Jason Freeman’s Othello Principle
Dawn Chan
courtesy of the artist
It was no different from any other Carnegie Hall concert. While the solo pianist played waltz after waltz that begged for dancers, the audience stayed decorously still.
One exception was the couple sitting in front of me. They anticipated their favorite downbeats with passionate head-dips that you might expect to see from frustrated football players post-fumble. Their enthusiasm suggested that even the straight-jacketed Carnegie Hall audience wants to interact–physically–with music.
Would this audience be able to overcome years of concert-going tradition: a tradition that permits only clapping, and only after a piece has ended? Would they go so far as to wave light-sticks in the air?
This was one of the concerns of composer Jason Freeman, who strives to "put some degree of control in the hands of people who aren’t trained musicians." In Glimmer, a ten-minute work commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, and performed in January at Zankel Hall in Carnegie, he put control, precisely in the form of red and blue light sticks, in the hands of laymen. He then asked them, in quite practical terms, to aspire to be fireflies.
I met with Freeman in his office–a space shared by three other electronic musicians, in a labyrinthine building that contains Columbia’s visual art students, room-sized vintage synthesizers, and even the Pulitzer Prize Committee for Music in the midst of their deliberations. As we sat besides a colleague’s electronic invention that looked like an overturned cockroach, Freeman spoke with humor about his computer science background at Yale University. He reminisced about the final programming assignment that convinced him to switch to music studies; a "client-server calendar with locks on processes and all sorts of stuff. That was the beginning of the end." And yet, while computer science courses may have been a dead-beat dad, necessity seems to be the mother of most of his technological skills. "I’ve learned it as I’ve needed it," he explained. "The strange thing is that now I’m a better programmer than I was in college."
Freeman applies his tech-virtuosity to the creation of interactive works. Some of his works appear in concert halls; others are presented on the internet and over phone lines. All of them give an unprecedented degree of power to the audience and performers, or audience-as-performers. Freeman admitted, with self-deprecating humor, that it was perhaps "utterly naive…to expect someone to have the same kind of experience, as a trained musician [who’s] spent years learning how to play an instrument. But it’s the Othello principle: ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.’"
He elaborated: "My goal is to have enough in there to hook people, get them really interested, so that they’ll continue exploring, and figure out how to exert more creative and subtle control of the space."
In Glimmer, the audience controlled orchestral sections by switching their light-sticks on and off. The more "interesting" an audience section was, the more their corresponding orchestral section changed pitch, volume, and attack, among other factors. To be "interesting," a section of the audience had to coordinate itself, and increase or decrease the total number of glowing light-sticks across time. And, as if we don’t already face enough daily pressure to be interesting at cocktail parties or on Friendster, the more boring sections of audience eventually found their orchestral-sections "killed off," one by one, until a single section was left playing.
Early in the piece, these competitive guidelines reference neural-network algorithms, in which immediate winners shortly become losers, to give others a chance. Later on, the piece’s competition grows Darwinian, as only the fittest survive. All in all, the competitive strategy seemed appropriate for a New York audience, which laughed and cheered as different sections disappeared.
Competition and group dynamics are continued themes in one of Freeman’s pending projects. While wearing devices that track their positions, audience members will roam through a room while serenaded by musicians stationed throughout the space. By standing closer to an instrument, audience members can induce it to grow louder or more interesting, while unattended musicians fall mute. In effect, the audience will have control over the soundscape created by different instruments, just by walking through the performance space. As Freeman describes this work, imagine an accelerated version of the polyphony that fills New York’s very subway system, where unrequited buskers eventually give up their trade.
Freeman’s other pending piece, as he currently imagines it, will be software that allows users to control music by manipulating an object shown on their computer screen. His hope is that an everyday user, who knows little about music, can find more control through a visual analogy.
"That’s one of the reasons I’m there," says Freeman, "to mediate the experience and create an environment where…the [audience’s] contribution doesn’t need same level of sophistication and subtlety."
Indeed, if Freeman’s work empowers its untrained audience, he seems well aware that most people understand what they see better than what they hear. As a result, in much of Freeman’s work, music meets visual art. In Glimmer, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini even preferred the performance’s "light show" to the music. Nonetheless, when played a video recording of the performance, I found that Freeman’s musical choices, though restricted, were still quite compelling. A curious contradiction arose between the soothing overall structure of the piece, which resembled a breath as it peaked then died out, and the urgency conveyed by the piece’s sound-texture, an urgency created by marimba rolls and the slightly aggressive accents that announced new winners among sections of the audience.
As Freeman noted, Glimmer faced its share of problems. Many audience members could not master the necessary principles, turning their lightsticks off and on too quickly to be interesting. Some complained "about being too short to see other people in their group." While some audience members felt control over the piece, according to Freeman, others left mystified as to why certain groups won. Or why the aim was to "win" at all.
Ultimately, despite its competitive edge, Glimmer may have just as much of a uniting effect as Jason Freeman’s other works, which bring together voices and files from remote corners of the internet community. Glimmer seems to unite its participants in an older and more well-worn, well-loved environment: that of a dark space punctuated by light. In any number of age-old rituals, we sit together with light in darkness: from campfires, to nightclubs, to winter holidays. In Glimmer, we sit together in a shared sea of glow-sticks, even as we may compete to be the last man standing.
