Merce Cunningham’s Sounddance at Juilliard (2018)

Merce Cunningham’s piece Sounddance features a multichannel electronic score by David Tudor, which presents some significant challenges in performance. Typically, the six channels of audio are dynamically routed to six speakers spaced around the audience, controlled in real-time by a performer. The dance department at Juilliard brought me on board to put together the sound performance system/instrument that we would use in the Peter Jay Sharp theater.

We started out with a Max patch provided by the Cunningham Trust, but fairly quickly realized that we could get something more suited to our specific performance environment by building something custom. To that end, I put together an Ableton set that loaded in each of the channels of audio and allowed me to pan around the space using only two continuous controllers per stem. Then, I built a user interface using Lemur for iPad that would enable a digital performer to visualize the placement of these stems on an XY pad, and move them individually. Since Lemur allowed me to place multiple physic-enabled objects within a single XY object, the performer would be able to throw sounds around the room and have them bounce around before coming to a rest. This created a dynamic and musical envelope to the localization of each individual file, since sound traveled with some degree of relationship to physical laws. By exposing controls for friction and movement speed to the performer, the performer could create movements that dynamically morph between extremely fast and extremely slow, as well as control the amount of entropy present within the panning system.

The choreography for Sounddance has a striking energy, with dancers performing precise, quick movements with great intensity. The complex patterns of dancers moving individually and in groups, especially as they circle eachother and speedily enter and exit inspired me to create a sonic performance instrument that would let a sonic performer capture some of that organized chaos via the placement of sound in space.

Unfortunately, as of 2022 the Lemur app has been discontinued. TouchOSC is a good replacement for this application, except for the lack of physics-enabled controls. There are a variety of solutions, but a combination of physics-enabled Max for Live devices and some sort of physical control surface representing force applied to each source on the XY plane might be appropriate. A bank of joysticks, or even a bank of XY pad with finger position mapped to acceleration rather than source position may be an interesting way to go.