Cheryl Melfi: Digital Reeds Extraordinaire!

S   pace is social, and each society produces its own space—space that is simultaneously mental and physical. Space is always ‘produced’, in the sense that it is always a set of relationships; it is never a ‘given’; never inert or transparent; never in a state of nature untouched by culture. There is no such thing as an ‘empty’ space. You have already filled it...”
  — David Wiles, p. 10.

I   n electroacoustic music the interrelationship of spatial attributes and spatial schemata is often engaged in a play of perceptual grouping—one that blurs and confounds distinctions like ‘source’ and ‘ensemble’.”
  — Gary Kendall & Mauricio Ardila, p. 125.

T he solo electroacoustic clarinet performance by Cheryl Melfi last night in CharlotteStreet.org’s City Center Square location was excellent. Apart from the beauty of the works, the program illuminated a number of aspects of electroacoustic performance practice—things that are more apparent when it is soloist-plus-electronics, as contrasted with larger-ensemble-plus-electronics.

• Mark Snyder: ‘Butterfly’
  
• Richard Johnson: ‘Hiram’ (première)
  
• Alex Harker: ‘Fluence’
  
• Daniel Eichenbaum: ‘The Lonely Road’ (première)
  
• João Pedro Oliveira: ‘Time Spell’

T hese are all works for amplified B-flat clarinet and electronics. By their nature (with the performer positioned center-stage in a multi-loudspeaker array configuration) the works explore the relationship between ‘enacted’ space (a space whose semantics are created through the presence of the clarinettist on stage), the composed space of the “tape” (electronics) part and the bridge between the two created by live processing (typically in Max/MSP or Pd or other software tool). The clarinet part calls for extremes in register and dynamic range, with extremely animated playing. Each of the compositions draws on sonic causal relationships that we perceive as interactive, but which are in reality generated through careful synchronization with the electronics part. In some of the pieces, by using ‘clarinet-triggered’ causal relationships and gestural interplay (notably in the Oliveira piece) as an alternative to continuous realtime processing, the electronic material becomes more strongly linked—spatially and narratively—to the live instrument.

T he unique potential of electroacoustic music to explore spatial relationships and our auditory perceptions and cognition of the body’s spatial situatedness has raised issues about appropriate performance practices for this music. Throughout the course of its evolution, electroacoustic music has invited research into new modes of performance. Spatial details are invariably a consideration in these.

T he unique potential of electroacoustic music to explore timbral relationships and our perceptions is also invariably revealed... so long as the performer is up to the challenge! Clarinettists are today challenged by innovations in both contemporary music and technology. Compositions for clarinet in recent decades have led to performance practices that include new techniques, such as frulato, multiphonics, glissandos, extreme alternate fingerings, reed-jacking, microtonal pitch-bending, key-clicks, lip-buzzing, and vocal sounds such as humming or singing at the same time the instrument is blown. These techniques are increasingly permeating the repertoire of the clarinet, especially so in the case of film scores. They require the clarinettist to constantly extend her/his technique, both blowing and fingering.

N otably, Rehfeldt recommends the amenability of the clarinet to experiments in new music: “Its flexibility allows a wide range of effects, including all manner of multiple sonorities, microtones, tone, trills, air sounds, percussive sounds” (see also Druhun, 2003).

C larinet and electronics mingle and exchange places. The identities/characters of each, though, remain discernable. An explosive staccato articulation is a ‘Bartokian’ act clearly in an instrumental idiom, while longer note values, with long dynamics changes and circular breathing to sustain them, manifest an overtly ‘vocal’, visceral, diaphragmatic aspect. Cheryl negotiates some superhuman clarinet feats—virtuosic technic [extreme technic] with appealing musicality!

M ono samples were used to dramatic effect in several of the works, panning the samples across the Mackie speaker array. This was most notably the case with the sounds of extended releases of breath through the clarinet, which present spectromophologies that ‘accept’ the spatialization attributes of panning across the area of the Mackie monitors. [Smalley emphasizes that “the motion must be implicit in the sound itself, or the texture itself, or the context itself.” Basically, the use of 5.1 spatialization (as opposed to 8-channel or other formats) magnifies the perceived kinetic energy of material. Small gestural fragments are scattered over the 5.1 array to form “cumulative” trajectories of sound, and the listener becomes immersed in dark and abstract soundscapes generated by the clarinet.] By layering materials a rich spatial hierarchy is created: a World, a believable World. At any given moment, certain sounds/motions dominate others, and the hierarchy is in constant flux as materials emerge, develop, and recede. Cool! A World that is impervious to human mastery!

A  number of processing techniques are utilized.

• Buffering: This is used to extend textures established by the clarinet into more dynamic and irregular textures, building up a dense sound-world which clearly originates from the clarinettist on stage.
  
• Delay Lines: Depending on the delay times, these either exaggerate short gestures through rapid and irregular repetition or, alternately, longer delay lines assist in the build-up of textures.
  
• Freezing: This facilitates harmonic layering based on the clarinet’s note being artificially ‘held’ once it has moved on to another.
  
• Granulation: This is frequently used to add fluctuating textures to sustained notes, often controlled via amplitude tracking (e.g., a louder sound will have a smaller grain size and greater grain variation).

C heryl Melfi has served as principal clarinetist in the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, the Catalina Chamber Orchestra, and the Michigan Pops Orchestra. She is a past member of Quadrivium, the Crosswinds Ensemble, the Arizona-based wind quintet Fünf, and the contemporary music quartet THUD. She has also performed with contemporary music groups including the Contemporary Directions Ensemble, the Prime Directive, and the Nova Chamber Players. With Quadrivium, she was a featured artist at the 2010 Electro-Acoustic Juke Joint and the 2011 Thailand International Composition Festival. Melfi has performed at the 2008 International Clarinet Association’s ClarinetFest where her performance was called “excellent and exotic.” Other festival performances include Electronic Music Midwest and SEAMUS.

