gold im bach

gold im bach is for one or more pianists. Where more than one pianist is involved, two pianos are used and the pianists alternate at points they choose in the score, overlapping and interjecting to create a `hand-off' back and forth over the whole duration of the work.

The title gold im bach arose from a discussion I had with Karin Schistek after listening to an electronic mock-up of the piece generated by my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken. Karin is a pianist and synaesthete for whom all objects, sounds, and experiences conjure up associated colours. I told her that I experience this piece as a long and ever-flowing river. She retorted that for her it was more like a `Bach' (= `stream' in German). She might have merely been taking me down with this comment but claims she meant a stream in the sense that she could see detailed objects underneath the flowing water, and that amongst the stones and other objects were flashes of gold.

The title also conjures up Bach's Goldberg variations, of course, and insofar as my piece transforms repeated structures over a significant duration (c. 34 minutes), the connection to Goldberg is not amiss. However, the extramusical and poetic thrust of the work is much more connected to an astounding short poem by the Beat Generation American poet Gregory Corso found on his headstone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome:

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

days with glass edges

days with glass edges (chasing the butterflies in my wallpaper) is for fifteen-piece ensemble and 4-channel electronics. The title is a composite drawn from two Charles Bukowski poems found in the collection Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (Part II, 1963-65). Here are two short extracts, one from each:

something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you…
we have everything and we have nothing ---
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss

don't come round but if you do
maybe I have broken my jaw
and am looking for wire
or I am chasing the butterflies in
my wallpaper
I mean if I don't answer
I don't answer, and the reason is
that I am not yet ready to kill you
or love you, or even accept you

Ranging from repellent gutter talk to fine-grained, unflinchingly honest observations of human nature (often in combination), Bukowski's output remains a powerful challenge to authority and bourgeois sensibilities even a quarter century after his death. His work has stimulated mine for half of my life, despite the repulsion I often feel when confronted with either the words or the man behind them. I cannot speak here of a structural connection between my music and these poems, just a feeling of shared experience: across cultures, time, and art forms.

Technically now, the piece was conceived, generated, and elaborated in software for four generic chord-playing instruments. The harmony investigated here was obtained from the steady-state spectra of the four bronze bells used in various ways by the woodwind players throughout the piece. What I love about working with these unique spectra—besides the process of filtering and the obvious first step of manipulating them so that they are playable on the chosen instruments—is walking the tightrope between unconstrained microtonal dissonance and syrupy triad or octave-dominated tonal reminiscences. It's all about the mapping and being open to the Aha! moments which arrive whilst evaluating material you have explicitly derived but which you'd never intuitively reach for.

Once the whole form of the piece was propagated in software and my ears were happy with the results, I developed an orchestration algorithm that sought particular groups of instruments to map the chords onto—again, it's all in the mapping. The resulting software-generated score became a framework to further stimulate more direct responses and editorial interventions to achieve the final score via standard composerly means, i.e., with pencil and paper, where a lot of the work still remains in almost all my algorithmic works.

P.S. The keyboard part drives a custom sound engine built by yours truly on a composite of granular and additive synthesis (rough vs. pure: hello again Mr. B.). It also triggers four-channel sound files. The latter are intricate mixes of sonic material also generated algorithmically, with the same data structures as the instrumental score, and using as input both analogue synthesizer models—some quite self-consciously cheesy, to match the occasional harmony—and samples of various provenance.

HOTPO

Hinting at something a little more coarse, the title HOTPO is in fact a completely innocent reference to the Collatz Conjecture. This mathematical proposition, also known by other names, refers to a succession of numbers called the hailstone sequence (or wondrous numbers), because their values usually ascend and descend like hailstones in a cloud.

Though the mathematical proof of the conjecture is complex, the proposition is very simple: Take any positive whole number; if it is even, divide it by two; if it is odd, multiply it by three and add one (hence the acronym Half Or Three Plus One: HOTPO); repeat the process with the result and you will find that no matter which number begins the process, you will always, given enough iterations, reach one.

The algorithm is easy to programme and experiment with plus it produces rather nice images when given different starting numbers and plotted over various iterations. I used the algorithm in this piece to generate section lengths and repeated structures from nine basic rhythm sequences, hence my sequence was 9 28 14 7 22 11 34 17 52 26 13 40 20 10 5 16 8 4 2 1. The piece alternates sections opposing mixed materials (odd section numbers) with obsessively repeated material (even). The numbers are also used for the generation of the sound files triggered during the performance. Despite the rather abstract nature of the generative procedure, the results of the algorithms were developed intuitively and the piece as a whole arises out of and proceeds through a maelstrom of events fitting to the imagery of a hailstorm.

Durchhaltevermögen

durchhaltevermögen was written for Mieko Kanno over about six months beginning late 2016. It is dedicated to the composer, violinist, and improvisor Malcolm Goldstein. Mieko and I share an enormous respect and admiration for Mr. Goldstein's music and his impact on contemporary violin playing. Speaking personally, his improvisations both in live and recorded form have offered me some of the most profound and moving experiences not just of late but of my whole life. I'm very grateful for his music.

But how strange to write a highly detailed composition and dedicate it to a master improvisor. Was I transcribing an improvisation and calling it my own? (Certainly not.) Was I trying to "capture the spirit" of an improvisation? (No. Not really.) Was I trying to capture anything? (No. Release something rather than capture it.) So what's the connection? (The spirit (I hope) and some of the playing techniques.)

The title can be translated from the German as stamina, staying power, or power of endurance. More appealing is the clumsy-literal translation of this compound noun's three units: through-holding-power:

Through as in through-composed: not only is this work in one continuous movement but it lacks, in its raw construction at least, formal sectional variety or opposition. Through also as in the biblical (via Bergman) through a glass darkly (a poor image or reflection perhaps: (my) humility in the face of (his) genius).

Holding as in supporting (a weight, which takes effort) but also holding back, suspending (which takes a completely different kind of effort). And of course holding a tone, a bow, and pushing through.

Power not in the sense of raw muscle or power over others, but power as in poise, mastery, the power of technical accomplishment, the power of multivalent interpretation; to be able to hold and present seemingly opposing states or views of an object, as in the Catuskoti paradox. (Take for example the question "Is this piece an improvisation?" Catuskoti insists that there are four, not two, possible answers: true, false, true and false, or neither true nor false, with the latter two being surely the most interesting responses.)

durchhaltevermögen was generated with the jitterbug algorithm I developed using my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software. After much tweaking this created a raw form of rhythms and pitches upon which a detailed reading was superimposed (an interpretation, a composer's cut, you might say). Next of course comes the violinist's reading. Then the listener's. (Did I really compose this piece? True? False? True and False? …)

Music for Parallel Consumption

Composed in 2010 but not released until some final polish was applied in 2015, Music for Parallel Consumption is a 4-channel digital composition made for delivery and playback via a custom computer app. The title refers only partially ironically to the tendency to consume music as part of a backdrop to our otherwise-engaged lives. At the same time as offering an alternative to this mode of consumption (((the details, the details!))) the very nature of the piece's construction and delivery strategy invites similar disregard. Not intended for concert performance, the app format almost encourages you to set and forget: choose your output mode, set the level, hit play, and let it run for as long as you like. Such contradictions are further inherent in the the polarity of the meditative quality of much of the music and the album artwork—war being the ultimate consumptive impulse.

jitterbug

jitterbug is, in performance, a four-movement four-channel work for computer, with or without improvising musicians. It is also available without improvised contributions as a stereo album. It was created with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software and premiered at Museum Siam, Bangkok, on November 29th 2015 as part of the As((ear))n exhibition of curated sounds from throughout South-East Asia.

The four movements---each taking one of the proportions 6:3:5:4, in that order---have a total duration of 40:30. Movements 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 overlap, making for two equal halves separated by silence. The titles of the movements are:

1(6): stuffed animals and licorice (13:30)

2(3): my father's hazards (6:45)

3(5): zero to ten (11:15)

4(4): shiny metal mixing bowl (9:00)

The title jitterbug comes from the name of the main rhythmic generative algorithm used in the piece. The movement titles come from Matt Sumell's 2015 novel Making Nice. I was reading this at the time my father was dying of cancer in the first half of 2015. In the novel, the protagonist's mother is dying of cancer. When taken out of context the titles themselves are particularly strong and colourful, though not particularly clear. In the context of the larger text, they take on different but generally very clear meanings, some rather prosaic, like various aspects of the process of dying:

Many different sounds were used in the mix. Some were longer sound files, treated acousmatically, such as rain in Montreal, interviews I recorded with my father before he died, or the evening call to prayer in Yogyakarta, Indonesia; some were vocal statements or sung animal-like sounds; others were many and various short sounds, used as samples and driven by different outputs of the jitterbug algorithm: prepared and normal piano samples, and many gong and bell samples made from my own instruments sourced in Bangkok. The animal sounds were cut, edited, and polished from recordings sourced online at the Macaulay Library of Cornell University. I used recordings of Jaguar sex by Gustav Peters; elephant seals by Thomas Sander; and red deer by Bob McGuire.

hyperboles 3

Programme Note

Humans exaggerate on a regular basis. Typical hyperboles might be "this bag weighs a ton", "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse", or any of the invariably (!) hilarious "Yo' mama so fat..." jokes. Perhaps even worse than footballers ("I hit the post. I was gutted") are artists. Have you ever sat silently suffering ("dying", anyone?) at a contemporary poetry reading, as the reciter over-emotes their way through a litany of subtexts we can summarise by "me, me, me! I'm so deep and clever!"? Such occasions often merely reinforce the popular perception of artistic outputs as being expressive of the creator's emotions. But that is less interesting than artworks' invitation to be social, communal, and at the same time to introspect and inspect our personal, perhaps emotional reactions to intrinsically neutral objects.

