Re the first paragraph, my apologies as well; we're going to Utah tomorrow
and I'm a bit tense, also feeling physically ill. -
Needless to say I agree with you. I also think there are things like the
old Casio midi sax - you blew into it, and so there's all sorts of
possibilties for interfacing. Most Midi people though use keyboards; they
can be taylored (misspelling but it's a great pun!), but the tendency is
of course towards either cleanliness or controlled/chaotic noise...
Then there's granular synthesis which seems something else utterly
different and exciting - Alan
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, mwp wrote:
(Thanks for the clarification, AS. I sometimes tend to read an implied
hostility into people’s writings where it is not intended, as I am sure they
sometimes unintendedly read it into mine. I’m very tense tonight for some
reason. Sorry if I overreacted.)
My short, silly list was meant to apply to written compositional variables,
or to switches on a foot pedal for live performance. For instance, you want a
particular passage you are playing on a MIDI instrument to sound breathy, you
press the ctrl-B button on the pedal. Crude, simple stuff, like a guitarist
has with fuzzboxes, wahs, etc. only more localized and nuanced in the effect.
I don’t think that an Ayler of today would feel too deprived of his “black
spirituality” if he was playing a MIDI instrument of sampled sounds. He
simply would find workarounds to create the effects he wanted, and while he
wouldn't be the Ayler we know and love, he still would sound marvelously
human. Look at somebody like Sun Ra, who was playing a clunky old DX7 when I
saw him a few times. I don’t think that the rise of session players using
digital instruments has much to do with the coldness of today’s music, as
there were plenty of cold, boring session players working in places like
Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley many decades before there were commercial digital
music programs and instruments. I see today’s “coldness” has as much to do
with a basic shift in attitude towards performance, -- from an existential
“being-in-the-world” attitude, such as you described so well, to a more
aloof, canned one that you get in rap, raves, etc. I don’t see the latter
necessarily as a musical regression of any kind, or as a diminishment in
music’s spirituality. If that causes Ayler to spin in his grave, well, every
new generation has that effect on its elders!
I haven't addressed your point about live vs computer at all, even though it
was fundamental to what you were saying, because I basically agree with you
and see nothing to add.
m
being preposterously verbose, as always, and now I will shut up and go into a
long self-imposed glottal hibernation...
On Dec 18, 2005, at 8:46 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, mwp wrote:
[Arggh, I feel the hostility meter starting to flutter into the red… If
that’s the case, I’m outta here.]
No hostility intended.
Don’t know why such a list of commands wouldn’t cut it to bring some sense
of life to a piece. Composers use such notations all the time to indicate
precisely what they need from performers, and Talan M’s work is a
composition, not a performance, however much he may intend it to sound
“performed.” And there’s no reason these controls couldn’t be implemented
live in real time with foot pedals or something, so there’s plenty of room
for overlap between composition and performance.
It may well bring life into a piece. That's not what I was on about; of
course I agree with you here.
I don’t believe improvisation can ever be totally in the “moment.”
Improvisors are always recycling and borrowing from buried experience and
spinning motifs, etc. The idea of the mind as blank slate creating order
out of nothingness just doesn’t “cut it” for me.
No one ever said improvisation came out of a blank slate; of course it
doesn't. But it is in real time, and all that recycling etc. - more
important where you are in the piece - can't be a second-take; what you do
then is what you get. And there's no 'nothingness' - there are chops and
what you're doing.
There's a whole politics behind this, which Ayler and New Thing music in
general came out of. It came out of the black revolution of the 60s as
well, and the rhetoric around it was part of it; with people like Baraka it
entered linguistically into the pieces as well. And this politics was
connected with notions of black soul, black body, black spirituality, even
the black church. At least for myself, I can't put this aside. In other
words improvisation - being-live-in-performances was _inherently_ part of
the music of these musicians.
And by ctl doesn't cut it, what I meant was, take your commands -
SAXOPHONE:
Flatten the pitch in the upper registers YES
Squeak SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-S
Pad SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-P
Breath SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-B
Force virtual fingering SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-V
Etc.
- Take the first. How much flattening? In relation to what? In what phrase?
What do you do about the control and dimunition with the upper overtones
that occurs when you slack the reed a bit? Etc. etc.
This doesn't mean you can't 'set' an Ayler-type solo, note-by-note
modification; you could always build something out of sine-waves note by
note. It's not magic. But it is missing the point - when 'squeaks' are
used, they mean something about the soul and positioning of the musician at
that point; they're not devices. It's also very hard to program a squeal
(if that's what you mean, you generally don't get pad squeak, so I think
you're referencing the reed?), which has incredibly-fast changing overtones
resulting from teeth/lip/pressure/moisture-degree/breath/-
pressure - all changing dynamically at an equally incredibly-fast speed.
I do agree with Talan's take, which seems a bit different than yours. In
any case I've heard a lot of electronics, as I'm sure you have as well, and
the types of sonority that Talan uses seem fairly accessible; on the other
hand, I've heard nothing approaching, say, Bells, in that regard.
- Alan
For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt .
Contact: Alan Sondheim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] General
directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .
