News
New Piece: Creatures from the Black Bassoon
0I finally finished my first electroacoustic piece! (for those of you who aren’t familiar with the genre, it uses recorded sounds as a basis instead of traditional notation and instruments. Wikipedia has plenty to say on the subject). This new piece, Creatures from the Black Bassoon, uses bassoon sounds to create a variety of animal-like characters. The form is more or less based on the golden section, with a number of contrasting “windows” in the sound.
Here’s what it sounds like:
This piece was composed with Pro Tools 7 LE (Steven Eiler’s copy), 8 HD (OU’s copy), and 10 (my copy), with processing by DigiDesign/Avid’s usual audiosuite plugins, GRM Tools Classic and ST, and Sonnox Oxford Reverb.
Those of you familiar with my music (both of you) will notice that this is pretty much unlike anything I’ve written. After all, if I’m wanting to be an acoustic composer, why switch to electronic music? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, marketability. Most academic job listings for composers now require some sort of electronic background, and if I’m looking to get a job in academia, this can only help (Will I get a job in academia? Do I want to? That’s another blog post). Secondly, the process of creating this piece has been valuable in learning how to use Pro Tools (an industry standard) and has allowed me to listen to (and think about) sounds in a new way. This is similar to my work with New IMPROV! Century Ensemble, where any sound is fair game. And of course, there’s also the value in having an 8 1/2 minute long piece of music that requires no performers.
So what’s next? Prepared piano? Instrument and tape? Pipe Dreams for wind ensemble? We’ll find out.
Progress
0That title is misleading. I’m not actually getting anything done. Well, not as much as I should be doing. Oh, how about I just tell you and let you decide?
First of all, I moved. Well, my website moved. So did this blog. I had my reasons for picking KyleVanderburg.Net several years ago, but I finally decided that it was time to move to a dot-com. So I’ve been carefully moving everything in such a way to where search engines and people don’t get confused. And I finally moved the blog from WordPress at Kylev.net to WordPress at NoteForge. Hopefully this will free up some space so I can upload more ridiculous things.
I also built some stuff into Hammer, but we’ll get to that in another post.
I’ve been practicing for an upcoming performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. I have the first two movements down, now I’m working on the third.
Yes. This is the actual printed sheet music to 4’33″.
Some Assembly Required didn’t make it as a finalist in the OU 4×4 Prizes, which is one of the few contests I’ve actually paid attention to recently. Luckily, it’s one of those pieces that leaves an impression, so I’m hoping that it’ll still get performed somewhere. I’ve mailed it off a few places, so, we’ll see.
I’ve been completely slacking off in writing music, which I’m sure has nothing to do with my parents being in town two weeks ago and my girlfriend being in town last week {Sidebar: it probably does}. That said, Creatures from the Black Bassoon is coming along somewhat slowly, but at least it’s getting…done? Written? What’s the proper word for the act of creating a piece of electronic music? Distilled? Forged? It sounds something like this:
http://img.kylev.net/mus/CftBB-20111107.mp3
Tara and Tripi’s performance of Foi dans l’aleatoire from 2 weeks ago is online over at Listen (note that it’s now listen.kylevanderburg.com! How cool is that!?), and it’s pretty much great, as are they.
Also, I’m playing around with how everything from the blog gets updated to Facebook, Twitter, and all that stuff. This should be fun.
Looking at Sound
0This year, I finally decided to dive into electroacoustic music, which causes more than a couple of problems. To begin, I knew next to little about electroacoustic music. While I’m pretty fast with Sibelius, I had only a marginal idea of how to deal with Pro Tools, and I was vaguely aware of how awesome Max/MSP was. What I did know is that working with electronic music was something that I needed to pick up if I wanted to someday land an academic job, and the process of relearning everything I knew about composing was going to help in the long run.
