Crash / The Destruction of a Motorcar
Back in the mid 1980s, Gay and I were working on a few dances together and Mark suggested we do something with JG Ballard's Crash, which we had all read and with which we were somewhat in love. I don't remember exactly who came up with the scenario, but as we later described it:
"Crash" is made of three broad sections, following the three major acts of the dance. The first is a garden scene, bare and damp, where a young woman sleeps. She has a dream of surrender with a lack of perspective, of a woman in mourning, of a funeral. The second action accelerates onto a freeway onramp, where the woman is awakened, seduced by the speed and exposed to encounters and, eventually, impact. From this, a future is revealed where beauty is redefined, anatomy is altered, and unnatural joinings are made. From the J.G. Ballard book of the same name, we recall the quote: "I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain."
Gay White choreographed and danced the piece, here in a performance at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, 28 June 1986. We worked together on the music and dance, she coming over to Henry Kaiser's studio to hear the piece as it was being assembled on his Synclavier II, and the dance developed at Nexus Studios in Berkeley. Mark AZ Dippé did the video accompaniment, filming Gay's choreography as well as focussing in on small aspects of the dance.
This was back when I was writing mostly using Just Intonation. The tonality is G, and the 11 other notes are represented by the following intervals from G: 4/3, 15/8, 16/15, 9/8, 6/5, 7/5, 3/2, 5/3, and 16/9. Besides those which are synthetic or sampled instruments, the sounds are modifications of auto sounds, toys, kitchenware, speech and singing.
The above tuning is simple, formed from two scales, one centered around E flat and the other around a G which is a 10/9 below an A which is a 5/3 x 5/3 above the E flat. Having some pitches from each of these two fairly distinct scales allows for a fair number of interesting changes. One thing that is a little different here is that modulations are made outside of these tonalities, incurring some harmonies which are significantly out-of-tune in a traditional sense but which are more effective in their abrasiveness than their in-tune cousins. In fact, they have (for me) a dominant effect, pushing the harmonic progressions back toward the tonal centers.