The beautiful hyperbole relevant to this piece, with its "vast vacuities" in the formal proportions and note-to-rest ratio, is the following quotation from a piece on culture in the southern United States one hundred years ago. It's the kind of thing we read today about TV/internet/pop culture and it's reassuring to know that we've always had our noses in the air whilst pointing at others' perceived deficiencies:

"It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the 'progress' it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert." (H.L. Mencken, The Sahara of the Bozart)

So, here's a piece of purely intellectual artistic construction, devoid of any emotional content whatsoever. Time to ponder.

their faces on fire

their faces on fire is a flexible, musician-tweaked algorithmic composition for baritone saxophone and computer. The objective of the approach is the algorithmic specification of the global structure, parameters, tendencies, data, and data processing techniques for a composition, with the configuration of the open parameter space made by the musician from a series of limited choices. This leads to different versions of the piece---some easier than others perhaps---but with an identifiable character common to all. For instance, the saxophone part will always consist of a three-in-one contrapuntal texture created by leaps between three different registers: low, "harmonic", and high (altissimo), but the order of these can be chosen by the musician.

The title comes from Samuel Beckett's First Love (1945):

"Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire."

One thing I love about this and similar works---especially the audience's various reactions to such passages when they're performed---is the jarring juxtaposition of such scatological imagery against the more palatable diversions within. In other words, such sentences create a spicy shock that can awaken you from the more uniform flow of prose surrounding them. Musical parallels to this have been an underlying concern of mine for years; moreover, the specific import of this quotation is, in my opinion, always worth highlighting.

hyperboles are the worst thing ever

Humans exaggerate on a regular basis. Typical hyperboles might be "this bag weighs a ton", "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse", or any of the invariably (!) hilarious "Yo' mama so fat..." jokes. Perhaps even worse than footballers ("I hit the post. I was gutted") are artists. Have you ever sat silently suffering ("dying", anyone?) at a contemporary poetry reading, as the reciter over-emotes their way through a litany of subtexts we can summarise by "me, me, me! I'm so deep and clever!"? Such occasions often merely reinforce the popular perception of artistic outputs as being expressive of the creator's emotions. But that is less interesting than artworks' invitation to be social, communal, and at the same time introspect and inspect our personal, perhaps emotional reactions to intrinsically neutral objects:

When faced with a Nitsch picture of animal guts resting on a man's genital area, do we feel horror and offence or see the skin as a mirror, a symmetrical inversion of nothing more than what's behind the man's (and by implication our) skin at all times, sobering as that may be ("hello mortality!")?

Whilst on the subject of male genitalia, do Mapplethorpe's motor oil crotch smearings (accompanied by tight testicular ties) excite homophobic panic or amazement at the textures and play of light and shadow?

The choice (to grow) is ours.

So, at the risk of being called a Cretan, here's a piece without any emotional content whatsoever.

for rei as a doe

Without wishing to appear esoteric, boastful, or holier-than-thou, it's relevant to the reception and contextualisation of this piece to point out that it would have been impossible for me to write it without years of practice of Vipassana (Insight) meditation. In contrast to most of my music, the piece is very slow and calm, lasting a total of 37 minutes or so, but with possible stopping points at 15 and 21 minutes along the way. It demands extremely quiet playing from the pianist almost all the way through, thus putting the piano back into the pianoforte you might say.

That Rei Nakamura, for whom this piece was written, could carry off virtuosic, fast, complex music was made clear to me in a couple of projects we have done together recently; hence the perhaps counterintuitive response--or challenge even--represented by this soft, gentle meditation on the piano's resonant properties. The title, with its image of a gentle woodland creature, is meant ironically--again: as a challenge--not in a new-agey manner.

The skill demanded of the pianist consists amongst other things in very accurately playing together the notes of each of the quiet chords, in order to properly fuse the sonorities; playing evenly, so as not to disturb the sense of line and serenity; and, perhaps dialectically opposed to the latter, the subtly different colouring and shading of isolated notes and chords in different registers, to place them spatially and create variety in an otherwise dynamically and rhythmically rather uniform piece.

PS: For the geeks amongst us: This piece was created with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software. It is conceived in four voices: one for each of the pianist's hands, and another two for the high and low voices of an analogue synthesis emulation played back from the computer and mixed with various other sound files (some algorithmic, some ambient) in four channels. Essentially there are three nine-bar phrases in 4/4 meter, each in four part counterpoint. The assignment of contrapuntal parts to each of the four voices (computer high/low, piano left-hand/right-hand) is determined by a permutation routine in which there are 24 possible permutations of the four voices. The selection of which of the three phrases to use is also decided by a partially repeated permutation (there being only six possible permutations of three items). Inserted into these longer phrases are an ever increasing, ever more frequently recurring set of shorter repeating bars, each of which is extracted from the longer sequences. Where these repeats are inserted is determined by a Fibonacci-based transition algorithm; the number of repeats by a sequence of ascending prime numbers (3 5 3 5 7 11 7 13 11 13 17).

The harmonic material was created by ear. There are twelve chords, or harmonic sets, which may or may not be used by the algorithm in their entirety--either linearly or vertically--during one rhythmic sequence. The determination of which chord(s) can follow which was also determined by ear, and a varying but internally consistent linear sequence extended algorithmically from this. (In fact, chord nine is missing in this piece, not so much by design as by algorithmic coincidence.) The harmonies are transposed by a minor third during the second half of the piece.

you are coming into us who cannot withstand you

The title of this piece is taken from the poem "Final Notions" by Adrienne Rich (1929-):

It will not be simple, it will not take long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not take long, it will occupy all your thought
As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
You are taking parts of us into places never planned
You are going far away with pieces of our lives

It will be short, it will take all your breath
It will not be simple, it will become your will

The mood of the piece picks up on the simplicity and directness of language, the repetitions, and the almost breathless speed (in my reading at least) of the poetic meter.

Deceptively simple on the page, "you are coming into us who cannot withstand you" gains its impetus from the combination of small, simple rhythmic units into larger, sometimes repeating sequences by means of an algorithmic technique I call rhythm chains. These sequences are usually placed in polymetric opposition to similarly constructed contrapuntally combined sequences. The tempi are quick, the energy level is high, and the perception of multiple pattern streams moving at different rates is the main feature of the music.

don't flinch

The title is taken from the poem "Don't Flinch" by Adrienne Rich:

Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver
when you lift your eyes. It's the glare. Don't flinch
The news you were reading
(who tramples whom) is antique
and on the death pages you've seen already
worms doing their normal work
on the life that was: the chewers chewing
at a sensuality that wrestled doom
an anger steeped in love they can't
even taste. How could this still
shock or sicken you? Friends go missing, mute
nameless.. Toss
the paper. Reach again
for the Iliad. The lines
pulse into sense. Turn up the music
Now do you hear it? can you smell smoke
under the near shingles?

The bottleneck guitar sound was utmost in my mind from the very beginning of working on this piece. I have a very strong and fond memory of watching Ry Cooder play the guitar with a bottleneck on the now defunct UK TV music show "The Old Grey Whistle Test" when I was about three or four years old. The sound of this has remained with me my whole life and is strongly associated with the guitar for me personally.

Other techniques specific to the guitar were also used in this piece: string rattles created by delicately touching a vibrating open string with either the fingernail or the bottleneck; different plucking positions, from near the bridge to on the fingerboard; tremolo with and without a plectrum; glissandi; exaggerated vibrato with and without the bottleneck; various single and double harmonics; and pitch bends.

Viewed historically, this is essentially an instrument-plus-tape piece. The computer is used only to trigger stereo sound files, sometimes at the push of a pedal, other times once the onset of a guitar note is detected. Simplicity was utmost in my mind in choosing to use the computer in this way as I wanted Yvonne and perhaps other guitarists to be able to perform the piece without my presence being necessary.

The piece is definitely out of the ordinary in having what is essentially a conventionally notatable computer part. Most electronic components in music of this kind consist mainly of sounds that could only be made--perhaps especially rhythmically--with computers or other electronic equipment. I was attracted in this piece to the idea of creating an almost acoustic instrumental trio, but having the luxury of continuously modifying, refining, and spectrally shaping two of the voices through digital production techniques.

In addition to software samplers and synthesizers, several other sounds were mixed in: a recording of myself improvising on tenor saxophone; myself reciting Rich's poem; recordings of sheep; and Artaud's "Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu". The latter was used purely for its sonic and not its semantic content.

altogether disproportionate

"We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves - an altogether disproportionate share of wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us." (Winston Churchill, 1914)

It is simultaneously satisfying and disturbing to read that such a powerful man as Churchill clearly understood the nature and causes of the staggering disparity of wealth between his country and those from whom it stole. At the same time, and like most of our leaders, it is to our shame that he did so little to redress the imbalance. In fact, writing only five years later about possible solutions to the Iraq problem of his time, Churchill would appear to be quite a different man from the one we might imagine--more related to Saddam Hussein, perhaps: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes", he wrote in 1919.