• Cheryl Melfi website
  
• Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance (KCEMA) website
  
• João Pedro Oliveira website
  
• Richard Johnson website
  
• Alex Harker website
  
• Mark Snyder website
  
• Daniel Eichenbaum website
  
• Timothy Place’s Max/MSP objects
  
• Timothy Place’s ‘8space’ Max/MSP spatializer plug-in
  
• Max/MSP Granular Spatializer object at IRCAM
  
• Max/MSP frequency-domain filter Spectral Spatializer object at IRCAM
  
• Karlheinz Essl’s RTClib for Max/MSP
  
• ppooll
  
• IRCAM tools
  
• IRCAM Spat and other tools at FluxHome.com
  
• Batista C. Uma abordagem da música eletroacústica brasileira no final do séc. 20. Monografia de Especialização. Universidade Federal de Goiás, Escola de Música. Goiânia, 2001.
  
• Druhan M. A performer guide to multimedia compositions for clarinet and visuals: A tutorial focusing on Works by Joel Chadabe, Merrill Ellis, William O. Smith, and Reynold Weidenaar. DMA Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2003.
  
• Emmerson S. Living Electronic Music. Ashgate, 2007.
  
• Heaton R. ‘The contemporary clarinet’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet, C. Lawson, ed. Cambridge Univ, 1995.
  
• Kendall G, Cabrera A. Why things don’t work: What you need to know about spatial audio. Proc International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2011;1-4.
  
• Kendall G, Ardila M. The artistic play of spatial organization: Spatial attributes, scene analysis and auditory spatial schemata. Proc International Computer Music Conf (ICMC) 2007;63-8.
  
• Gary Kendall page at Queen's Univ Belfast
  
• Moore A, Schmidt P, Dockwray R. A hermeneutics of spatialization for recorded song. twentieth-century music 2009;6:83-114.
  
• Rehfeldt P. New Directions for Clarinet. Univ California, 1994.
  
• Smalley D. Space-form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound 2007;12:35-58.
  
• Wiles D. A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge Univ, 2003.
  
• Young J. Reflections on sound image design in electroacoustic music. Organised Sound 2007;12:25-33.
  
• Zampronha E. Notação, representação e comunicação. Um novo paradigma da escrituração musical. Fapesp. São Paulo, 2000.
  
• Zvonar R. A history of spatial music. eContact! 2004;7(4)

Kari Johnson & Robert Burke: ‘Unity’ Concert

M any things to be enthused about last night, regarding Kari Johnson’s and Robert Burke’s KCeMA performance at Unity Temple.

• Christopher Biggs – The Ends of Histories (piano, electronics, and video, 10-min)
  
• Peter Swendsen – Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is (instrumented bass drum and electronics, 8.5-min)
  
• Jeff Herriott – Velvet Sink (piano and electronics, 13-min)
  
• João Pedro Oliveira – Liquid Bars (vibraphone and electronics, 12-min)
  
• Scott Blasco – Queen of Heaven (piano and electronics, 23-min)

C hristopher Biggs’s ‘The Ends of Histories’ for piano, digital video and audio represents ideas regarding how history must end—any history, all Histories—including religious ones, socio‐political ones, geological histories, all of them. A primary-color-heavy, apocalyptic video of watery scenes and splotches of color is displayed on a screen adjacent to pianist Kari Johnson. The high-contrast, posterized quality of the video’s color palette adds to the non-human, bichromatic wolf-vision, Terminator-vision, Predator-vision, insect-vision viewpoint of the camera/cameraperson. The piano part is full of sforzando emphases, a hyper-percussive quality that is meant to mate with the punctate, unforgiving synth and cosmically abject waveform-samples on the digital audio tracks. Ms. Johnson provided a spirited, empathetic reading, flawless.

T   he materials represent the following conceptions of the end of history: (1) a polarized religious End Time whereby everyone either ascends into a Pleasant World or descends into Fire—a prophetic, spiritual, transcendent End that has appeared in many forms throughout history and is currently represented by the idea that there will be some kind of cataclysm at the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012; (2) a sociopolitical End in which capitalist democracy supplants all other ideologies...; and (3) ‘scientific’ Ends... mass-extinctions.”
  — Christopher Biggs, composer.

P eter Swendsen’s ‘Nothing is not there and the Nothing that is’ for miked/instrumented bass drum and electronics draws its inspiration from violent forces of wind and weather. Forces of Nature are the architects of the sonic space and textures, and humans are compulsory respondents to natural events that are not of their choosing. The majority of the piece consists of canticle-like ‘verse-and-responsory’ segments, each about one minute in length. The human percussionist (Robert Burke) is entrained in Nature’s mesh (electronics, plus waveforms captured by mics—his own playing, digitally processed, delayed, pitch-bent, filtered, and replayed through monitors adjacent to him on-stage). The piece is written in such a way that the performer becomes progressively more mindful of the sonic consequences of each gesture, each mallet stroke, for what the future will become—and we in the audience experience this sense of the long-term impact that we have, on each other, on other species, and on the planet as a whole. Burke’s finesse with extended mallet techniques—including inducing aeroelastic drum-head vibrations with his hypothenar eminence and including wiping a stick fitted with a red silastic scrubber on the drum-head to evoke wild-animal growls and anguished roaring—were ‘Never-heard-anything-like-that-before!’ breathtaking.

A   long the coast, this collision is a constant negotiation: the land and sea changing back and forth; the clouds that hover near the shoreline. In the interior, however, wind and weather do not negotiate.”
  — Peter Swendsen, composer.

J oão Pedro Oliveira’s ‘Liquid Bars’ delivers sonic textures that marry live marimba/vibraphone with the electronically-processed signals from two large dynamic ribbon mics positioned at approximately mid-resonator-tube height on the left side and right side of the instrument. The electronically-processed sounds mutate spontaneously under software control, modulated by the mallet strikes. The increasingly complex polyphonies and polyrhythms are fascinating and unnerving—almost like interviewing a person whose acute psychiatric problems have landed the person in your Emergency Room in the wee hours of a Saturday night. The notion of ‘self’ is called into question, not only who the self or ‘selves’ are—the one(s) in front of you—but also whether the whole assumption that ‘who’ any of us are is stable and ascertainable is faulty. The composition has ketamine-like psychotropic properties. Gee, should FDA and DEA regulate this music as a Schedule II pharmaceutical? Powerful! Robert Burke’s 4-mallet technique is superb...

