Papers by Brent Wetters
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I composed Saturn and Jupiter as part of my Master’s degree thesis at Wesleyan University in 2003... more I composed Saturn and Jupiter as part of my Master’s degree thesis at Wesleyan University in 2003. It is an electro-acoustic and soundscape composition that responds to Glenn Gould’s 1967 radio documentary, The Idea of North. I made the source recordings while on a week-long trip to Churchill, Manitoba, where I took the same train that Gould had taken some thirty years earlier. Saturn and Jupiter responds both to the ideas in Gould’s documentary in the form of interviews, and compositionally by imposing considerably more atmospheric space into the work. Where Gould’s documentary is noisy with talking – Gould famously pioneered a technique he called ‘contrapuntal radio’ where he layers multiple speaking voices simultaneously – the spoken components of my documentary are quite sparse. This new presentation commemorates the re-opening of the Winnipeg – Churchill train line after suffering massive flooding damage in 2017. In this version, listeners are invited to hear and view to the 32...
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This is a creative project, a parody of Alfred Jarry's 1905 "The Passion Considered as an Uphill ... more This is a creative project, a parody of Alfred Jarry's 1905 "The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bike Race" and J.G. Ballard's "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race." It is, however, based on research material on Gustav Mahler's cycling activities to be presented shortly. http://www.brentacol.com/blog/2014/11/mahlers-fifth-symphony-considered-as-an-uphill-bicycle-race/
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Few would have predicted the later ascendancy of the early-romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin as a... more Few would have predicted the later ascendancy of the early-romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin as a source of inspiration for the post-war musical generation. Long considered a marginal figure in German literature, Hölderlin had already had a significant resurgence by 1943 when Viktor Ullmann set his poems. His reputation was buoyed by the work of Martin Heidegger, whose political writings on Hölderlin found a receptive audience during the Third Reich. His poems were distributed to soldiers on the front line in so-called Feldausgaben, to edify them with thoughts of the Fatherland in their time of sacrifice. He occupied a place in the German imagination of the time not unlike that of Beethoven—a symbol of German exceptionalism. But why would his works then prove so attractive to a generation that actively sought to distance itself from the excesses of romanticism and the recent past, and why would Ullmann set three of his poems while imprisoned in the concentration camp at Terezín. I argue that Ullmann’s settings form a kind of double protest against his oppressors. Many Jewish inmates considered themselves culturally German and believed German poetry to be part of their cultural inheritance, and seeing it turned against them was horrifying. The poem “Sonnenuntergang” remembers an imagined past beauty—a beauty that then seemed all but lost: “He plays his evening-song on the heavenly lyre…who still honor him in his absence.” The setting uses free chromatic tonality, lilting triple meter, and long melodic lines to summon a nostalgia that belies the circumstance of its composition. The unassuming traditionality of the setting is precisely what marks it as protest. Ullmann’s Hölderlin settings stake a claim on the Germanic musical tradition and compellingly argue that Germany had betrayed not only its Jewish citizenry, but its own cultural heritage.
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Musicological work on Glenn Gould’s groundbreaking radio documentary, The Idea of North, has ten... more Musicological work on Glenn Gould’s groundbreaking radio documentary, The Idea of North, has tended to focus on the work’s generic status and its musical construction (Sallis, 2005; Bazanna, 2005; Cushing, 2012). Considerably less interpretive work has been done on its meaning and message. I intend to show avenues by which Gould constructs something like a thesis about the north through the assemblage of divergent voices in the work’s production. Much of the documentary is concerned with the north not just as idea, but as ideal. The north appears to be, as one of the interviewees says, “the final playing out of those two great dreams of man: Eldorado and Utopia.” This sentiment is further supported as the participants ponder the north as a potential space, and a space of pure potentiality. The documentary ends with an assertion of an ethical purity in the north—a place where humanity is still at the mercy of a powerful and dominating nature. This assertion is played against the triumphant strains of Sibelius’s Fifth symphony, again evoking a kind of power and victory embodied in the desolate isolation of the north. The north, as a blank and potential space, functions more as mirror than Utopia. It shows humanity both its highest aspirations and most troubling impulses—and the two are frighteningly hard to separate. In this paper, I investigate the ways that Gould simultaneously constructs the north as both utopia and dystopia. Between the two, the north itself may be salvaged, precisely for its capacity to disturb the very concept of humanity.
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I composed the Hörspiel Saturn and Jupiter in the winter of 2003, after spending a week—where tem... more I composed the Hörspiel Saturn and Jupiter in the winter of 2003, after spending a week—where temperatures never broke -20 degrees—at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (http://www.churchillscience.ca) in Churchill, Manitoba. I undertook the project and trip after a period of almost two years of prolonged exposure to and study of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s Idea of North, his ground-breaking radio documentary from 1967. Saturn and Jupiter is conceived as a series of 32 vignettes, each exploring a northern sound environment or an interview with one of the researchers at the Centre. Each movement is named for a different stop along the 36-hour train route between Winnipeg and Churchill; beyond the names, there is no connection between the stops and the specific movements. However, like a train trip, a listener (or in this case, the person preparing a specific realization) is invited to pick which stops will constitute an aggregate work. The specific version constructed for the Logos Foundation contains 18 of the vignettes, paired with a video accompaniment comprised of photographs taken on that trip and from a second trip to Churchill in 2005. (Some pictures were also taken by Roger Woloshyn who is featured in several interviews, as well as participants in an Elderhostel learning vacation being taught during the period I visited.)
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