Altogether disproportionate, no? At the time of writing (October 2010), the proposed cuts to the UK military budget are 8%; those to the higher education teaching budget, 80%. The widely broadcast US military deaths since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 number more than 4300; the almost always ignored Iraqi civilian deaths caused by the war, circa 100,000. The cost to US tax payers of each Taliban fighter's death in Afghanistan? $50 million, according to one estimate. Such depressing statistics were taxing me whilst writing this piece, along with a Diane Arbus image of one of the 'patriots' she photographed during the Vietnam War. Not the more famous one, with the maniacal expression on his face, but the stiff boater wearer, sporting the almost illegible lapel badge which implores "Bomb Hanoi." Pleasant young man. Proportionate? Hardly.

As for the music: Per Rundberg asked for it. He told me he wanted something similar to my ensemble piece, cheat sheet, that he co-premiered in Austria in 2007. He enjoyed--or so he said at least--the very fast tempi that drove the performers to almost skim through the vast array of notes--16000 odd in that piece I believe; only 3000 or so here--careering into each other and into all sorts of unplannable serendipities that are usually found only in free improvisations. He also expressed a desire for music with political content, something that was abundant in cheat sheet. So here we are.

I was further mindful of various conversations Per and I have had over the last thirteen years about works for piano and electronics. It was Per who pointed out to me that one of the difficulties of using amplification is that musicians perform not just in, but with the architectural space of a concert hall; that they learn to project their instrument's sound into that space, and loudspeakers disturb this relationship. So although I nevertheless wanted to write for piano and computer, this time I didn't want to make a piece which demanded amplification through a PA system. My solution was to use loudspeakers under the piano. This allows me to excite the piano's sound board with electronics; mix the instrumental and electronic sources acoustically, in situ, rather than electronically, in a mixing desk; and allows Per to perform without microphones, balancing sound levels according to both the acoustic properties of the piano and the hall he plays in.

I can't resist ending with a quotation from the composer Helmut Lachenmann. His inspiring writings go some way towards explaining the presence here of so much political comment in what should be a simple concert programme note: "The experience of the beautiful is indissolubly connected with making perceptible the social contradictions in our reality; because to make them perceptible is to make them surmountable."

who says this, saying it's me?

"Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?"
Samuel Beckett, opening of Texts for Nothing 4

Composers' concentration on the musical text and the general perception of composers as exclusive musical visionaries who set down notes which performers need only play in the right order and with the required precision in order to succeed, greatly obscures the role of the performer and all s/he brings to a piece of composed music. We can see this not just in terms of conscious interpretation, but centuries of mostly undocumented and implied performance practice; all the intricate details which need to be mastered to bring music to life, but which are not to be found on the page. Anyone who has heard a machine performance of a well-known piece immediately hears and understands this.

In more and more of my recent works I treat the score not as an ideal which must be achieved but as a system to strive against which leads to expressive yet often out-of-control situations. All the usual notational details are present and most are quite simple (this is not the New Complexity); there is nothing aleatoric or random about the score, but one or two of the performance parameters will be extreme. In this piece, the speed at which musical material is to be presented is such that the performer is forced to skim, to improvise even, to react to the score rather than simply (!) play it. The intention is for an unusual energy and tension to arise, along with unimaginable and perhaps unnotatable instrumental sounds.

The saxophone as we know it is slowly revealed through various more unusual views of the instrument, as a technological extension of the human vocal apparatus, and as a resonating tube. Each of the six sections proceed via the same but ever-shortening algorithm: a two-in-one-voice hocket-like exchange of foreground and background notes, most often in different registers. Both saxophone and computer play through the same basic material but this is obscured in the former by a superimposed note-rejection procedure and in the latter by intentionally programmed rhythmic sloppiness. The obscuring reduces over the course of the piece until in the final section the computer and saxophone are locked in a uni-rhythmic and euphoric mêlée of sharply accented, ever-changing metrical assaults. Whose music you are hearing though--mine or the performer's--is open to question.

for Magda Cordell, if she'll have it

Magda Cordell's "Figure (Woman)" is a hugely energetic painting that manages to create recognisable forms from techniques we usually associate with abstract expressionism, something analogous to the conscious yet non-reactionary use of tonal (even jazz-like) structures in the cascade of notes that pour forth in my piece.

cheat sheet

"cheat sheet" for solo electric guitar, flute, clarinet, percussion, string trio, double bass, and live electronics was a commission from the Austrian Ensemble for New Music (OENM) and the Bregenz Festival. It has very curious beginnings. On May 3rd 2005, two days before the Blair Labour Government was re-elected, Edwards was reading the BBC News website and stumbled on the following statement by the Labour Minister Gordon Brown regarding the government's decision in 2003 to invade Iraq: "We believed we were making the right decision in the British national economic interest...at the end of the day we wanted the security of Britain and the British national interest to be advanced." Edwards couldn't believe his eyes: that this reason--well-known to all but denied by those responsible--was there to read in the mainstream media two days before the election. It was "too good (or rather too bad) to be true. And so it was. For when I reloaded the page some fifteen minutes later the statement had been removed. Redacted. Edited out. Censored. A search of the BBC website resulted in another story with the same quotation. And again, a few minutes later it was gone from that story too. [...] I was stunned--frightened even--to see what I could only suppose was government control of the media so nakedly at work. Or perhaps the BBC themselves redacted the statement", so writes the composer, who immediately contacted several national newspapers, national and international political organisations, the BBC, even Gordon Brown's office. No response was forthcoming, no open discussion, no explanation, "no trouble". In his work "cheat sheet" Edwards thematicises the idea of censorship.

German version:

"cheat sheet" für Solo E-Gitarre, Flöte, Klarinette, Percussion, Streichtrio, Kontrabass und Live-Elektronik ist ein Auftragswerk des Österreichischen Ensembles für Neue Musik und den Bregenzer Festspielen und hat eine äußerst kuriose Vorgeschichte. Am 3. Mai 2005, zwei Tage, bevor die Blair Labour Regierung wiedergewählt wurde, stolperte Edwards beim Durchsehen der BBC New-Webseite über folgendes Statement des Labour Ministers Gordon Brown, der über die Regierungsentscheidung 2003, in den Irak-Krieg zu ziehen, meinte: "We believed we were making the right decision in the British national economic interest...at the end of the day we wanted the security of Britain and the British national interest to be advanced." Edwards konnte seinen Augen nich trauen, dass dieser allen bekannte--und von allen Verantwortlichen geleugnete--Kriegseintrittsgrund zwei Tage vor der Wahl in den Medien zu lesen sei. Es war "too good (or rather too bad) to be true. And so it was. For when I reloaded the page some fifteen minutes later the statement had been rmoved. Redacted. Edited out. Censored. A search of the BBC website resulted in another story with the asme quotation. And again, a few minutes later it was gone from that story too. [...] I was stunned--frightened even--to see what I could only suppose was government control of the media so nakedly at work. Or perhaps the BBC themselves redacted the statement", so der Komponist, der sofort mehrer Zeitungen, nationale und internationale politische Organisationen, die BBC, sogar Gordon Browns Office kontaktierte. Ein wirkliches Echo kam nicht--keine öffentliche Diskussion, keine Erklärung, "no trouble". In seinem Werk "cheat sheet" thematisiert Edwards nun die Idee der Zensur.

I Kill by Proxy

I read somewhere that when we elect a leader we are choosing the person to murder in our name. It's an idea that's easy to reject out of hand, but when you think about it, there's an awful lot of killing still being done today by large military organisations. The days of the wild west and the crusades may be over; the idea of war within a 'civilised' country's own borders may be unlikely; but still, some of those countries--my own included--spill a lot of blood in various parts of the world. Those countries who do the killing are usually relatively wealthy; those who die, poor. It's not difficult to see the connection. As Balzac wrote: "The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly."

Commissioned by the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Germany, I Kill by Proxy (when I vote, when I shop) is a composition for piano, percussion, and computer lasting between 60 and 75 minutes (in the full version). Mixing fully-composed and improvised musical structures, the considerable duration of this work is mitigated by a division into several sections, the major parts of which are a solo percussion piece, a solo piano piece, and a piano-percussion duo. Transitions between the pieces are improvised, creating a continuous work without breaks. Notwithstanding this design, the individual fully-composed sections can be performed separately, in a different context and programme.

The computer part combines real-time sound processing techniques with playback of pre-mixed sound files. The sources for these sound files are mainly snippets of recordings of the instrumental parts of the piece, ordered and processed by the same algorithms that helped generate those parts.

As with all my compositional work since c. 2000, I Kill by Proxy was composed with my own algorithmic composition software. Object-oriented Common Lisp code was developed mainly at ZKM with the generous support of two Guest Artist stipends in the summers of 2000 and 2001. The software is continuously in development. For I Kill by Proxy, programming was focussed upon new pitch-selection algorithms.

Many thanks, as always, to Bill Schottstaedt of Stanford University for the CLM software with which the majority of the signal processing of sounds was made; and to the Camargo Foundation for a wonderful residency in Cassis, France, where most of the compositional work was done.

scei XVIII (tramontana)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei XVII (charlie)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei XVI (charlie)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

24/7: freedom fried

Busy, busy, busy. If we're shopping for food at 3am, is this a testament to modern convenience or an indictment of our over-crammed lives? If we have time to think, will it be about our career, family, i.e. the serious stuff, or about art (which should be a pleasant distraction, not yet another challenge, right?)?

