Berio, L. Sequenza III for female voice

This piece was unlike anything I had ever heard before. I found it completely by accident and simply had to comment on it because it was so unique.
Luciano Berio was an Italian composer who was mostly known for his experimental work in the Sequenza series. These were a number of works for solo instruments where the main focus was to explore every possible expression of an instrument.

In Sequenza III the instrument is a woman, and simply looking at the score one can see how demanding the piece would be to sing. She is instructed to sing through every emotion one could express, moving from angry to dreamy in a second. There is no traditional melodic structure, but rather pitch indicators for the singer to follow.

The way in which her voice is forced through these motions shows her skill as i would imagine it would take a lot of strength and discipline to move from singing or almost screaming to the opposite sound with very little time for preparation. The way in which the piece begins is almost comical because you do not expect her to start the piece in the way she does. I think Berio meant for it to do this, take the audience by surprise.

Generally a great piece to listen to which aptly explores the idea of serialism.

- Sascha

Time Doesn’t Exist

Dali's "The Persistence of Time"

Well I have a subscription to Scientific American and in the latest edition there is an article about how the concept of time has changed (over time?) to the point where many scientists don’t think time actually exists. The article Is Time an Illusion? can be accessed in full via the Monash Library as an electronic resource. For Newton, time was an independent entity that influenced the way the universe operated. Underlying everything was a universal clock as it where. Then Einstein changes this by showing how the time is relative and progesses differently depending on gravity and velocity. You actually weigh slightly less and clocks move very slightly slower on Mount Everest apparently. In more recent times (theres that word again) physicists have realised that its not necessary to have time in the equations that describe the operation of the universe (to the extent that its possible outside of a grand unified theory which is yet to be achieved). Time is an illusion it seems. Its a bit hard to get your head around this I know, but its thought that time is a bit like money. Money dosen’t actually exist it only represents the value of something else and time simply represents the chains of causality that happen in the universe.

Now I can relate to this, and I guess you might be wondering why I think you might relate to this as well. The reason is that this contemporary description of time actually fits well with the way that I have come to understand temporal structures in music. Tempo, pulse, time signatures etc don’t actually exist, they are simply convient ways to talk about what people do when they make music. When you work on a computer this is very easily forgotten because most software assumes a Newtonian model for the management of time. The computers clock is the God of time. All events spring from and have meaning in relation to, the silicon God inside your machine. In programs like Sibelius and Logic time exists first and is presented in the score or region layouts in the edit space of the software. If you want to speed time up or slow it down you have to do that independently of making the music, and time is not actually represented that well in these programs.

In my work in generative music, in particular in the design of Nodal, I have come to realise the limitations of Newtonian time as applied to computer music. You see, digital systems don’t do musical time that well. In music, time is presented as a series of proportions that are nested hierarchically within a central pulse. Within that pulse you can have 2 events in the space of one pulse or beat – or 3 events or 5 events and so on. Temporal divisions are factions of the pulse. However in the digital world with its silicon God dominating events, time must be expressed as units like milliseconds or samples or at the base of these measurements, the computers clock cycle. So if you want to express a fraction like one third of one it comes out 0.33333333 which isn’t exactly right, is approximately right. Now in most software this isn’t a problem because when we organise events on a timeline any small errors get corrected out at the next major timing event like the start of a bar line or timing pulse. However in generative music where the software makes time happen this can be a problem and we ran up against this when we thought about how to design Nodal. It was a fascinating problem but I won’t go into the technicalities only to say that when you have a series of loops and loops within loops, as you can in Nodal, then any small factional errors can compound over time. So the errors get bigger and bigger. We had to find ways to minimise this as much as possible.

Anyway I guess you could say that time in generative systems like Nodal conform more to the Einsteinian view of time. Events that happen are relative to other events. So what represents the currently debated view of time, at least as I have only very briefly described it above?  Well I think it is simply the way that people perform music on the one hand, and how we listen to music on the other. To perform music you have to make a pulse and keep that pulse going. Its something that you do and it doesn’t actually exist unless you do it and the audience doesn’t know what the pulse is unless musicians actually state it. Also a pulse is elastic, it can be sped up or slowed down and it can be bent as we do when we swing or groove. These are all aspects of the way performers expend energy in performance and this relates to the idea that listening to music is a process by which we actively track the energy imparted by performers to their instruments while playing. Listening to music is motivational, I don’t mean this in the Amercian style pop psych sense, I mean that  our brains actually respond with movement messages because they are stimulated by sound that carries the trace of human energy. Besides the act of hitting,blowing or scraping to make a sound, making and keeping a pulse requires concentration and energy. This is what musicians give to their listeners. Possibly one short coming of computer music (although I’m not sure that it always has to be) is that to make music with the trace of human energy we have to fake it as far as this performative energy goes.

