Friday, February 16, 2007
new electronic music: Evidence
Evidence is a new electronic piece I've just completed. I began work on it last year, put it away for a while, and recently went back to it and finished it. The idea for the piece was related to a 2003 piece I wrote for the Seattle Chamber Players called Premonitions. It was about space and silence, quietude, and putting emphasis on each sound event as a discrete unit. Also, in that piece I was trying to ask the question: What is the minimum amount of activity that can happen in a 10 minute piece of music and still hold one's attention?
Evidence was originally going to be basically an electronic version of Premonitions. In the end I decided that wasn't quite interesting enough to justify its own existence. The piece as it exists now relates to that piece, but through that piece it is investigating a different question: How much time can be spent in a given aesthetic mode before changing that mode calls the piece's identity and unity into question? How does overt contrast affect the listener's perception of a piece's identity after a significant amount of time? Is it still the same piece? Why or why not?
Almost all of the sounds are from samples of a casio sk1 keyboard on a trumpet patch, although the samples are truncated down to a microcosmic and then looped so that they just become pure electronic tones. The ending section of the piece also uses an idea I stole from Rhys Chatham's Echo Solo for piano: combining the use of just intonation and aleatoric processes, two seemingly mutually exclusive musical devices that I find work quite beautifully together, albeit in a very weird way.
Anyway, download the mp3 here. ¶ 4:35 PM
Evidence is a new electronic piece I've just completed. I began work on it last year, put it away for a while, and recently went back to it and finished it. The idea for the piece was related to a 2003 piece I wrote for the Seattle Chamber Players called Premonitions. It was about space and silence, quietude, and putting emphasis on each sound event as a discrete unit. Also, in that piece I was trying to ask the question: What is the minimum amount of activity that can happen in a 10 minute piece of music and still hold one's attention?
Evidence was originally going to be basically an electronic version of Premonitions. In the end I decided that wasn't quite interesting enough to justify its own existence. The piece as it exists now relates to that piece, but through that piece it is investigating a different question: How much time can be spent in a given aesthetic mode before changing that mode calls the piece's identity and unity into question? How does overt contrast affect the listener's perception of a piece's identity after a significant amount of time? Is it still the same piece? Why or why not?
Almost all of the sounds are from samples of a casio sk1 keyboard on a trumpet patch, although the samples are truncated down to a microcosmic and then looped so that they just become pure electronic tones. The ending section of the piece also uses an idea I stole from Rhys Chatham's Echo Solo for piano: combining the use of just intonation and aleatoric processes, two seemingly mutually exclusive musical devices that I find work quite beautifully together, albeit in a very weird way.
Anyway, download the mp3 here. ¶ 4:35 PM