What ended up happening was some intense questioning of what I’m doing in a DMA program (Which is another, lengthy, blog entry), and a lot of difficulty with the aesthetic of computer music (which is another lengthy, ranty, blog entry). But those problems were resolved (more or less), and the piece (my first work for fixed media) is coming along, and if you’re really curious to see it, it’s over on Soundcloud. I’ll update it as it becomes more of a thing.
But one thing that I’m learning so far that can immediately inform my future acoustic writing is how to look at sound. I mean, it’s easy enough to get used to thinking in terms of notes and rhythms, like this passage from Foi dans l’aleatoire.
Of course, the work is slightly longer than three bars, if you’re curious the full score is here.
But what does this piece look like if you could actually look at the sound? Well, using GRM’s Acousmographe, that sound looks like this:
The different colors are strengths of frequencies (it kind of reminds me of a weather radar. The weather for Foi dans l’aleatoire today is sunny, with a high of 74 and a chance of octatonic flute scales). This graph is actually of the Sibelius rendering of FDL, while the real recording of the work looks a little more alive:
Kind of a difference between the clinical sound of the MIDI rendering (with no higher frequencies) and the 2011 University of Arkansas-Little Rock performance, isn’t there? I thought so. How useful is it as an acoustic compose? Well, it’s certainly another way of thinking about music. (More spectrograms are available over on Flickr)
On the subject of Foi dans l’aleatoire, Jennifer Tripi and Tara Burnett performed it fantastically at OU’s fall Student Composers Recital this weekend. I’ll post audio over at Listen as soon as I get it.
The 4000-year-long orchestra piece.
0I mentioned recently that I was working on a sort of choose-your-own-adventure orchestra piece for OU’s 4×4 prizes. (I still have no idea if that was a good idea or not, but it was fun, and here it is). So through the process, I planned to sit down and write out all the possible combinations of parts.
Luckily, I had the foresight to count up how many parts there would be, in case the number was way higher than I expected. Like 393,239,448. Which is how many different combination of parts there are. I decided against listing them all.
So with close to 400 million different combinations of parts, how long would it take to play them all? Assuming six minutes per combination (I haven’t calculated all the possible tempo variations because, no.), the total works out to 2,359,436,688 minutes…or 4,486 years.
I can’t wait for that royalty check.
Sibelius 7, OS X, and non-software updates
0Before all of you get excited, the “OS X” in the title doesn’t mean I’m finally becoming a mac user. I just happen to be working on a professor’s computer, moving files from his old system to the new one. Since it’s telling me that I still have OVER AN HOUR left and I’m not in the mood (or near enough to coffee) to compose, I thought, hey, blog posting time.
So my copy of Sibelius 7 (and the 800-page user manual) finally came in today, and I immediately installed it on my laptop. I played with the demo earlier, and knew what to expect, with most of the changes making sense. It’s cleaner, the tabbed interface works better than control-tabbing through open scores, and I’ve been a fan of the Microsoft Office-style ribbon. However, it’s slow. The 7.0.2 update fixes this somewhat, but loading the built-in Sibelius sounds takes forever. And at this time my Garritan sounds don’t work (yet). And I think the program icon is silly. I’ll be interested to see what my desktop does with it later. Overall, I think it’s an improvement.
Meanwhile, composing continues to be adventuresome. The orchestra piece is “orchestrated” (which is to say, I think I know what everyone’s going to play, but it’s not in the computer yet), and hopefully that will be a project for this weekend. With electronic composing, I’ve started making a list of the things I want to accomplish by the end of this year (which will be greatly accelerated after this orchestra piece gets off my desk). They are, in no particular order:
- The tape piece (working title: Creatures from the Black Bassoon)
- Some sort of tape-and-instrument piece
- Some sort of interactive piece with MaxMSP
- Something for prepared piano
I think all of those would be fun, I’d learn a lot, and maybe I’d integrate some of those techniques into my own writing. We’ll see.
Oh yeah. I also won my first ASCAPLUS Award this year. Yay!
Summer and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Music.
0What’s this? I haven’t blogged since I waxed poetically about my automated music delivery engine!? This must change at once!
