COMPEL Omeka Dev

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  • TaleSpin was commissioned by the Montague/Mead Duo (Philip Mead, Piano & Stephen Montague, Electronics). It is a short musical fantasy, written in a quasi-romantic style. It has something of a program, too, whose subject may be evident from some of the section titles: Telltale, Hot Topic, Blissful Ignorance, Morning After Songs, Still Spinning, and Picking up the Pieces. Many of the electronic sounds are processed sounds recorded inside the piano, included stopped and bowed notes, plucked and struck notes, prepared notes, etc. In the outer fast sections, it is similar to a piano 4 hands piece, with the computer responsible for the middle two “hands.” The computer part is relatively simple and accompanimental, however, while that played by the performer – the outer two hands – is soloistic and quite virtuosic.

  • Don’t Look Now for String Quartet and Electronic Sounds was commissioned by the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the world premier at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City on April 28, 1991.  The piece has since received numerous performances, including at the International Computer Music Conference in Montreal and the SEAMUS Conference in Urbana, Illinois, both in 1991.  It was subsequently performed throughout Europe and South America by the Smith Quartet, who made this recording at the Electroacoustic Music and Recording Studios of the Royal College of Music in London.

    Composers have long been fascinated by the “special effects” obtainable on traditional instruments, but have tended to use them sparingly, in part because many of them are very soft and/or difficult to control and produce reliably.  In this piece, I have used the electronic medium to amplify and extend some of the effects which can be produced on stringed instruments, such as col legno battuto, tremolando sul ponticello, snap pizzicato, left hand pizzicato, harmonic glissandi, etc.  In most cases, the effects are introduced first in the acoustic ensemble, then developed further in the electronic part.  Because of this, and also because the sounds on the tape are almost exclusively derived from recordings of real stringed instruments, it should not always be apparent to the listener whether a sound is coming from the quartet or from the speakers, and hence the title, Don’t Look Now.

    Many of the sounds in the electronic part were originally recorded by the cellist, Barry Sills, of Austin, Texas.  I then digitally processed these sounds at The University of Texas Electronic Music Studios in a variety of ways, using MIT’s CSound, Mark Dolson’s Phase Vocoder, and some of my own software.  The sounds were then loaded to Ensoniq EPS and Kurzweil K2000 samplers for real-time performance.

  • Hardware-based analog modular synthesizer music; a combination of vintage and contemporary analog modular synthesizers.

    Breathing Voltages is a purely electronic piece of music, which was created in 2014.  It uses as its source material, sound which has been generated on a combination of old and new analogue modular synthesizer components.  I chose this title, because there is a kind of “breathing” character to the music, which is generated through the application of continually varying control voltages articulating long amplitude and filter envelopes.  It is also somewhat evocative of wave action.

    The piece employs my fragment-based compositional process, wherein discrete musical gestures and textures are recorded and then used as source material for the creation of the finished work in the computer, through the use of extensive audio editing and signal processing.  One can hear shades of minimalism in the piece, and it also makes fairly extensive use of chance operations and what one could call controlled randomness, though always refined in the crucible of my own relentless drive to create aesthetically satisfying musical experiences.  It is structured in three clear sections, which segue into one another.

    This is a piece which celebrates its electronic character, and in particular the sound of analog (as opposed to digital) synthesizer timbres.  It never tries to evoke the timbres of traditional acoustic instruments.  In addition, I would consider this piece to be more on the beautiful side, though my aesthetic dark side does make its presence felt from time to time.  I was striving to remain somewhat more tonal, at least with most of the primary musical elements.  For example, there is a decidedly tonal pentatonic pitch set that is presented as randomly generated melodic material at the heart of the second section.

  • At times minimalist and pattern driven. At times warm and buzzy. Hardware-based electronic music.

