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.
