The Birth of the Gangan Series

The piece was initially called "The Rotation of Nine" but Tad Ermitano and I decided on calling the ensemble of nine, The Motzkin Gangan Ensemble, and in turn called the piece the "Gangan series." In math, Motzkin numbers enumerate various combinatorial objects; while Gangan is a Japanese onomatopeia which can mean a clanging sound, or a headache, or a ringing in your ears; and as I am a sufferer of Vertigo syndrome, I found the name convenient.

The birth of the Gangan pieces started when Rock Drilon, owner of the Mag:net Cafe Art Spaces, asked me to curate a sound exhibit during the grand opening of the Galleon Trade Exhibit last July 24. Subsequently, it was also a day after my birthday and I decided to call the event "Happy Tengal Day."

To compliment the exhibit opening, I decided to pit 9 sound artists (incl. myself) to improvise for 90 minutes following time specific rules as represented here in this chart:



The numbers on top of the horizontal bar represent the total duration of the piece; the number represent the numbers in minutes. The bars represents each performer of the ensemble.

The piece is basically an organic rotation of 9 individuals interacting with each other thru time-restraints.

The rules are simple:

1) Each player plays for 9 minutes only, then stops and waits for another 9 minutes before they resume playing.
2) Each player should play 3 minutes apart.
3) They do this for 90 minutes. However, during the 87th minute, everyone has played four times – and to keep the rotation going, everyone will be playing 20 seconds apart from each other during the last 3 minutes starting from player 9 to player 1. (The Conductor will be cuing the players).

Notes:
The tempo, timbre, content, method/technique of playing is left to the discretion of the performers. However, each performer should not repeat what he/she did on the previous 9 (or 3) minutes section. For every new 9-minute section, each performer should change and explore ideas differently depending on the new sound textures and ideas made available by the rest of the performers at that time.

The aim of each performer is to collaborate, interlock sound textures with other performers and make the totality of the ensemble’s sound organic as possible. The idea is to make the ensemble sound as real and organic as sounds evolve, intertwine, interlock, and change and move forward every 3 minutes or so.

To avoid confusion on the part of the performers, there will be a prompter to make sure each performer is following the rules, by giving hand or card cues (and whatever means) to ensure the fluidity of the performance.

Cuing System



Tad Ermitano explains the cuing system we used on the first performance as taken from his blog:

"As most of the band members would be seeing the score for the
first time on performance day, Tengal and I spent a good bit of time working out a simple and unambiguous way to cue the players. First, we gave each musician had a written schedule of when to play. (So Player 1 had text that told him to play from minute 0 to minute 9;minute 18 to minute 27 and so on.) I also set up a laptop running a stopwatch connected to a monitor visible from the stage. This gave each player a copy of the big picture, and allowed him to watch out for his own entrance points. Aside from this, we broke down the score into a set of 29 cue cards (one for every 3 minute interval of the first 87 minutes) showing which player was supposed to start/stop playing. I had thought of doing this with hand signals, but we figured it was better to be safe and explicit. The last three minutes were the busiest, as it required people to come in every 20 seconds. Another thing I was concerned with was keeping everybody playing softly so that there was enough headroom to get loud during the crescendo. We decided that it would be simplest for me to just do this last bit with hand gestures."

The Motzkin Gangan Ensemble:

Player 1: Lirio Salvador on a self-made touch-modulated synthesizer



Player 2: Inconnu ictu on Alesis Airsynth



Player 3: Ria Munoz on Kaoss Pad and contact mics



Player 4: Chris Garcimo Roland SH-101 synthesizer



Player 5: Caliph8 on Akai MPC Sampler



Player 6: Erick Calilan on self-made circuit-bent devices



Player 7: Jonjie Ayson on a scrapmetal bass (created by Lirio Salvador)



Player 8: Blums Borres on electric guitar



Player 9: Tengal on drums, panart, various objects



Conductor: Tad Ermitano




Avenues for Future Exploration/Adjustment: The Birth of the Gangan Series

After rethinking my initial ideas of the piece after its first performance, new ideas, problems, realizations, as well as the comments from the audience needed to be brought into light. Tad and I discussed the possibilities of future improvement and explorations of the piece and we came up with these: [taken from Tad's blog]

"Dynamic Control: The lack of dynamics made the piece feel overlong to some. Local sound artists seem to think that noise has to be loud. Either most are still unaware of the dramatic possibilities of silence and/or sudden volume shift, or some may (consciously or unconsciously) equate improvising with soloing or domination, a possible consequence of primarily performing solo. In the absence of a shared vocabulary of dynamic effects, the next performance should incorporate structures for cuing volume levels. I once created an animated video loop to the cue performance dynamics of the (now defunct) noise gamelan Volume Control, but a video doesn't incorporate changes easily and graphic design perhaps ought to be left out of the picture at this point. It would be more elegant to do the cuing as flexibly and with as little technology as possible.

Increased Readability: The audience often had trouble knowing who was playing/making what sound. This is a fundamental problem with electronic instruments, whose sounds are not easily correlated with the player's physical behaviour. Tengal is thinking about using lights in some form (perhaps blinking LED necklaces, if they are still available in Quiapo) to mark the players. In addition, there perhaps ought to be an introductory section (like the Alap of Indian Raga performances) during which each player basically showcases his instruments' range of sounds."


This blog is a dedicated blog site for the Gangan performances, its updates for future performances and documentation, as well as provision for comments and feedback from the performers and the audience.

Pictures of the first Gangan performance here.
An essay of the the first Gangan performance written by Tad Ermitano here.
A newspaper article about the first Gangan performance can be found here.
Audio and videos of the first Gangan performance will be uploaded shortly.

Enjoy. 

Tengal