subverted by extended technique) question the logical structure, allowing us to transcend the structure, and access the mythic or spiritual. Those sounds interpolated on a grid, whether related or not, can become profound. I am very interested in how shifts in experiential perspective question this notion.
This piece wraps around on itself, it ends where it begins. Krauss discusses the centrifugal and centripetal readings of grids, and this piece falls firmly in the latter, “The centripetal [reading] works, naturally enough, from the outer limits of the aesthetic object inward.” We begin with a broad concept, the drum figure, and we create a landscape based on this figure that has momentum toward a central point, but applying an almost Dali-esque melting of the grid we question the hegemony and assumed logic of the modernist grid. When that energy is spent we spin back to the original percussive space and the cycle continues. Importantly this is only one view of this grid, one representation of the landscape. I wanted to express that the same rhythmic pattern could lead in different directions depending on the aesthetic choices made.
aaron edgcomb 