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Music is the eye of the ear.
- Thomas Draxe
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
- George Steiner
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Red Auerbach
Topic:
THE HARMONY OF THE SPHERES
What kind of listener are you?
As a composer-performer, I desire to create music and multi-media productions that "resonate" with the energy of the inner landscape of the human psyche. I want my music and art to inspire and move people and reconnect them with the very essence of the universe...the so-called harmony of the spheres. Because sound is produced by the combined efforts of noise-energy and the structural quality of instruments that resonate with vibrations, when I perform my compositions, I express myself through the medium of subtle interactions of pitched frequencies that enable the formation of harmony overtones within my chosen frame of observation. When an objective composition is replaced by subjective composition of perception, the organization of reflected sounds relates to the matrix of the cultural and cognitive associations of the listener. The listener is no longer a passive consumer but an increasingly active creator of his or her own experience. As a composer I take into account, not only the rigid relations of conceptual notes but also the high-energy interactional phenomena of tones in sound patterns of resonance, beat, combination tones and phase - shifts. I supplement consonance with dissonance as the sounds I create are in the process of developing their full psycho-acoustic effects within the vast range of electromagnetic radiation, even above or below (or outside) of the range of human perception.
Sounds are not judged by the pseudo-objective value of their static hierarchic relations, but by the psychosomatic effects of the dynamic/cybernetical processes that they release. The sound effect is transformative and cannot be standardized. The first phase of a transformative process requires the acquisition of energy by disintegration; i.e. the deconditioning of the reflex associations and the dissolution of the self limitations of ego-definition, including dissolution that disperses into a whole. This integrating process is associated with the harmony of the spheres, and my goal as a composer is to carry the listener, by adjusting attitudes and emotions in the listening process, towards a more direct experience of that esoteric state of experience.
And it is also on the basis of this subjective experience, along with reflective and surrounding environmental properties, that the noise-orientation of transformative music may be explained. New Music is --(in the first instance)-- nothing but "noise" when we first listen to it. Each experience of the same music after that, lessens the "noise" quotient and alters the character of the listening experience. It becomes a more memorable or catchy tune after that, and along the changes of cultural listening patterns, one may observe how the originally senseless noise, slowly changes into sensitive signals and is finally accepted as music (in an analogy to a cultural process in which dissonant intervals insert themselves into an enlarged notion of harmony). Human listening patterns are well defined and deeply imprinted (which is what causes those songs that go around and around in your head after hearing them) and usually occur after the breaking-up of the social eggshell (puberty) accompanied by hormonal developments and metabolic changes.
Without music life would be a mistake.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The MacArthur Foundation Awards, commonly known as the "genius" grants --given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation-- are presented to men and women in the arts, sciences and academia on an annual basis. The award winners receive an annual check of $100,000 for five years, to be used however they want. One of this year's recipients is George Lewis, a composer, performer, teacher, theorist and historian who has focused on experimental music. He has published numerous articles on music and cultural studies and is the author of an upcoming book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom.
If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.
They teach you there's a boundary line to music.
But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
- Charlie Parker
I am inspired by the thoughts on the Dare2BU website. Below is info taken from the website:
"There are numerous examples of people throughout the world who have overcome handicaps to achieve great success. One thing separates these winners from those who fail: they disregard any and all obstacles. These people-and all winners-possess the will to win. It's a will that starts with a belief in our ability to achieve the goals we dream of accomplishing.
Unfortunately, the world does not provide much inspiration on a daily basis. From the reporting of mostly negative news, to a "20% chance of rain" mentality, to music that tells us that love must be a painful experience, most people have few daily reminders that they can obtain personal and professional greatness without having to win the lottery.
Music is by far the most wonderful method we have to remind us each day of the power of personal accomplishment. And now -finally- the music industry has a new type of record company, one that is intensely dedicated to producing songs that inspire us all to accomplish great things."
Music is the universal language of mankind.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
- William Congreve
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
- Confucius
From the beginning, I have avoided categorizing The Phoenix Bird Symphony with any distinct label. I intend to produce it as recorded music, as a concert piece and a fully staged performance, so it is advisable for me to take all of the various forms of distribution into consideration, as well as invest research time and efforts into creating unique instruments and performance techniques that will allow for an imaginative, musical exploration of this concept. I am considering a specific area of this "New Music for New Instuments" approach, (although I remain open-minded about an entire range of experimental possibilities). Because of my background as a sculptor, I have experience in the production of Clay artforms, and I'm researching a method of instrument making that is a spinoff of that type of work.
Topic:
EMBARKING ON AN ACOUSTIC ODYSSEY WITH CLAY INSTRUMENTS
Shedding stereotypes in the interest of innovation
I am considering the use of clay as a material for musical instruments. When clay is fired in a kiln, the resultant material is hard and brittle, and yet has some unique possibilities due to exceptional resonance and acoustical properties. If you have ever tapped on a thin-walled ceramic vase, bowl or plate, you will know what I'm referring to. The sound produced from such material can be exceptionally resonant, ringing with a clear pitch that could be considered a non-clangorous tone. As with all solid materials that have the ability to vibrate when struck, fired clay can be used to produce pitched tones of specific frequency based on the engineering of the structural thickness, length of vibrating chamber or area of surface resonance.
Based on previous experience with various clays with different characteristics from all over the world, it should be possible to make some choices pertaining to the temperature at which the clay vitrifies or hardens into a denser material. The type that would be the most applicable for this purpose would be stoneware clay, which works best for sculpting large forms. Firing it to about 2400-2500 degrees F. would produce a durable and resilient material, hard and dense enough to resonate with excellent tone characteristics.
Instrument designs based on columnar air resonance could include: Ceramic flutes, whistles, ocarinas, horns and didgeridoos. In addition to wind instruments, percussion instruments such as: darabukkas, doumbeks, udus, abangs, kimkims and other forms of traditional and goblet drums based on a ceramic "bowl" and a stretched skin top would be possible --even without throwing them on a potter's wheel, because they could be built using coils. Some of the resultant sounds that could be produced would be comparable to the Indian tabla or African talking drum.
Experimental Clay instruments could also be produced. These might consist of hybrids of the above categories of wind and percussion instruments, as well as clay versions of Egyptian rebabba-type stringed instruments that could be played with techniques similar to those used for violin. In addition, imaginative designs based on previously unexplored design principles could be fabricated, as long as they can stand up to the requirements of musical tonality, durability and transportability.
Ceramic Speakers!
Another design innovation from nOrh Loudspeaker Ltd., a high-end audio manufacturer, located in Bangkok, Thailand. They sell over 20 types of speakers, including the nOrh 4.0, which comes in a black ceramic version and two special ceramic versions - the Celedon and All American.
In art, truth and reality begin
when one no longer understands
what one is doing or what one knows,
and when there remains an energy
that is all the stronger
for being constrained,
controlled and compressed.