It is the nature of composing that I blog when I’m not composing, and I compose when I’m not blogging. Since I’ve not been blogging, I must have been composing, right? (pay no attention to the fact that I watched the first four seasons of NCIS in their entirety this summer). But, as it turns out, I HAVE been composing this summer, just not as much as (and weirder than) normal.
I spent the beginning of the summer recovering from The Thesis, and while looking through my folder of "things I haven’t finished but probably should someday," I discovered an orchestra piece that I’d tried to write back in 2008. The work, with the working titles of "Post Tenebras Lux" (after darkness, light) and (as I became more frustrated with it,) "Asinus ad Lyram" (an ass to the lyre), was intended to be my Opus 7, but the work never came together properly during undergrad.
So in June, I dust this piece off and try to shape it into something new. That is, after I spent several days wondering "what was I thinking?" Such is the norm for looking at old compositions I suppose. After a few weeks of doing some extensive musical renovation, I discovered what the piece needed to be. I needed to write a choose-your-own-adventure orchestra piece.
You read that right.
I’ve thought of applying the choose-your-own-adventure idea (normally seen in books) to music, but I’ve never discovered how I could make it work. I’m still not convinced that I’m staying true to the concept, but here’s what I’m doing. I’ve taken the aforementioned orchestra piece (which currently clocks in at around six minutes), and doubled the instrumentation (For example, Flute I A and Flute I B). Most of the original music is given to the "A" instruments, and I’ve written new B material that both fits in with the A material and can stand alone. So really, I’ve written a 12-minute orchestra piece and folded it in half. Or I’ve written a six-minute work for double orchestra.
Of course, the plan is that an audience will only hear half the work at any performance. (I suppose if a large orchestra wanted to play the original double-orchestration work, they could). The idea is that a conductor will study the work, pick the sections that meet the aesthetic of the concert, and program it that way (For example, from the beginning to Reh. H, play A parts, from H to O, play B parts, from O to the end play A). Or, if a conductor wanted more fine tuning, the work could be programmed "At section H, everyone play A except for Oboe I, who will play the solo written in part B" Or, for something a little more indeterminate, the conductor could say "everyone play whatever part they want".
I call it Some Assembly Required.
Of course, this produces a number of challenges. Like writing two different pieces that can stand alone and be combined with each other with no problems. Or convincing Sibelius that "yes, I really do want to do this." Or explaining this all to an orchestra. (yeeeeah, I’m not looking forward to that part).
Meanwhile, I’m working on an acousmatic work titled "Creatures from the Black Bassoon". Thank you Steven Eiler for that title.
Also meanwhile, I’ve done some upgrades to my home office/studio. I switched my old Wal-Mart surround sound system with a pair of Mackie MR5MK2′s, bought a Zoom H2 for recording, picked up a copy of MaxMSP, and upgraded to Sibelius 7 (well, eventually. They’re backordered on physical copies). I also think I was one of those people who bought an HP Touchpad. Because it’s shiny.
The post-thesis rundown
1As it turns out, I passed my thesis defense. Four months of writing and stress and coffee, and the entire defense lasted roughly thirty-five minutes. Aside from a few issues in the wording of my abstract, there weren’t many changes.
Almost immediately I started sending out perusal copies, hopefully someone will pick it up and want to play it. Meanwhile, I’ve taken it easy the past three weeks as I wrapped up the semester and, you know, graduated. I’m hoping to get back to writing in the next few weeks now that I have my summer schedule set. I think another piano piece is in the works. Or perhaps a string quartet. Suggestions? Send them my way.
Thesis: 25 Days
1Wow, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The last time I wrote, I was trying out a new download system and rebuilding a harpsichord. I’m still in the middle of both projects, but for right now my time is occupied doing something quite different than programming or woodwork.
As part of the strangeness that is the graduate music composition curriculum, I have to present a recital of original works (which happened on March 6, and you can listen to it here), and I have to write a significant large composition as a thesis. And of course, this being academia, there are plenty of forms to fill out and plenty of deadlines, but the important deadline right now is the date of my defense: April 29. This leaves 25 days in which to finish writing and orchestrating a 13-minute piece for symphonic band, a piece named Tempest.
