ANTHONY TAN

Pose II - Ars Memorativa (Working Title) for Piano and Electronics
- Commission from the Experimental Studio, Freiburg as part of the 2011 Giga-Hertz Preis

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. ...
- Baudeliare, Correspondances


The second work within my Pose series deals with the relationship between music and memory. I’ve become interested in how the hierarchical structure of music influences our ability to perceive, understand, and recall music. Some theorists state that the repetitive, and nested structures of music contribute to the facility of mental organization of musical sounds.

Further, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, before the commonality of the printed word, the art of memory represented an important skill for rhetoric, philosophy and mysticism. This skill required the memorizer to visualize each ‘object’ to be memorized, place it within a specific location of a theatre or hall, and then make it memorable by linking a striking emotional abstraction to the object. To sequentially recall these objects, the memorizer simply had to ‘walk’ through this visual theatre, and observe the objects in order.

For me this process sounds extremely similar to music. For what do we do as composers but take musical objects, place them within a location in space, and give it some emotional context. Therefore, music’s communicability may rest on its ability to engender memorable objects within the mind of the listener.