- Henri Matisse
In new media production as in all art, I find myself restructuring and reordering information to form a continuity of idea. The process of memory-retrieval, performed subjectively is both psychoanalytic and highly personal, and is a way to reconstitute desired events selectively to organize a new whole. The Phoenix Bird is a conceptual work then, which ideally, gives insight into how an artist deals with these arenas of process and value.
Recently I have been inspired by a re-examination of William Gibson's book "Burning Chrome" in which memory, data, and simulations form much of the basis of human information "trafficking", emotional or otherwise, ultimately resulting in a blurring of flesh and machine. Gibson's later assertion of "the tamagotchi gesture" referring to the Japanese toy (a small digital creature housed in an amulet in need of daily feeding, love and sleep) has additional resonance with an artist's interests in self-formation and development.
Topic:
PRIORI
A priori versus a posteriori as a method of learning and the possibility of genetically inherited abilities.
"A priori" is a term used to identify a type of knowledge which is obtained independently of experience. A proposition is known a priori if when judged true or false one does not refer to experience. "A priorism" is a philosophical position maintaining that our minds gain knowledge independently of experience through innate ideas or mental faculties. The term a priori is distinguished from a posteriori, which means knowledge gained through the senses and experience. These are the two most common ways in which philosophers argue that humans acquire knowledge.
For Aristotle, "a priori" referred to something which was prior to something else. By "prior" he meant that some thing's existence was caused by the existence of another. Aristotle argued that to have knowledge of a prior thing, then, was to have knowledge of a causal relationship. He argued that we can establish a causal relationship between things through syllogistic logic. Descartes used the term "a priori" in his quest for the foundation of all knowledge. For Descartes, knowledge of our own existence was a priori because (a) denying it leads to a contradiction, and (b) we do not need to rely on our experiences to ponder our existence.
Kant believed that a priori truths could be found in the two areas; mathematics and the categories which organize the material of experience and science. Kant divided a priori truths into two categories: the synthetic and the analytic. Traditionally, mathematical propositions were seen as both analytic and a priori. Kant, however, classifies both mathematics and the categories as synthetic a priori. Math is synthetic a priori because it depends on the pure intuitions of the elements of time and space. Kant argued time and space were central intuitions to mathematical knowledge, and were thus the reasons for his grouping mathematical truths in the synthetic a priori. The categories are identified as synthetic a priori because denying them does not lead to a contradiction. On the other hand, these categories are central to experience. Kant used the example of causality, in the "Second Analogy" of the Critique of Pure Reason, to demonstrate that the concept of an "event" having a "cause" must be connected before we can give apply either notion. This connection can only be a synthetic one, since it is not tautological.
At this point, I question whether artistic abilites come from a so-called instinctive sense of what it takes to create beauty, or indeed are motivated and willful intentions to create things (as art), as an expression of the desire to articulate what seems to be beauty "in the eye of the beholder". Primitive artforms were known to function both as an expression of respect and awe for primal forces (such as representations of the deities that had power over the forces of nature) and as not-so-simple expressions of creativity by the artists who created them. Obviously art had a value to the people who created it, and also to the people who had the benefit of knowing about it (the audience). Participation in community art forms, such as decorating the environment (cave paintings), became a way of establishing a creatively expressed signal to non-community members that territorial imperative was being declared. Hence decorations were in order to make the same claim to outsiders that the territorial markings signify to hunting predators. "Stay away from my established area or deal with a defensive consequence". This is a survival mechanism, which must be deeply ingrained into the primitive lower levels of brain function. Termed as instinct, it may be easier to comprehend as programming on the level of the "wiring of brain circuits" as adverse to the genetically blue-printed instructions that are left from the previous experiences generated when survival was assured in the ancestor gene material, and those lessons learned while the life form survived it's personal threats were passed along as "talents" that could be inherited by descendants who would then benefit with the increased level of survival abilities which insured success as a species type. It is possible that creative problem solving in the breeding stock sub-species eventually became more evolved creative pathways to enhance personal experience with a sense of appreciation of the beauty in life.
Being able to record high quality audio on a desktop or workstation is great, but has its limitations in spite of my high expectations. And recording a live performance with existing technology, based on today's type of box-type PCs with the typical noise being generated by hard-drives and fans, is actually NOT desirable. Yes, I could use a minidisk, but I want a decent quality, live recording. At least two tracks --for the left and right stereo channels-- would be my minimum requirements. Beyond that, if I am using my DAW (digital audio workstation) for its software synths, real-time FX processing and other creative capabilities (algorythmic composing?), I'm sure I don't want to risk taking my entire PC or MAC to the show with all of my precious data on it. A laptop DAW would be the answer, but in order to turn a regular laptop into a digital audio workstation, I'd need an audio and/or MIDI and/or SMTPE generator, etc...interface. Unfortunely, there is a smaller selection of audio / MIDI cards to choose from in the PCMCIA market than there is in the PCI / USB markets.
Silent Computers!
Props go out to Ray Bronk ( who will be prominently featured in upcoming posts) for turning me on to NorhTec. NorhTec is going to raise some eyebrows. Not only are they about to release some exciting designs, but they are doing it in a way that will be beyond most of the standards that are prevalent today, and at a price that is, simply put... within my budget. These computers are lighter and smaller, use less energy, produce less noise and generate less heat than anything I've EVER heard about.
NorhTec's Panda PC is the ideal platform for my project requirements, in fact I can predict that I'll be using these from now on for nearly ALL of my computing needs. The Panda PC will sell for $495.00. This includes 20GB 2.5 inch hard disk, 256 MB RAM, and slim DVD/CDRW. And there's more...
NorhTec Microservers can be configured as firewall, gateways, application servers, video teleconferencing servers, bridges and laptop replacements. The advantages are:
- Energy Efficient
- Small Footprint
- Portable
- Cross Platform Compatibility
- Reliability
- Low Heat Dispersion
- No Cooling Fan !
- Pricing
Good news indeed.
If there was a prescription for "How to remain stressed out all of the time"...
it would be compounded of equal parts of:
- self-imposed personal standards as high as Mt. Everest
- daring to compare yourself to the great masters and their accomplishments
- merciless judgements of your own imperfections and mistakes
- assessing your value as a human being by prematurely forcasting the outcome of your projects
- obsessive frustration about being unable to control factors that are beyond control
- and NEVER LISTENING TO MUSIC !
The Great Instrument is uncompleted. The Great Tone has inaudible sound.
- Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
Topic:
WHAT MAKES A GREAT COMPOSER?
Under the most difficult circumstances for a creative musician, that of total deafness, Ludwig van Beethoven achieved more than any other composer in better, similar or worse circumstances.
The story of his life is one of great tragedy and mystery. His music is some of the most dramatic and endurable ever written.
