Scapegoat is a unary electroacoustic ensemble piece where instruments are miced up in unusual ways to create a morphing, static sound mass. Ordinary orchestral timbres - French horn, trombone, double bass, piano - are heard against a greater number of electroacoustic sounds. The resulting texture is a droning mass which sounds like many sections occurring in parallel.
Many sounds are harder to define. The percussive rattlings and wailing high pitches, as well as the various midrange squeaks and "tremolo" rhythms, dominate the sound. Sounds range between sounding very immediate and quite distant, with some seemingly affected by reverb.
Strangely, this piece seems to resemble Riley's In C. Though I feel in terms of timbre this is like comparing apples to oranges, the kind of density and repetition of pitch material (notably the repeating piano note and the wailing horns) resembles the denser, droning sections of In C, taken to a logical conclusion.
Listening to this piece brings up several issues of perception for me. I've heard that humans don't really experience sound as several things happening at once. We tend to perceive things one by one, albeit fast enough that we can experience, for example, a block chord, as more than one pitch occuring simultaneously. This piece defies listening to simultaneous occurences; as soon as you latch onto something hidden within the weave of the overall texture, it drops out and bides its time. Each sound is equally distracting and listening to the piece as a single static texture is like trying to look along a piece of metal with many small holes in it. It defies focusing your senses.
Add to this the fact that each individual sound is timbrally rich and you have a piece with so many ways to listen to it that even in a recording there is a kind of indeterminacy in listening. You may be taken on a different route and find yourself lost each time.
Many sounds are harder to define. The percussive rattlings and wailing high pitches, as well as the various midrange squeaks and "tremolo" rhythms, dominate the sound. Sounds range between sounding very immediate and quite distant, with some seemingly affected by reverb.
Strangely, this piece seems to resemble Riley's In C. Though I feel in terms of timbre this is like comparing apples to oranges, the kind of density and repetition of pitch material (notably the repeating piano note and the wailing horns) resembles the denser, droning sections of In C, taken to a logical conclusion.
Listening to this piece brings up several issues of perception for me. I've heard that humans don't really experience sound as several things happening at once. We tend to perceive things one by one, albeit fast enough that we can experience, for example, a block chord, as more than one pitch occuring simultaneously. This piece defies listening to simultaneous occurences; as soon as you latch onto something hidden within the weave of the overall texture, it drops out and bides its time. Each sound is equally distracting and listening to the piece as a single static texture is like trying to look along a piece of metal with many small holes in it. It defies focusing your senses.
Add to this the fact that each individual sound is timbrally rich and you have a piece with so many ways to listen to it that even in a recording there is a kind of indeterminacy in listening. You may be taken on a different route and find yourself lost each time.