How we pick up what a pulse is when listening is an interesting issue especially when we ask the question “what is the least amount of information that a person needs to tell what a pulse (in the context of music) is”?Obviously if you hear only one event there is no pulse. Similarly if you hear repeated events that are too far apart (beyond about 14 sec) we don’t seem to be able the remember these stretches of time and therefore no pulse will be perceived. Now if we hear 2 events we still don’t hear a pulse because it is ambiguous, is the second event a pulse or a subdivision of a pulse? Even after hearing beyond three events the temporality of pulse may still be uncertain (composers like Beethoven loved to play with this ambiguity) and the listener may need strong cues for the sense of rhythm to be established. The flip side of this is that once a listener has established a rhythm, you can take out information from a musical texture and the listeners will feel the implied beat. Its like a kind of momentum has been created. To stop this momentum completely, takes some preparation musically speaking and this is why many musical forms have a coda I suspect. The point is that there is no actual concept of specific pulses (time) in the heads of musicians and audience, pulse is what emerges after a series of  events have been created. Each event is a response to the previous event and only have temporal meaning in the context of other surrounding events. So in this way time doesn’t exist in music.

Theres a lot more to be said of on this topic but for now I thought it would be good to give you all a few of my  recent musings.Hope they mean something to you.

Wish you all well in your studies, Peter Mc

Webern, A. Symphony Op. 21, 2nd Movement

Webern, an Austrian composer and conductor became on of the best-known exponents of the 12 tone technique and his work became characterized in the musical technique of tonal serialism. He had a strong influence later with the avante gard, which isn’t surprising when thinking of his works.

His Symphony Op. 21 is not something that one could hum along to, it’s very abstract in its exploration of material. There are no clear melodic motifs and it basically goes through a series of sustained notes, each with a discordant character.

The texture base is very thin in nature, for example only a layer of shrill strings will be heard with solo instruments such as a featured oboe, flute or clarinet. The music is something to which is disconcerting because of the keen discordant melodies and some would consider it creepy.

- Sascha

Colour Television – The J. Arthur Keenes Band

The J Arthur Keenes Band - Pamplemousse. Click the image for an amazing Free EP.

Dan McLay is a 17 year old Canadian gameboy prodigy. He has played at events in both Canada and America, most notably the large chip music festival “Blip Fest” held in New York annually. He writes under the moniker “The J. Arthur Keenes Band” which can be very misleading as some of his music features guitars, vocals, organs, harmonicas and more. It’s very easy to think that JAK is multiple people. This tune however is for a single gameboy using the popular gameboy tracking software LSDJ. I’m analysing this tune because of my project on gameboy to try and pick up a few techniques that he uses.

Essentially the idae on gameboy is to be very economic with your use of sound, as you are only capable of using 4 channels at once. Two pulse channels, a wave channel and a noise channel. The two pulse channels, PU1 and PU2 are capable of  a few different timbres by changing the duty cycle. Namely; 12.5% pulse, 25% pulse, 50% pulse and 75% pulse can be used. The wave channel (WAV) in which custom waveforms can be drawn in and samples can be played back (such as BRK and CHK DIS OUT). The  noise channel (NOI) has a variety of different white noise sounds and awesome glitchy noises.

At the very beginning of the piece JAK uses a volume envelope to emulate a delay effect. Essentially he has a note sound at full volume then follows it with another volume at 1/4 or so volume out of phase with the main melody. This allows him to have a melody / delay track on a single channel. He does a similar delay effect on PU2.
The following section uses the wave channel as a bass and one of the pulse channels for both a kick and arpeggios. As it is only possible to have three notes sound simultaneously on hardware such as the gameboy, musicians make use of quick arpeggios, that outline a harmony and give the illusion of chords. They also sound rather badass. He also uses the noise channel for some hi-hat like percussion. By changing the envelope on the hats (Quick decay/No sustain), he is able to create some very punchy hat sounds and he messes around with this for the duration of the track. There is one particular section at 1:01 that I really like. It appears that he uses a PU1 for syncopated arps, PU2 for an interesting melody in which he changes the duty cycle throughout to add some timbral variation, the wave channel for a chunky bass and the noise for kicks / percussion. The second time through he uses the Pu1 channel to not only keep up the syncopated arpeggios but to also harmonise the melody. Channel economy at its best.