He performed in his first public recital at the age of eight, and began to compose at the age of eleven. To improve himself further Beethoven took violin lessons.
At the age of sixteen, Beethoven went to Vienna to meet Mozart who was very taken with him and said these immortal words about Ludwig ,"Keep your eyes on him; some day he will give the world something to talk about."
Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction.... Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands.
- Leopold Stokowski
Physicist Fritjof Capra informs us that the integration of recent insights in physics and the life sciences will require "a conceptual shift from structure to rhythm." Theorists now describe atoms in terms of harmonics; molecules vibrate; each substance is "tuned" to a unique pitch; plants and animals undergo cycles of growth and rest; planets fall into resonant orbits; stars oscillate, and galexies whirl a majestic spiral dance.
- Richard Heinberg
Music of the (Hemi) Sphere
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
- George Jean Nathan
You know what I really like about cyberspace? The rumors. Such as the recent so-called fact that the Vatican had been bought out by Microsoft.... One world, one operating system! ...from the The Nerve Bible performance, 1996
- Laurie Anderson
the First International "Performance Art" Superstar
What Laurie Anderson does is very hard to describe. Combining audio special effects, acting and song writing with stand-up comedy style information delivered with a trippy multimedia Pink Floyd concert flavor, her "act" is ART with an emphasis on entertainment.
During her multimedia tour of the 90s, "The Nerve Bible," (a metaphor for the body), Laurie treated audiences around the nation to a one-woman opera scored with 11 computer languages, 35-plus tons of computer equipment, three 12-foot wide screens madly free-associating dreamy images, an electronic bodysuit that made percussive noises and her trademark neon violin. Laurie Anderson has always been out there, doing what she does best: using the tools available to tell stories straight from the human soul. She's been called a lot of things: the high priestess of quirky performance art, America's most popular avant-garde performance artist, a clever, pertinent artist, not a radical visionary, the technological story-teller. But she keeps on experimenting, in the great American fashion, keeps on reinventing herself, seeking to find the forum and the arena for her messages. As technology seems to be catching up, Anderson seems to have shifted gears slightly: the themes of her latest works are more personal than ever. From reflections on her near death experience in Tibet, to the deaths of her grandmother and her father, in "The Nerve Bible" tour she mused on the importance of the human voice keeping us all connected. She is still concerned with geo-political issues -- plagues from which there is no sanctuary, devastating floods, the firefly lights over Baghdad. It seems that the story of humanity, the story of human existence (which is so tenuous, she seems to be asserting) is counterpointed with the comic relief of technology (albeit an uneasy relief). With all her multimedia experience, she may just be one of the most essential souls of the new machine we have.
Topic:
MUSICA FACTA
Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit announces important appearance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead
Located in the Bay Area, the Bridge School is an educational facility for children with severe speech and physical impediments. Neil Young and his wife Pegi have been intimately affiliated with the school since its inception in 1986.
MTV.com informs us that Neil Young's 16th annual Bridge School benefit concerts will include performances by Neil himself, the Foo Fighters, folk-pop legend James Taylor, Grateful Dead remnants the Other Ones, pop-sensation pianist Vanessa Carlton, Hawaiian surfer-songwriter Jack Johnson, Jack Black's novelty act Tenacious D and a solo appearance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Yorke's solo appearance (and the expectation that he will showcase new Radiohead material) continues a tradition of high-profile experimentation at the Bridge School shows. In previous years, Green Day surprised fans with an acoustic set and Smashing Pumpkins appeared with Marilyn Manson. A CD of performances from the first 10 years of Bridge School shows, "Bridge School Concerts Vol. 1" was released in 1997.
In the forward to Electronic Music Interactive (other wise known as EMI), "Content Expert" Jeffery Stolet writes:
Electronic music can teach a musician many things. Bringing electronic music to life is a wondrously multi-faceted experience. To create sounds, the musician becomes the instrument builder. When selecting notes and rhythms, the musician becomes the composer. As the notes and rhythms are shaped, the musician becomes the performer. And finally, working to balance and coordinate the myriad and complex parts of the musical work, the musician becomes the conductor.
For these and many other reasons the study of electronic music offers an abundance of unique rewards. Perhaps no other pursuit of music is so intensely gratifying; and because of its amazing, seemingly infinite qualities, electronic music is a discipline that has riches to share with everyone, student, musician, and casual listener alike.
For more information about this amazing project and to experience EMI, check out the website.
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone;
the spectator brings the work in contact with the
external world by deciphering and interpreting
its inner qualifications and thus adds
his contribution to the creative act.
- Marcel Duchamp
Topic:
THE PHOENIX BIRD REDEFINED
Descriptions of Compositional Thinking and Real-Time Performance
The Phoenix Bird was composed in 1977, and in it's original configuration, was intended to be performed by an orchestra or multi-instrumental band (with multiple keyboards). My MO as a composer/performer has been to collect electronic instruments born of different persuasions and to configure them into harmonious systems that make good playing and performance fields --ideally, even going so far as to use multiple keyboard players in place of other instruments to exemplify the range of sounds that can be obtained from classic analog synthesizers, vintage keyboard sounds like the Fender Rhodes, Hohner Clavinet, Hammond B3, Yamaha Electric Grand, etc. and newer forms of electronic synthesis methods including: FM, WaveTable, Additive and even cutting edge areas like Physical Sound Modeling and Granular synthesis. As a composer, rather than forcing musical issues, I normally begin the compositional process experimentally searching for voices by coaxing my instruments to speak for themselves and to suggest musical paths for exploration and study. Like many of my other compositions, The Phoenix Bird began as an etude, a study of tonal and temporal shapes. It began to take its current form as I played with the instrumental design (orchestra or keyboard band) tweaking, fine tuning, and massaging its musical variables while at the same time building the conceptual and physical technique to discover as well as to come to terms with the overall "voice" of the composition. After a certain period of unfettered study I began to focus on a more defined set of musical materials. Based on those materials I alternated playing and recording with listening and more compositionally oriented study. When, after years of this sort of activity, I reached the time when successive versions of the composition began to take the same overall musical shape, I started thinking about recording seriously and making multiple takes. The current version has been chosen from the best of those ideas and various previous efforts. This compositional process is an area of my research in real-time composition. This composition has been programmed many times as a stand-alone sound piece, a score to one of my videos, or a piece to be used for multimedia performance projects. When I first started on The Phoenix Bird, I was still notating music in the traditional way. This was one of the last pieces I notated traditionally. Although I took great pains to notate as precisely as possible what I wanted the instruments to do musically, in the end I would have to sing it to a performer to get what I wanted. Because of this, I seriously began to doubt the efficacy of traditional notation to suggest much beyond gross mechanics (this realization was surfacing after 23 years of studying, performing, and composing with traditional music notation and learning a great deal about music composition and theory). At this point I find myself getting deeper and deeper into the notion of real-time composition in both solo and group settings and the idea of visual music in which the notation (the imagery) emerges directly from the same source as the sonic music.
