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dewdrop world : live computer music for meditation and dancing.
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Dewdrop world is the performing name of James Harkins, musician and long time computer enthusiast who seeks to combine these two passions into live performance works for computer and other instruments with the aim of opening the senses, awakening the mind, and inspiring joy, compassion and hope. The name comes from an old haiku by Issa: This dewdrop world A gentle and powerful teaching about impermanence and our engagement with impermanence. This name is a reminder of the fragility and beauty of this world, which, like a dewdrop, will one day dissolve. |
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dewdrop_world began his creative life as a composer of dense, dissonant and generally disorganized chamber music, but abandoned this path in 1995 upon realizing the common ground between minimalism and danceclub music. Sensing the creative possibilities of applying harmonic and formal sophistication to the vibrant sonic and textural landscape of the danceclub, he turned to the computer, initially working with MIDI gear to produce perplexing and searching dance music for listening. This work culminated in a doctoral dissertation, brightening, for four saxophones and recorded electronics.
In the last several years, dewdrop_world has been designing his own software for live algorithmic composition and performance, using the state of the art audio programming language, SuperCollider. Musical material input from a MIDI keyboard can be mangled, looped and overlapped in real time to maintain dynamic, evolving textures over long time spans. The result occupies the middle ground between composition and improvisation, and charts new territory in using automated calculation to produce works of space, heart and spirit.
H. James Harkins studied composition with Michael Schelle at Butler University (B.A. 1993, summa cum laude), and Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett and Scott Lindroth at Duke University (Ph.D. 2001). He is also an enthusiast of traditional and ethnic flutes, having studied the modern flute with Loretta Contino at Butler, and Baroque flute with Rebecca Troxler at Duke.
Artist's statement
It was perhaps inevitable that I would turn to electronic music, given my interest in technology. During my composition studies, I noticed that I was listening to the music in gay dance clubs in the same way that I listen to minimalism: following layers, allowing my attention to shift from layer to layer and exploring the interactions between them. The next logical step (although it seemed radical at the time) was to study this music as seriously as I studied Western contemporary music ("composer music," as I now sometimes call it), and to try my hand at making dance music.
This work revitalized--redefined--my creative activity. That the body is so central in dance music forced me to get my music out of my head--that is, to strive for gripping, visceral musical experiences, the kind that lift you up out of your seat, up off the floor, out of ordinary consciousness into an ecstatic or contemplative state that has been the province of the whole world's music, from African drumming to Balinese gamelan, Middle Eastern cantillation to the sacred polyphony of the Renaissance, Mahler to Peking Opera, Steve Reich to acid house. Too many composers take pride in replacing ecstasy with intellection, when in fact they get it exactly backward. The consciousness-raising is not an accident resulting from the intellectual activity. The consciousness-raising is the point, no matter how you get there.
The tension in electronic dance music is that these states are achieved using cold, lifeless digital technology. In the most recent phase of my work, I am moving more deeply into this tension by embracing the perils of live performance over the safety of polishing a single, static "performance" (that is, non-performance) intended for release over the Internet or on CD. Bringing the technology into a social space and responding to the energy in the room--interacting with the audience through the medium of the computer--humanizes the technology while I realize a full, complex musical vision with my own two hands. I do not want my music to be disembodied. The technology has advanced to the point where it is possible to create social and spiritual relationships through the technology. This is what I seek to do.
Along the way is the guiding influence of Buddhist practice. There's so much alienation and suffering in the world, and so much avant-garde electronic music celebrates this alienation with musical techniques that seek primarily to destroy source materials. Some such musicians make it to the next step of building something compelling and enlightening out of the shards. Most simply present the destruction and alienation, possibly justified as music that diagnoses the 21st-century human condition. If we artists are to make the most of our intuition, we must move beyond diagnosis into healing. Out of this realization, a second stream in my work is emerging: meditative, atmospheric works to invite calm and peace. My practice helps me hold my center and hold this vision in clear sight.