kkk The following link is an mp3 file of my orchestrative rendering
of the Fugue from Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor in its entirety
(4 minutes, 48 seconds). A word of warning before you go there:
It's an 4 megabyte download. Due to the characteristics of mp3
files a lot of the information in the lower and higher registers
will be lost. This realization of what is questionably* the most famous organ
fugue over conceived was not an cheap attempt to de-throne Wendy
Carlos (although it may have turned out that way - a 'cheap attempt').
It was instead simply a method used to test the basics of Digital
Performer. I was in the midst of my last quarter of Midi Hell
when this piece was attempted (you must remember, I picked up
electro-acoustic music again after 23 years - PRE MIDI, PRE POLYPHONY).
I had what I considered a good enough understanding of the new
instruments I had aquired and it was time to give them a whirl
via recorded midi and digital audio. While I did study piano in college, I am far from what I would
consider a keyboardist. The midi tracks were laid down as separate
parts of my own conception extrapolated from the original organ
score. In effect this piece also tested my orchestration (gulp).
I tried at all times to keep true to Bach's score, although I
did change the emphasis of the pedal right before the recapitulation,
because I've always found it to be more interesting than the counterpoint
at that instant. The midi information was recorded from a written
score by one of three methods: 1) I played them real time 2) I played them at half and even quarter time. 3) I step -recorded them in as close to real time as that process
allows Laying down the midi tracks was the hard part and this took me
over a week - bringing them to voice via digital audio was done
on a single rainy afternoon in the fall of 2001. * - 'Questionably' refers to a generally unaccepted arguement
by musicologist Peter Williams who has pubically questioned the
authenticity of this work to be that of Bach. One of his major
points is that there is no autographed copy of the manuscript,
the earliest surviving copy being that of a pupil of a pupil,
which WIlliams found unusual. However, we do know that Bach felt
that after a piece was performed it was in effect 'done' and there
was little use for its score. Indeed, it has been told that Mrs.
Bach would use her husband's old manuscripts from to time to time
to wrap fish in from the market. A horror to think what jewels
we lost in the process! Williams also points out that this piece
alone stands out both harmonically and contrapuntally from Bach's
other organ works, the main objection to this being that Bach
often broke his own molds. TECHNICAL NOTES This rendering I think gives a strong aurgument of the strengths
of analog modeling over true analog and I would be curious to
see the outcome of a blind taste test when asking people to pick
from which it came. In fact, all of the voices present are digital
- from either a Yamaha TX816 or a Waldorf Q which was on loan
to me from Gary Chang. Click here to download the Fugue
nn The following link is an mp3 file of Space Groove: Caheunga and
the 101 in its entirety (22 seconds). There will be no excuses
allowed for not downloading this as it's only a half megabyte
large! Due to the characteristics of mp3 files a lot of the information
in the lower and higher registers will be lost. The name 'Space Groove' was borrowed from a friend of mine, Miles
Richmond. Love that name (thanks, bro). The original (working)
title is Caheunga and the 101, taken from the location of the
CHANCE process developed to determine the duration and pitches
in the piece, to wit: I have long been curious of process-intense music (unfortunately,
more than listening to some of it). 1978, I received a (very)
small independent grant to realize a piece of chance music. Chance (aka aleatoric) music was developed in the late 1950s
as a direct counterpoint to the vigorous contorols of the serial
music process. Several noted composers experimented with this
relatively short-lived fad (John Cage, Karl Stockhausen, and Ramon
Sender among them). As pointed out by Wendy Carlos like much new
music, chance was considered nihilistic and did little more than
fan the flames by further alienating John Q. Public with more
'new classical' music to hate. The process behind aleatoric music belies serialism as it's designed
so that the deliberate inclusion of chance elements are part of
the performance, thus in effect no two can be the same. Oddly
enough however, the process required to assure the uncertainty
was sometimes no less confining than the 12 tone music thus and
resides as the flip side of the same coin, an observation made
by composer Barry Schrader. While the genre itself faded from
popularity rather quickly, it did have its effect as anyone who
has applied random voltages to a analog patch can contest. The process behind this particular piece involved taking pictures
from a Caheunga overpass of vehicles on the 101 freeway in Hollywood
as a means to determine both the pitches and their durations in
musical score. What better way to pay homage to this great City
of Angels than a repertoire based on its freeway system. In 2001,
going through my old school notes long since in storage, I stumbled
across this score and recorded "Space Groove' from a small snippet
of over 3 minutes of music generated from that exersise. This section of the 101 Freeway is rather large - it has five
lanes (one each for the five bars of the staff). Three cameras
were positioned on tripods pointing directly down to the freeway
itself and pictures were taken simultaneously from each at regular
intervals. This is how pitches and polyphony was determined. Their
duration was calculated by the length of the vehicle in the crosshairs
of the lens at any given frame. The color of the vehicle also
had a baring, with rules allowing for glissandos rather than incidentals
if the vehicle happened to be two wheeled and crossing lanes when
a picture was taken. Inflection was determined by the location
of the vehicle over the sampling region. One final rule allowed
me to raise or lower a given note an octave if the driver had
their turning blinkers on and it was transposed in the direction
the indicator was 'pointing'. Later on, all of the photos we examined and plotted in a single
score of about 3 minutes (this was all the film my little grant
allowed for). This particular realization of the score could be
considered more translational than chance in nature in that certain
liberties were taken and a result, as you will hear, the outcome
is remarkably tonal. Admittedly, I chose this one portion in 2001
as it was the best of the lot in turns of what would be considered
as generally accepted musicality, and some artistic licence was applied to determine the timbre of
the voices in this realization (small keyhole in the rules - I
intentionally didn't account for timbre in the original scheme).