"I shall go forth, against all sorts of things, towards bright, strong and righteous aims, towards a genuine art that loves mankind, lives with his joys, his grief and his sufferings."
- Modest Mussorgsky
Modest Mussorgsky was one of the so-called "mighty five" composers that came together in St Petersburg in the 1860's to create music with a truly Russian voice which would speak in loud contrast to the European popular styles of the day. The others in the "mighty five" were Borodin, Cui, Balakirev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. His music spoke dramatically and eloquently to all. One of Mussorgsky's most celebrated compositions, Pictures at an Exhibition, is a musical interpretation of the visual experience of viewing several paintings. Each painting is vividly portrayed in sound, using a subtle variety of musical shades and hues, a virtual acoustic equivalent of a painter's palette of colors. Mussorgsky composed it for piano, and it is a tour-de-force for any pianist. Years later the French composer Maurice Ravel saw its potential for orchestra, and it is in his orchestration that Pictures at an Exhibition has become most well-known.
Topic:
LISTEN WITH YOUR EYES / SEE WITH YOUR EARS
The harmony of the senses.
As I am interested in developing my own sound processing programs for The Phoenix Bird project, I have been doing research about the future of creativity and sensation. I found an excellent book by F. Richard Moore (1990) entitled "Elements of Computer Music" which covers a great many topics in a very readable style.
An experimental project that deeply sympathizes with the theme of recomposing the "ways we sense the world" was originally performed in Europe under the name "Dialogue in the Dark"--it takes place in a pitch black room, where one hears various sounds, touches plants...has a non-visual experience. Moreover, those who guide us through the room are visually handicapped. Experiencing the world of the blind through this para-experience makes one realize the extent to which our sensory circuits are shut down in normal daily living.
Details can be found at Dialogue in the Dark.
June Nights
In summer, when day has fled, the plain covered with flowers
Pours out far away an intoxicating scent;
Eyes shut, ears half open to noises,
We only half sleep in a transparent slumber.
The stars are purer, the shade seems pleasanter;
A hazy half-day colours the eternal dome;
And the sweet pale dawn awaiting her hour
Seems to wander all night at the botom of the sky.
- Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo, born in Besancon, France (1802-1885). Novelist, poet, dramatist and critic. He is best known for his novels "Notre-Dame de Paris" - Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and "Les Miserables" (1862). Victor Hugo is considered one of the leaders of the Romantic movement in French literature. Hugo created poems and novels that integrated political and philosophical questions with stories of his times. He was the herald of the new spirit of liberty and humanitarianism in France. Victor Hugo died in Paris, at the age of 83. Over three million people attended his State funeral.
Topic:
SENSEWARE
Telematics and fuzzy dreamz.
Fuzzy Dreamz...a net.art project by Doctor Hugo, explores the telematics of the mind, from fear to fun and the poetic power of a sense of wonder. A syntax of montage in relation to synaesthetic dream experiences in a film noir atmosphere.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.
- Scott Adams
What lies behind us
and what lies before us are tiny matters
when compared to what lies within us.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Joseph II — Holy Roman Emperor (1741 - 1790) "Too many notes."
Joseph's comments were to Mozart regarding his opera Die entfûhrung aus dem Serail [The Escape from the Seraglio]. According to Niemetschek's bio of "Woofie," Joseph was charmed by the stirring music, nevertheless commented, "Too beautiful for our ears and an extraordinary number of notes, dear Mozart." With the noble dignity and frankness so often present with genius, Mozart replied, "Just as many, Your Majesty, as are necessary."
Topic:
THE MARKOV MELODY ENGINE:
GENERATING RANDOM MELODIES WITH TWO-STEP MARKOV CHAINS
So, what is the Markov melody engine?
Stochastic algorithms have had a consistent, if somewhat disreputable, role in western musical composition at least since the 18th century. W. Mozart's Musikalisches Wurfelspiel is perhaps the best known, but other composers, including J. Haydn and C. P. E. Bach dabbled in this domain. As the name suggests, this method of recombining carefully composed musical elements in random orders according to a throw of the dice, was seen as an amusing novelty, not as a serious compositional tool. Peter Welcker published in 1775, in London, a "Tabular System Whereby Any Person without the Least Knowledge of Musick May Compose Ten Thousand Different Minuets in the Most Pleasing and Correct Manner".
In the twentieth century, the inclinations toward indeterminate notation on the one hand, and formalized (serial) compositional strategies on the other, came together in the application of formal probability theory to music. This has gone in two directions: One, indeterminate composition, in which the precise choice of notes is turned over to dice, coins, or a computer pseudo random number generator; two, compositions more or less formally inspired and structured by probability theory. The first mode has been advocated perhaps most prominently by John Cage, the second by Iannis Xenakis, who after some initial reticence plunged into the first as well.
Chance procedures can act on any element of music: pitch, timbre, rhythm, choice of musicians, time and location of the performance, choice of repertoire, etc. Most popular are random pitches, perhaps because of the superordinate role played by melody in Western music, and the early appearance of a tractable theory of musical pitches. The systems for generating random sequences of pitches have been generally of two types. The simplest approach is pitch-centered, most commonly a Markov chain, where each pitch has a distribution given for its successors.
A bit more continuity is achieved by interval-based programs. Here one might define, say, 15 possible intervals, ranging in chromatic steps from a perfect fifth down, to a perfect fifth up, and give a stochastic matrix which defines the probability of one interval following another. For instance, it might be that a perfect fourth down is likely right after a halfstep up, but unlikely after another perfect fourth down. Such a model can have a minimal sense of direction, but all sense of key is lost. The melody will wander willy-nilly over the available pitches, without significantly emphasizing the notes of any scale.
As an experiement, I would like to combine these approaches, allowing some control over the pitch statistics, together with some memory for the direction. The obvious thing to do is to define a Markov chain whose states are several pitches in a row. For larger values of ell, this will allow quite good approximations to the statistics of genuine melodies, allowing us to distinguish between the likelihood of, for example, C \Gamma D \Gamma E \Gamma F and F \Gamma D \Gamma E \Gamma F . On the other hand, as ` increases the complexity of the model grows exponentially. If there are n pitches, and the memory is ` notes long, then we need n ` (n \Gamma 1) numbers to specify the model.
There is a danger of overspecifying. If I imitate order-10 probabilities from a fund of prior melodies, I am likely to end up largely imitating them piecewise note for note, while excluding some possibilities that were musically reasonable, but which happen to be absent from the data set.
"The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells. Fine jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra run around the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments."
