John Oswald

Aparanthesi holds two versions of a single composition by John Oswald, built on one pitch: the note A in its ten audible octaves, from the lowest A of the piano at 27.5 Hz up to 14,080 Hz. Both were commissioned by Réseaux des arts médiatiques for the Rien à voir concert series in Montréal, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, and realized at mLab, his studio in Toronto. aparanthesi B is a dynamically compressed stereo realization of the eight-channel concert version premiered under the title Just on 9 March 2000 and revised in 2003. aparanthesi A is the final revision for home listening, premiered on 22 March 2003.

Anything with a broad range of frequencies is gradually filter-tuned to the tonic: a prairie thunderstorm played through comb filters, an aviary whose birds were tuned one by one by Phil Strong, a male chorus slowly morphing into a foghorn. All the piano sounds come from a Yamaha Disklavier lent to Oswald while he was working on the Glenn Gould ballet Disembodied Voice, and an anonymous piano tuner, recorded without his knowledge, becomes one of the two soloists. The other is the cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, heard in a reversed take recorded for his string quartet Spectre (1990).

In B the tuner's preparations stay as documentary, room sounds included, and the piece closes on a louder return of the opening chord after an orchestral tune-up. In A the room cues are gone and a single A sounded in ten octaves fades over the last five minutes, with Oswald whistling one breath at the edge of audibility. “I’d rather leave the audience to sleep in if that’s where they’ve gone,” he says in the long two-part interview with Norman Igma printed in the booklet, which walks through both versions with timings.

Born in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1953, John Oswald nearly always works with an electroacoustic element. He is known for his plunderphonics, collages made from existing recordings, and his works are in the repertoire of the Kronos Quartet. As a student he worked with R Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0368, 2003.