So, I thought, to take up time, I’d write about it. Perfect sense, huh?
My initial idea for Tempest was as an orchestra piece, but it appears to be notoriously difficult to get new orchestral music played. The wind band genre on the other hand is less populated and full of players wanting to try new playing techniques and notation. The first several minutes of the work are quasi-aleatoric and use proportional notation (music in free time, without a time signature). Due to the nature of this notation, I chose to orchestrate a great deal of the material by hand rather than convince Sibelius to write such alien notation (though it should be said that I’ve since notated this opening section in Sibelius and it looks fine).
The act of writing a composition thesis is especially unique in two ways that immediately come to mind. One, with a little change in margins and pagination, the work will be ready for publishing after it is completed and defended, which can’t always be said for prose theses. The other issue is that the document is not a prose thesis, and forcing a 37-stave piece of music into the “normal” 8.5” by 11” size paper is an adventure in spacing. I have asked the graduate college about the possibility of submitting an oversized thesis, but I’ve yet to hear an official answer.
So the state of Tempest, 25 days out, can be described as being partially-orchestrated and partially notated. In the next three weeks we’ll watch as it becomes a full-fledged piece. Well, I guess you’ll watch and I’ll panic.
I’ll try to post pictures and score samples tomorrow.
Harpsichords and Downloads
1One of my favorite things about writing music is the freedom to do a variety of things that are related to music, but not directly related to composing. I’ve written in this blog many times about the website-related issues that come with self-publishing and self-hosting (and I’ll get to a similar topic soon) but recently I’ve had an opportunity that is not quite normal, even by composer standards.
Fellow composer Steven Eiler somehow received a harpsichord. Or rather, a harpsichord-shaped object. I’m not quite sure how this harpsichord came into Steven’s possession, but considering that he keeps a clavichord in his apartment I’ve found it best to just not ask questions. As neither of us have any experience restoring baroque instruments, we thought it would be a brilliant idea to restore this one. Restore, rebuild, whatever. We had no idea what we were getting into.
Step one in restoring a harpsichord is to acquire said harpsichord, and this requires a roadtrip to Tulsa. That is, if aforementioned harpsichord is in Tulsa. So, we made a weekend trip to Tulsa, full of tacos and music and watching True Grit (which has a marvelous soundtrack) and packing up the (absolutely unplayable) harpsichord.
So we deliver the instrument to my dining room, and take the first real look at it. It appears to be a kit harpsichord, fairly well made, but whether or not it has ever been playable is beyond either of us. It has, however, been used as a plant stand, indicated by the large dark stain on the lid and soundboard. This is how we feel about the project so far:
Besides the cosmetic issues, we didn’t know how much work this project would require. We knew that the instrument didn’t play, but we didn’t know how or why. Of course, we also didn’t know how or why a harpsichord is supposed to play…
We started by removing all the jacks—that is, the part of the action that plucks the string. Many of these are in need of significant adjustment and replacement. But at least we have all of them!
Other than some problems with the action and some minor structural and cosmetic issues, this instrument should be soon be playable. Staining the instrument a dark walnut may be an option, or perhaps a baroque-style paint job. I like the idea of painting it red with a racing stripe.
Beyond the harpsichord project, I’ve also been working on a download management utility for selling sheet music, MP3s, and other music files. It is in the process of being tested, and will probably become part of the Hammer Music Management System within the next few months. It’s this ridiculously complicated system of secure links and permissions that expire and hidden file names. I’ll likely mention more about it as it’s developed into a workable thing.
Brave New Works to record Salvation at OSU Residency
0As part of an ensemble residency at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, the Michigan-based Brave New Works will be recording my new piano trio, Salvation, during their reading of new works on January 12, 2011.
Now I finally get to know what OSU’s campus really looks like!