- Charles Mingus
Double Bass Player; Piano Player; Composer; Vocalist; Arranger; Philanthropist
Perhaps the most influential bassist in the history of jazz, Charles Mingus also earned acclaim as one of the greatest composers in the history of music. In addition he was also a bandleader and an accomplished pianist, however -like many jazz greats- his contributions have been minimized by critics and various segments of society that have historically marginalized jazz music and continue to do so today. The lack of respect and appreciation for jazz in the United States was and continues to be a defeating paradox, as jazz (along with the blues) is the only genre of music that can be classified as distinctly American. Charles Mingus deserves his legend status not only in jazz, but in American music as a whole.
Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922, his early influences were classical and gospel music. The gospel influence grew out of his religious home life and the fact that his stepmother only allowed gospel music in her home. After moving to California at an early age, Charles studied composition and classical bass and played in the L.A. Youth Orchestra. Unfortunately, Charles -like so many others- had to abandon his dreams due to the cruelty of societal ignorance. He was told that because he was black, he would never be able to play classical music the way it should be played. Charles Mingus crushed this stereotype later in life, as several of his classical compositions went on to earn widespread acceptance.
Charles deliberately incorporated a variety of different styles into his unique sound. He developed a "conversational" approach with his playing, characterized by a single line "vocal" type of playing. This technique was centered around the idea that the bass deserved equal footing with the other lead instruments. By nature, this leads to artistic improvisation which, at the time, was frowned upon by jazz critics. Those critics claimed that improvisation was nothing more than "spontaneous composition," but Charles refused to allow the critics to detract from his art and often encouraged instinctual playing and improvisations in his bands (Trios, Sextets, and Octets). Interestingly, even his style of composition favored improvisations, and at a certain point in his career, he rarely wrote down fully developed scores. Rather, he would sit at the piano and sing/hum melody lines and then allow his band members to expand on the line and contribute melodically, technically and (perhaps most important to Charles), personally.
Even though he had an extremely prolific carreer, Charles was not free from financial troubles. As is true for most musicians playing for what they believe rather than for money, Mingus tried earnestly to break ties with the mostly "white commercial jazz scene." In an attempt to free himself from the financial lock with the jazz record companies, he organized many concerts (out of which emerged the Jazz Artists Guild), wrote an "autobiography" entitled Beneath The Underdog, and started two of his own recording companies; Debut Records and the Charles Mingus label. However, despite his best efforts, Mingus failed in his efforts to beat the system and disappeared from public awareness towards the latter half of the 1960's. In describing his feelings before his descent towards poverty, Charles was quoted as saying, "I've come to the point, musically and personally, where I have to play the way I want to. I just can't compromise anymore." Unfortunately, these words weren't just a feeling that Mingus had, rather, they were a solemn sign of the times.
Forced back into public performances by heavy financial burdens, Charles resumed his carreer in 1969...and by 1971, after he published his book, and acquired a Guggenheim fellowship in composition, he was basically back to full speed composing, arranging, singing, and playing. Sadly, in 1977 he became extremely ill and was later diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. One year after his last recording session (1978), Mingus passed away leaving behind more than fifty albums and about 300 individual works. The achievements of Charles Mingus live on through his archives at the Library of Congress (he is the first jazz artist to have papers admitted into the archives), and through his music, and most importantly through the musicians that he signed on his record label.
Topic:
ANGER AND RESISTANCE:
What's the Meaning of This?!
In studying society, we often unconsciously assume we are studying "them" -- but we are not. We are studying ourselves and we resist that, we dislike that. It makes us uncomfortable and it makes us angry. Socrates wasn't given a medal and a tickertape parade after all. As the Russian existentialist philosopher Shestov said, "It is not man who pursues truth, but truth man."
When you turn the TV on, in effect, you turn the world off. The TV is only two feet high or so, yet we are fooled into thinking we are watching life-sized things. How is it that everything on it appears real and life-like?
Technical events produce the illusion of being natural and realistic. They produce the feeling of being non-produced (a good cut is one you don't notice, as the editors say). In the same way, we are unaware that the practice of watching TV is a practice because we have never experienced it as a phenomenon in its own right. Doing the Technical Events Test forces us to notice that watching TV is a practice, an active, ongoing achievement that we accomplish "for another first time through" each time. We see what the texture of the experience of watching TV consists of. We are shocked into seeing what it is we've been doing all these years.
By counting the technical events as we watch TV, we bring about a "paradigm shift." What is a technical event? We've all seen TV cameras in banks and jewelry stores. A stationary video camera simply recording what's in front of it is what I will call "pure TV." Anything other than pure TV is a technical event: the camera zooms up, that's a technical event; you are watching someone's profile talking and suddenly you are switched to another person responding, that's a technical event; a car is driving down the road and you also hear music playing, that's a technical event. Simply count the number of times there is a cut, zoom, superimposition, voice-over, appearance of words on the screen, fade in/out, etc.
When you focus on the technical events you can't focus on the plot or storyline. You learn very quickly how difficult it is to divide your attention. Either you watch the program or you count the technical events. You are unable to do both at the same time. In terms of the phenomenology of perception, this is a little like the famous demonstration of either seeing-the-vase or seeing-two-profiles, but not seeing both simultaneously in any sustained manner.
As we watch, we notice the discrete segments of independent footage that are presented with a rapid-fire quality. We, the "passive" viewers, apparently put together, synthesize and integrate the scenes: we link, we knit, we chain, we retain the past and anticipate the future. We methodically weave them all together into a coherent narrative. A high-speed filling-in-the-blanks and connecting-the-dots occurs. Our actively synthesizing mind, our labor, goes on while we sit back, relax and absorb. This high-speed integration of often wildly disconnected phenomena (angles, scenes, persons, music) is experienced in the mode of blank and passive absorption. It would seem that our minds are in high gear without our knowing. To address this we want to look at the following:
This difference between internally generated and imposed imagery is at the heart of whether it is accurate to say that television relaxes the mind. Relaxation implies renewal. One runs hard, then rests. While resting the muscles first experience calm and then, as new oxygen enters them, renewal.
When you are a watching, absorbing techno-guru, your mind may be in alpha, but it is certainly not "empty mind." Images are pouring into it. Your mind is not quiet or calm or empty. It may be nearer to dead, or zombie-ized. It is occupied. No renewal can come from this condition. For renewal, the mind would have to be at rest, or once rested, it would have to be seeking new kinds of stimulation, new exercise. Television offers neither rest nor stimulation.
Television inhibits your ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that's as far as television goes. The mind is never empty, the mind is filled. What's worse, it is filled with someone else's obsessive thoughts and images.
This dramatically reveals the functions of the political institution of television in
(a) training us to shorten our attention span
(b) making ordinary life appear dull
(c) injecting a hypnotic quality into our ordinary awareness
(d) coercing us into its reality
Television is the quintessential short-term medium. Like jugglers, television lives for the split second. Its relationship to viewers is measured in tiny fractions. Solemn hierarchies of men and women react to overnight program ratings with something approaching nervous breakdowns, because one percentage point can mean $30 million a year. The result of this manic concern is to design programming that will serve attention-getting rather than the humanistic substance that will stay with the viewer. The ratings race serves the advertisers, not the audience.