L   et us imagine a Marimba who can produce sound... Let us imagine that the Performer and the Marimba would each have the possibility of dividing themselves into two or more instruments and performers—and imagine that all of these play against each other.”
  — João Pedro Oliveira, composer.

J eff Herriott’s ‘Velvet Sink’ is a piece that explores the possibilities of the piano through both extended performance techniques and the use of digital audio. I worry that technical obsolescence tends to make works like these short-lived. Several works realized on the IRCAM’s realtime audio processor 4X, for example, can no longer be performed, because the equipment and operating-system become obsolete so fast and cannot readily be ‘refactored’ and ported to new configurations that can render the same effects as the old ones. There are maintenance problems even with well-structured software. Pieces for ‘tape’ survive: the process of recording will always be ported to more recent technologies, such as CDs, DVDs, and hard disks. Here, though, Herriott’s Max/MSP scripts and Peak and ProTools elements are fairly portable and are likely to withstand the technology changes of this decade and the next. Kari Johnson gives tactile, delicate treatments of the keyboard passages. Repetitive eighth-note patterns, very insistent, have undulating up-down microtonal bends applied to them, until the patterns feel like waves, a gentle-swell aquatic envelope—the sonic surface is a kind of ‘minimalism-built-out-of-complexity’, sort of oxymoronic jumbo-shrimp. Then she stands up, reaches into the piano and begins plucking strings with fingertips and fingernails; hammering piano strings with percussion mallets; modifying the placements of rubber erasers between strings, prepared-piano-style—at times music-box-like, at times chime-like.

S   amples were recorded using both a baby grand and an out-of-tune piano-harp from a destroyed upright piano. Some of these sound snippets were then processed and patched to generate longer sound files that were, in turn, reconfigured with ProTools. Others, notably the plucked gestures in the third movement, sound in performance much as they did during the recording. Ultimately, a unique Max/MSP patch is used in performance to control the playback of the recorded material.”
  — Jeff Herriott, composer.

S cott Blasco’s (b'79) Queen of Heaven, composed for Ms. Johnson and premiered last night, consists of five movements, each conceived as [a religious—] icon, concerning itself with a single idea, turning it over and over, meditating on it from different angles. ‘Queen of Heaven’ is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “a source of comfort and inspiration to Christians from the earliest years of their history,” in the composer’s words. Blasco’s composition, informed by his Master’s degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and degree in Composition and Music Theory from Calvin College, is a highly personal exegesis. The angels’ ‘greeting’ the Mother of God in the first movement conveys more of a confrontation—as in Awed and Struck Dumb—than a ‘greeting’. Sonority and terror appear linked in other of the movements as well, enough to cause most to have second-thoughts about the appeal of the Pearly Gates.

W   hen I write music, I’m not writing it ‘for me’ per se. I see it as holding out an olive branch to my audience, and offering praise by mirroring the Creator.”
  — Scott Blasco, composer.

K ari Johnson is a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory where she studies with John McIntyre. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Central Missouri, a master’s degree in Piano Performance from Bowling Green State University, and a master’s degree in Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Johnson has won or placed in competitions throughout the Midwest, including the MTNA Steinway Young Artist Competitions in Missouri and Illinois and the Venetia Hall Concerto Competition. An active performer of new music and chamber music, Ms. Johnson’s recent performances include collaborative concerts at the University of Central Missouri and Pittsburg State University, UMKC’s “Carter and Messiaen at 100” festival, and the CMS Great Plains Chapter 2009 Regional Conference. In the coming year she will perform at the 2010 UCM New Music Festival and the 2010 SEAMUS National Conference.

R obert Burke is also a DMA student at UMKC Conservatory. He has enjoyed an eclectic carrier performing, studying and teaching throughout Canada, The United States, Japan and Europe. He is originally from Alberta, Canada although for the last decade has hailed New Orleans as home. A strong advocate of new music, Mr. Burke has commissioned and performed countless solo percussion works in recital and held member ship in New Works Calgary, Syncronia (St. Louis) and Conundrum New Music Ensemble. He has also been a regular member of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, The Calgary Philharmonic and The Louisianna Philharmonic. As a drumset player, Mr. Burke has performed and toured with a remarkable number of recording artists in clubs and festivals throughout the United States and Europe, including Brian Lee, Johnny Sansone, Preston Hubbard, Frankie Ford, Cyril Neville, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Peter Nero, Marvin Hamlish, and Robert Goulet. He holds degrees from University of Alberta and the University of Calgary and has served on the faculty of the University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, the University of Missouri-Columbia and Central Methodist College.

• Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance (KCeMA)
  
• Kari Johnson page at UMKC Conservatory
  
• Robert Burke contact
  
• Scott Blasco website
  
• João Pedro Oliveira website
  
• Christopher Biggs website
  
• Jeff Herriott website
  
• Peter Swendsen website
  
• Musser M75-Century vibraphone
  
• Musser M250-ConcertGrand marimba

Quadrivium Novum: Unity with Autonomy

A    [filmic] image combined with a sound placed in a context--none of which matches expectations--creates a metaphor and invites an individual search for meaning at a physical, emotional and psychological level (in that order).”
  —  Paul Rudy, UMKC Conservatory.

T he performance last night at Unity Temple by the electroacoustic quartet Quadrivium Novum was the final event of the 2009-2010 season for the Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance, KCEMA.