But art and entertainment are not synonyms.

"The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part." (In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell)

If true in 1932, when Russell wrote this essay, then it is perhaps even more so today. An important question is to what extent this phenomenon occurred naturally as opposed to being manipulated, and if at all the latter, then by whom? Russell in the same essay writes:

"In the West, we ... have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all... We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labour by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man."

No news there. Many people would recognise this social structure as fundamental to our modern 'democratic' societies. Others see it rather as oligarchy, plutocracy. Whichever it is, the distractions of over-work and a media system offering more cud for the chew than that which is our due seem to be working well:

"what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps ... to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms. Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power." (Quitting the Paint Factory, on the virtues of idleness, Mark Slouka)

So what has all this to do with my piece of music? Everything and nothing. Everything because both my imagination and indignation are fueled by social injustice and this feeds the creative urge. Everything because I do not want to be "putting art to the service of suppression and the propagation of a false sense of security" (Helmut Lachenmann). Nothing because (diminuendo...) the driving generative and structural force of the piece relates to the title in another, infinitely more abstract way:

A viola player uses the four fingers of the left hand to stop the strings; there are 24 possible permutations of the four fingers; of these 24 there are 620448401733239439360000 permutations, only seven of which are used in this piece (thankfully, you might say), memorised by the performer and superimposed--generally as fast as possible: busy, busy, busy--onto various transpositions of seven basic tetrachords on each of the seven strings of the viola d'amore...

And "freedom fried"? From the embarrassingly childish jingoism of the US House of Representatives in renaming their French Fries as Freedom Fries after France's refusal to join the 2003 Iraq crusade. From the perversion of the very idea of freedom, something which can now apparently include frying innocent Fallujahns in burning white phosphorus: not, according to the military and the media, a chemical weapon, and certainly not remotely as wicked as the infamous chemical attacks Saddam inflicted on Halabja. Of course not; on the contrary, simply a fair price to pay for good ol' democracy.

24/7: freedom fried was written for Garth Knox.

in limine

in limine is based on the syllabic and verse structure of Eugenio Montale's (1896-1981) 1924 poem of the same name (provided below with William Arrowsmith's translation):

The third of a set of pieces based on Montale's poetry, in limine (Latin: at the threshold) particularly takes its impetus from the imperatives of the poem: Rejoice, Look, Advance, Find, Leap, Flee, Go. These active verbs are countered, however, both in the poem and the music, by the static, timeless quality of the reliquary, the coast, the wall; the summer heat of Montale's native Liguria.

Also at work is a deliberate distortion of musical proportions: sections at the beginning are compressed to an unusual degree, they rush through material to the point where musical ideas are only hinted at, creating an almost schizophrenic musical atmosphere. Later, sections and material are stretched beyond their means, to the point where the musical fabric almost tears or bulges into ungainly shapes; like your reflection mutated in a hall of mirrors.

The composition of in limine was made possible by the support of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Board.

breathing Charlie

"and nothing, and nothing. the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who'd kill you
because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good . . . "

(Charles Bukowski)

From Charles to Charlie (Parker), and working on his assertion that if it's not in you, it won't come out through your horn, this piece is based around the two versions of "Bongo Bop" Parker recorded in October 1947: a four times augmentation of the 9x12 bar blocks, rhythmically and harmonically derived from the source, there is very little of Parker sampled for the piece (most samples are of myself on alto), but you may hear snatches of a very young Miles Davis and, later in the piece, lots of the short rhythm section fills between solo phrases, complete with wax disc aberrations, clicks, and general lo-fi distortions. Most of all, however, you'll hear breath.*

* N.B. You probably won't notice much correlation between what you see the saxophonist doing and what you hear. In this piece, the saxophone is used more as a system exciter than as a normal musical instrument. So for one thing, you probably won't hear any normal notes. Also, due to processes such as live sampling, granulation, and looping, if something audible is done live, you may not hear it at the time but rather later, or perhaps not at all.

P.S. At the beginning of the piece I decided to set the scene properly, albeit briefly, for a work of this nature by transporting us out of the (perhaps overly formal?) concert hall into Henry's Jazz Cellar, just off the Lothian Road in Edinburgh. Seemed like a more suitable venue. A little bit more relaxed.

skin

The form and rhythmic structure of skin is closely based on (generated with, even) the following poem by Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), as translated by William Arrowsmith:

Ciò che di me sapeste non fu che la scialbatura, la tonaca che riveste la nostra umana ventura. Ed era forse oltre il telo l'azzurro tranquillo; vietava il limpido cielo solo un sigillo. O vero c'era il falòtico mutarsi della mia vita, lo schiudersi d'un'ignita zolla che mai vedrò. Restò così questa scorza la vera mia sostanza; il fuoco che non si smorza per me si chiamò: l'ignoranza. Se un'ombra scorgete, non è un'ombra--ma quella io sono. Potessi spiccarla da me, offrirvela in dono.

What you knew of me was only a whitened skin, the cowl that cloaks our human destiny. And perhaps behind the blue veil the air was blue and still; between me and the clear sky lay a simple seal. Or else it was that wildfire changing of my life, the disclosure of the kindled clod I'll never see. So then this husk remained my true substance; the name of unquenched fire for me was--ignorance. If you glimpse a shade, it's not a shade--it's me. If I could strip that shade away, I'd give it to you, gladly.

Technical Details

Along with amplification, sound file playback, and diffusion, the computer is used to perform real-time granular synthesis (with transposition) of the viol signal using a custom Max/MSP external written by the composer. The viol part was made using the composer's slippery chicken algorithmic composition software, as were the pre-prepared sounds triggered during the piece (using the same data and algorithms as the viol part, as well as sounds from that part as input to the sound processing).

Motivations

The nature of the piece is a reaction to a reaction from Mark Summers when he was considering whether to play a previously-written cello piece of mine: "Don't you ever write any long notes?"

Long notes combined with unnatural playing techniques create the potential for all kinds of wonderful failures over and over again. Rather than be avoided, these are desired, amplified, and celebrated. There is beauty there. As well as a detached structural rigour applied almost remotely, coldly, like destruction at a distance, technical sophistication applied to ugly, violent ends.

Which naturally leads to:

programme_note_version_2.0.the_other_side.neither_sophisticated_nor_elevated.but_heartfelt

Rant

and so I finally come back to britain with a real job paying real taxes and what do the bastards spend them on in my name? : bombing the shit out of some poor oppressed people several thousand miles away (as always)

and with a view to robbing them (as always)

and calling it "acts of liberation" (as usual)

and still calling this a democracy (as if)

pisses me off

yeah right 51st state land of the free (free to
shut up
put up
fuck up (collectively of course))

I really tried I did I tried to concentrate on beauty even found myself a nice poem didn't work though it came out really nasty this time shocked even me felt like dr (dj?...nah) frankenstein

consumed by monstrous algorithms

yeah skin

shards of it

dripping off your neighbours' wall

imagine that and tell me you still want those bombs

(it's not the actual crime of this war that gets to me most it's the boundless cynical audacity of their lies so-called reasons justifications imagine them sitting in their clinically secure offices marketing their abominations "[laughing] oh come on no one could believe that" "damn straight they're gonna believe it 'cause we got the best goddamn pr firm ever existed an' if they can sell bud to beer lovers..." (substitute suitably stiff limey equivalent for the downing street version)

saddest thing is they (we!) do believe

because that's what makes it possible again and again and again (and again))

scei XV (skin)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei XIV (skin)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei XIIIb (skin)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei XIIIa (skin)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei XII (skin)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

tramontana

Tramontana was written mainly in September 2002 in the Villa Serbelloni of the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italy) shortly before I moved to Edinburgh after a five-year stay in Austria. The title is from a Eugenio Montale poem that refers to a stark, cold, northerly wind coming from the mountains.

The piece has three sound sources: 1) a live amplified viola, tuned so that the first three strings have a harmonic that is exactly in tune with the seventh partial of the fourth string; 2) 4-channel sound files made from samples of a recording of the viola part; and 3) live processing of the viola using Max/MSP and a C programme I wrote for live granular synthesis with transposition. The version for first performance with the Experimentalstudio Freiburg included grains circulated around the audience in eight channels using their Halaphone hard/software.

The instrumental and sample-processing parts of the piece were created with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software (written in Common Lisp). Of significance here is the close structural relationship between the two parts, particularly the quasi-instrumental listening experience that the sound files produce. This often goes so far as to make the live viola and sound files indisinguishable. It is my goal in such pieces to create a sound world in which neither the instrumental nor the electronic sounds dominate, rather, each one supports and extends the other. This is achieved here insofar as the same computational processes are used to generate both layers (in Tramontana mostly permutation and "tendency producing" algorithms). It is a feature of slippery chicken that once the data for a piece is produced in computer memory (in an abstract and output-media independent format), the programme can generate from the same data scores using the programme Common Music Notation (CMN), sound files using Common Lisp Music (CLM), and MIDI files using Common Music (CM).

For CLM and CMN I am, as always, grateful to Bill Schottstaedt of Stanford University; for CM to Rick Taube. For several tips and suggestions I'm obliged to the violist who gave the premiere in Darmstadt on August 12th 2004: Barbara Maurer.