It is easier to shorten attention spans and increase distraction than to lengthen attention spans, increase concentration, and calm, quiet and still the mind. There is an old Zen analogy that the way to calm, clear and quiet the mind is similar to the way to clear a muddy pool -- not by action, by doing, by stirring it up, but by stillness, by letting it be, by letting it settle itself. The function of TV is to create, maintain and constantly reinforce what -- in the Zen tradition -- is often called "monkey-mind." The question to ask is: What is the good of a jumpy, volatile, scattered and hyper monkey-mind?
HYPNOSIS UNLIMITED
Since the emergence of long-term space flight in orbit above the earth, a new physiological phenomenon has arisen among our astronauts. They found that as a result of long-term weightlessness, some rather drastic physical changes began to occur in their bodies. They experienced a marked and dramatic reduction of muscle size. Even their hearts became markedly smaller. The astronauts also experienced a loss of co-ordination abilities -- such as the ability to focus on and follow moving objects with their eyes. All of this seems to be due to taking the human organism outside the experience of gravity. In order to preserve their earthbound physiology in conditions of weightlessness, astronauts need to do two to three hours of custom-designed exercises per day. Perhaps watching TV produces the equivalent mental condition of weightlessness for the human mind, together with the attending shrinkages and deteriorations. The normal, invisible, all-pervasive pressure of mental gravity, of our ordinary, active, incessantly thinking mind is suspended when we turn on the television.
COERCING US INTO REALITY
Our culture and education conspire to condition us, to create a reliance on media to reinforce our actions, feelings and self-perceptions. When we seek media confirmation we acknowledge and assume that our personal experiences are not qualified as reality any longer. We lose the drive to pursue direct experience as well as the drive to participate in co-creating reality. We no longer do, we watch, and reality is someone else's creation. As Todd Gitlin has said, it's not until an event (institution, thought, principle, movement, etc.) crosses the media threshold that it takes on a solid reality for us. Stretched out across our world is the media membrane, over the threshold of which -- and only over the threshold -- lies legitimate, confirmed reality, and though we don't have to believe what the media tell us, we can't know what they don't tell us.
TV WITHOUT SOUND
There is such a thing as a narrative trance, a narrative-consciousness. We have been programmed to become narrative subjects, subjected to the developmental narrative mode, intertwined with the storyline. In this, we're suspending our narrative consciousness and hence de-stabilizing the narrative subject. We identify not with a character, nor with the omniscient author, but with the camera. During usual viewing, however, our eyes do not see what is actually there because our narrative-trained mind overrides our eyes. We don't see with our eyes, we see with our programming, and we are programmed to see stories. TV programs are made so that we don't notice the "technical events," the details -- so that we don't pay attention. We are programmed to be unaware of the programming, the non-narrative structure and possibilities of that structure. To watch TV programs is to be lifeless and unresisting. This is the state that allows the commercials to take full effect and operate our minds for us.
THE NATURE OF THE NEWS
As a usual daily routine, only the unusually tragic or triumphant is shown -- not the ordinary routines and day-to-day reality of our lives. It is true that the news show has fewer technical events. There is a good reason for this. With fewer technical events the news show appears realistic relative to other shows in the TV environment. Further, it appears super-realistic relative to the commercial shows in this environment. As earlier, we witnessed the joining of technical events in a coherent narrative. Here, we witness the reduction of worldly events into a narrative.
The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that TV presents all subject matter as entertaining. This transcends TV and spills over into our post-TV life experiences. TV trains us to orient toward and tune in to the entertainment quality of any experience, event, person. We look for that which is entertaining about any phenomenon rather than qualities of depth, social significance, spiritual resonance, beauty, etc. In this sense TV doesn't imitate life, but social life now aspires to imitate TV.
Further, we become greedy. Not greedy in the traditional sense in reference to material wealth, rather, we experience a greed to be entertained. It's not just a need for entertainment, but a downright greed for entertainment, and it becomes a 24-hour obsession. In the absence of entertainment, we usually entertain ourselves with plans for future entertainment.
As one formula puts it, Media Power = Political Power Squared The TV has shown us that politicians can't be trusted but TV can. That is, according to Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place, implicit in showing us this about politicians is the message, "We who are showing you this, the TV, can be trusted." We can trust TV, and the institution of TV, to reveal how politicians and the institution of politics can't be trusted.
TV AND THE ILLUSION OF KNOWING
Marshall McLuhan says TV opens out onto an electronic global village. It would seem, rather, that it gives us only the illusion of being. It reinforces security by presenting danger, ignorance by presenting news, lethargy by presenting excitement, isolation by promising participation. The media confines reality to itself. And it limits knowledge by giving the illusion of knowledge. In the same way that the most effective way to deflect, diffuse and terminate a social movement is to announce that it has been achieved (the feminist movement must contend with this on an almost daily basis), the most effective way to deflect inquiry is to present it as fulfilled. TV acts in this guise as a thinking presentation device which offers non-experience as experience and not-knowingness as knowing.
In the words of Mat Maxwell, "Television becomes the world for people.... The world becomes television." The overall and cumulative effect of the media is to heighten our insensitivity to reality. Rather than breaking the chains of ignorance, political domination and illusion in our Platonic cave, something insidiously similar yet different is going on. Instead of actually turning away from the shadows to see the realities, instead of actually leaving the darkness of the cave and going up into the sunlight, we merely watch an image of ourselves doing this, we fantasize about doing it and think it's the same.
"If you can be free of conventions, that is extraordinary; if you intentionally value the unusual, that is not extraordinary but weird."
-(Huanchu Daoren, c.1600 trans. by Thomas Cleary)
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
- Pablo Picasso.
Pablo Picasso created paintings, sculptures, prints, and ceramics and is famous for his pioneering work in cubism. During his 75 year career, he continued his creative output at a prolific pace and with a vital energy more equivalent to today's accelerated technological and cultural changes, than to his own comtempory culture.
As a 'sculptor-painter', Picasso observed: "Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on a painting."
Topic:
IMAGINATION AND CREATIVE GROWTH
The process of inventing reasons and meanings to explain things about the world.
Psychologists and physiologists have discovered that words and images are particular impulses which originate in separate parts of the brain. The left hemisphere generates words; the right generates images. If I ask you to describe the breakfast you ate this morning, you will probably experience both visual and verbal thought. You might see the food in your mind and then select and organize the words needed to describe that picture. Brain activity influences personality. The left-brain is the seat of logic and linear organization; of structural certainties - lists, outlines and scientific proof; of sensing the order of time. The right-brain is intuitive rather than mathematical in influencing judgment, recognizes the parts of a thing as an integrated whole (gestalt), yet is divorced from knowing time. Visual impulses move through consciousness as images, impressions, and sensations like dream experience. Visual thinking is our ability to imagine. The right-brained person might be accused of being a dreamer - lost in "imagination".
