{"id":208,"date":"2014-09-25T10:26:24","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T10:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/?p=208"},"modified":"2019-02-16T10:26:03","modified_gmt":"2019-02-16T10:26:03","slug":"their-faces-on-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/?p=208","title":{"rendered":"their faces on fire, San Marino"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gianpaolo Antongirolami and I premiered my new piece for baritone saxophone and computer&nbsp;<em>their faces on fire <\/em>in San Marino on June 20th 2014. It\u2019s 100% algorithmically generated, and allows the musician to configure various parameters of the algorithms via a MaxMSP interface:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/videoseries?list=UUqHPyodpLCjwbHgutkbRClA\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the programme note:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;their faces on fire&#8221; 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&#8212;some easier than others perhaps&#8212;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, &#8220;harmonic&#8221;, and high (altissimo), but the order of these can be chosen by the musician.<\/p>\n<p>The title comes from Samuel Beckett&#8217;s &#8220;First Love&#8221; (1945):&nbsp;&#8220;Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>One thing I love about this and similar works&#8212;especially the audience&#8217;s various reactions to such passages when they&#8217;re performed&#8212;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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is the first piece I\u2019ve made with Arshia Cont&#8217;s\/IRCAM&#8217;s score following software <a href=\"http:\/\/forumnet.ircam.fr\/product\/antescofo\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>antescofo<\/em><\/a>. I extended my <em><a href=\"http:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/sc\" target=\"_blank\">slippery chicken<\/a>&nbsp;<\/em>software to generate the antescofo score file for this. I wanted it to be deliberately punchy, rhythmically, in order to test synchronisation, etc. So I purposely left my usual workflow and chose to work in a MIDI-sequencer fashion, with a sampler I programmed in MaxMSP. It was great fun.<\/p>\n<p>Both Gianpaolo and I really enjoyed the flexibility this performance approach gave us. We found that Gianpaolo&nbsp;could stretch out rests as much as he wanted and the score following software coped really well, on the whole, triggering events bang on time at the next synchronisation point.<\/p>\n<p>Gianpaolo and I did a short studio recording after the performance. Here&#8217;s the rough mix:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<!--[if lt IE 9]><script>document.createElement('audio');<\/script><![endif]-->\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-208-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/stopen\/michael\/faces-master.m4a?_=1\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/stopen\/michael\/faces-master.m4a\">http:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/stopen\/michael\/faces-master.m4a<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gianpaolo Antongirolami and I premiered my new piece for baritone saxophone and computer&nbsp;their faces on fire in San Marino on June 20th 2014. It\u2019s 100% algorithmically generated, and allows the musician to configure various parameters of the algorithms via a MaxMSP interface: Here&#8217;s the programme note: &#8220;their faces on fire&#8221; is a flexible, musician-tweaked algorithmic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,11,108],"tags":[3,70,71,4,48,171,84,40,132,47,19,72,6],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-algorithmic-composition","category-composition-documentation","category-slippery-chicken","tag-algorithms","tag-antescofo","tag-baritone-saxophone","tag-common-lisp","tag-fibonacci-transistions","tag-italy","tag-maxmsp","tag-musician-tweaked-algorithmic-composition","tag-osc","tag-permutations","tag-rhythm-chains","tag-score-following","tag-slippery-chicken"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1154,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/1154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michael-edwards.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}