---

Tramontana wurde hauptsächlich im September 2002 in der Villa Serbelloni der Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italien) geschrieben, kurz bevor ich nach einem fünfjährigen Aufenthalt in Österreich nach Edinburgh zog. Der Titel stammt von einem Gedicht Eugenio Montales und bezeichnet einen starken, kalten Nordwind.

Das Stück besteht aus drei Klangquellen: Zum einen die live gespielte Bratsche, die verstärkt und so gestimmt ist, dass die ersten drei Saiten ein Flageolet bilden, das mit dem siebten Teilton der vierten Saite übereinstimmt. Zum anderen Computer-Klangdateien, deren Ausgangsmaterialien (Samples) von einer zuvor aufgenommenen Version der Bratschenstimme stammen sowie die Live-Bearbeitung der Bratschenstimme mit dem Programm Max/MSP und hier insbesondere mit einem von mir in C geschriebenen MSP Objekt für Granular-Synthese mit Transposition. Die Grains von der Live-Granular-Synthese werden in dieser Aufführung mit dem vom Experimentalstudio entwickelten Halaphon verräumlicht.

Der Instrumental- sowie der Sample-Bearbeitungsteil des Stückes wurde mit meinem in Common Lisp geschriebenen Algorithmischen Kompositionsprogramm "slippery chicken" entwickelt. Signifikant daran ist der enge strukturelle Zusammenhang zwischen diesen zwei Teilen und besonders das quasi instrumentale Hörerleben, das die Klangdateien hervorrufen. Dies geht so weit, dass die live-instrumentalen und elektronischen Teile oft ununterscheidbar sind. Mein Ziel ist es tatsächlich in solchen Stücken, eine Klangwelt zu schaffen, in der weder der Instrumental- noch der Elektronikteil dominiert, sondern beide das jeweils Andere unterstützen und erweitern. Dies kann erreicht werden, indem die gleichen Prozesse (in Tramontana meistens Permutationen und Tendenzen erzeugende Algorithmen) zur Erstellung beider Teile angewendet werden: Nachdem in einem abstrakten Format die Software des Stücks fertig ist, kann das Programm die Partitur mittels Common Music Notation (CMN) schreiben und mittels Common Lisp Music (CLM) und den Samples die Klangdateien erzeugen.

Für CMN und CLM bin ich, wie immer, Bill Schottstaedt von der Stanford University dankbar. Für technischer Unterstützung in Freiburg bin ich den Mitarbeitern und André Richard, dem Leiter des Experimentalstudios, dankbar. Für sämtliche Anregungen und Lösungen danke ich auch Barbara Maurer.

selbstporträt als ein anderer

Self-portrait as another person or another person's self-portrait? How do you see yourself? How do others see you, themselves? I mean really how as well as what do you see? How do you want to see yourself? How do you want to be? Like Dorian Gray, do you present a pretty shell covering an ugly heart? Do you want to change?

"Selbst-porträt als ein anderer (bleib ruhig einmal verdammt!)" means "Self-portrait as another [person] (stay calm for once, damn it!)".

OK though, this shouldn't descend into lame pop psychology, sociology or 'self-help', but a recent interesting phenomenon is that of email or chat-room persona, virtual-reality 'avatars' even, where a person may represent themselves through internet technology as something that they are not, or perhaps are, but want to keep secret. It is common to find people who exchange highly insulting messages ("flame wars") whereas in person they are quite timid, harmless; complete misanthropes or social misfits who come across as friendly, well-balanced people; your next-door-neighbour perhaps, who becomes the drooling sex fiend you always knew him to be. Computers allow the adoption of a new character, the realisation of the wildest schizophrenic dreams even, with countless, multiply split personalities; and no-one has to know a thing about it.

But I'll come clean: this piece was developed with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software. With this, I create (potentially large) musical structures from basic musical material. Don't misunderstand me: I do the composing, not the computer. Every single step the computer takes in generating the structures has been programmed by me. What the software allows, is for me to step outside of myself for a while, to investigate, explore, to see what might be possible were I to use this idea or that idea. I have the possibility to write music that I otherwise might not be able to due to the high complexity of its generation. Central to the concept is also that the same input material creates both instrumental and digital ("tape") music structures so that the two sound worlds are unified, not at odds with each other (unless that is the intention).

In this piece, and for quite some time now, I wanted to change, to eschew my usual loud, aggressive, fast, dense musical character and produce something quiet, slow, rather diffuse. The music is still me though, partly because I failed of course, but also because I still have to bring to full fruition, and react to, the structures offered me by the program; that is, I still have to compose in the traditional sense of the word. But I'm able to present a different aspect of myself, develop a side of my musical character that perhaps lies dormant, dominated, obliterated by its bigger, stronger alter-ego(s).

Thanks to Bill Schottstaedt of CCRMA, Stanford University for the Common Lisp Music software with which the sounds were processed for this piece; and to Miller Puckette whose Pure Data software is used for the real-time sound triggering, mixing and diffusion. This composition was made possible by the kind support of the ".KUNST Bundeskanzleramt" of the Austrian government.

scei XI (portrait)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei X (portrait)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei IX (portrait)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei VIII (toihaus)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei VII (toihaus)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

snow shoes, maupin, air conditioners, mother's, fleas, satyricon, and you (la cucaracha)

For some reason, the composition of this piece was dominated by my recollections of living in

New Orleans, Summer 1993

lying on the couch drinking snow shoes, a disgusting-sounding but rather tasty little cocktail of Wild Turkey and peppermint schnapps; reading maupin's "Tales of the City," a famously-funny novel about San Francisco, which is very near to where I was living at the time when not in New Orleans; complaining about air conditioners, both their overuse in general and our lack thereof in particular; escaping every now and then to eat collard greens cooked with a whole pig's foot at mother's restaurant; scratching in the apartment of a partially-lobotomised cat crawling with ravenous fleas; watching Fellini's satyricon with Ludi and Sarah, Sarah being the you of (la cucaracha) fame, the memorably efficacious killer of cockroaches pressed into duty when yours truly didn't have the guts to deal with the 10cm-long flying, biting beasts. Michael John. Dead. Underwater. On the other side of the world.

"the war came running in and next I knew
I was in New Orleans
walking into a bar drunk
after falling down in the mud on a rainy night.
I saw one man stab another and I walked over and
put a nickel in the juke box.
it was a beginning. San
Francisco and New Orleans were two of my
favorite towns."

Charles Bukowski

Breath and breathing were main concerns and sound sources for the piece, hence extended periods of playing without the mouthpiece and an overall high noise content. The main processing techniques were: sound granulation/time-stretching/-scattering/-splintering using custom algorithms developed with CLM (thanks to CLM's author Bill Schottstaedt of CCRMA, Stanford University); convolution, to meld bass clarinet and ambient sounds, including a recording of a steam organ from a Mississippi river boat---thanks Roland!; and my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software for the overall structuring of the instrumental and electronic parts. The piece consists in the main of long, continuous stretches of sound and focuses hardly at all (on the audible level at least) upon structures made up of "note events."

This composition was made possible by the kind support of the ".KUNST Bundeskanzleramt" of the Austrian government.

scei VI (snow shoes)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei V (snow shoes)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

anonymous obvious

anonymous obvious (aka several instrumental structures to annoy ludi) is based around a prototype of an instrumental composition algorithm (called slippery chicken) that I am in the process of developing. Using instrumental samples, the algorithm generated short musical structures (and will generate longer ones); complete little pieces even, that are surprisingly convincing and somehow musically logical. They are, however, also rather anonymous, that is, to me they sound like a generic form of contemporary classical music that lack my own musical characteristics. Hence the "anonymous" part of the title. Hence the algorithm is still under development.

The "obvious" part is the deliberate and prominent use of rather hackneyed musical devices, such as fade-in and fade-out, in combination with generically beautiful electronic sounds (actually processed vibraphone and marimba in this case). Beginning after about two minutes, the obvious and foreseeable structure fulfills its natural tendency to become very loud but then surprises (I hope) in simply staying at this extreme volume and thwarting its small, beautiful beginnings with its transformation into a very weighty and rather threatening adult sound form. The idea then is to make something interesting out of what was initially obvious.

Arriving at the subtitle, I must first explain that anonymous obvious was created during the summer of 2000 whilst I was in residence at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, as made possible by an artist's stipend from the ZKM | Institute für Musik and Akustik, director Johannes Goebel (thanks go to him and his excellent staff for his/their support). The composer Ludger Brümmer (ludi) was also at work there and, being old friends, we had many conversations, some of which were even about music, in particular the sorry state of electroacoustic (tape) music within the already marginalised field of contemporary classical music. Disappointment was expressed over the domination of this field by mainly instrumental composers, leaving little room for the specialists and therefore the development of structural paradigms of a purely electroacoustic nature. And there was I, one of the supposed specialists, working on instrumental composition algorithms that I was then using in a tape piece. True to my nature, I decided to flaunt this fact rather than hide it, much to Ludi's chagrin. So much for the subtitle.

In my defence I must say that these obviously and self-consciously instrumental structures represent what may be called ideal, or even impossible ensembles, and that is what makes them so appealing to me. They are ideal in that every sound, no matter how quiet (the tremolo bowing of a violin tailpiece for instance) or loud (a cymbal crash) is heard in perfect consort, something that would be impossible when performed live, despite the closest attention paid to discrete amplification. These structures are also not alone, as many of the sounds are more purely electroacoustic in their nature: granulated, splintered, transposed, filtered, delayed, hurried, deep-fried, burned sounds from samples of many and varying types, from the purely instrumental (bass and contrabass clarinet, violin, horn, prepared piano, various percussion instruments) to the purely ambient (café noise, a catholic mass, mountain air...)

