Leslie Stuck: Pas
Pas brings together a collection of six pieces from composer Leslie Stuck, created over a period of more than ten years. Beginning with his compositions for William Forsythe in the 1980s and continuing with works created for the choreography of Jiri Kylian, David Parsons, and Alonzo King, Leslie Stuck has created a music of interplay--the collaboration between composer and choreographer, the interrelationships of events in timed sequence, and sound in the service of the stages on which the aural, physical, and visual meet. His works have been performed by such diverse dance companies as the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, Pappa Tarahumara, and the Tokyo Ballet.
The recording's title neatly encapsulates meaning and form on several levels--from its ordinary reference to a single step in French, to its more specialized reference in the world of dance to both a short, complex dance move and to a brief dance with a small number of dancers (such as the pas de deux shown in the cover photograph).
The recordings themselves are also concerned with another kind of multileveled interplay of form--the patient development over time of a single collection of software algorithms realized using Cycling '74's Max/MSP, whose outputs constitute a kind of complex dance between Leslie Stuck's generative materials (patterns of chaos created using recursive quadratic equations) and his own considerable skills at listening, tweaking, and mapping the generated materials to produce music of mystery, subtlety and sassy grace.
Cover video stills by Carol Michelson.
Click here to see a list of the C74 one-sheets.
MP3 Samples
- Soothing the Enemy (848 KB)
- Convolution (904 KB)
- Mondriaan (1 MB)
Some of Leslie Stuck's collaborators
About Soothing the Enemy
"Stuck's violent, surprising score for 'Soothing the Enemy'--a feast of factory noise, electronically generated brass choirs and disturbing low hums--is of a piece with King's choregraphy and its moving dialectic of attraction and repulsion." --
"Leslie Stuck is known for the soundtracks he made for William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt, Jiri Kylian, or the "Cave" that Jeffrey Shaw and other artists installed at ICC. This album focuses on Stuck's collaborations with choreographers, and all pieces included in "Pas" were in fact made for dance performances. With the exception of one, all tracks are based on the "Max" patch's algorithmic sound patterns, resulting in incredibly beautiful polyrhythmic structures. Some of the pieces sound like Bartok's compositions, others are reminiscent of Gamelan, and again others of late 19th/early 20th century music. After listening to these fine tunes I feel like seeing some high-quality dance now... "--
This and the other C74 Music CDs can be purchased from our online store.
Copyright © 2008 Cycling '74. All rights reserved.
Artist Interviews
Visit the interviews section where you will find discussions with some of the c74 music label artists as well as other people who use our software. We're not as interested in having them extol the virtues of our software as we are in finding out about their approach to whatever it is they're doing with the software, whether it's music, engineering, art, industrial process control, or some combination thereof.
We hope these conversations will stimulate you to think about new approaches to electronic media, and will encourage you to check out the work of the artists if you're not already familiar with them. We've peppered the interviews with links that you can use to explore their work in more detail.