Nathan

Colour Television

He’s so dreamy.

Berlioz – Symphonie Fantastique

Even though it isn’t on the list, seeing as I just wrote 2000 words on the piece, I thought I would summarise that into a nice short blog post.

It’s proper title is “Episode de la vie d’un Artiste Symphonie Fantastique en cinq parties” (An Episode in the Life of an Artist).

The piece is romantic.

It is a programme symphony – and indeed Berlioz required (atleast, until he revised the program notes in 1955) that the audience be given quite extensive programme detailing what each movement is about.

The piece describes a horrible trip that the ‘artist’ takes whilst on opium. Berlioz’s father was a doctor, and regularly took opium to relieve debilitating stomach pain (and yet, people didn’t seem to mind getting treated by a doctor constantly high on drugs… Reminds me of a certain Dr House?), and there has been some strong suggestion that the inspiration for Symphonie Fantastique might have been opium induced dreams that Berlioz himself had.

The piece uses an early form of ‘leitmotif’ in form of “idée fixe”. The “fixed idea” represents the object of the artists obsession (aka a woman, in this case representing ‘Harriet Smithson’).

The piece does not use classic symphonic form, although the first movement is similar to sonata form and the second to rondo form.

Almost everything in this piece has been stolen from earlier works. The idée fixe was taken from a cantata called ‘Herminie’, the theme for the first movement from a very early romance, the fourth movement lifted almost verbatim from an early opera titled ‘Les Francs Juges’, lots of the third movement from an earlier mass and romance – indeed the only parts of the piece that are apparently original are the second and fifth movements.

Did I learn anything from the piece? Of course. Mainly that stealing from your self is a great way to make really good pieces of music.

-Saska

Francisco Guerrero’s “Coma Berenices”

This rather recent composition is, I believe, particularly instructive in orchestrational methodology. In this work, the composer utilises an underlying principle of differentiation/integration to produce a work of subliminal fluidity that presents elements of accentuated contrast. This is achieved through contrasting the various timbres within particular instrumental families, presenting two or more entirely different timbres from multiple families, and by blending these various timbres together.

At the start of the piece, the lower strings produce a rich dissonance which is contrasted with the shrill sound produced when this very same material is transposed two octaves higher – in the range of the upper strings. Then, the lower brass is instructed to join this variety of colours, augmenting both the nature of the timbre and the dynamic levels involved. This creates a curious situation where the sounds produced by a relatively large ensemble can changed rather noticeably through the addition of only a handful of instruments.

A pulsating tremolo from the lower strings is also produced with the addition of percussive pulsation from the percussionists of the orchestra. These sounds are produced together, then in isolation of each other. The contrast between the two sounds is very noticeable, yet the combination of the two makes their isolation appear like a gradual, fluid change.

The most curious element of this piece, thus, is in regards to the way in which contrast is deployed. As composers, we must be mindful that excessive use of contrast results in the creation of a piece which the listener will ultimately find alienating. We must somehow make our works accessible, and Guerrero achieves that in this composition through an almost subliminal use of orchestration.

-Timothy

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Piano Trio in D minor

Felix

This is a lovely piece of music, and for the purpose of this analysis I will be focusing on the first movement.

The first movement is in Sonata form, and opens with a beautiful and rich melody from the cello, with the piano playing an arpeggiated rhythm underneath. The piano never seems to only be playing accompaniment, and is more playing along side the violin and cello, as opposed to underneath. The theme is beautiful and lyrical, and seems to have sad and melancholy undertone. The contrasting section is just as lyrical, and much more joyful in its sound, you could almost say it has a certain nostalgic quality to it.

