{"id":5955,"date":"2016-06-30T16:42:47","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T16:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5955"},"modified":"2016-06-30T16:42:47","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T16:42:47","slug":"how-does-ankhrasmation-look-wadada-leo-smiths-scores-on-exhibit-at-l-a-s-hammer-museum-through-august-28","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/06\/30\/how-does-ankhrasmation-look-wadada-leo-smiths-scores-on-exhibit-at-l-a-s-hammer-museum-through-august-28\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does Ankhrasmation Look? Wadada Leo Smith's Scores On Exhibit at L.A.'s Hammer Museum Through August 28"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wadada<\/a>
Wadada Leo Smith scores\/photos courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nI’ve written often here and in The Wall Street Journal about \u00a0trumpeter and composer\u00a0Wadada Leo Smith. <\/b>That frequency is partly due to the fact\u00a0that Smith is so\u00a0prolific a musician, but it’s mostly it’s because his music and its surrounding aesthetic are so fascinating, deep, distinctive and ever in forward motion.
\nRecently, I posted <\/a>about Smith’s residency in New Orleans (and mine) through the New Quorum, and\u00a0delved into the working of the musical system he named “Ankhrasmation.”
\nYou can find my Wall Street Journal piece about Smith’s March collaboration with pianist Vijay Iyer, “a cosmic rhythm with each stroke,” here<\/a>, and an older article of mine about his sprawling “Ten Freedom Summers” here.<\/a>
\nSmith’s project with Iyer was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and inspired by the work of visual artist Nasreen Mohamedi. Yet Smith himself is a formidable visual artist, mostly by way of what he calls the “language scores” that he creates to guide each musical piece, and which, he says, are specific to each individual performance of that piece.
\nThese are striking works of diligent and creative visual representation, made all the more fascinating by their functional value to musicians.
\nLast year in connection with the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which Smith was an early and important member, Chicago’s Renaissance Society mounted an exhibition of these scores<\/a>.
\n
\"Wadada<\/a>
Wadada Leo Smith scores\/photos courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nNow, within “Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only<\/a>,”<\/b><\/i>\u00a0the third biennial at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Smith’s\u00a0Ankhrasmation<\/i>\u00a0scores are on view through August 28.
\nAccording to the exhibit’s accompanying text, “Ankhrasmation blossomed in Southern California, where Smith relocated in 1993, joining the faculty at California Institute of the Arts.”
\n“Each\u00a0Made in L.A.<\/i>\u00a0sheds a new light on the work being made by Los Angeles artists, expanding on previous versions of the exhibition,” said\u00a0<\/b>Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin. “Made in L.A. 2016<\/i>\u00a0investigates what is vital and distinctive about this city as an international destination and cutting edge art center, and how its artists-from vastly different backgrounds and disciplines-resist and defy categorization.”<\/p>\n

Click here to watch the\u00a0Made in L.A. 2016<\/i>\u00a0Artist Announcement video<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here\u2019s the wall text about Wadada from the Made in L.A. Exhibition and some installation images of Wadada\u2019s works:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nWadada Leo Smith is a performer and composer in equal measure, having taken up both trumpet and writing music at the age of twelve. Smith was a formidable presence in the free jazz scene of the late 1960s, the period when he developed a form of musical notation he refers to as Ankhrasmation, a word combining ankh (an ancient Egyptian symbol meaning life force), ras (father), and ma (mother).
\nAnkhrasmation began as a cuneiform-like notation in which Smith abandoned instrumentation, meter, and choice of notes, making it a framework not so much for what to play as for how and when to play it. Rather than notes, Ankhrasmation privileges discrete moments of activity, for which he provided only general determinants: number and duration of notes, tempo, pitch, and phrase length. The notation\u2019s signature glyph is the pennant, referred to as a velocity unit. It is a signpost for the intensity of activity. Depending on whether the triangular portion is filled in or accompanied by a horizontal dash across its stem, a velocity unit can call for a rapid burst of notes or prompt a lithe melody.
\nThis selection of scores dates from 1967 to 2014. While it took root during Smith\u2019s years in New Haven, Connecticut, Ankhrasmation blossomed in Southern California, where he relocated in 1993, joining the faculty at California Institute of the Arts. The move west coincided with a wholesale expansion in his use of color, repertoire of signs, and compositional approaches to the page as a whole. Some are defined by large blocks of color and bold singular shapes, either geometric or calligraphic in nature. Others resemble a schematic for what could be a fourth law of thermodynamics. In any case, Smith\u2019s latter-day output only confirms what Ankhrasmation has been all along, namely a cosmology, a meditation about creation in the human and intergalactic sense.
\n \n<\/div>\n
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\"Wadada<\/a>
Wadada Leo Smith scores\/photos courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written often here and in The Wall Street Journal about \u00a0trumpeter and composer\u00a0Wadada Leo Smith. That frequency is partly due to the fact\u00a0that Smith is so\u00a0prolific a musician, but it’s mostly it’s because his music and its surrounding aesthetic are so fascinating, deep, distinctive and ever in forward motion. Recently, I posted about Smith’s … <\/p>\n

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