dream a little dream ….
So, there’s a dream I have, whenever I have a concert after a period of time … like, two weeks, or a month, or even if I’m just doing different programs spread not so far apart. I dream I’m going to play a concert, and I’ve forgotten something really important. Sometimes, I’ve forgotten to finish writing the piece. Sometimes I’ve forgotten to bring the computer I’m going to perform with. Often I’ve forgotten the score. Even more often, I’ve got no cables to hook things up, no way to transport my gear, no sound system. Occasionally, I realize I can’t go on stage because I’ve forgotten my pants.
This dream always happens at about the same time in preparing a new program. It’s the time when I need to put aside whatever else I’m working on, and make sure that I really am prepared, that I know how to play what I need to play, that I’ve organized what needs to be organized for me to get to the gig and be confident that I can show up and have everything I need, and that I can give the best performance I can give.
Ran into this dream about a week ago, in relation to the concert coming up on Sunday. I’d been spending all my time refining and revising things for Numb, which has really been consuming me for the last couple of months. The dream said it was time to make sure I could still play MONO Prelude, which I’ll also have to do in the concert, and which puts me in a completely different role. In Numb I’m sort of a support player, processing and playing back files. In MONO Prelude, I’m the whole show. I speak, and play the computer, I process my voice, and I hope I’m convincing. And I hadn’t looked at it since we did the recording for the new CD back in February.
Although I always wake up in a fright from these dreams, I’ve come to appreciate them. Since I returned a week ago, I’ve managed to revive MONO Prelude, made a few changes and adjustments, and feel pretty good about being able to make it work on Sunday. Will even have a video track from Luke for it this time … So as long as I’m ill prepared in my dreams, it seems to keep me on track to make sure I have time to be prepared for the real deal.
soft strings, and not much else …
Thinking about what I’m writing, what I’ve been writing. Concert coming up next weekend with the two parts of MONO which I’ve done so far … the Prelude and Numb, nearly half an hour of music. And then I dive into finishing up the next CD, hopefully done by the middle of May, when I head off to MacDowell for a month.
What I’ve been thinking about is my language. Tonal, rhythmic, melodic, accessible. Recently I’ve heard a number of things which have seemed to me exactly the opposite of what I like, but which have generated great audience enthusiasm. Specifically, in the concert last weekend, my piece was preceded by a work from Matthias Pintscher. Which sounded very derivative of work by Helmut Lachenmann. I heard a full evening of Lachenmann’s music few weeks ago at Miller Theater. It’s all whispering strings, in the range of ppppp to pp, entirely composed of “extended techniques”, scrapings, playing on or near the bridge, all very quiet. Both Lachenmann and Pintscher are clearly skilled composers. But the work strikes me as similar to the big Mark Rothko paintings, with slowly morphing monochromatic canvases. What’s wrong with the Rothko canvases? They’re from the ’50’s, that’s what. Let me explain. It has a lot to do with why I write the way I do.
Mid to late 20th century music and art seemed to be a time to test boundaries. Visual arts needed to explore how you made a language without representation. Composers needed to explore how you could make structure and musical sense out of all the full universe of sounds. This was the ultimate lesson from Cage, and from Stockhausen, and even from Pierre Schaeffer. Good lessons. Both in the visual and musical arts, our minds are more accepting and our ability to form a language draws from a much wider range of choices. But this is a lesson I learned in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a student. And my reaction to the concert of Lachenmann’s music was that I’d walked into a fossilized version of my 1970s grad school composition seminar. This music sounds very old to me.
So it’s surprising to me to run into young musicians who seem to hear this as something new and exciting. And I’m talking about really wonderful young players whom I’ve worked with and respect. And while I can relate to the “gee whiz” factor of figuring out how to make unusual sounds from your instrument, I find myself unable to find any excitement in music which seems to only focus on the novelty of the sounds. The novelty, for me at least, wears off. Then I want the music to say something to me, to make me feel something, to take me somewhere emotionally and intellectually. Ideally, to take me somewhere I might not otherwise visit. For that, extended techniques, the use of all manner of unusual sounds from acoustic, electronic and environmental sources, are certainly useful tools. It would be foolish to act as though they weren’t available as part of our music. But, at least to me, it’s also very limiting to refuse to include the elements which speak to people in all cultures: melodies, rhythmic patters, pulses, harmonic movement. The things that allow us to remember a piece of music.
An example in my work is my fascination with using electronics to transform acoustic sounds in concert. For me, what makes the noise of the transformation meaningful is the reference to the acoustic sound it comes from. This is just the opposite of the standard dogma of electroacoustic music, formulated by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s, which says the sound should be completely divorced from its source. For me, this is just wrong. What is fascinating, and what carries meaning, is hearing how the transformation happens. Because transformations carry stories, and stories carry meaning.