Also, I was free to pick the time and the day of this outing and
did so after a few audits beforehand to determine when traffic
conditions would allow for some sort of breathing room between
notes. As it turned out, the photos were taken at about 9 on a
sunny Saturday morning. The arrangements played a key role in
this realization as I freely assigned voicing to each instrument,
which surely helped to bring it its tonality. Played by a single
instrument this work would have a whole different effect on the
listener, none of it being all that pleasing. If this were to
be a true chance piece, no decisions would be left to the composer
and the process itself would be soley responsible for the outcome. I intentionally picked sound which mimics that of conventional
instruments (bass guitar, vibes, electric piano, bell tree and
electric guitar). I figured the material alone was wack enough
as is and wanted to give the listener something identifiable to
listen to - fearing the piece would be over by the time they were
comfortable with anything foreign. With the benefits afforded with digital photography, I plan to
revisit this process in the next year but this time WILL take
timbre in account in the formula. I would also like to document
samples taken at three distinct times of one day, each 8 hours
apart., I am confident this will give me some stark variations
between the three movements. I hope you enjoy this, it was certainly
a lot of fun to do. On a more private note, a tip of the hat to
KL for lambasting this idea as nonsensical! Click here to download Space Groove
ll The following link is an mp3 file of Eclipse in its entirety (10
minutes, 8 seconds). A word of warning before you go there: It's
an 11 megabyte download. Due to the characteristics of mp3 files
a lot of the information in the lower and higher registers will
be lost. Eclipse was written at the electronic music studios of the California
Institute of the Arts entirely on the Buchla 200 Electric Music
Box in the spring of 1976, while I was in my third (hard) year
in their composition program. Obviously, I don't remember much
about the details of the piece outside of it being an attempt
to arrive at a tonal set from a non tonal one. LINER NOTES; Any wirting on this piece of music would be incomplete without
a bit of name dropping: Eclipse received it's premier at Cal Arts in a concert named 'What
Goes Up, May Go Sideways" which was taken from a direct quote
of Milton Babbit's, who had recently visited the school. I have
pictures of him and I together during his visit there (click here). He was actually the first person to hear the work after it
was completed (outside of Gary Chang, who I will get to in a second).
Another notable Columbia visitor, composer Pril Smiley and I had
a laugh in that we both had pieces by this name. I told her it
was intentional on my part in the hopes the two pieces may get
shuffled so people would hear hers and think it was mine. Eclipse
(my version) went on to win the Virginia Commonwealth University
Electronic Music Festival the same year. Surprisingly, it was
my second win at VCU's EM festival , the first being the year
before with a piece named Untitled Masterpiece. Pril's Eclipse,
derservingly so, went on to much greater heights. The version you are hearing is a two channel mixdown of what was
written as a quad piece. This is why things are generally happening
in fours. On Gary Chang: Although the quality of the piece as presented
here is at best bad (partially due to it being an MP3 and partially
from being taken from 27 year old magnetic tape that wasn't stored
in any particular way over the years to protect it from temperature),
it would not be here at all had it not been for the gracious assistance
of composer Gary Chang (who at that time was a graduate student
in the composition program at Cal Arts and has remained a pal
since). The school had recently switched over from Scotch 206
to Ampex 456 recording tape and not understanding the biasing
differences of the two correctly I had mistakenly set all of my
recording levels for the source tapes 6 dB low, instead of 6 dB
high. When the night came to mix the piece (three four track Ampex
440 decks running concurrently onto another 440 which created
the master), things were sounding pretty bleak. This was a crushing
blow to me as I had worked on this piece for easily three months
(remember, not only was this pre-midi, but all analog as well)
and felt it was truly worth all that work. Dazed and demoralized,
I wandered into the cafeteria and ran into Gary. Forfeiting his
own studio time (he was slated to take the room that evening when
my block was done), he returned to the studio with me and worked
some magic to get the amplitude where it needed to be and quell
the noise that I couldn't seem to on my own. In short, Gary Chang saved this piece of music from oblivion.