As with all of my pieces which involve computer processed sound, the transformations were carried out using signal processing algorithms developed by myself using the Common Lisp Music (CLM) software by Bill Schottstaedt of CCRMA, Stanford University. The hundreds of sounds created by the automatic and non-automatic processes alike were sorted, ordered, described and stored in an SQL database that I developed for this purpose, and which was then queried according to various structural criteria to produce a track list for the mixing program (ProTools LE). All was accomplished on Macintosh G3 and G4 and Windows computers.

slippery when wet

Deutsche Fassung

slippery when wet was commissioned by the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik (ÖENM) and the solo violinist Frank Stadler. The tape part was created from many different source samples: instrumental recordings taken from the score, ambient recordings from various locations in Salzburg (the Mönchsberg, the train station, the old market and my apartment amongst others), Havana, Cuba, parts of a rather popular violin concerto and songs from a well known Brazilian composer. Thanks go to the soloists of the ÖENM for the instrumental samples and Arteom Denissov who provided some of the ambient sounds.

The samples were processed on a G3 Macintosh computer using the Common Lisp Music (CLM) software by Bill Schottstaedt of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, California. I am very grateful to Bill for developing and, furthermore, diligently supporting this free software and its users, as well as to Fernando Lopez-Lezcano and Tim Stilson of CCRMA whose software implementation of a Moog Synthesizer filter was used significantly towards the end of the piece.

The most prevalent technique applied in generating the tape was one of multi-voice looping, granulation and transposition, using a CLM programme written by myself. The note lists were generated from compositional algorithms (also written in Common Lisp) that I have developed over the last several years. Particularly new in this piece though is a close structural relationship between the instrumental and electronic parts that creates an often instrumental feel in the tape. This was accomplished by applying algorithmic processes to the generation of the instrumental score and then translating these same structures into Common Lisp and applying them to the processing, ordering and structuring of the samples. The success of these procedures has led to the current development of my algorithmic composition programm "slippery chicken."

The title slippery when wet comes from a favourite road sign of mine that I encountered daily when living in California. This rather obvious message always amused and appealed to me, as does the rather foreboding Vous n'avez pas la priorité as found on French highways and used as the title of another piece of mine. Direct relevance to the piece at hand is, however, tentative at best.

slippery when wet ist ein Auftragswerk des Österreichischen Ensembles für neue Musik und des Solo-Violinisten Frank Stadler. Der Tonband-Teil basiert auf vielen Sound-Samples, wie: Instrumentalaufnahmen vom Stück selbst, Umgebungs-Geräusche von verschiedenen Orten in Salzburg (Mönchsberg, Hauptbahnhof, Alter Markt, meine Wohnung, uvm.) und Havana, Kuba, sowie Teile von berühmten Violinkonzerten und Liedern eines bekannten brasilianischen Komponisten. Für die Instumental-Samples bin ich den Solisten des Österreichischen Ensembles für neue Musik sehr zu Dank verpflichtet, welche sehr behilflich und großzügig mit ihrer Zeit waren. Für manche Umgebungs-Geräusche schulde ich meinen Dank Arteom Denissov, der mir seine exzellenten Aufnahmen freizügig überließ.

Die Samples wurden auf einem Macintosh G3 unter Verwendung der Synthese- und Signalverarbeitungs-Software Common Lisp Music (CLM) verarbeitet, welche von Bill Schottstaedt vom "Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics" (CCRMA) an der Stanford University in Kalifornien in den Programmiersprachen Common Lisp und C programmiert wurde. Großer Dank geht an Bill, für die Entwicklung und Betreuung dieser Software und deren Benützen, sowie an Fernando Lopez-Lezcano und Tim Stilson vom CCRMA, deren Implementation eines Moog-Synthesizer-Filters gegen Ende des Stückes vermehrt verwendet wurde.

Während der Generierung des Tonband-Teils wurde hauptsächlich eine Technik angewandt, die auf dem Loopen von mehreren Stimmen, sowie deren Granulation und Transposition beruht. Dies wurde mittels eines von mir entwickelten CLM-Programmes implementiert. Die für das Programm signifikanten Parameter wurden durch Kompositions-Algorithmen berechnet, welche ich in den letzen Jahren entworfen habe. Signifikant neu in diesem Stück ist der enge strukturelle Zusammenhang zwischen dem instrumentalen und dem elektronischen Teil des Stückes, welcher ein quasi instrumentelles Hörerleben im Tonband-Teil hervorruft. Dieser konnte erreicht werden, indem algorithmische Prozesse zur Erstellung des instrumentalen Teils des Stücks angewendet wurden, und ebendiese Strukturen unter Verwendung von Common Lisp Grundlage für die digitale Verarbeitung und das Arrangement der Samples gebildet haben.

Der Titel slippery when wet ist zurückzuführen auf eines der Straßenschilder, welches ich täglich während meines Aufenthaltes in Kalifornien sah. Die ziemlich offensichtliche Aussage des Schildes war immer amusant für mich, genauso wie das ominöse "Vous n'avez pas la priorité" Schild (entsprechend dem "Vorrang geben", aber direkt übersetzt "Sie haben nicht Priorität"), welches auf französischen Straßen zu finden ist und Titel eines meiner weiteren Stücke ist. Ich nehme gerne Anregungen für weitere Titel entgegen, wobei bemerkt werden soll, daß nur eine geringe Chance, einen Zusammenhang zwischen Titel und Musik zu finden, besteht, so wie es auch hier der Fall ist.

scei IV (slippery when wet)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei III (slippery when wet)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei II (slippery when wet)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

scei I (slippery when wet)

The engagement with my algorithmic composition software slippery chicken has become amongst other things a generative music project. Apart from the main instrument-with-computer and purely acoustic works, this has generated a collection of self-sufficient little pieces in the form of sound files. They are all called scei (= slippery chicken egg, where Ei is German for egg...).

Contrary to traditional studio work (which can often be thought of as sound sculpting) my approach here is to generate perhaps hundreds of sound files automatically from a given sample palette and set of compositional data. Sound file selection then, as opposed to sound crafting/design, becomes the main activity before mixing.

The best results of the algorithms (with no post-output editing) are to be found on the sumtone site as short but complete pieces.

Thick

Thick is constructed from two similar and continuous musical structures, one made from a sample of piano strings being scraped with a piece of metal (scraped gently, however; this is not your amplified fingernails-on-blackboard nightmare--I hope), and the other, the opening phrase of a piece of Renaissance sacred vocal music. Both structures gradually open up an ever-increasing frequency space, starting low and aiming high.

The digital signal processing algorithms applied to these samples were developed and programmed by the composer using Common Lisp Music, a music software package written in the programming languages Common Lisp and C by William Schottstaedt of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, California. They include, amongst other techniques, granulation (including pseudo-random distribution of the grains), looping, convolution, transposition, time-stretching/compression, and formant filtering.

Many other smaller highly processed structures were overlaid onto the two larger intermingled structures, and created in the main from prepared piano attacks and cello samples. There is, however, rather significant, though background use made of lightly processed 'ambient' sounds: a dinner party, a telephone answering machine message, commentary from a televised horse race, helicopter radio communication from the Vietnam war (found on the internet), a brass band parade, as well as highly processed synthesised sounds made from drum-machine loops.

All of the processing and mixing for this heterogeneous, overweight piece was created in the composer's spare room on a 200MHz Pentium PC running Linux and Windows 95.

Vous n'avez pas la priorité

Vous n'avez pas la priorité is a composition for two, three, or four clarinets and internet. Owing to constraints imposed by the commission, it is not meant for distributed performance, with some performers in one location and others elsewhere. Neither is the piece meant for "web broadcast". The idea instead was to use a web server to organise musical material and offer it to the performers who, quite normally, play together in the same room before a live audience. It uses the internet, via a standard web browser, to present the performers with the pages of music that they are to play, thus replacing the physical pieces of paper that usually constitute a musical score. This idea came from Dexter Morrill, when we worked together on a piece he wrote for one clarinet and internet. For that piece, I had the idea of programming the web browser to change the pages of music automatically, after a specific amount of time had elapsed. For Vous n'avez pas la priorité, I also had the idea of having the computer choose the ordering of pages (based upon some constraints that I built into a pseudo-random ordering process) as well as varying this order for up to four different players. The following is an example of some of the constraints:

At the beginning of the piece, three clarinets will enter one after the other with the same page of music. Which page they will play, I do not know, but I know they will have the same page. I also know that the fourth player will enter with a different page, but again, I don't know which. Similarly, in the middle of the piece, all players will have different pages from each other, and, at the end, they will all share the same page again, but a different one from the opening, and again, in both cases, I don't know which pages will be used. In this way, all players will play each of the sixteen pages I have written for the piece exactly once, though each player will perform them in a different order.

The length of time allotted for each page will also be different for each player (though not generated randomly), as their automatic page turns happen at different times. Further, the length of time for each page will be longest at the beginning (about two minutes) and shortest at the tenth page (about 30 seconds), lengthening again towards the end (about 90 seconds). These durations are themselves modifiable, as the performers can configure the performance to last for anything between eight and twenty minutes: the page durations will be scaled automatically by the web server during the performance configuration.