So, the Pinstcher piece I heard last week was a lovely extended moment … but it was a static, quiet, unmoving and very blurred snapshot. Not unattractive, but missing anything which will really make me care about it. And using sounds which seemed very old hat to me, but which the audience seemed to be discovering for the first time. Go figure.
Numb at first …
So, I think it’s time to re-start this blog, but this time with a broader focus. In previous entries I tried to talk mostly about the actual experience of my hearing loss. From here on out, I think I’m going to focus more on the music I’m writing now, which is very much in response to the situation I chronicled in earlier entries.
Last week I did the first trial performance of the 2nd piece for MONO: Numb. It’s based on a text by an anonymous contributor to the project who lost the sense of touch on the skin of her breasts and belly after cancer surgery. The preparation for the performance was pretty dicey. The way the piece is set up, the text begins scrolling across a video screen while a string trio with digital processing plays. About a 3rd of the way through, a soprano starts speaking parts of the text as they go by, and the text loops and is combined with or processed by the music of the trio. Eventually more and more of the text is sung, until a real “song” emerges for the last couple of minutes.
I planned to use a kind of processor called a vocoder, which effectively superimposes the artifacts of speech on a carrier signal – in this case, the carrier signal is the strings trio, often playing in rhythmic unison with the speaker/singer. The effect is to make the strings seem to talk or sing. As I usually do, I got this all worked out in the studio, making “virtual” string parts on the computer, and recording the singer. The first two rehearsals, one with strings along, and one with strings and singer, just didn’t work. The players were fine, but I couldn’t hear the processing at all. The second rehearsal disintegrated when I ended up with the microphones and processors feeding back uncontrollably, and the players said they couldn’t take it any more and split. What a nightmare! And no matter what I did, I couldn’t duplicate the effects I had in the studio in a rehearsal with live instruments.
I spoke (via email) with my friend and incredible sound engineer Jody Elff, who was on tour in Seoul, South Korea. Back and forth, it seems I was doing everything right, but Jody responded that what I was trying to do was difficult, and that monitoring and balance, as well as adjustment of the parameters of the vocoder and compression of the incoming signals from strings and voice were key elements which I’d need to get right.
The reality of performance, though, is that there’s never enough time in rehearsal to get it all right, at least not for one-off performances like this one. And when we were rehearsing, I just didn’t trust what I heard. I had to ask the players what was coming out of the speakers, because I can’t tell what’s coming from the speakers and what’s coming from the instruments. It’s all just coming from the same place for me. There are a few players who are close friends and long time collaborators, with whom this might work. But not in this situation, where the musicians expect things to roll out as planned. It was the first time most of these players had played my work, and they don’t have a long term commitment to it or investment in it, other than as professionals who are playing what they’re asked to play (and who play spectacularly, I might add). But dealing with my hearing limitations isn’t what they signed on for. This was another situation where I should have hired a sound person to make the necessary adjustments and tunings of the processing for me, someone who knows my work and whose ears I can trust. But there was no budget or time for that with this gig.
The solution was to go back to the studio, where I have more or less unlimited time, up to 24 hrs a day, and use recordings of the players to make a separate track of the processing, generated by the interaction of the strings and the voice as I’ve recorded them. This way I can minimize the problems with my hearing. I can monitor just the processing, or just the live recording, and I can take everything apart to listen to it, and to make sure that the sounds I want to have happen are happening. What a weird way to make music! But it works. The fact remains that I have a very clear aural image in my head (or somewhere within my body) of what the music should sound like, including what the digital processing should sound like. In performance, I just don’t trust what I hear in terms of processing, so I don’t have any reliable instincts on how to tune it in real time … which is something that have I counted on, and assumed, for years.
Ultimately, of course, this isn’t about me being able to do what I do in real time in performance. It’s about making the music work, and sound the way I want it to sound. This “pre-recorded effects” solution worked like a charm. The sound guy on the gig was able to do a great job of keeping my effects-track in balance with the sound from the live players, and the audience had no inkling that the effects weren’t happening in real time. And the nice thing for me was that I seemed to get great feedback from the audience about the piece, which many people said they found moving. Which was, after all, the main idea.
Next week I do a repeat performance, with the full crew of singer, strings, video and two dancers. It’ll be preceded by MONO Prelude, which by now feels like an old friend. And in which I do the processing live. I’m eager to see how these two work together in order to put together ideas about how the whole piece will go. The fact of starting with the focus on me and my senses, and then expending to other people and their sensory challenges is really the direction I want to move in with the piece. We’ll see how it goes.