    Implied Movement is an electronic music piece which I completed work on in February of 2015. It is included on the Six Projects album, which is available on Innova Recordings. The piece was created using a combination of vintage and contemporary analogue modular synthesizers and a vintage Minimoog D. All of the material was recorded into a computer, where the final composition was assembled using my fragment-based compositional process. The piece has as it’s primary organizational underpinning, a series of short repeating ostinatos, which are constantly evolving in one way or another. This is significant, as it is a bit of a departure for me. I tend to avoid loops like the plague. I don’t even like using repeat signs in my traditionally notated scores. I’ve done my share of copying and pasting within MIDI sequenced projects over the years, but even in that environment, I tend to try and play all the way through on each part most of the time. Not only does this encourage improvisational “comping”, but it also has the added benefit of infusing the individually performed parts with a lot of variation in (MIDI) velocity and pressure, which results in constant slight variations in volume and timbre. That’s what I’ve done a lot of in the past in my MIDIsequenced pieces, but the sequencing in this piece is accomplished using hardware-based sequencers. A different world entirely.

    Using short repeating patterns that evolve, also lends itself quite naturally to minimalism, the influence of which is clearly evident in the piece. There are also some chance operations which crop up in the form of the application of random voltage. This is particularly evident near the beginning of the piece at about 0:45, when the first quick note are heard.

    There is a lead synthesizer melodic part that makes an obvious entrance at about 3:30, which was created using the Minimoog, played through a Big Muff distortion box. The listener might also notice sustain-y, distorted electric guitar-like gestures in this piece, the first of which shows up at about 3:15. These were performed on my Moog Model 12 modular synthesizer using the Big Muff and a device called a Talk Box. The Talk Box is a small metal box with a speaker in it that sends the sound up a flexible plastic tube. The tube is placed in the mouth, which is in front of a microphone. The sound comes through the tube into the mouth, where it is shaped in realtime and picked up by the mic. I didn’t use this device to make the synth “talk”, but rather to shape and filter the sound with my mouth. Both the Big Muff and the Talk Box and traditional electric guitar effect boxes, which is why my Moog playing comes off as being at least evocative of the electric guitar.

    The short repeating patterns were a lot of fun to work with, perhaps because I had so assiduously avoided their use in the past. The end result reminds me in places of 1970s vintage Tangerine Dream. Actually, the whole piece has a kind of “old-fashioned” feel about it. But then again, I’m no spring chicken. I really love the warm old buzzy analogue sound of this piece. Even though it makes use of strictly repeating machine like sequences being generated by electronic instruments, it still retains a human, and in my opinion, “musical” feel.

  • Live/studio hybrid composition using hardware-based electronic instruments.

    I completed work on this project in the Winter of 2016. It’s a fragment piece, which uses as it’s source material a recording of the live electronic music performance I did at my Six Projects record release party, and also some recordings of the rehearsals for that performance. I deliberately chose to NOT use a computer in this live performance, which was something new for me. I’m calling the piece “North Loop” for several reasons: 1.) The live performance took place in a part of downtown Minneapolis called the North Loop, 2.) though the piece is not particularly loop-intensive, it does make use of some loops, and 3.) I live and work in Minneapolis – a Northern city.

    The attached video is of the live performance. The music you’re hearing is the actual finished piece, which was created later in a computer, using audio from the performance and from rehearsals for that performance. There are multiple layers of audio, which have been highly edited and mixed to create the finished product. I edited the video to more or less line things up to match as best I could, but it’s really just an approximation. There was a lot of improvisation involved in the performance, and the finished music actually has more simultaneous layers than I would have been able to pull off live as a solo performance. Still, it’s nice to see the video with the music and I also like that we have some documentation of Paul Christian’s visual projection work. He was using the Processing software environment to create the imagery. I was feeding him about eight separate audio lines that he was working with live.

  • Experimental electronic drone piece created from material generated on an ARP 2500 modular synthesizer.