The word "imagination" is often associated with young children. We find it cute that children have such vivid "imaginations" when they play, pretend and invent.
As adults we lose interest in imaginal thinking. Robert Fulghum, a former (part-time) Unitarian minister and author of the book Everything I Wanted to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, once visited a kindergarten class and asked, "Can any of you draw?" Every child raised their arms emphatically. "Can any of you dance, sing, act?" For each question every child could do all of those things, and wanted to demonstrate with an impromptu audition. Then he visited a college classroom and asked the same questions. No one could or would admit to drawing, dancing, singing or acting. Picasso observed that "all children paint like geniuses". Then asked, "What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?"
If we examine the word imagination we see that it has "image" in it. An image is a mental picture. It also has "imagine" in it. To imagine is to create mental pictures, to see with eyes closed. We all imagine in common ways everyday, in remembering - "did I turn the stove off?"- , daydreaming - what will I say at the next committee meeting?"... Through imagination we project our feelings and expectations onto objects in our environment, like Van Gogh’s painting of a chair or Leonardo’s notebook descriptions of seeing dragons in the clouds and faces in the cracks of sidewalks.
We create analogies and metaphors to connect with things outside of ourselves, as in the classical myths where the forces of nature are personified into gods and goddesses, and with the inner aspects of human personality, as the characters of fairy tales - giants, witches, trolls, fairy godmothers, princes and frogs.
Through art, personal analogies and metaphors are shared through the visual language of the imagination.
This is clear in the Haiku:
- Jack Kerouac’s haikus (Spring,1958-Blues and Haikus):
The tree looks like a dog/ barking at heaven.
In my medicine cabinet/the winter fly/ has died, of old age.
- or from Basho the 17th century inventor of Japanese Haiku:
Bright moon: strolling around the pond all night long.
- Kobayashi Issa: (early19th century)
Under my house an inchworm, measuring the joists.
Imagination is the source of fantasies - daydreams, the visionary’s ability to create unseen worlds and discover unknown routes to familiar places. We seem to have an instinct for inventing images to identify the intangible forces of our lives. With the ability to visualize, to see through our mind’s eye, we project our hopes and plans for the future, and the identity of who we are and how we connect to the world around us. The images we create determine the reality of personal existence. We become what we imagine.
John Lennon asked us to :
Imagine all the people, living life in peace... no countries, ... no religions, ... no possessions, ... no need for greed or hunger, ... Imagine all the people sharing all the world...
- John Lennon, Imagine
We use imagination in remembering, daydreaming/fantasizing, empathizing, dreaming, and seeing.
It provides the atmosphere in which the arts can breathe.
It provides images which suggest answers to the hard questions: What am I? Why am I living? What is real...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Research activities by buster & friends’ d’da include the following projects:
io 0.0.1 beta
Automatic Morricone Machine
Church of Sonology
...all of which include tongue-in-cheek experiments with A.I. (Artifact Intelligence),
granular synthesis, vocoders, pseudo-random number generators, iteration, recursion and loudspeakers.
NOTE: Software component of io written in HMSL.
Download, install and Jam with the Multiplayer version of Webdrum 2 from TransJam.com.
"Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas."
- Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Arnold Schoenberg had considerable influence over the course of music in the 20th century, particularly through his development and promulgation of theories of composition in which unity in a work is provided by the use of a determined series, usually consisting of the twelve possible different semitones, their order also inverted or taken in retrograde form, and in transposed versions. Schoenberg's earlier compositions are post-romantic in character, followed by a period in which he developed his theories of atonality, music without a key or tonal centre. Schoenberg's most important opera is Moses und Aron, of which he completed only two of the three acts. Schoenberg's music for orchestra includes a violin concerto, a symphonic poem based on Maurice Maeterlinck's medieval drama Pelleas und Melisande and Five Orchestral Pieces. In addition to four string quartets and a late string trio, Schoenberg's post-romantic Verklärte Nacht of 1899 is particularly noteworthy. Gurrelieder, written between 1901 and 1903, is a work of Wagnerian proportions and mood, for solo voices, large chorus and orchestra. Other, later vocal music includes A Survivor from Warsaw, written in 1947, for narrator, male voices and orchestra. Solo songs range from the 1909 settings of Stefan George in Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Garden) to the cabaret songs he wrote for the Berlin Überbrettl in his earlier years.
Topic:
SPRECHGESANG
Words half spoken and half sung, speech or singing?
In The Pierrot Lunaire, a study of madness --based on German translations of seven poems by Albert Giraud-- Arnold Schoenberg used the technique of 'Sprechgesang" to express the ideas from the poems. According to Schoenberg's own explanation, "the pitch is indicated, however left again immediately."
These are not "operating instructions", but interpretation instructions, requiring practice in order to express properly. The method remains controversial despite experimentation. Perhaps the "ambiguity" of the instructions, separates the inability to deal with the term "speech singing" from the interpretation in performance that NEVER followed instructions or methods, but was intended to be subject to a continual dialectic principle.
The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma
-- like the days when everything used to sound like that.
Some people crave baseball -- I find this unfathomable --
but I can easily understand
why a person could get excited about playing a bassoon.
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love,
Love is not music
and Music is THE BEST
- Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa, inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Tributes:
"I was surprised that someone could be so multi-talented, such a good writer, and so articulate a composer. Moreover, he was a virtuoso technician on guitar and had an incredible sense of humor. He had all those skills and the ability to conceive, write, and orchestrate very complex orchestral scores.
--- Kent Nagano, music director of the Opera de Lyon. Paris.
"It was important that Frank be shown to the world not as a rock star, but as a serious composer."
--- Dr. Dieter Rexroth, director of the Frankfurth Festival
"My first reaction was that I couldn't believe it. When I learned that Frank Zappa was a composer of serious classical music, I told my partners, "Okay, there's some of these pop stars who try to do this kind of stuff, but I am sure that he is just a beginner." I was really surprised when I saw the high quality of compositions like "Mo 'N Herb's Vacation."
--- Andreas Molich-Zebhauser, director of the Deutsche Ensemble Academy
"Americans are really suspicious of anything cerebral, and Zappa didn't disguise his intelligence well enough. In addition to being a man of wide-ranging talent, one amazing thing that always struck me about Frank was his melodic dimension.....Frank Zappa was my Elvis."
--- Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons
"Never stop until your good becomes better, and your better becomes the best." --- Frank Zappa
Topic:
ALGORITHMIC COMPOSITION
Is it possible to emulate a model of the process of creativity?
