Lars Kynde (b. 1981)
Lars Kynde is a composer and sound artist. He started playing cello and percussion as a child and has played ever since. After he graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen as a composer, he moved to the Netherlands to explore his interests in the relationship between music and visual art. To broaden his knowledge about visual art, he studied Art Science at the Royal Academy of Art in Hague. He currently lives and works in the Netherlands.
Lars Kynde is a composer that delights in creating the instruments on which his compositions are played - in fact these two aspects of music making are not so easily separated in his case and the invention of new instruments and the music created for them melt into surprising new forms. Kynde’s works focus on the mutual influence of the music, the instrument and the notation system. By building physical sculptures, mechanical machines and three-dimensional scores he seeks new ways of constructing and comprehending musical structures. The instruments contain a duality that enables them to be presented both as instillations on exhibitions and as instruments in concerts.
Kynde often collaborates with artists in other fields to create a boarder range of musical experience. He has performed and exhibited extensively abroad, including in Mexico, Australia and most of the European Countries.
With inspiration from historical performance practices in combination with modern technologies and free imagination Kynde’s works suggest an alternative basis for future music.
Selected work:
Elephant Heart (2010)
Elephant Heart is both an instrument and musical score at the same time. It is an alternative way of music notation and can therefore be seen as a “composition machine”.
The setup includes a conveyer belt, which functions as the score and conveys small marbles as notes. At the end of the belt, the marbles fall down and hit tuned metal tubes, which functions as the sounding part of the installation – the “Tubephone Campignon”.
The instrument is played by three performers: “Tempo”, “Rhythm” and “Pitch”. The Tempo player conducts the tempo by controlling the belt, so it either rolls slow or fast. The Rhythm player installs the marbles on the belt following rhythmical patterns according to the colours of the belt. The Pitch player turns the “Tubephone” so that each falling marble makes a sound in a different pitch.
The delay between installing the marbles and the actual sound, exhibits a spot in between composition and improvisation: The performers interact on each others actions, showing each others and the audience what music they can expect at the end of the belt. As the music actually is played it is too late to react. The performers have to be one belt-length ahead of the music.
Other compositions are fixed and expressed with a series of graphical scores. The colours and shapes of these scores correspond to those of the belt and “Tubephone”.
The instrument and the exhibition of it has two purposes:
1. As an exhibited installation where the audience can experience and play the instrument themselves in order to realize the inner structure of the musical limitations the instrument give.
2. As a performance where the audience can listen to virtuoso compositions played by the three performers.
The tuning of the “Tubephone” is a 19-tone circular system based on chains of minor thirds rather than chains of fifths used in the circle of fifths. It is similar to the 34-tone scale described by Larry Hanson (1994).
In 2011 a new version of the instrument was produced with motors of rotating wires, which are hitting the tubes of the “Tubephone”. This enables the instrument to play compositions with sustained tones. The motors are controlled via a wireless based computer interface that shows a virtual conveyer belt. The new version explores the duality of the virtual belt and the real physical belt and the different possibilities of the two worlds.