Q uadrivium is comprised of Rebecca Ashe (flute), Kari Johnson (piano), Cheryl Melfi (clarinet), and Mark Stauffer (cello). [‘Quadrivium’ may not only allude to their quartetness but also to each member’s equal, autonomous role in bringing new, disruptive repertoire and techniques to the ensemble’s collaborations—much as though each member were a canonical ‘subject’ to be studied, learned, mastered?] Each of Quadrivium’s members is associated with the UMKC Conservatory’s Community Music & Dance Academy.

• Daniel Eichenbaum: Orbit (flute, clarinet, live electronics; 20 min)
  
• Jason Bolte: Scrap Metal (prepared piano solo, fixed media; 10 min)
  
• Mara Gibson: E:Vespers (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio; 8 min)
  
• Andrew Seager Cole: A Slow Unraveling (flute, clarinet, cello, piano, electronics, video; 8 min)
  
• William Lackey: The World Falls Asleep (cello, digital recording of cello; 10 min)
  
• Christopher Biggs: Bioluminescence (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio, video; 12 min)

E ach of the works was rewarding, and I should apologize for not commenting here on each of them. Let me at least offer a few impressions of the three pieces that were world premieres: ‘E:Vespers’, ‘Orbit’, and ‘A Slow Unraveling’.

M ara Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, a ‘fantasie’ or tone-poem composed on the occasion of observing an eclipse, was remarkable for the organic, natural way in which the digital audio functions as an equal to the three live performers. The partitioning of human assistants and digital tracks programs all the tasks into one application, run by a single assistant at the console workstation in the center of the performance space. This approach does not ‘reduce’ the interpretation to ‘assistant vs. trio’ duality, nor does it risk dichotomizing the technology and the performers at the front of the performance space. Rather, with the house lights dimmed, the effect is one of a thoroughly integrated ‘whole’ in which the individual parts reveal their character and ideas—beginning with the tolling of delicate, repeated notes by the piano.

T he technology actually helps to maintain the textural and timbral cohesion of the other parts (clarinet, flute, piano), whose acoustic spectra are otherwise diverse. Unlike some electroacoustic works in which the technology is intrusive or merely ornamental; unlike works where the digital tracks, having been laid down and sequenced in advance, are inflexible and impose too much determinism on the live executants. In the case of Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, the composer is still the creator, and the 3 performers and 1 assistant are the directors in charge of interpreting the musical elements of the work, whether they are for an acoustic instrument or combined with a computer sequencer. The performers are responsible to recreate the world the composer has envisioned: here, a contemplative, reverent, panoramic one—punctuated with worries but ultimately beneficent—captured in the twilight of the eclipse and return of the sun after 'totality'.

W    e orbit and float in our space gondola and watch the oceans and islands and green hills of the continent pass by at five miles per second. We move silently and effortlessly past the ground. I want to say ‘over the ground’ as I write this, but remember: in space, your sense of up or down is completely gone and my description must reflect this fact. In addition, the breathtaking speed of the ship is an odd and confusing contrast to the feel of perpetually floating within the spaceship. You do not sit before the window to view the passing scene, certainly not down upon it. Are you speeding past oceans and continents, or are you just hovering and watching them move beside you?”
  —  Joseph Allen, U.S. astronaut.

D aniel Eichembaum’s ‘Orbit’ is an antiphonal piece for flute, clarinet, and electronics. Rebecca Ashe and Cheryl Melfi are dressed in black, in near-total darkness, barefoot. They perform Orbit’s several movements as a duo, gliding anticlockwise between the four ‘stations’ that are set up on-stage. The stations are separated around the perimeter of a 10-meter circle whose perigee is closest to the audience and apogee farthest away.

T he ephemeral, ambient quality of electroacoustic elements is abundant, at times dominant. But it is important to note that the digital tracks are derived entirely from recordings of Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s own playing, breathing, moving—not from Eichenbaum’s digital waveform library or independent geek artistry in a vacuum. Extensive digital signal-processing (DSP) and editing have been done to produce what are now rendered by the sequencer in performance as, say, massive, rocket-like, spine-shaking ‘rumbles’ [from the multiple studio monitor speakers that are arrayed around the performance space, controlled from the assistant’s digital audio workstation console] or celestial chirps or high-energy quantum particle ‘tweets’. We had no idea of this in advance. But when Rebecca and Cheryl remarked after the performance that all of the electroacoustic effects we had just heard during this piece had begun from sounds that they themselves had made, and that Eichenbaum had recorded and processed and sequenced them as the three of them sat together at the DAW console in the studio, it was heartwarming evidence of a deeper sort of collaboration between performers and composer. Composer/DAW-artist/engineer as performer; performers as engineers/editors/co-composers. There is something profoundly ‘right’ about this.

W hat I mean is, composers, performers, computer musicians/DAW-artists have accepted, for the most part, the progressive abstractions from older analog and now-obsolete digital hardware into software modules and sequencer patches... not just ‘miniaturization’ per se but now total automation and virtuality, including software to manage the multiple applications and equipments and software to insert random aleatorics and emulate human-like variability effects. These abstractions are motivated by reliability, by productivity for the composer, by aesthetic considerations—all valid and admirable. But the abstractions have incrementally impoverished the electroacoustic performance experience, I think—compared to, say, my first experience of a Moog Synthesizer as a child of 10 at the Minneapolis Symphony (now Minnesota Orchestra) in 1963, teeming with patch-cables and wires and mad-scientist musician (I regret I cannot remember who, or which composers’ works were performed) at the keyboard, clearly *not* in complete control.



B ut in Eichenbaum’s ‘Orbit’ we have a focused assimilation of the digital and acoustic environments, in which the digital realization is a cohesive part--‘gluey’ elements that hold the entire composition together. The live performers are not ‘bystanders’. They are confronted, yes, by their own DSP-processed previously-recorded sounds. They are reacting to the aleatoric expressions of the DAW assistant who is reincarnating the sequences at one remove, so to say. And they know this, even though we in the audience did not, until the remarks following the performance.

