Notes on Descent into the Amygdala

I presented Descent into the Amygdala to a class at the University of California at San Diego last week, and more recently I submitted it to a festival in Miami. Writing and thinking about the piece has produced something that may be of interest to visitors to my blog or website:

"I often wish to capture the essence of the sublime in my works. In previous centuries, the sublime experience required pitting the insignificant human observer against the beautiful, awe-inspiring, yet horrifyingly powerful effects of nature. This type of experience fascinated artists and philosophers of the nineteenth century, and in particular, landscape painters often attempted to reproduce the experience of the sublime. Many of my works focus similarly on the sublime in relation to the natural world; in particular, my works Nyx & Eris, Archaeopteryx and Jökulhlaup deal with fleeting human experience in relation to the incomprehensible time and space scales of astronomy and geology.

A new era of the sublime has dawned, as humans have gained the ability to transcend the boundaries of the natural world with technology and machines. Now, manifestations of our great technological strength, such as the hydrogen bomb or space flight, instill the observer with the same feelings of insignificance once reserved for the apprehension of natural phenomena. The essence of the technological sublime is the foundation of Descent into the Amygdala.

Musical precedents in artistic manifestations of the technological sublime include George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique, and Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. Some works use existing performance technology (ie. acoustic instruments) to relate the composer’s experiences of the technological sublime with an audience, an example of which is Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231, a symphonic work about a steam engine. Others actually use technology itself to induce the sublime experience in the listener directly, as if the applied music technology was the steam engine. This is my approach. Nancarrow’s music, when played on the original pneumatically driven Ampico player pianos, certainly falls into this later category, also.

Descent into the Amygdala is sound about sound. It is inspired by the visceral and sublime impact of a pervasive form of music technology: overdriven tube-amplification. Using complex tempo-relationships, grinding dissonances, extreme loudness and distortion, this work descends into the fear producing parts of the listener’s brain, directly producing an experience that is both beautiful and horrifying."