My day began with a series of wonderful serendipities that set the tone for a great day. I got on the bus to Heriot, opened my laptop to work on my max patch, and the passenger behind me introduced himself as Martin Parker, one of my hosts for the day: he guessed it was me because seemingly not a lot of people on the X95 bus edit max/msp patches. We met Amble Skuse and Alex Fiennes at the bottom of the Heriot rd who rescued us from the rain and took us up to the studio in Amble's van.
Heriot Toun Studio is wonderful, great views and a perfect small studio atmosphere. Robert and Brian from the band were already there, and after introductions, myself Alex and Martin got the electronics ready. I had been pretty confident that my patch would be fine, I knew what it wanted to do and apart from some optimisation issues it was working fine, but one of the main lessons that I learned from this workshop was about the performability of the patch, and time management in rehearsals. First, a little about the electronics and the piece:
'overlapping surfaces' uses live processing in max/msp/jitter, taking the live sound of the quartet and using processing it into a continuous texture that acts as a parallel surface to the live sound. The piece is a simple ABA, two rather static outer sections framing a violent middle section. The initial idea of the electronics was to use spectral freezing (see below) to smear the harmony of the piece, layering the harmony against its own history, and hopefully blending the sound of the quartet and the electronics together so that the electronics would sound like an extension of the live instruments.
This was achieved differently in the static and violent sections. In the static sections the quartet slowly build up a chord by layers of microtonally tuned notes in overlapping rhythmic layers. The microtones help create a rich beating texture as very close pitches grate against each other. The electronics sample the quartet (either violin/cello, or viola/bass*) every couple of seconds, freezing and sustaining the pitch/timbre at that moment in time: there are eight overlapping voices of spectral freezing, with each new voice randomly allocated and fading out the previous one.
The violent middle section is mainly loud chords. After each attack, the instruments glissando to a nearby pitch, meaning that the harmony is never stable. The electronics are triggered live here, after each attack the electronics sample the whole quartet (as one sound) six times at 100ms intervals. This is akin to photographing a runner with a high-shutter speed, every frame is a slight variation on the last, capturing different positions of a body in motion. Similarly, the glissading chords are sampled quickly to catch slight variations in tuning. These six samples spectrally frozen as above and the streams are then played back in constant high-speed alternation, like a strobe-light. This is augmented with a glitching process where very short sample are taken (recorded and triggered on-the-fly) and played back with a randomly shifting loop-length of 1-50ms: this process appears in several places across the piece as a brief "solo" by the electronics, deliberately breaking the blending of live-sound and processed-sound.
The final section is more static than the first, the strings glissando slowly around a few fixed points, registrally divided into high/low and using artificial harmonics. As in the first section, spectral freezing sustains the string sound in high/low register, while the hole in the middle of the register is filled with a massively time-stretched recording of section one of the piece. The time-stretching is a granular patch which I took from Mattijs Kneppers, and I used it largely unmodified (though with more time I would have optimised it for my own needs, removing some extraneous aspects like the pitch-tracking).
In general, the piece was written quickly in response to the call, and I wanted to try out some new ideas with good musicians, I also had not had the chance to work with electric string instruments before (more on this below). My max/msp patch is a series of processes to be applied to one of the two main types of material in the piece from other sources. Some modules are my own and some are modified versions of other people's patches, in particular, Mattijs Kneppers' time-stretching as above, and Jean Francois Charles' excellent tutorial on spectral freezing. While there are some aspects of the piece I would tweak structurally, I was pretty happy with it. The need to compose quickly meant that it has more "notes" than I would normally compose as I relied on some tried and tested compositional methods, it ended up to my ears sounding like my music of 2005-6, especially my piece 'M Grisey, his Galliard' for string ensemble, but I love that piece so it was like hearing an old friend in new clothing. The ideas for the electronics came first, and the notated music was written to with those processes in mind.
As I mentioned at the start, one of my big lessons from the day was in time/energy management when rehearsing. The musicians were all wonderfully friendly and enthusiastic, there were some initial questions to clarify the notation and intention of the microtones, but no great difficulties. One notable aspect was that I had used 8th tones notated as normal accidentals with arrows attached to them to indicate "slightly sharper/flatter", this is not a problem in itself when the intention is clear (in this case they are only inflectional, not intended to be strictly tempered 8th tones) but for performance the accidentals are difficult to distinguish from normal sharp/flats, especially when playing from score. Robert suggested adding up/down arrows above the notes to make it more clear, I'll add these to the revised version of the score.