H aving heard Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s post-performance commentary on ‘Orbit’, though, we now comprehend aspects of the performer-electronics interactions that we hadn’t grasped at first hearing: the intimacy of the part that you are now playing, live; the musical subtleties of rediscovering the state-of-mind you were in when you made the sounds that you are now hearing emanate from these electronics; the expressive stimulation of being re-reminded now, of how that sequencer patch was co-edited by you and Daniel not so long ago. This can be a truly productive process—and a provocative montage of active, creative roles and meta-roles for performers in their interpretations of electroacoustic music, as it was with the Quadrivium performance last night!

W hat else? The noise gradations range from total silence (a bus is heard faintly, passing by outside Unity Temple on 47th Street) to 100 dB butt-shaking. ‘Really Noisy’ (what Stockhausen would call ‘sehr geräuschaft’)–filtered ‘pink’ noise and rumbling ‘red’ noise, convolved with other signals on the track to the point where it pervades the space and progressively washes out and obscures Rebecca’s flute and Cheryl’s clarinet. ‘Sort of Noisy’ (‘etwas geräuschaft’) – square and sawtooth waves convolved with the rest, but with enough high-frequency spectral content to meld with and preserve the listener’s attentiveness to upper-register activity in the flute and clarinet parts... A dense polyphony, reminiscent of György Ligeti’s writing for the score of the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’: a choir of myriad voices; the mixing and intermingling and asynchronous entries and departures of thousands of voices; microtonal voices, sounding notes a quarter-tone higher or lower than their neighbors; cosmic cacophony tending toward pantheism.

A ndrew Seager Cole’s ‘A Slow Unraveling’ applies combinatoric permutations to tiny musical elements to generate large [fractal?] structures. The fast-tempo elements that begin the piece devolve into slower ‘child’ elements that enclose and subsume the ‘parents’ until the music completely unravels, finally coming to a rest. The music was genuinely interesting and admirably executed, regardless of its formal compositional methods and inspiration. Kari Johnson’s piano and Mark Stauffer’s cello were especially compelling, as regards imbuing the piece with vivid kinesthetic impressions of velocity and depth/space. The piece has narrative; a story unfolding among the performers. It is intimate ‘chamber music’, yes. But it is the paradoxical ‘intimacy’ of space itself, on an astronomical scale.

B ravo!

• Quadrivium Novum on Facebook
  
• Quadrivium Novum website
  
• Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance (KCEMA) website
  
• Rudy P. Three requiems and a dream: The language of electroacoustic sound in film. EMS, 2007. [1MB pdf]

Soundscape: The Large, Ambient Instrument We Occupy

T wo thematic elements threaded through all of the works performed at last night’s KCEMA event in Kansas City, ‘I See You’ [ICU]: (1) exploring modes of urgency/emergency/criticality, and (2) confronting the natural tensions between aural and visual perception.

• James Mobberley—‘Going with Fire’ (Rebecca Ashe, flute; James Mobberley, sequencer and tape)
  
• Matthew Dotson—‘Song Cycle for Haruki Murakami’ (Bart Woodstrup, video; Matthew Dotson, electronics and tape)
  
• Peter Lawless—‘Tim Sequence’ (Timothy Eshing, viola; Peter Lawless, sequencer)
  
• Jacob Gotlib—‘Filaments’ (Rebecca Ashe, flute; Jacob Gotlib, sequencer)
  
• J.T. Rinker and Carolyn Tennant—‘Directed’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)
  
• Len Lye / Per Magnus Lindborg—‘Tusalava’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)
  
• Jeff Herriott—‘Barnwork’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)

T he first piece, by composer James Mobberley, is a rich and compelling work, powered by Rebecca Ashe’s incendiary flute playing Walter Piston-esque chromatics and 12-tone phrases against a sequencer track that covers an astonishing range of timbral and rhythmic textures during the 7-min work. The electronics and the flute form a duet, with phrases in the flute part carried over into the synthesizer part, turned over and mutated, pitch-bent, and—freed once again—on their independent way. The piece has jungle-ous percussive sounds admixed with rustling and emulations of wind in the trees...


followed by aqueous ripple-ey sounds that suggest a soundscape in nature.

G    oing With the Fire’ is the third in a series of works that utilize only the solo instrument as the source for the taped sounds. The piece embodies the flash of creative fire that takes over as a work begins to gel. After the inevitable frustration period, with idea after idea, suddenly the grid unlocks, the boundaries slip away, and I find myself giving up the formal structures and preconceived notions, and simply going with the fire.”
  —  James Mobberley, program notes.

T he experience for us in the audience is ‘immersive’, and the reality that the music conjures is a coherent story of ‘going’, of ‘discovery’—a spontaneously-forming linear narrative that has an immediacy and an arc that makes sense.


T he Dotson-Woodstrup piece likewise has a playfulness and spontaneity. Excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s novel ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ form the text around which the music and video are organized. The animated text fragments projected in front of the audience engage in a duet with the musical utterances—at times corroborating each other, and at times carrying on a dispute.

S    onically, Murakami’s work made it evident to me that, in the words of his main character, it should be ‘something concrete’... The material was derived from several ambient recordings that took place both inside and outside of my apartment in Chicago... symbolize the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds.”
  —  Matthew Dotson, program notes.

E shing’s viola and Lawless’s sequencer tracks plumbed the reverberous La Esquina acoustic space. In fact, the rhythmic patterns of the piece engaged the room beautifully, invoking the performance hall itself as a large, ad hoc ‘instrument’, waiting to be played. The ‘surfaces’ of each part; the interface between each pair of them—the ‘liminality’ of our expression and its inevitable fading so soon after we have uttered/played it—are illuminated by this beautiful piece.


T usalava’ is a 9-minute black-and-white animation created in 1929. ‘Tusalava’ is a Samoan word denoting the idea that ‘eventually everything is or becomes the same.’ It originally had a piano score written by the Australian, Jack Ellitt, who had known film-maker Len Lye in Sydney. The original score has been lost, and Sinchak and Herriott perform using a new score written in 1999 by Norwegian composer Per Magnus Lindborg. Transmute and augment the sounds of traditional instruments, creating novel sound scapes and acoustical/expressive spaces!

