Organs, scores, and arguments.

I gotta admit I'm blocked on this organ piece. I'm really struggling to find something I like. I don't like notes anymore. I'm getting really bored of music. I'm going to spend all day tomorrow developing my existing ideas into something, but I don't have much, and I don't know how or where it's going to go at this point.
The organ music we listened to in class was cool. The Ligeti piece in particular, although we can't get access to the pipes to do the weird stuff he was doing there. I did really like the way he uses the organ as one big mass of sound, rather than separating the voices and playing various melodies/counterpoint etc. I have composed a lot of disparate ideas so far, and I'm thinking of just taking one of them and approaching it the Ligeti way. The thing I liked the most about the Ligeti pieces was the way he blends the colours together, the way he sculpts the volume and timbre to create a gorgeous sound painting. I'd realy like to try to do something like this. So far my piece uses 3 different polyrhythms, and segues from being a kind of ambient piece/ballad into a progressive, Zappaesque jam. I think I can do without the prog bit, it's starting to bore me.
Like the Cargle piece, my organ piece has additional sounds. I've been up to the engine room with Ariel, and I recorded the sound of the motors running. It's pretty much just noise, but it's a particularly interesting noise, with a direct relationship to the sound hear at idle in the auditorium. I want to slowly fade the engine sound up through the sound system before the organ plays, and I've set up some processing, rhythmically panning and filtering the noise, eventually cutting it up into a "musical" texture to accompany the piece as it progresses.
I'll also be using drums, baritone guitar, and vocals.

I've started working on my score for Ash. I hope I wasn't misunderstood in class. I think that an image can be music. I think that non traditional scores are awesome. I merely wanted to express that it bugs me when people make a visual/graphic score out of context, that doesn't communicate anything. I think that a graphic score, or a painting, or whatever can communicate music. I think that composing with loose musical instructions that depend on the performers interpretation is totally the way to go. I was merely commenting that there's a lot of shit scores and I hate them when they don't come with instructions. I think the debate got a little out of hand. Part of the problem is that many graphic scores have been composed for specific performers/ensembles, and workshopped with the composer, so the performers understand the parameters. Someone picking up a score like that after the fact would need to do their research on the context of the piece before just diving into it and playing whatever. It bugs me when someone just throws some ink on a page and says that's my piece, when they've no idea who's going to play it, and therefore no idea of what they're doing. I think maybe I haven't existed in the composer/score area for so long, I don't really know what I like or hate about it anymore. I pretty much chose this course over others, like VCA composition, because I didn't want to study music composition in a score writing way. I don't know if I'm really interested in doing it. I prefer to play the music myself, or to communicate it through a score if I need other players, but I don't think of my work being written down for someone else to play without my involvement. That sort of thing doesn't really interest me at the moment. Maybe this project will develop that interest.

My piece for Ash is called Blue, and is a tone row based piece, building in 5ths from E-Bb. There is instruction for how to integrate the pitch material. I'm debating whether or not to include the pitch on the score, or not, but ultimately, the navigation of the form is totally interpretive. The scores are a series of watercolour paintings I've been making, abstract shapes that fade and morph together. There are instructions for how to use the colour, tone, hue, density etc as metaphor for register and dynamic and gesture. All these things are up to the performer to navigate through the shapes. I want my notes to be brief, but informative. I don't want to write an essay, and kill the improvised nature of the music, I want to give the necessary information to get Ash to perform the music I'm hearing in my ears. I think that any guitarist could play this music, regardless of fx, or electric/acoustic sounds. The sparseness of the score opens itself to options. I've been playing it myself to make sure the ideas work, and I get a lot out of it so far. I think I'll probably record it at some stage, perhaps with Ash, as a duo. I like the idea of it being a piece for any number of instruments (as long as those instruments are guitars, dammit).

I've been trying to find a copy of the Alvin Lucier Still Lives music. I loved that stuff. I really want to listen to it over and over again. It's just such a beautiful and simply idea, and it works on such an intuitive human level. Maybe it's the piano too, I love piano. I don't really know what to say about the piece other than I loved it. The simplicity is really what gets me. The meditative nature of it too. I've been writing a kind of Still Life piece recently. It's a sort of serenade at the same time. Mine is pretty different, obviously this has a unique idea at play, but the piece I'm working on does evoke a similar mood, just with different sounds. I've been trying to avoid the use of drums in it until absolutely the end of the piece. I think I'll use the Lucier music as a reference to how "still" my piece is..

