Psyte #3 Biedenkopf
Posted in: Current Speculations on September 4, 2010
Psyte #3 was performed in the town of Biedenkopf in the Hessen region of Germany on May 8, 2010. Klaus-Jürgen Höfer, the music teacher at the Lantahlschule Biedenkopf was instrumental in the realization of the performance, recruiting his orchestra and their family members to participate in the performance. This was the first performance of the Psyte score by a live band. Birgit Simmler, cultural director for the town of Biedenkopf, was able to secure a vacant storefront on the Marktplatz for the performance.
Psyte is a site-specific music project which uses a generative score to develop new logistical spaces. The score takes as its starting point a series of systems commonly used for identifying place: Longitude, latitude, dimensions of an architectural structure, time of sunrise and sunset, average temperature etc. Though their goal is to specifically locate a place based on its particular qualities and attributes these systems also have the effect of departicularizing and rendering abstract the places that they identify. These systems are inverted and combined with one another to generate a series of equations which determine the timing and character of the musical events which will occur when the piece is performed.