“Mandala” (mušn'd?l?) , [Skt.,=circular, round] a concentric diagram having spiritual and ritual significance in Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism. The word mandala itself is derived from the root manda, which means essence, to which the suffix la, meaning container, has been added. Thus, one obvious connotation of mandala is that it is a container of essence. In the earliest level of India or even Indo-European religion, in the Rig Veda and its associated literature, mandala is the term for a chapter, a collection of mantras or verse hymns chanted in Vedic ceremonies, perhaps coming from the sense of round, as in a round of songs.”
Mandala
is a novel musical performance installation employing emerging technology
to create an experience of shared musical interaction accessible to musicians
and non-musicians alike. In its essentials, the piece was first performed
at Mobius ArtRages, in Boston in November of 2005.
Mandala is an electronically mediated game piece, drawing inspiration from
the graphical scores and game pieces of composers such as Anthony Braxton,
Cornelius Cardew, and John Zorn, as well as the theater games of Viola Spolin
and Second City. Graphical scores often bear only a passing resemblance to
conventional music notation (staff lines, notes, etc.), but still offer visual
information for a musician to use to create music. Game pieces emerged from
the free-jazz tradition and are a kind of “meta” musical notation,
guiding musicians in how and when they are to interact, but generally not
providing information about what sounds they should play.
In many other fields the move from paper to digital media has led to phenomenal
advances, but in the field of musical notation, innovation has not forayed
much beyond text editors for conventional musical notation. Hugo Solis created
IMPI, one of the first computer-based interactive graphical scores for an
ensemble, as part of his MS thesis at the MIT Media Lab. He wrote, “Shaping
collective free improvisations in order to obtain solid and succinct works
with surprising and synchronized events is not an easy task.... One of the
main goals of the system is the translation of planned compositional elements
(such as precise structure and synchronization between instruments) into the
improvisatory domain.” Solis’ system relied on a conductor/painter,
one person in charge of generating transitions and textural materials for
the other players.
One of my first expeditions into designing Mandala, was to transcribe Check
Your Head, by the Beastie Boys with a stop watch. I recorded no information
about the sounds, except onset/stop times on each track. These times were
used by the musicians to decide when to play, but they could play anything
they liked. In this way, Mandala might be conceived as a kind of structural
complement to DJ or turn-table music. Here, we fill an arrangement with improvised
“samples” rather than arranging found samples into a form.
For Mandala, we have created an animated visual language in pursuit of an
understanding of what might be a universal grammar for game pieces. Who listens
to whom, who follows whom, timed sections, cued transitions, recapitulation
of past states, etc... By projection, this visual language becomes part of
an architectural space that mediates the interactions of its inhabitants.
And investigates the possibility for a computer to mediate an extremely dynamic
and socially sensitive inter-human interaction, such as brainstorming, therapy,
or improvisation.
In the piece, players gather around a circle of light. Within this circle
of players, are many smaller circles of many sizes. Ornamented, translucent,
spinning, these images simultaneously perform as synaesthetic inspiration,
as batons suggesting transitional cues, as clocks providing temporal orientation,
and as markers for recapitulation. Directional filaments connecting them represent
temporal precedence, both micro and macro, slowly fading to leave the players
in a state of simultaneity.