T usalava’ was constructed using 4,400 drawings or animation ‘cels’, each of which was photographed—the classical process known as cel animation. The film begins with the screen divided into three rectangles, with vertical arrays of dots and circles wriggling and twisting. Eventually, they collapse into two rectangles, and the wriggling shapes continue to mutate and form intricate patterns. Out of one of the rectangles a totem figure appears and is parasitized by a wriggling shape, with several suckers. The shape scrolls off the screen, displaced by a number of spirals, which are in turn consumed by a primeval black dot.

T usalava’ is an abstract film, in a 1920s surrealist idiom. Lye (a New Zealander) was influenced by Australian Aboriginal art, though, so what strikes us as surreal may simply be exotic ‘otherness’. Tusalava references organic shapes that sprout bio-arms and devour each other, not Modernistic shapes or mechanistic parts and actions. Reportedly, Lye was a doodler and sketcher, activities that he viewed as ‘pre-conscious’ truth bypassing rationality. ‘Tusalava’ can be seen as a film about morphogenesis—in and of itself; and about movement as an irreducible evidentiary primitive. It has a concretism about it, a literality that is not concerned to symbolize other processes.


T his entire concert is, I sense, opposing the oculocentrism of most of Western culture. Aural vs. Visual space. A new dialectic, one that grants equal rights to ears.

O h, in Western culture, sight has been ever-predominant—philosophers since ancient times have been sighted people, who held that ‘The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears and other senses’ [Heraclitus]. We have the Mind’s Eye; before now, we never had the Mind’s Ear.

T he historical prominence of eyes, while understandable, needs to be shaken up from time to time—as the artists performing at La Esquina tonight were able to do.

T he notion of a ‘Shared Sonic Environment’ was introduced ... Public Sound Objects (PSOs)? The works performed last night each revealed the disrupting effect of acoustic velocity and the latency in musical communication over room-sized distances, with studio monitors splayed out around the hall about 2 meters above the seating.


T he Gotlib composition juxtaposes the human voice of the flute with the alien, matrix-oid sequencer/tape. Sounds are transferred and colored, such that each part constitutes a ‘sonotope’. The trajectory of the piece has the flute becoming more dispassionate and automatized, while the synthesizer part becomes progressively more ‘human’—my impression only; barely implied by Jacob’s program notes. The failure to merge leads to the re-individuation of the parts’ personalities and a satisfying resolution to the encounter.

T    wo threads—the flute and the electronic sounds—struggle to merge and connect. They meet briefly in the calm middle section of the piece before falling away again.”
  —  Jacob Gotlib, program notes.

T hese works rely on story-crafting that is considerably different from conventional compositional methods. They are not assemblages of abstract sounds or disparate textures; they are not comprised of ‘movements’ in any classical sense. Instead, they have ‘scenes’ and ‘acts’—they are closer to opera than to traditional chamber music idioms. The videos predominantly serve the role of ‘set’ and ‘props’—creating the atmospherics that enable the narrative and contextualize the other performers. The performers’ ‘inhabiting’ their roles and delivering the inspired performances that they do—these things don’t happen just anywhere: they happen here, situated in this soundscape, in this video scenery.

S o, beyond ‘set’, the video and the soundscape—the aleatoric front door opening and slamming as people come and go from La Esquina; the antiphonal freight trains rumbling-scritching by on steel rails 200 feet from the building; the rustle of shoes on the concrete floor—all comprise a larger, ambient ‘instrument’ in which the performers and the audience are together immersed. Hard not to be caught up in the hyper-moment. Bravo!

• AIAKC Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance "I-See-You"
  
• KCEMA "I-See-You" at La Esquina, 17-FEB-2009.
  
• Jacob Gotlib website
  
• Gotlib profile at American Composers' Forum
  
• James Mobberley page at UMKC Conservatory
  
• Jeff Herriott website
  
• Herriott page at Society of Composers Inc (SCI)
  
• Sonict website at Univ Wisconsin Whitewater
  
• J.T. Rinker at Robt & Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, Univ Buffalo.
  
• Lye L. Tusalava. U.K./New Zealand, 1929. BigBangLab vlog.
  
• Cantrill A. Description of Len Lye cinematography, at SensesOfCinema.com
  
• Len Lye page at Wikipedia
  
• Per Magnus Lindborg
  
• Barbosa A. Displaced Soundscapes. VDM, 2008.
  
• Blesser B, Salter L-R. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. MIT, 2006.
  
• Erlmann V, ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Berg, 2004.
  
• Grueneisen P. Soundspace. Birkhauser, 2003.
  
• Hedfors P. Site Soundscapes : Landscape Architecture in the Light of Sound. VDM, 2008.
  
• Licht A. Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories. Rizzoli, 2007.
  
• Martin E. Architecture as a Translation of Music. Princeton Arch, 1994.
  
• Muecke M, Zach M. Resonance: Essays on the Intersection of Music and Architecture. Lulu, 2007.
  
• Murakami H. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Vintage, 1998.
  
• Pallasmaa J. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. 2e. Academy, 2005.
  
• Schafer R. The Soundscape. Destiny, 1993.
  
• Xenakis I. Music and Architecture. Pendragon, 2008.
  
• DSM. Conversation pieces: Electroacoustic music and open-ended dialogue. CMT blog, 25-APR-2008.
  
• DSM. Sound Art: Beyond mere music. CMT blog, 26-APR-2008.

Sound Art: Beyond Mere Music

Interactive Gestures, a performance of electroacoustic music and multimedia works, with guest artist João Pedro Paiva de Oliveira, was held last night at La Esquina, in Kansas City, co-sponsored by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and by the UMKC Conservatory. One could say that it was a healing of the wound between ‘fixed-media’ and ‘live’ electroacoustic performance. The unity of the aesthetic effect of the musicians who performed live and the composers who engineered their fixed-media playback was among the best I’ve ever heard.

