Guide de la vie associative — Marina Rosenfeld

Score excerpt, Guide de la vie associative — Score excerpt, *Guide de la vie associative*

Okkyung Lee, performance, Qubit, New York, 2018

Guide de la vie associative (2013)

Guide de la vie associative is a piece for solo cello composed for longtime collaborator, cellist Okkyung Lee, in 2013, with live amplification aimed at highlighting and working with the resonant characteristics of the performance site. Guide takes off from the close relationship Lee and I have established in over a decade of collaboration. As improvisers, we both have ways of thinking through motivic repetition, through listening for small changes and for resonances and other acoustic features of sites. I wrote this piece quickly in 2013 when another work I had planned to present in a festival in Brussels was held up in customs. I drew inspiration from the concert site itself, a large social-services bureau in Brussels’ Anderlecht section that housed dozens of helpful agencies devoted to aspects of daily life. The score is a translation from each entry in the bureau’s pamphlet, into a set of numbers, which I use to regulate series of repetitions, de-tunings and difficult to perform technical operations. It offers Lee and myself an intricate framework within which to explore Lee’s palette of extended techniques on the cello, and my interest in creating a conversation between the architecture of the building and the music. My role is to sit nearby at the mixing desk and spatialize the mic signal live to a carefully prepared PA system. The length of Guide de la vie associative is approximately 40 to 45-minutes. Guide was premiered in 2013 as part of the festival “Tuned City Brussels,” and has been performed by Lee several times since, including in Borderline Festival, Athens, in 2014 and at Project Qubit in New York in 2018.

'Guide de la vie associative' is a piece for solo cello I composed for my longtime collaborator, cellist Okkyung Lee, in 2013, with live amplification aimed at highlighting and working with the resonant characteristics of the performance site. 'Guide' takes off from the close relationship Lee and I have established in over a decade of collaboration. As improvisers, we both have ways of thinking through motivic repetition, through listening for small changes and for resonances and other acoustic features of sites. I wrote this piece quickly in 2013 when another work I had planned to present in a festival in Brussels was held up in customs. I drew inspiration from the concert site itself, a large social-services bureau in Brussels’ Anderlecht section that housed dozens of helpful agencies devoted to aspects of daily life. The score is a translation from each entry in the bureau’s pamphlet, into a set of numbers, which I use to regulate series of repetitions, de-tunings and difficult to perform technical operations. It offers Lee and myself an intricate framework within which to explore Lee’s palette of extended techniques on the cello, and my interest in creating a conversation between the architecture of the building and the music. My role in performance is to sit nearby at the mixing desk and spatialize the mic signal live to a carefully prepared PA system. The length of 'Guide de la vie associative' is approximately 40 to 45 minutes. 'Guide' was premiered in 2013 as part of the festival “Tuned City Brussels,” and has been performed by Lee several times since, including in Borderline Festival, Athens, in 2014 and at Project Qubit in New York in 2018, where this recording was made. Part 1 0:00 Part 2 7:57