I distinctly remember the concert at which it premiered at Cal
Arts. Gary was also showing a new piece he had completed called
Forgotten Memories, the first one done on his then shiney-new
eight panel Serge (then called a 'Tcherepnin'). Mort Subotnick
showed up for this conert (he NEVER came to these things) and
this made me terribly nervous. During intermission, after both
Gary's and my piece had played, Mort came up to us both and said
somethng along the lines of 'Well, thanks to you two at least
I got to hear some good music tonight". I'm not sure if he meant
it, but I tell ya, it was a huge relief. TECHNICAL NOTES; There isn't much to be said (or remembered) about Eclipse, outside
of the fact that most of it came from a single patch on the Buchla.
It does give an example however of the sound that can be had from
the Buchla fixed filter bank (he called it his Comb Filter), which
was fit with separate non-attenuated outputs on each filter along
with a summed output which relfected the mixture of all of the
attenuator settings for each filter at the end. Outside of the
Synthesizer.com FFB, I'm not aware of any other manufacturer who
has elected to include separate outs for each filter. The first
thing you'll notice in Eclipse is an exercise in that benefit.
What you are hearing is one generation of a single oscillator
sound whose frequency is being swept by a random sample and hold
and whose timbre is first routed though a high q Band Pass Filter
which is being controlled by the same S+H and then through the
large Fixed Filter Bank. Each of the ten outputs of that filter
were taken and gated through their own VCA, each with it's own
envelope shaping the sound, all of which had different, albeit
short decay times. The pulse outputs of the 16 step sequencer
were gating these envelopes and because of another Buchla exclusive
feature, those are being fired randomly (clock this up to the
Buchla Sequencer's vc input of direction - another splendid control
feature that outside of Wiard, every manufacturer has now chosen
to omit). The variations in this patch are timbal in nature and most of
this comes from the separate filter outputs of the that fixed
filter bank. Click here to download Eclipse There is relatively little I remember about this piece of music outside of the fact that its obviously in A-B-A form and reallized from a score that was drawn prior to its recording. The sound design became an attempt to illustrate that visual score sonically. It was the first piece I wrote that won a major EM festival, in this instance the 1976 edition of the Virginia Commonwealth University Electronic Music Competition. Hearing it now, I would rate this somewhere between horrible and dreadful (Hey...I was only 19 when I did it!). However, if you find yourself at the tail of this page with little or nothing else to do and if you are a lover of Buchla-phat, you might want to give it a go. SERGE MUSIC: YOU BETTER NOT CRY (1978) There is little I remember about this film as well (sorry). It had to do wit h a Vietnam helicopter unit that was downed in a storm on Christmas Night beyond enemy lines, the only thing on their radio they could get being White Christmas, and just barely. In this cue, you can hear my interpretation of another search helicopter flying overhead which of course misses them. This sound track does remain though one of the few things recorded on my Serge that's made it through 25 years without being completely annihilated by time.
MISC AND REAL OLD MUSIC SAMPLES
.
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FUGUE from the TOCATTA AND FUGUE IN D minor by J.S. BACH, BMW565
SPACE GROOVE: Caheunga and the 101 (2001)
lll
ECLIPSE (1977)
gggg
UNTITLED MASTERPIECE (1976)
The following link is an mp3 file of Untitled Masterpiece in its entirety (7 minutes, 51seconds). A word of warning before you go there: It's an 7 megabyte download. Due to the characteristics of mp3 files a lot of the information in the lower and higher registers will be lost.
The following link is an mp3 file one of the cues to You Better Not Cry, a small film I did music for in 1978. It's a relatively short download (about 2:30 and 2.7 megs).