Composers who create works for fixed-media (recorded and edited in the studio; replayed in performance halls) are maybe more comfortable in the studio than on-stage. For them, performance is in the studio, but probably not more so than for traditional composers. The spatialization that’s achieved in concert may be subject to many environmental variables and interpretive choices that are out of the composer’s control, just as any chamber or orchestral work is out of the composer’s control at the moment of performance. Last night, as in other electroacoustic events, we had the composers as performers——at the mixer control board, conducting the performance and responding (by improvisatory actions on their MIDI keyboards and controllers) to the playing of the live performers.

Although the array of 8 Mackie SR-450 speakers and the excellent mixing mitigated a number of problems, the La Esquina performance venue lacks acoustic features that are essential to the transparency and crispness of delicate, wide-spectrum works like the ones last night. (That La Esquina is an AIA venue is ironic.)

By contrast, NOVARS at Manchester University uses chilled-water cooling of the structural steel to silence the architecture of the studio and performance spaces. The total absence of architectural sounds arising from thermal expansion-contraction of the building frame—unwanted noises—is a great advantage for electro-acoustic performances at NOVARS. La Esquina, though, is a 20 x 40 meter warehouse ‘box’ with the railroad across the street, less than 50 meters away. Freight trains rumbled by every few minutes during the Interactive Gestures performance last night, an intrusive aleatoric element that seriously impaired the sonic integrity of several of the works. The roaring Burlington Northern diesel engine can ruin your ‘Time Spell’, for example, unless you happen to be casting a magical abjuration against a wizard who has morphed into a train.

Probably the works that were least affected by these complications were de Oliveira’s. The 8-channel pieces were at a sound pressure level that exceeded the ambient distractions, and the timbral and rhythmic diversity of them were riveting. The spatial articulation of sound was dramatic: we were listening to a master storyteller. The title of the event, ‘Interactive Gestures’: clinically correct. Gestures, comma, interactive, comma, in your face.

That the sound reinforcement gear and the building itself can interfere with pre-composed material is no surprise, just as the concert hall architecture and ‘system’ can interfere with traditional acoustic performance. In fact, anytime you perform a piece you transform it—its tone colors, reverb, spatialization among the channels/speakers, and amplitude shaping are different in ways that are idiosyncratic to that performance and that venue, even if the equipment is the same and the controls’ settings are the same as on a previous occasion or the same as when the piece was composed in the studio. We get a great degree of variability in the timbre, in the directed spatial distribution or trajectory of sound from the monitors, in the acoustic morphology, and in the temporal structure as perceived by members in the audience.

In the de Oliveira pieces, the acoustic spatial diffusion that was rendered via the 8-channel playback through the Mackie SR-450 300W monitors (8 loudspeakers, placed on 5-meter centers, 4 on the left side and 4 on the right side of the audience) revealed the works’ rich internal spaces. Oliveira creates a wide range of textural and gestural acoustic shapes, with semantics and phrasing that have trajectories from milliseconds to tens of seconds long—very much like intense conversation.

From sub-50Hz to sounds above 5KHz, Oliveira establishes a captivating ‘spectral occupancy’ with figures that serve as anchors to his composition/story. He structures processes around these to ‘articulate’ or define interactions of his implied ‘characters’ within the performance space.

Fluctuations are then introduced into the acoustic material either locally (at individual loudspeakers or clusters of speakers, via EQ or layering of channels and phasing effects between channels) or globally (via pitch morphing; granulation; splintering; master output from mixing console; replaying/looping; interrupting/restarting; montage). These sonic gestures evoke dynamic relationships between the elements—imply characters/actors and processes amongst them, musically.

A particular textural motion leads the live musician who plays with the fixed-media to react and respond with her own spatial and musical trajectory. Rebecca Ashe’s interpretive sense in this regard was superb. The human responses in turn introduce yet further mutations of timbral coloring, and then meta-articulations of the textural/spatial/motion arise.

For example, Rebecca Ashe introduced a sforzando spatial articulation, and this was ‘answered’ by de Oliveira in Channels 1 and 2 in response to the gesture, not only by increasing the levels to these on the console, but with chunkier density via delay and transposition layering.


Each interpretation creates a unique realization of a piece, just as any other chamber music performance generates a unique realization. Some reshapings were vehement and improvisational, bordering on realtime recomposition. Other reshapings were gentle and dutiful—especially those near the compositions’ ends, where the composer and performers are providing acoustic gestural ‘cues’ to the piece’s ending. Electro-acoustic may be a different language than you are used to, and the under-40 median age of the audience may be a different culture than you are used to in classical music performance, but the semantics are just as understandable and trustworthy as Beethoven.

That said, the risks in electroacoustic performance are clear. Like traditional performance practice, there is the chance that a multi-channel fixed-media interpretation that is not well-planned, or that is executed poorly, will work against a piece, no matter how fancy the performance venue architecture is and no matter how state-of-the-art the sound reinforcement gear is. All performance practice carries huge risk of error or misinterpretation. Jacob Gotlib and his collaborators did an excellent job of insuring that the performance risks were minimized. Wonderful!

Admittedly, these composers’ and performers’ works are often closer to cinema or theater than to conventional music. Whether the stories they create are conscious or unconscious, narratives are implicit in the sampling and aleatory. Every story leads to another story to another story to another story. Some of these stories are, I think, surreal or ‘pre-linguistic’ ones, in the way that de Oliveira confesses. In all, a very enjoyable evening was had by the 50 or so attendees at La Esquina last night. Bravo!

• Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance on MySpace
  
• Urban Culture Project: Interactive Gestures. KCEMA and AIA UCP, La Esquina, Kansas City, 25-APR-2008, 20:00.
  
• Eno B. 'The studio as compositional tool', in Cox C, Warner D, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Continuum, 2004, pp. 127-30.
  
• Kahn D. Noise, Water, Meat. MIT, 2001.
  
• Labelle B. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. Continuum, 2006.
  
• Landy L. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. MIT, 2007.
  
• Licht A. Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories. Rizzoli, 2007.
  
