Love in the Asylum

Michael McNabb has always been the bearer of an electronics that I would define as “light”, which does not mean that he has not experimented, indeed, he has done it and often very advanced, but, IMHO, his compositions have never abandoned post-tonal suggestions with purely emotional functions.

Here we present Love in the Asylum from 1981, a piece that, when it first appeared, struck me for its liquidity and for the continuous mutations of the audio material. The piece is ideally divided into various movements and subsections:

Mad as Birds
illusorio
allegro ridendo
accelerando perpetuamente
Pirouette
vivace
The Magician’s Daughter
inquieto
amoroso
carosello
lontano

Author's notes:

Love in the Asylum is a love song to the calculated insanity and spontaneous magic that one must sometimes call upon in order to live in this strange universe of ours. It features an orchestra of familiar instrumental and vocal sounds, new sounds drawn from the imagination, and—perhaps most expressively—sounds that fluidly shift between the two. The work, which critic Paul Lehrman called “one of the most devastatingly beautiful pieces of electronic music I have ever heard”, is built of two psychological layers. Foremost is a layer of cheerful confidence and exuberance, colored and occasionally overpowered by a dark emotional undercurrent of anxiety and psychological imbalance.

All sounds in Love in the Asylum were synthesized except for the laughter and the player calliope music. It includes a number of musical quotations, including quotations from other works of electroacoustic music. The spatial sound paths at the beginning of the first movement are from Turenas (1972) by John Chowning, who was a primary mentor, and influenced McNabb’s decision to specialize in electroacoustic music and performance.

Love in the Asylum premiered on November 2, 1981, at the Monday Evening Concert Series in Los Angeles.

Love in the Asylum has been realized on the Systems Concepts digital synthesizer at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.

The original is in four channels. Here listen to the stereo reduction made by the author.

Listen to Love in the Asylum resynthesized and remastered in 24-bit high definition audio in stereo or even in binaural recording on the author's website

More music and videos from McNabb are available on his site.

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