By combining the page order and the page duration structures, I was able to add a pre-defined, yet very simple arch structure to the piece (accelerando followed by ritardando; all four players performing the same music at the beginning, different music in the middle, and the same music at the end), yet almost guarantee a different performance each time the piece is played (it is very unlikely that the computer will choose the same ordering for any two performances). Not knowing in which order the pages will be presented to the players means it is up to them to interpret the music in such a way that this structure is clear to the audience in any performance.

Apagón

CD available from Sargasso

Apagón is a collaborative project made with the pianist and composer Marco Trevisani, who I met at Stanford University, where we were both working for a number of years. Our collaborations started back in 1994, but really took off with the composition of segmentation fault beta 1.1, which we prepared whilst still at Stanford and which was the impetus for the creation of this CD.

The CD was made in Havana, Cuba, in September of 1998, at the invitation of the Laboratorio Nacional de Musica Electroacustica in Havana, where we did most of the recording and mixing. The percussionist we worked with was Diego Ruíz, known to the world as Habichuela, and the engineering was performed by Darío Nuñez. Marco and I did all of the mixing and mastering.

The title Apagón means "blackout" in Spanish, and refers to the many problems caused by frequent power cuts during the production of this CD in Havana. Such problems were always treated with humour and patience by the locals, if not by the uptight (northern) European who often felt it was just an impossible task to get something done in this environment. Things were made worse by the appearance of Hurricane Georges towards the end of our stay, which cancelled our scheduled concert and put the fear of God into our aforementioned uptight (northern) European. Again, the locals treated this force of nature with humorous disdain.

Despite everything though, we managed to finish the project whilst still in Cuba and so both Marco and I would like to thank the staff of the Laboratorio Nacional de Musica Electroacustica for making this possible, in particular Enmanuel, Zenaida, Darío, Julio and Ania.

pas de poule, pas de pot

About a year before composing this piece, I was at a concert where a friend of mine was playing the drums in a jazz trio comprising himself, a guitarist, and a pianist. The drums, being naturally clangourous (especially in the enthusiastic, polymetric hands of my friend) along with the guitar (played by an apparently half-deaf aficionado of the noise bomb, who definitely had an amplifier that went all the way up to eleven and stayed there), left the piano struggling, or rather failing, to make itself heard. No amount of amplification was going to help the situation before feedback had its wicked way and sent us all running for cover. So, being in a position to see the pianist's fingers at work, I was left to imagine what he might have contributed had he been even the slightest bit audible. This was a very engrossing project, and I soon arrived at the point where I was hardly even listening to the two sonic terrorists sitting beside him; instead, I was completely focussed on mentally reconstructing the havoc I saw his fingers wreaking at the piano keyboard (it has to be admitted, he too was not at all shy of committing aural atrocities). Suddenly, seeming to grasp the lamentable situation he was in, he did a wonderful thing. After a particularly tumultuous (looking) run over the whole length of the piano, his fingers went off over the high end of the keyboard and into thin air. He stood up, faced the audience, and played, quite unashamedly, the greatest "air piano" solo you could ever wish to see. Notwithstanding the onslaught pouring forth from his comrades-in-arms, his intent was clearly audible above their mere sonic utterances, and seemed to augment and compliment the now climactic part of their performance.

This unheard music then, this music of the eye, became the starting point for my piece. It was tempting to pilfer the idea of the "air piano" solo, but I shunned this out of moral compunction. Besides, it takes a unique personality to bring off this act with the panache I was lucky enough to witness (and, more importantly, will probably never witness again). Instead, I concentrated on the idea of musical mime, of expending tremendous amounts of energy at producing next to nothing at all. Coming after a considerable period of time spent working almost exclusively in the field of computer music, this was not at all alien to me. And, after so many tape music concerts involving no visual stimulation whatsoever, it was actually rather inviting to consider a piece in which the visual element plays the most important role of all, for some time at least. Accordingly, at the beginning of pas de poule, pas de pot we find the pianist busily playing nothing, the clarinettist hard at work at making almost no audible effect. If the performance works, however, it will appear that they are playing music of the highest complexity and speed, with all the subtle interactions and exchanges of a monstrously detailed score. What little aural result there is though (besides the one created inside the listener's head), comes not from the playing, but rather from the amplification of the act of playing.

(About the title: pas de poule, pas de pot has several meanings, two of which at least are "No chicken, no pot" and "No chick [girl], no luck." But the meaning of the words does not have any particular relevance to the music. Their sound, however, created by the alliteration, and their ambiguity (or better still, their lack of comprehensibility to non French speakers) has everything to do with music, which, as we know, is the least concrete of all the arts. The connection is, then, that I write what I like to hear, and I like to hear "pas de poule, pas de pot.")

segmentation fault beta 1.1

segmentation fault beta 1.1 is a composition for prepared, digitally processed piano and live, computer-mixed sound files. It uses software (Artimix) written by Michael Edwards to trigger and mix (in real time) sound files stored on the computer's hard disk. With this software, sounds are mapped to the keys of the computer keyboard and triggered at will during the performance. Each sound can also be mapped to a specific MIDI channel so that individual gain control can be applied to each sound in the mix through the use of a MIDI fader box. The computer part therefore consists of triggering prepared sounds and controlling their relative amplitudes.

This piece is a collaboration between the two performers: Marco Trevisani, prepared piano; Michael Edwards, computer. The sounds used were created by the composers using Common Lisp Music, the signal generating and processing software written by Bill Schottstaedt at Stanford University, California. They were realised with sample processing and manipulation of sounds from various sources, including piano, prepared piano and cello, as well as through direct synthesis using Frequency Modulation techniques.

As this was a collaboration between two composers, and also because it involved new technology unfamiliar to us, the process of composition was an investigative one. It involved a great deal of studio time, necessitated by the constant refining and redefining of our ideas and goals, the need to come to an agreement on how to proceed with our (often different) ideas, the fine tuning of the interaction between piano and computer, and our desire to take time to fully realise the potential that the software offered when used in conjunction with the piano. As such, the piece has no real score to date. Instead, because of the close collaboration between the work's two creators, all of the material has been memorised and is open to further interpretation as the need or desire arises. What is essential to the piece, however, is that the two sound sources interact with equal importance, that the palette of sounds remains cohesive and integrated across the two sources, and that the rhythm of the piece proceeds in an almost continuous, yet highly varied manner.

Stückchen

Stückchen is a set of five short piano pieces I wrote during the spring and summer of 1995. They range in length from 1:20 to 6:00 and in style from highly compressed and thematically obsessive to expansive, calm, and, perhaps, even soothing. What they demand of the performer is both an accomplished technique with which to effect the pianistic explosives of the faster, more aggressive pieces, as well as a creative and thoroughly musical imagination to conquer the problems posed by a musical semi-vacuum: it is only through extremely sensitive musicianship that the performer is able to sustain life within the stark musical texture of the final piece, whose purely technical demands, it must be said, would hardly exceed the abilities of an average seven-year-old. Success in performance then, relies on the subtle tonal shading and rhythmic placement of the piece's slowly repeated notes. On the other hand, without a considerable ability to rapidly pound the keyboard (as well as a certain joy in doing so), the visceral urgency of the first and fourth pieces will not be adequately expressed. (The second and third pieces are of an altogether different nature, being concerned, as they are, with matters harmonic and contrapuntal respectively.)

Overall, the set represents five rather diverse views of the piano, albeit views we already know from the abundant, perhaps even saturated, corpulent repertoire that exists for the instrument. But this was my brief: to consciously attempt, in these days of digital technology and organised noise, to extract something expressive from (only!) the keyboard and pedals of the piano, without regard for the grail-like search for the new, and without a grand unifying principle with which to bolster my notes and rhythms, which, after all, add up to just five short pieces of music for piano.

''________________''

Traditionally, string players coordinate the fingers of the left hand with the movement of the bow by the right arm. My idea for this piece was to disassociate the two hands/arms of the cellist and give each its own structure, reserving the confluence of the two for a structurally significant point, something the cellist has to work towards rather than take for granted as the performance norm. Naturally then, some of the sounds produced are a little out of the ordinary, as well as not especially sonorous, particularly the sounds produced by the left hand, which at the beginning of the piece is limited to tapping the finger board, pulling at the strings and executing quiet pizzicati. Hence the need for amplification: to give life to these small sounds and expose the listener to the tiny resonances and percussive noises that arise from such a performance practice.

Throughout the piece, one simple fingering pattern continuously dominates, though it is only heard as a series of definite pitches some time after the point at which bow and fingers are brought together onto the same string. At this juncture, the piece takes a different direction as the fingering pattern gradually works its way from one string onto all four, i.e. it becomes a four-note chord instead of a fingering pattern. Throughout this process, the method of bowing the string is continuously changing, from bowed in the normal fashion, to bowed with the wood of bow, from bouncing the bow, to a smooth legato, to an aggressive staccato etc. etc. This makes for an altogether rather ferocious, agitated performance which is intended to be both stimulating to the eye as well as to the ear and which, enhanced and exaggerated again by amplification, should present the listener with a more physical and intimate engagement with the performer.