• Smalley D. Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes. Organised Sound 1997; 2: 107-20.
  
• Smalley D. Space-form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound 2007; 12: 35-58.
  
• Mackie.com
  
• Mackie SRM450v2 active sound reinforcement speaker
  
• Peterson G. Mackie SRM450v2 Snapshot Review. MixOnline, 01-FEB-2008.

Conversation Pieces: Electro-acoustic Music and Open-Ended Dialogue

M  y music will not break with the past or confront it … It only tries to communicate something very personal, something which may even not be communicable. I try to create something that may eventually have a glimpse of beauty.”
  —  João Pedro Paiva de Oliveira.

T  here is a small left-shift, to a position where sound becomes an expression of equivocal encounters with technology’s pervasive presence ... The ‘emblem book’ is a quirky kind of hypertext that reached its peak in Europe in the mid-17th Century. Each emblem is composed of three elements: a motto, a visual symbol, and some epigrammatic prose ... The assemblage of poetic/acoustic, visual, and literary spaces invites personal reflection on the analogies to be made between its separate components. As a form, it invites readings from several directions and offers the opportunity for each reader to reach their own individual conclusions. The various metaphors, symbols, and digressions allow room for internal flight within the space of interpretation. There is freedom to travel back and forth.”
  —  Katharine Norman, Sounding Art, p. 29.

Interactive Gestures, an evening of electroacoustic music and multimedia works, with guest artist João Pedro Paiva de Oliveira, will take place tonight, Friday, April 25 at 8:00 pm at La Esquina, at 1000 West 25th Street, Kansas City, Missouri. The event is co-sponsored by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and by the UMKC Conservatory.

Portuguese composer João Pedro Paiva de Oliveira, visiting professor at the UMKC Conservatory, will be a featured artist. Oliveira has written in a variety of idioms, including chamber opera, requiem, orchestral, string quartet and other chamber and solo instrumental ensembles, and electroacoustic music. He currently serves as Senior Professor at Universidade de Aveiro where he teaches composition, music theory and analysis.

Interactive Gestures will include the following works by Oliveira:

• ‘A Escaba Estreita’ (winner of Musica Nova, Czech Republic, 2005), Rebecca Ashe, alto flute;
  
• ‘Time Spell’ for clarinet and tape, Cheryl Melfi, clarinet;
  
• ‘Aphar’ for eight channel playback (winner of the Concours International de Musique et d’ Art Sonore Electroacoustique de Bourges, France, 2007); and
  
• ‘Bloomy Girls’ for fixed media and video.

The program will also include:

• ‘MHCHAOS’, Chris Biggs, computer, Rebecca Ashe, flute;
  
• ‘Tone Goblin’ for fixed media and video, Noah Keesecker;
  
• ‘Infested Readings’, Nihan Yesil;
  
• ‘Tower of Babel’ for eight channel digital playback, Jacob Gotlib; and
  
• ‘Third Option’, Jon Robertson, narrator, Joey Crane, guitar.

These are tremendously ‘open-ended’ pieces, as is typical for electro-acoustic music. It’s especially apropos to unite the acoustic experience with architecture and art—both of which similarly place substantial interpretive responsibilities on the viewer. Here’s an example. You’re standing in front of the Vermeer painting, one with a woman in it. Looking through a doorway, the woman is holding a lute. She has just been handed a letter by another woman. Naturally, you vicariously construct narratives in your mind, in which you contemplate the contents of the letter and confabulate the relationship between its author and the woman who is beginning to read it. (This natural human tendency is specifically what Paul Lansky’s ‘Things She Carried’ is about. And it’s also characteristic of Oliveira and other of the composers whose works are represented this evening.)


It’s paradigmatic in electro-acoustic music that very little is explicitly stated and that much is left to chance. But the drama is every bit as rich as more traditional forms. The music situates you in a pleasant altered state of awareness, peering as it were into your own subconscious, watching your mind form thoughts and associations.

Socially, this is not a solitary thing. Instead, it can be a shared experience that is every bit as much a stimulus to conversation and convivial speculation as any other chamber music event can be. The audience arranges itself in the midst of 8 loudspeakers, surrounded by 8 channels of exquisitely-mixed stimulations. Private confabulations become shared conversations, on topics that would never have arisen in any other way. That’s very much the spirit of the event at La Esquina this evening. Promoted on ClassicalLounge.com, it promises to be an exciting gathering. See you there!

• Urban Culture Project: Interactive Gestures. KCEMA and AIA UCP, La Esquina, Kansas City, 25-APR-2008, 20:00.
  
• NOVARS Research Centre for Electroacoustic Composition, Performance and Sound-Art, Univ Manchester
  
• EARS (Electro-Acoustic Resource Site) at de Montfort University
  
• Algorithmic.net
  
• Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Academy
  
• Ressources.Electro
  
• International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music (CIME-ICEM)
  
• Jacob Gotlib page on MySpace
  
• Gotlib Electroacoustic Music for Flute
  
• Urban Culture Project (UCP)
  
• Subliminal.org
  
• Eric Leonardson experimental instruments
  
• Braun H-J, ed. Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Johns Hopkins, 2002.
  
• d'Escrivan J, Collins N, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. Cambridge Univ, 2008.
  
• Lansky P. Etudes & Parodies. (Bridge, 2007.)
  
• Lansky P. Things She Carried. (Bridge, 2006.)
  
• Lansky P. Music Box. (Bridge, 2006.)
  
• Lansky P. Ride. (Bridge, 2005.)
  
• Lansky P. Conversation Pieces. (Bridge, 2004.)
  
• Licata T, ed. Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives. Greenwood, 2002.
  
• Manning P. Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford Univ, 2004.
  
• Norman K. Sounding Art. Ashgate, 2004.
  
• Ohm: Early Gurus of Electronic Music. (Ellipsis, 2005.)
  
• Simoni M, ed. Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music. Routledge, 2005.
  
• Composers In The Schools program (UMKC Conservatory)