Frank O. Lunaire #10: Raub (excerpt), by Paul STEENHUISEN by AMP21C

Title: Frank O. Lunaire #10: Raub
Duration: 8'
Electroacoustic

1. Through metal
2. Through wood

While resident in Los Angeles, Austrian expat Arnold Schoenberg infamously never met Igor Stravinsky. Another person he never met was Canadian-born architect Frank O. Gehry, who moved to the city at the age of seventeen, four years before Schoenberg’s death. One of the radical structures designed by Gehry and Associates is the Walt Disney Concert Hall, also in Los Angeles, and home of the L.A. Philharmonic. Since composers dating from Schoenberg’s time onwards are relatively seldom heard in such halls, I have chosen to force the music in – not through the front doors, but through the materials of the building itself. To get the music in, it meant penetrating the brilliant metal exterior that now monumentally dominates Grand Avenue, and pushing the sound into the wooden acoustic space. To achieve this, I employed physical modeling software and sent Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire #10: Raub (Theft) virtually into the materials, stimulating simulated tuned models of metal and wood. The resistance and resonance of the models to the soundfile that traverses the interior of its shapes and curves provided the essential collection of sonic materials for the work. Forcing the music through the materials and into the hall may be seen as an act of civil disobedience, partially reconciling the discrepancy between the radical design of the space and the museum music played within it - REDcat being the exception.