Anthony Brandt: LiveWire and Meeting of Minds
Navona Records

That the live presentation of Anthony Brandt's string quartets involved more than a four-piece chamber outfit is clearly indicated by a striking album cover photo showing Musiqa's musicians performing with dancers and visual projections. Even in the absence of clarifying details about the two works, one would still likely identify them as ballet scores when rhythm is so fundamental to their character. Brandt's LiveWire and Meeting of Minds were, in fact, created as collaborations with NobleMotion Dance and the University of Houston IUCRC BRAIN Center, such that the mobile brain-body imaging devices worn by dancers displayed live visualizations of the neural synchrony between their brains. A more symbiotic marriage of music, dance, technology, and science would be hard to imagine. Helping Brandt and Musiqa bring these projects to fruition were choreographers Andy and Dionne Noble, neuro-engineer Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal, and multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian.

Interestingly, the Houston-based ensemble Musiqa is credited as the musical performer for both works, but the members of the string quartet in each case differ. While violinists Jacob Schafer and Evie Chen, violist Sebastian Stefanovic, and cellist Bree Ahern tackle LiveWire, their counterparts Nanki Chugh, Astrid Nakamura, Molly Wise, and Christopher Ellis perform Meeting of Minds. A graduate of California Institute of the Arts and Harvard University, and currently a music professor at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, Brandt (b. 1961) is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Musiqa, and both works were recorded in October 2021 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. They're not the only time Musiqa has undertaken such a project; since its 2002 founding, the group has regularly paired music by living composers with literature, film, theatre, art, and other art forms. And neither is the meeting of music and mind a passing interest of Brandt's. He's written extensively about the ways the two interact and co-authored with neuroscientist David Eagleman The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World.

It was, in fact, Eagleman who coined the term “livewired” to emphasize that our brains aren't hardwired by adulthood, as once believed, but continually rewire themselves. The neuro-engineers made a fascinating discovery in determining that as the dancers mastered the choreography for LiveWire their brains indicated less activation as they rehearsed. Correspondences between brain states and the Brandt's music are identifiable as the work advances through its five movements, but the score is sufficiently arresting on purely musical terms. A subtly obsessive quality permeates the music in the opening movement, “Automated behavior,” appropriately so in alluding to the unconscious practices that underscore our interactions with the world. Short, stabbing phrases intertwine as the movement unfolds, with insistent rhythmic gestures key to its design. Alternation between lyrical and aggressive sections characterizes “Repetition suppression” to convey the idea that repeated exposure to a stimulus renders it less, well, stimulating. In “The internal model of reality,” the shift in inner stability by the emergence of a new development is signified by the cello's abrupt disruption of the even-tempered musical material. In the penultimate part, “The serial order effect,” a theme-and-variations approach is adopted to illustrate how derivations of an initial idea can grow wilder over time. The rhythmic drive of the opening movement reinstates itself for “The dynamism of thought” in a manner that suggests the agitation of mental activity.

In contrast to the five-part structure of LiveWire, Meeting of Minds is in ten and also uses two string quartet parts, one live and the other pre-recorded, to evoke the interaction between two brains. For the live presentation, dancers wear electroencephalography (EEG) caps to generate a “brain synchrony meter” display in real time, such that the brighter the glow the greater the neural synchrony between their brains. In the opening four parts, the focus is split between the male and female dancers, with separate themes created by Brandt for both. Movements exude languor, urgency, and even frenzy as they barrel forth with laser-focused determination until the dancers' themes come together in the fifth, the result naturally combative and filled with tension, and perpetuate their confrontation in the defiant sixth. Gradually convergence sets in as mutual acceptance and harmonious alliance develop between the figures, the music's romantic shift conveyed through the use of pizzicato and a less abrasive attack. A clear arc is discernible from beginning to end, one that would be even more clearly shown with the visual components included.

October 2024