The return of the theme is much more urgent, with the violin playing its upper register, whilst the piano plays rather frantically underneath. I thought the opening was lyrical and emotion, so when the opening theme then returned, I was happy to change my thoughts. The reprise of the theme the second time is much more emotional and lyrical than the first time, as the piano becomes more complex, more romantic. An interesting compositional technique used within the work is when both the cello and violin play in unison. It gives the melody an amazing amount of power. The same goes for when the piano plays on its own, allowing for an eery emptiness to occur before the return of the violin and cello.

At another point during the movement, we hear the numerous themes played on top of each other, creating a beautiful texture. This again happens towards the end of the movement, where the violin and cello play the main theme, whilst the piano plays fast and furious scalic phrases, adding to the fierce emotion of the whole movement.

The emotion behind the work is almost tangible, with the fierce piano, the rich cello and the lyrical violin. Something that became obvious for me towards the end of the work  was that the piano became gradually more and more complex throughout. At the beginning it plays deceptively simple chords and arpeggios, yet by the end it’s no longer being deceptive. Indeed the piano playing becomes almost virtuosic, giving the work an overallfeeling of a gradual growth of emotion, starting sweet and soft, whilst ending emotionally charged and strong.

Emma

Michael Daugherty’s “Dead Elvis”

Wow. I haven’t come across many pieces which have taken my breath away lately, until now. Wow. This piece, by Michael Daugherty, could possibly be described as a somewhat eclectic mixture of funk, atonalism and avante-garde. It is composed for a chamber ensemble consisting of a soloist bassoonist accompanied by violin, double bass, percussion, trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. The result is a very enjoyable, engaging and stimulating composition.

Perhaps the most notable compositional aspect of this piece is that it encourages the listener to focus on the the rhythmic structure, as well as the contrasting timbres. Most musical compositions explore the possibilities of one musical element: in the Classical period, Haydn and Mozart dedicated themselves to the study of musical structure; in the early twentieth century, Schoenberg explored the possibilities of atonality; whilst later Berio and Crumb examined timbral possibilities through extended techniques. Daugherty does utilise extended techniques in this composition (as well as contrasting some more traditional methods), which, like Berio, engages the listener in an exploration of the sonorities this ensemble is able to produce. Simultaneously, he emphasises the beat with rhythms that vary in syncopation. Occasionally, he gets all instrumentalists to stop playing, which breaks up the repetitive  emphasis of the beat.

What is remarkable is that these focal points of musical interest are closely aligned with two different styles: contemporary art music on one hand, which emphasises the nature of sound material; and popular American music, which typically emphasises the use of rhythm. The resulting middle ground created is surprisingly enjoyable. I therefore think the most valuable lesson we can take from this piece is to consider what musical element we want our audience to be aware of in our compositions, and whether we can make them more interesting by having an audience focus on two or more elements.

Timothy

K. Penderecki, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

Written in 1958, this piece is one of the first examples of “sound mass” where the collective texture of instruments are treated as one single entity. It is scored for 52 strings, 24 violins, 10 violas, 10 celli, 8 contrabasses. Contrary to popular belief (and to the title) this was not initially composed for the victims of Hiroshima, it was originally called 8’37”“[The piece] existed only in my imagination, in a somewhat abstract way. When Jan Krenz recorded it and I could listen to an actual performance; I was struck with the emotional charge of the work. I thought it would be a waste to condemn it to such anonymity, to those “digits”. I searched for associations and, in the end, I decided to dedicate it to the Hiroshima victims.”(www.pdfqueen.com “Kryzstof Penderecki” Sarah Wallin). Although this fact does not detract from the sentiment, it does alter ones perspective of the piece in that upon hearing it for the first time three years ago, I imagined the high strings mimicking the screams of the victims, the aggressive percussion; the anger, and tone clusters; an inverted madness. Now I look at the piece as an exploration of “sound mass”.

Threnody has quite distinct sections. Each moving to a new collective texture. We firstly have the “highest possible note” played on the strings, this is a very odd sound. It is tense and strained and the sound produced seems almost electronic. The highest note possible diminishes in volume  and exposes a single string quietly sliding up and down between two notes, like a lazy siren. The second section is an exploration of percussion, the bodies of the instruments being hit. The rhythms they play are canonical, for half of this section the high notes are still played on the violins and a very complex, disjointed percussion cycle continues, the second half of this section changes the high, strained texture to fast paced bowing on the strings on much low notes, it produces a rougher tone. Again the sliding string (lazy siren) enters and the third section arises, a single note that develops into tone clusters. The lower string instruments and higher string instruments almost feel like two separate orchestras, as they are both using such extremes of their instruments. The high on the “highest possible note” and the low a much more subdued sliding between notes. In this section there is a canonical element as well, each of the “orchestras” playing a similar melody with staggered starts.