Finally I wanted to comment on how much I responded to the article Explaining My Music by Tom Johnson. I really liked his style. "The truth isn't always beautiful, but beautiful things can't be untrue". I love his ideas. Not being autobiographical is hard. It was weird, because that morning Alice and I had been talking about atheism and logic, and the logical absolutes that form the universe, and how these absolutes form a beautiful system. To some people, logic and science take all the "magic" out of living, to some people, the spiritual is what gives beauty to life. But to that I think blah. The truth is much more interesting and beautiful. I think there's more magic in understanding the truth than there is in any form of "spirituality".

Ding Dang Dong.

I regret missing class this week. But I've been planning to make my bells performance KICK ASS for months, and I think I did it. So rather than blog about the themes of the class, I thought I'd write a brief annotation to the performance just to keep the blogs up to date.

I'm really glad I gave myself HEAPS of time to set up. Like a fool, I left a power supply at home, the power supply for the drummer, James', headphone mixer. Luckily Alice managed to drive home and back to get it while I set everything else up, and I don't think anyone noticed the mistake.

Overall, I was pretty nervous about the performance. I was really happy with it, but because of the power supply mishap, I didn't get a run through/sound check before everyone arrived, which made me nervous. I think we pulled it off beautifully. Some of the notes seemed to trigger wrong, and I think that was just a case of the midi cable being too long (10 feet is the recommended distance for midi, and this was 25 feet).

My piece is still untitled. I had begun the whole thing influenced by the Higgs Boson discovery, and wanted to write a sort of secular hymn. As the process continued, I was almost writing it about something else. One idea that got in the way was this idea of Spring time (the weather had been influencing me), and the story of Persephone. I tried to make the song about the temptation of Persephone from the pomegranate's perspective, but as I researched the story and wrote my lyrics, I found it increasingly difficult, kind of like write a song about rape from the rohypnol's perspective. I wanted the song to be joyous and full of energy, but with a longing that can't be placed. Then I  decided not to set anything in stone with lyrics, and instead worked with some glossolalic syllables. That's something I want to explore further. Using my voice, without words, but with specific sounds in place of the words. Like a made up language, like Sigur Ros or Dead Can Dance or similar. In future, I will make a whole record like that, and see what happens.

I feel like the piece is still about spring, and about the potency of science. I like the pomegranate as the imagery for the piece, and will probably expand on it further. Maybe lyrics will come, maybe not. who knows right now.

Sonically, the sounds in the piece are: the Federation Bells, sleigh bells, 3 dancers with 200 tiny bells each, sampled sleigh bells cut up and "glitched" and panned around the 4 channel surround system, reversed samples of the Federation bells drenched in reverb and also panned around the space. Voice, put through 4 different tempo delays, 1 for each speaker, drums, a filtered beatbox response to the kick drum pattern that plays a 3 on 2 poly rhythm it one pair of speakers and the same pattern reversed in the other pair. A synth bass drone that has been tuned to the just tuning of the bells and panned slowly around the space, and a dirty synth bass line that plays out of all 4 channels at once over the end rocking out section.

I do have plans to expand on the music. It began as one of my daily loop pieces from before semester started.



I'd like to eventually have lyrics and perhaps vocoder/guitar in the piece. Maybe replace some of the bells with rhodes or celeste, and sample/record the bells live in the space to add to the recording. Over the summer I think I'll try to work on some more "sections" by expanding on the musical phrases.

There's essentially 3 "sections" in the work so far. There's the intro part with the straight 8th notes, which also returns at the end, and overlaps in the middle a bit. The "verse" with the bass drone progression and the vocals. The elastic break down section that has no bass, and eventually becomes the bass line at the end of the song. All these sections have potential to grow further, so who knows where it will end.

Since it's kinda become about spring, i'd like to pursue it as the nocturnal mirror to Gyokuro. If that doesn't work, I'll save it for down the line when I make my glossolalia record.

I think I've rambled on long enough about this.