Program Notes:
This second work within the Pose series deals with the relationship between music and memory. I intended to explore how the hierarchical structure of music influences our ability to perceive, understand, and recall music. Some theorists state that the repetitive, and nested structures of music contribute to the mental organization of musical sounds. Certain musical organizations lead to memory reinforcement, while others lead to memory sabotage. Further, in the middle ages and renaissance, before the commonality of the printed word, the art of memory represented an important skill for rhetoric, philosophy and mysticism. This skill required the memorizer to visualize each ‘object’ to be memorized, place it within a specific location of a theatre or hall, and then make it memorable by linking a striking emotional context to the object. To sequentially recall these objects, the memorizer simply had to ‘walk’ through this visual theatre, and observe the objects in order. I believe this process sounds extremely similar to music composition. For what do we do as composers but take musical objects, place them within a location in space, and give it some emotional context? Therefore, music’s communicability may rest on its ability to engender memorable acoustic objects within the mind of the listener. Thus, this work models the process of one attempting to memorize a list of objects. As repetition, contextualization, visualization are all techniques one uses to memorize, I attempt to present musical objects in the same manner. The title of the work comes from a text by Giordano Bruno, De Umbris Idearum (‘The Shadow of Ideas’) – a treatise that presented a system of memorization through mnemonic, psychological and hermetic magic.