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TUBER, RHIZOME, TENDRIL AND CORM: ON THE MUSIC OF MARTIN ARNOLD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2016

Anna K. Höstman
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Abstract

Martin Arnold is an experimental composer currently residing in Toronto, Canada. His unique approach to composition originates in the close relationship that he developed with Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous while Arnold was a doctoral student at the University of Victoria. Martin Arnold's desire to create music both familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, generates paradoxical listening experiences that reside on the edges of things. In this article, the author explores a number of these edges and meeting places, especially as they occur within the composer's very singular string quartet, Contact; Vault.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 70 , Issue 277 , July 2016 , pp. 16 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 See Martin Arnold, ‘Observations About, around and Beside “Burrow out; Burrow in; Burrow Music”’ (PhD dissertation, University of Victoria, 1995).

2 Arnold was a composition student in 1983–85 (Masters of Music), and 1986–95 (PhD), during which his primary advisors were Rudolf Komorous and Michael Longton (composition), and Mowry Baden and Linda Gammon (visual art theory).

3 Martin Arnold, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, in Canadian Cultural Poesis, ed. Garry Sherbert, Annie Gérin and Sheila Petty (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006).

4 Rudolf Komorous quoted in Arnold, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 306.

5 Arnold writes in the footnotes to his article that ‘there have been a few generations of Komorous students and many continue to be conspicuously active within the Canadian experimental music scene. They include: John Abram, Christopher Butterfield, Allison Cameron, Anthony Genge, Stephen Parkinson, Rodney Sharman, Linda Catlin Smith and Owen Underhill”, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 320.

6 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 307.

7 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 307.

8 Arnold describes the Reveries as working ‘in a margin they have located between lounge jazz, psychedelia, and post-rock’, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 318. The trio consists of Ryan Driver, Doug Tielli and Eric Chenaux.

9 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 318.

10 Arnold writes that “all three musicians have sweet, pop voices and sing consummate three-part harmonies”, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 318.

11 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 318.

12 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 319.

13 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 319.

14 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 319.

15 Arnold ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 320.

16 Norman Bryson quoted in Arnold, ‘Observations’, p. 60.

17 Bryson quoted in Arnold, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 315.

18 Bryson quoted in Arnold, ‘Thinking the Wonderful’, p. 315.

19 These techniques were used extensively in Burrow Out, Burrow In, Burrow Music. To understand how Arnold imagines them in ‘the service of “convey[ing] a multiplicity” of listenings’, see his discussion on Instrumentation and Recording, in “Observations”, pp. 3–30.

20 Arnold, programme notes for performance of Tam Lin (Drapearray) by the Array Ensemble, Array space, Toronto, 2012.

21 Juliana Pivato, ‘Martin Arnold, the Snider Visiting Artist’, http://www.pivatopraxis.org/000-news-and-announcements (accessed March 20, 2012).

22 Arnold, liner notes to Martin Arnold: Aberrare, Quatuor Bozzini, CQB 1112, CD, 2011.

23 Arnold as quoted in Eldritch Michael Priest, ‘Boring Formless Nonsense (or, On The Aesthetics of Failure in Recent Experimental Composition)’ (PhD diss., Carleton University, 2011), p. 114.

24 Arnold quoted in Priest, ‘Boring Formless Nonsense’, p. 114.

25 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 63.

26 Giacomo Leopardi quoted in Calvino, Six Memos, 57.

27 Martin Arnold in Steenhuisen, Paul, ‘Martin Arnold—Getting Lost, an Art of Musical Meandering’, Musicworks, 87 (Fall 2003), p. 29Google Scholar.

28 Calvino, Six Memos, 57.

29 Leopardi quoted in Calvino, Six Memos, 57.

30 Priest, ‘Boring Formless Nonsense’, p. 117.