electro-acoustic music 
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contents:
1. Ghost Ship (10:48)
2-8. Gamma Orionis (19:08)
Cityscape: Domes—Power
Plant—Spires
Wasteland
Dark Forest
Mesa
Mountain
Desert
Ocean
9. Improvisation 860822: Lunar
Music (3:50)
10. Beta Cygni (9:38)
11. Alpha Eridani (10:12)
Gamma Orionis and Ghost Ship were realized at
the
Music
Engineering Technology Studios of Ball
State University, Indiana.
Alpha Eridani was realized in the (then)
Computer
Music Studio at California
State
University, Northridge.
The other works were realized in the
composer's
personal studio.
Notes:
Overview of an Aesthetic
The singular noun aesthetic means a guiding
principle
in matters of artistic beauty and taste. For composers, their
aesthetic
is their particular artistic approach to writing music. Probably
no two
composers have exactly the same aesthetic—and sometimes they can
be as
divergent as Copland and Varèse. The pieces on this disc
share a
particular “style” arising from my own aesthetic, and I felt a
brief outline
of some of the concepts I concern myself with might be of
interest.
As a composer who works primarily with
sound-events,
as opposed to one who works primarily with pitch-events
(traditional “note-music”),
I of course am not involved here with functional harmony, singable
melodies,
or regular rhythms. The listener who has never ventured outside
the realm
of such traditionally organized music is likely to wonder on first
hearing
what forms of organization I have employed instead; I believe I
can offer
a clear description.
First—and operating most perceptibly in the
large,
overall form of each piece—is the idea of tension and release. In
the sort
of music being offered here, this is often accomplished in a
straightforward
fashion: an increase in the density, activity, and volume level of
sounds
creates tension, and motion in the opposite direction causes a
sense of
release. There are many, many uses of this idea, and variations of
it,
throughout my works; it forms what some call the “dramatic” or
“narrative”
aspect, and for me gives a piece the feeling that it is “going
somewhere.”
Second, a good deal of attention is devoted to
sound-textures. To be able to explore the very sounds themselves
(as opposed
to drawing upon the pre-existing tone-colors of traditional
instruments—certainly
still a worthy practice) is the reason this kind of music exists.
Pieces
such as these attempt to create aural experiences and sound
combinations
never encountered before, and it is to be hoped that these sonic
landscapes
are as fascinating to hear as they were to create.
A third idea I find running through much of my
work is a kind of audio mimesis in which sounds resemble the
activities
of unknown living creatures (possibly on other planets). The
attractiveness
of these sections seems surely to be related to our pleasurable
response
to sounds of nature, and I purposely allow the individual events
in these
instances to proceed in a random manner reminiscent of such
phenomena.
On the other hand, I also tend to organize these regions at a
higher level
by giving them an overall direction, such as gradually increasing
or decreasing
density, pitch range, and/or volume level, among other
possibilities. (An
example especially pertinent to the foregoing description occurs
in Track
10, from 6:42 to approximately 7:56.)
Finally, I often employ a sense of movement
and
gesture, treating sounds like physical objects that can interact,
collide,
rise, fall, follow trajectories in space, move up close or recede
into
the distance, and so on. Virtually all the sound-events in my
works were
in fact performed on various controllers, giving them a natural
gestural
feel. (Computers also provide the composer with a marvellous
ability to
mold and reshape such performances in the manner of a sculptor.)
Thus the
works on this disc were, in a very real sense, hand-crafted.
Ghost Ship
There are legends surrounding the part of the
Atlantic
Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. It is a large area of water where
virtually
no currents exist; this has allowed miles of seaweed to float
undisturbed
there for centuries. The legends tell of a fantastic graveyard of
lost
ships, where ancient galleons became entangled in the weed, their
crews
perishing. This work, perhaps, has something to do with
encountering the
ghosts of these long-dead sailors.
Ghost Ship uses natural acoustic sounds
throughout,
many of which have been extensively transposed, modulated, or
filtered.
Custom samples include the sounds of a bowl, a cooking sheet,
applause,
jingling keys, a Slinky®, a guitar string stroked with a pick,
several
metal grilles, a ruler, and human voices. Factory samples include
crickets,
a metal pole, and additional voices. Such concrète sources
provide
not only a wealth of timbres, but many evocative associations that
are
part of the work’s aesthetic.
Gamma Orionis
The central metaphor of this piece is
that
of a journey across regions of sound. This particular journey
crosses seven
regions, starting in a Cityscape (with its Domes, Power Plant, and
Spires)
and moving outward through Wasteland, Dark Forest, Mesa, Mountain,
Desert,
and finally arriving at Ocean. These regions are all quite
different from
one another and yet exist together in a way that suggests the
real-world
experience of traveling across a diverse continent.
All the sounds of Gamma Orionis were created
with a Yamaha TG77, using Yamaha KX-88 and J.L. Cooper Fadermaster
controllers
with the program Digital Performer running on a Macintosh IIci,
with Lexicon
digital reverberation. The Yamaha TG77 provides both FM synthesis
and a
set of sampled sounds. One of the most unusual of the latter is
“Styroll,”
a sound made from tumbling styrofoam pieces of the kind used in
packing
material. This sound became the “water” in the region “Ocean.”
Improvisation 860821: Lunar Music
A single source—a sine wave derived from the
resonant
filter of a Roland Juno-60 synthesizer—is layered, pre- and
post-echoed,
and reverberated into a dense, shimmering fabric whose inspiration
can
be traced to the earliest pioneering magnetic tape pieces of the
1950s.
Beta Cygni
Created with a Fairlight II CMI and a Kawai
K-1r
synthesizer module controlled by Opcode’s Vision sequencer running
on a
Macintosh IIx. Again, the work employs a metaphor of travel across
a sonic
landscape. It was also my first piece to be titled after a star (a
potentially
endless source of titles).
Alpha Eridani
Composed with the same equipment as Beta Cygni
but
following a very different course, this piece is tightly
structured around
the occurrences of a small number of distinct sound-events. Many
of the
sounds exploit the Fairlight’s ability to move its “loop start”
point while
the sound is playing. This technique created the opening roaring
effect
as well as the later sound resembling a bird-cry.
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