We began with a couple of run throughs of the piece to familiarise the players, and myself. There was discussion about tempo, and whether they should use a click track or keep time themselves. In the end, I preferred the feel of the piece when they were able to manage the ebb and flow fluidly, which worked very well in the outer sections as the overall tempo dropped considerably to take a leisurely pace with the long notes fading in and out. However, the central section suffered under the slower tempo, making it tricky to co-ordinate bowing, glissandi, and tutti accented chords. It was late in the day before we realised that the central section needed to be much faster to maintain energy, that the piece really should have separate tempi for the three sections, rather than the 50bpm notated at the start and kept throughout.
What is interesting for me in terms of the workshop is that I should have picked up on this earlier and made hard decisions then, but after the first couple of runs through the piece I moved my attention to integrating the electronics, and a large chunk of the workshop was spent then with the musicians effectively running the piece on their own as I struggled to both structure and perform my patch. Martin later pointed out that since my patch had no cueing and ran essentially independent of the musicians (other than as its source sound), we should concentrate on getting the live performance correct and then add the electronics after: by playing the recording through the patch and performing it that way. In hindsight, I should have realised this earlier and focused on the performance of musicians. It's very easy in situations like this to lose sight of what's important as many small details begin to swamp everyone's attention, but of course it's impossible to know in advance what issues will arise. Next time I'll be more on top of this by regularly stopping and taking stock of the situation, but as it was it wasn't a huge problem, it just meant that I flip-flopped between several ways to interpret the middle section, trying many different performances in search of the "right" way to play this, which is tiring for all involved. This is also exacerbated by unclear notation, I knew the sound I wanted but was undermined this by my own notation, especially in terms of dynamics and tempo.
The other issue that arose was in relation to the electronics patch. I had prepared well in terms of having a working patch what did what I wanted, but had completely failed to consider the details of both how the processes would map to the notated piece, and how they would be perfumed live. Martin was indispensable here, bringing his live electronics experience to the fore with a host of his own sub-patches to make my patch more performable: especially using midi-learning to bind my faders and triggers to a control surface, and by adding some panning to my otherwise motionless patch as I hadn't thought as far as the speaker sound in the room.
After composing the piece and building the patch, I arrived with only a vague notion of which electronics processes applied to the sections of the piece. I clumsily played along with ensemble a couple of times to get a feel for what should happen where, and made notes. Next time I'll temper this experience-based "feeling through" the electronics by also simply listening to the musicians' performance and noting into the score where which electronics should happen. In workshops like this it's also easy to lose track of the fact the live and the electronics may really be two separate pieces, as far as rehearsal is concerned, and time/focus needs to be managed accordingly.
In runs-through, it quickly became clear that there was a problem with the patch in terms of triggering. I had faders to control process volumes, and I also had triggers to begin long fade-ins/outs, these two things ended up conflicting with each other: this problem could have been avoided by using the "line~" object rather than "line", and this would have forced my hand to organise the volumes as live fader action rather than triggers, but I hadn't thought that far ahead. What I needed to do was practise the patch beforehand and work out a performable version, and simply notate this into the score and learn it: electronics, like any other instrument, needs to be practiced.
After the live recording was done, we settled into applying the electronics, by performing them over the recorded recordings. We had some unpredictable technical issues in feeding the recordings from the recording computer back into the max patch, but live electronics almost always run into unforeseen problems at some point. I left Alex and Martin to figure this problem out as I would probably have only made it worse. The timing of this problem meant that the little time we already had left in the day to mix was reduced further, but we took a couple of shots at performing the patch and kept the best of these. I really needed another hour of listening and practicing to get it right, but I'll try a couple more performances when I get home, as I have the recordings of the live tracks.
I should note that in an ideal world the electronics and live parts would be recorded as a single performance, with each feeding off the other, but this would require much more rehearsal time. I think we found the best solution for the limited time available.
Overall the day was a great success both musically and as a learning exercise excellent dinner of homemade chilli (thanks to Jo), and a host of desserts brought by the ensemble.
* originally I wanted to sample each instrument, but chose to sample in groups of two to save on cpu, spectral freezing is quite cpu intensive: I was running my macbook pro at 70% in that original scenario, which caused a lot of dropouts in the sound.
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