Antony: A Reimagining (2015)

Program note

Antony is one of the few fixed-media pieces Wessel had ever created—his work was not focused on generating works fixed in time that would be played again and again, unchanged. Rather, it was about fluidity, change, and temporal immediacy. […] So we began to search for a way to pay tribute to Wessel and to the fixed nature of Antony in a way that also pursued this engagement with the present.

We were conscious, all during this undertaking, that this version we were creating was not to try to make Antony “better,” (or worse!) but simply to speak to the “now,” to the circumstances of its performance. We decided the only way to keep the aesthetic richness, complexity, and identity of the original piece while allowing a way in for our own participation was to use those tools and techniques that Wessel had passed down to us to reinterpret the original material itself; tools for which Antony itself had been seminal.

[…] We analyzed the original recording of Antony in real-time […] and fed the output into the migrator […]. We analyzed each of the two stereo channels separately and used 3200 oscillators to resynthesize each channel. […] Antony begins with a long fade in, and it was our intention to preserve that in performance. We decided to project that part of the recording unaltered before fading in the resynthesized version nearly two minutes into the piece. Similarly, we ended the piece by returning to the original recording as a mirror image of the opening of the piece.

From John MacCallum, Matthew Goodheart, and Adrian Freed, “Antony: A Reimagining”, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, 2015.