This is followed by a four-five second silence, where a low rumble sounds out quietly from the strings on low notes. Another silence and then staggered starts to create a sustained collective texture, tense in range and close proximity of notes. This fades out to a new section that is the same as the previous one except the staggered starts come much more quickly. This is followed by yet another silence and the instruments begin playing with the “whole” instrument, i.e sustained notes, dramatic hard bowing, pizzicato, hitting the body of the instrument. Once the percussive section ends the piece just gradually evolves into an intense “sound mass” finally stretching across all instrument ranges, the expanse of notes so large that there is absolutely no melodic quality just texture, loudness and tension, What a wonderful effect!

Although this is quite obviously a piece that relies on texture, I thought the most interesting part was the complete lack of melody created by cramming as many notes into a range as possible. The compositional intentions might not be as noble as the title suggests but it undoubtedly a very exciting work, worthy of analysis, listening and praise, and dare I say it, a prime contender for next years Golden Guitar award.

Jamie-Leigh

Bartok – Concerto for Orchestra

I’ve previously looked at MVT IV of this piece, the Intermezzo. I will be looking, instead at the second movement, largely because of the unique historical

I’ll start by saying that Bartok is a fairly unusual composer. He was born in 1881 and only really composed in the 20th century. His sound, however, whilst definitely 20th century, started off very late romantic sounding, and often sounded neoromantic and neoclassical nearer the end of his life, but with a definite 20th century sparkle care of multi-tonality and general abandonment of classical harmony and tonality. Concerto for Orchestra was infact one of the last 4 pieces he wrote (of which he only completed 3) before he died of leukemia in 1945, and is rich in texture and harmony while still being easily accessible to a very wide range of audiences.

This next paragraph is a quote from Wiki.

The second movement, called Game of Pairs (but see note below), is in five sections, each thematically distinct from each other, with a different pair of instruments playing together in each section. In each passage a different interval separates the pair—bassoons are a minor sixth apart, oboes are in minor thirds, clarinets in minor sevenths, flutes in fifths and muted trumpets in major seconds. The movement prominently features a side drum which taps out a rhythm at the beginning and end of the movement.

What I enjoyed most about this piece was the range of the different styles that Bartok uses. In particular the sudden change to this almost military chorale at 123, with very evocative and stylistic voice leading in a brass quintet, with added side drum for emphasis. This is then carried over into the next section of the movement, and then it vanishes. I like this fairly sectional style of composing, as I think it’s very much the way that I work when composing (section by section – oh a nice chorale would sound awesome here), but what Bartok does, and I don’t, is to blend between the sections, creating one very smooth piece and sound, and it doesn’t make it seem so angular and sectional, but rather very naturally flowing. By carrying over the sound of the chorale just for a little while into the next section, over which a flute, oboe and clarinet do a little duet (well, as much as 3 instruments can do a duet… but is 3 instruments soloing together a triet?), it definitely makes a big difference and I’ll have to use this in my own composing.

Harmonically, the chorale is fairly interesting as well. I did a quick chord analysis on the section played by the brass quintet (well, I worked out what each chord was).

Interestingly, immediately after the chorale like section, which is a step away from the rest of the movement, we move straight into a recapitulation of the first section of the movement. It is almost an exact copy-paste, just slightly reorchestrated with additional instruments such as the harp. And finally, the movement ends with the side-drum solo from the start. It is almost palindromic, and works very well.

Rhythmically this movement is fairly boring. There are a couple of quintuplets again triplets, and a couple of instances of septuplets, but they appear very infrequently. There is an interesting offbeat semiquaver motif at 57-58 and again at 210-211 in the recapitulation, where the emphasis is of the offbeat semiquaver for two bars, so when we arrive at the next bar and the beat is suddenly on 1 again, there is a feeling almost as though the next bar arrived too early, even though everything lines up exactly.

So yeah, 500 words on Bartok. Enjoy.

Saska