Being inspired, having the visualization and proceeding with purpose to create, is usually going to be the order of steps that a composer would take. At that moment of blinding insight, emotionally charged and unmistakably unique thoughts occur. Sounds arrive in whole flurries of phrases, humming passages, suites of songs, even entire imaginary scores with clear details marked out in abstract symbols to encapsulate the beauty of infinite vistas with pure harmony of the spheres vibrating throughout. The results would be inexplicable and unstoppable. Literally being carried along on a force outside of yourself, a stream of consciousness that sweeps you along to the ocean of your dreams.
OR...
The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
- Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)
Claude Debussy, at the age of ten, was sent to the Conservatory in Paris to study piano, music theory, and composition. In his twenties, he won the Prix de Rome prize with his composition L'enfant prodigue. Debussy continued to compose and in 1894, he completed one of his most famous works Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). Much of Debussy's music was written for the piano --- an instrument capable of a wide range of tonalities. From it he drew exquisite nuances, relying greatly on subtle use of the pedals. He also was a masterful composer for orchestra and used a large number of instruments not for loudness, but to give a variety of musical colors. Debussy also worked on other projects like the Suite Bergamasque for solo piano (which includes the famous Clair de lune), and the Nocturnes for orchestra --- Nuages (Clouds), Fêtes, and Sirènes.
Topic:
COMPOSITION VS. IMPROVISATION
Experimenting with the concept of time.
I think of composition and improvisation as two different ways to create music. Composing consists of visualizing something, building the form and structures of that imaginative construct and then documenting them in a written score. However, the improvisational method is where I try to create instant complexity, by manipulating many parameters which are always available, parameters that are also available in composition. To further describe the difference between composition and improvisation, I refer to the different ways that they deal with time. In composition you are way outside of real time, using an abstraction of the linear time sequence; I try to imagine the whole process and then I can jump in at any point by zeroing in on time microscopically - stopping the linear flow, so to speak. In composition I can simulate a time structure that -converted to reality- allows the actual piece to come into existence. But improvisation is completely different than that. I am inside time in the moment, forming time and it's passage through reality; and now, with this unceasing flow passing through the time frame I have to follow a certain path which I may have thought about before this and which may turn out to be negotiable during the improvisation. At the same time I have to continuously be conscious of references: what's happened before, how can I go on working with this. This is no senseless continuous going forward, but the intentional visiting of previously existing conditions in order to further transform them. Again and again building bridges to the past. I think this is very important: that time goes forward, but in improvisation again and again one tries consciously to recur to that which was, so as to create points of reference.
Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.
- Helmut Walcha
Memorizing all of Bach's music is so difficult that only a few musicians have ever done it. As for Helmut Walcha, it took about 15 years. What is extraordinary about Helmut, is that he did this as a blind person. His vision loss -caused by chronic keratitis- became total after he was sixteen years old. It was at the age of 25 that he undertook learning every piece of music that Bach ever wrote. This was no small task, because Bach created 165 organ works alone, not to mention a great deal of other compositions for additional instruments. This great accomplishment was possible because of Helmut's point of view, as he was quoted: "The disease which cut me off permanently from the visible world also opened up and smoothed for me the way to inner perception." Helmut's repertoire included other Baroque era composers as well, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Händel among them. Considering that he never learned any of this music until after he was blind, it may be that an explanation is necessary. Required to memorize everything, Helmut had the assistance of his mother Anna at first, and after that his wife Ursula, who played each passage one-by-one on piano, which allowed him to 'synthesize all of the voice parts in his head'. Helmut's musical career included performing recitals and concerts on organ and piano, giving lectures and recording Bach's music on organ for EMI and Archiv Produktion. He was awarded the Goethe medal by the Frankfurt am Main Institute.
Topic:
ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND MUSICIANS
New gear may enable more visually impaired people to become musicians.
Blind performers, recording artists and musicians such as Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, Ray Charles, and Andrea Bocelli have already proved that it's possible to be visually impaired and successful too! But behind the scenes, the process has never been easy. Writing songs and composing orchestral scores would usually require assistance and co-operation from a sighted colleague or collaborator. Time and a great deal of patience were required to translate music into Braille.
Now all that is changing. A MIDI keyboard connected to a standard PC allows the recording of a musical idea with sequencing software. Then the music file can be transcribed with the Goodfeel Braille Music Translator. Made by Dancing Dots Software, Goodfeel automates the production of Braille music scores. This program allows visually impaired musicians to create Braille compositions and store them as standard PC music files. With a special Braille printer, the musician can print out notation for music in a completely tactile format. It's also possible to email the Braille file to other musicians who can then print it out or replay the music on their own systems.
One of the most popular applications that acts as a PC-based multitrack recording studio is called Cakewalk. This program records separate tracks for individual instrumental voices supplied from a MIDI connected synthesizer or sampler. Using a screen reader application such as JAWS (Job Accommodation with Speech) or Windows Eyes, a blind user can record, review, and edit his compositions in Cakewalk. An optional add-on for Cakewalk and JAWS (called CakeTalking - also made by Dancing Dots), allows users to learn how to navigate the Cakewalk user interface, by supplying comprehensive tutorials and lessons that reduce the learning curve to manageable proportions.
Once upon a time
There was a little boy
And he went outside
- a Partchism
The musical ideas of Harry Partch (1901-1974), with his individualistic and innovative theories about microtonalities, natural acoustic resonance (just intonation) and expanded melodic and harmonic possibilities, included speech integrated with music. To perform his own music, he had to invent one-of-a-kind, hand-built instruments. His unique instrument designs, doing double duty as far-out pieces of sculpture, were created to play custom multi-tone scales that have influenced musicians ever since. Harry --in his own words-- was "seduced" into carpentry to make indescribably beautiful percussion instruments such as the BOO, the KITHARTHA, and the MARIMBA EROICA. Using "found sound" generators such as hubcabs and nuclear cloud chambers made of glass, he created the ZYMO-XYL and the SPOILS OF WAR which allowed him to explore philosophical and intonational concepts that pushed the boundries of traditional roles of the performer and composer, and the role of music in society.
Topic:
THE REOCCURING THEME OF THE THEREMIN
Klaatu, Barada, Niktu!
John Rigg's multi-voiced theremin, can actually play chords made up of 12 distinct tones. The original theremin with its "music from the ether" was intended to be used by classically trained performers, who would use it much as any instrument is played except for one difference. The performers would use their hands but would never touch the instrument itself. The Theremin is played using it's antennas - one controlling pitch, and the other controlling volume. As the players' hand approaches the vertical antenna, the pitch gets higher. And as the horizontal antenna is approached, it makes the volume softer. With no physical contact, it takes precise movements "in the air" to get the correct pitch. Although most often used for its spooky sound in sci-fi movie soundtracks of the 50's and 60's, the Theremin was used by legendary musical artists like Brian Wilson (Good Vibrations), and Jean Michel Jarre (Oxygene 7-13), and most recently by great bands like Garbage, RadioHead and Incubus.
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