Brownian Motion

Rather than referring to the kinetic theory of gases, Brownian Motion takes its impetus from a very well known American soul musician. It is an homage to this giant among musical performers. But the piece is not an imitation of the soul style--far from it. My own concerns and predilections in musical taste are very much to the fore here. Instead, it is an attempt to take source material that is radically different from my style and turn it into something that is very much my own, yet at the same time preserving some of the structural elements of the original. In particular, the rhythmic structure of the piece is wholly based on the structure of the source, though the pounding beat of the original is rarely apparent. Some of the pitch patterns of the source are also present in my piece, but at a more abstract level.

Primarily then, this is highly processed music with only snatches here and there that remind us of "real" instruments. The whole piece is concerned with combining interleaved structures that, overall, gradually move from one state to another, but at first seem merely to rub up against each other, hiding their identity, their goal, and hence their relationship to each other, and further, to the source.

flung me, foot trod

flung me, foot trod takes its title from the Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet, Carrion Comfort. This is urgent, violent, exciting poetry, but it was not until I read some of Hopkins' own notes to the verse that I felt particularly drawn to pilfering a title from him. He writes of one word, "rude", that must be enunciated with force, "in an uncouth, violent, barbarous manner". This, if anything, summarises the articulation necessary to interpret my piece.

In preparing the tape I sampled selected portions of the solo part. In particular I concentrated on some of the more unorthodox sounds an alto saxophone can make, key clicks, breath noise, growling etc. For demonstrating these sounds I am very grateful to Gary Scavone who gave freely of his time and tolerated my often outlandish requests. Indeed, the whole piece is aimed at utilising his slick virtuosity. Armed with these samples, it was my intention to create sounds that go far beyond the timbral qualities of the saxophone. Although the tape sometimes presents recognisable saxophone sounds, on the whole it is in its own sonic realm, marrying itself with the solo part only in its presentation of similar material types (driving rhythms, scurrying textures etc.). It was not my intention to create the effect of an "orchestra of saxophones", or to have the saxophone play against itself on tape. On the contrary, flung me, foot trod takes its precedent more from the solo concerto, pitting two unequal forces against each other, their only common ground being material and, hence, structure.

On the more technical side, the samples were processed using Bill Schottstaedt's "Common Lisp Music", the note lists were created with Heinrich Taube's "Common Music", and the mixing was accomplished with Paul Lansky's "Real Time Mixer" application--all on the NeXT computer.

Redislocations

Relocation/dislocation: Musical material can develop organically or it can be instantaneously transformed beyond all recognition. In order to create a large, interesting structure, I thought it desirable, in this piece at least, to consider both approaches: Saxophone samples are taken out of their original context and relocated in foreign structures. By extracting segments of sound and manipulating them through reversal, equalisation, transposition and amplification, the original samples (and the sounds that were created from them) are transformed and re-transformed into shapes that bear little or no resemblance to their parent sounds. Structural processes based on repetition are distorted by seemingly alien sounds tearing the musical fabric and beginning new processes whose relationship to former ones only becomes apparent as the piece progresses. Dislocation becomes the focal point, but as new yet repeated sounds follow each other with shorter and shorter gaps, a cycle of interruptions creates its own continuous structure.

Redislocations is dedicated to the memory of my oldest and dearest friend Michael and his girlfriend Louise who visited me while the work was in progress and died off the coast of New Zealand before it was finished.

Cantus Fractus

Cantus Fractus literally means broken melody and refers to a semi-improvisational polyphonic technique of the middle ages. Whilst this piece in no way represents a neo-classical return to a previous style, it nevertheless consciously utilises the technique of a cantus firmus, which almost from the outset forms the background of the musical flow. Against this background the music undergoes some fairly abrupt changes, moving from overtly melodic textures to more static harmonic passages and then on to rhythmically pointed sections. This opposition of styles becomes most prominent after the middle of the piece: Here concentrated passages of sharply characterised musical material are juxtaposed against one another, some being presented in an isolation caused by the intrusion of short rests between the statements. The melody itself is passed from one instrument to the other as its line unfolds over the whole length of the piece. It is also dissected and transformed to create the more clearly foreground material.

Sonorities Apart

Sonorities Apart was written during the summer of 1992 at the request of Robert Bates, Stanford University's Assistant Organist. In keeping with some of the wonderful repertoire for the organ, it is a toccata-like piece that draws its energy and basic sound from an almost uninterrupted moto perpetuo type texture.

The title has two meanings: First, it is a comment on how I approached the composition of the piece: As composers we are so concerned nowadays with specifying and relying upon (for the delineation of the musical shape of a piece) the sonorities we are working with. Whilst this specification is possible with the organ, it is not very practical, given that not every organ sounds alike, even if they do have the same basic stops. As I wanted to write a piece that was performable on any three manual organ (with pedals) I had to eschew the usual compositional preoccupation with specific timbres, and concentrate instead on writing a piece that utilised generic organ sounds alone.

This leads to the second meaning of the title, which is closely connected to this fundamental problem of writing for the organ: When the piece was finished I realised that the notation was even closer to a kind of tablature than musical notation usually is, literally telling the player where to put his or her fingers, how long to keep them there for, and when to move on to the next note. No dynamics, no expression marks, and not even a completely faithful representation of pitch, given that registration effects octave transpositions (as well as sometimes creating other unnotated pitches). So, I had the feeling that in giving this piece to the organist I was in effect saying, "apart from the sonorities, here's the music". This is not something which I would be happy about when composing for any other instrument or ensemble, but with the organ it is almost a necessity that you leave these choices (or at least some of them) to the performer. Naturally, since finishing the piece I have worked more closely with Robert Bates and together we have arrived at a satisfactory and much more specific registration scheme. This scheme remains generic however, and so Sonorities Apart should be performable on any three manual instrument, as was my original intention.

Sheet Metal Study

This is the first computer-music piece I ever wrote. It is an all-synthesis piece using the Frequency Modulation (FM) technique as developed by John Chowning, whose classes I took at Stanford University. As a project for one of the classes, I modeled and synthesised a gong, then, using the synthesis programme I had developed, wrote this piece. The frequency structure is based on the overtone series of the modeled gong sample.

The Camera Eye

The Camera Eye was written as a companion piece to my Cabiri Fragments and uses exactly the same instrumentation as that piece. It was the first work I wrote after moving from England to California, and the title is taken from a particularly appropriate book that was given to me by a friend before I left: John Dos Passos' U.S.A. This book interleaves stories with newspaper-like snippets called "Newsreels" and more poetic sections called "The Camera Eye". The following passage particularly struck me and is taken from the beginning of The Camera Eye (39).

daylight enlarges out of ruddy quiet very faintly throbbing wanes into my sweet darkness broadens red through the warm blood weighting the lids warmsweetly then snaps on

enormously blue yellow pink

Cabiri Fragments

Cabiri Fragments was written at the request of Alwynne Pritchard, who was directing a new music ensemble at the Royal Academy of Music in London at the time. Most of the musical ideas were culled from my earlier piece Cabiri, which was considered too difficult to play when I showed it to performers. The process of composition was one of taking my favourite, often disparate ideas from the earlier piece and reworking, simplifying and re-instrumentating them for the new ensemble. The result is not exactly a patchwork, but nevertheless offers numerous different musical textures in a relatively short space of time.

String Quartet 1990

This String Quartet was written early in 1990 as a requirement of my Master's degree courses at Bristol University. It is an important piece for me in that it is the first in which I made extensive and systematic use of microtonal intervals. But it is not so much the division of the semitone, but rather the division of the minor third into two equal parts that I am interested in here, although both result in the use of quarter tones as opposed to third or eighth tones etc.

A single-movement work lasting about eight minutes, the piece is divided into eight continuous sections, each demarcated by an increase in tempo. These occur smoothly (except for the first and last) by the use of metric modulation, and so the general tendency of the piece is to accelerate from eighth note = 48 to eighth note = 216, with a resultant dramatic increase in internal energy. Likewise, the dynamic schemes are mainly restricted to crescendi, so that the overall design of the piece could therefore be described as a type of 'wedge' form.

Though I am not a string player myself, the string quartet is one of my favourite media, both to listen to and to write for. In writing this piece I took particular note of Beethoven's technique as exhibited in the late quartets (especially the slow movements). He seems to be one of the first composers to be fond of spreading his melodic lines between the members of the quartet, rather than using the first violin almost exclusively as the main bearer of melody. Similarly, in composing my piece, I viewed the quartet as a whole as one instrument, sharing the often long-ranging melodic lines between the four players in a sometimes labyrinthine manner. I believe it is the necessary continuity of these lines and accompanying patterns that presents the biggest challenge to the performers, and also one of the greatest points of interest for listeners.

Buridan's Knot

Buridan's Knot was written in 1989 just after I finished my undergraduate studies at Bristol University. It is a single movement work scored for three oboes and eleven strings which lasts approximately fifteen minutes. Due to the nature of the ensemble the musical interest of the piece lies in the opposition of strings versus oboes. Neither one assumes a primary role but rather the two groups face each other off in sections in which both the two groups and the individual members of the group fight for attention in the often dense and continuously moving counterpoint. There is a tendency over the course of the piece, for the two groups to align themselves in a common musical state, though still in opposition to each other, and towards the end to finally arrive at exactly the same musical state, which is merely a held chord. This serves as a contrast to the moto perpetuo type textures that have preceded, and to set up the coda which is almost a very short second movement.

© Michael Edwards 1997-2026