    Chamber of Mechanisms is a fragment-based electronic music piece, which uses audio generated on a vintage ARP 2500. This is a very rare analog modular synthesizer. They didn’t make very many of them and only a very small number still exist. The particular instrument I’m using for this project is installed in the electronic music lab at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The instrument was there back in the early ’80s when I was a composition student at the U. of M., but it was completely out of commission. I’m so glad it didn’t wind up on the scrap heap, as has happened to so many of these exotic old instruments. It is now functioning and usable, and I was very excited to be able spend some quality time with this beauty. Many thanks to Michael Duffy who heads up the electronic music lab at the U. of M. for allowing me access to it. I spent an afternoon working with the instrument and recording a bunch of material that I then took back to my studio. There I transferred the audio into my computer and began work on constructing the finished piece. It sounds somewhat different than anything else I’ve ever done. This is no doubt due to the fact that the instrument itself has its own very particular sonic characteristics.

  • Experimental hardware-based live performance electronic drone piece.

    I’ve always been very interested in the idea of limitations when it comes to creating music. Whenever I start work on a new piece, I begin by establishing meaningful limitations to work within. I find this to be very freeing. (Stravinsky was right when talked about the freedom of limits.) Last Summer I did a live electronic music performance that involved a large amount of equipment in an elaborate setup. At some point shortly after that performance while discussing it with a friend, I mentioned, (kind of half jokingly) that I could do an effective live performance with a Quad Oscillator and a wah wah pedal. Though I had meant it as a joke, the more I thought about the idea of working within that kind of extreme limitation, the more attracted I was to the idea. So, I set about creating this piece.

    Murmurations of the Krell is improvisational, though it is following a general plan and has been rehearsed. I would call this an experimental electronic drone piece. The only sound source being used is a Quad Oscillator that was built by Tim Kaiser. It has only a single output that I am splitting multiple times and running through a couple of loopers and various hardware signal processors, (including a wah wah pedal). The piece is notable for what it does not use. There is no computer, no sequencer, no keyboard or other conventional musical instrument interface. Just knobs, switches, faders and pedals. I found this to be a challenging set of limitations, but at the same time, stimulating.

    The title of the work is a direct reference to the classic 1956 sci-fi film, “Forbidden Planet”. In this film, the Krell were an ancient, long-extinct race of beings with highly advanced technology – a technology which eventually lead to their own demise. The electronic score for the film was created by Bebe and Louis Barron, and I feel that some of the general aesthetic character of my piece is evocative of their work.

  • Electronic work for two vintage instruments. Slowly evolving. Warm. Buzzy. Minimal.

    This piece involves the first use of my recently acquired vintage model 31H Leslie speaker. I played my Hammond M3 through it and recorded various elements that were used in the construction of the finished piece using my fragment-based compositional process. I also generated some repeating and evolving short patterns using a Dot Com Q960 sequencer driving my Moog Model 12 modular synthesizer.

  • red sprites, blue jets, noctilucent clouds, whistling air, diffuse, faraway haze

    In the mesosphere – too high for aircraft and too low for spacecraft – fleeting electrical phenomena like red sprites, blue jets and noctilucent clouds consistently elude careful study. Higher still, in the thermosphere, are gas molecules that vibrate furiously in isolation, superheated by the sun but so thinly spaced that they cannot collide with one another to properly constitute a gas. Mesospherics musically inhabits these strange, poorly understood places. The piece uses ambisonic spatialization techniques to situate a wide variety of sounds, both processed and synthetic, in a very large three-dimensional virtual space. Some of these have clear images attached, such as the whistling air sounds of the opening, while others have less concrete associations. Some are fixed in place, articulate and very close, while others resemble a diffuse, faraway haze, and still others fly rapidly and brilliantly through space. But all of these sounds are highly fragmented and elusive, much like the fascinating and bizarre phenomena we observe in the earth’s upper atmosphere.

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If you see an error or would like to add content to COMPEL, please leave a comment or contact Hollis Wittman at hollisw@vt.edu.