The music discussed in this paper and premiered at my MFA Thesis Concert on April 17, 1993 is now available, on my "Brains" CD.
Additionally, I have just html-ized my 1991 paper Karlheinz Stockhausen's New Morphology of Musical Time.
by
Christopher K. Koenigsberg
My computer music is discovery music. I seek surprising discoveries in sound, and arrange them for presentation in a pleasing fashion. But the technocrat must set the stage carefully for the madman to dance with abandon. In this paper, I will discuss my aesthetic of balancing between the "insane" and the "technical." I will discuss the Basement Artifacts, and my obsession which led to them, as representative examples. I will also discuss my Thesis Concert. I hope to serve as a useful archaelogical specimen of the musical condition in these waning postmodern days of the twentieth century. The pieces are copied on the accompanying audio tape, and the original, extensive concert program notes are included as an appendix.
To find and germinate new seeds which will grow to become musical textures and sounds, I chase rational thought away. I invoke the unknown and unexpected instead, to take over my mind and surprise me, with obsessive gems from the unknowable deep well of inspiration. My Basement Artifact series of pieces embodies this obsession, discussed further in the next chapter. I seek to find new juxtapositions of familiar thoughts in combinations that throw strange shadows. My LCM for 12 Piano Sample embodies this search. I loosen the bonds of causality, and collaborate with stochastic processes. Back to Nothing embodies this collaboration. I also explore the world of sounds and effects which are available through recording or other means of appropriation, and The Rat's Nest embodies this appropriation.
There is a conflict with my desire for the irrational, though. To master the bewildering multiplicity of control systems necessary to command the software applications, hardware interfaces, and studio devices that capture and nurture sound for me, I must be thoroughly rational and organized in my thoughts and procedures. Someday there will be more unification among the tools. But today's computer music studio is not for the faint of heart. It is a maze of disparate languages and interfaces, each with a lengthy user's manual that must be read and referenced with fierce concentration, or even worse, with no documentation at all, requiring guesswork and intuition to succeed.
So to satisfy my aesthetic, my method of working in the studio must be schizoid in nature, with fits of insanity feeding stretches of rational elaboration. The technocrat must set the stage carefully, for the madman to dance with abandon. Think, in particular, of the multiple wild singing voices in All the Same to Me. I engineered, performed, produced and mixed all the sounds in that whole song all by myself, entirely alone in the 24-track studio. Neither the singing madman nor the silent technocrat alone can produce the elusive music I seek.
Any description of my music and the process of making it, then, cannot be entirely straightforward. In the rest of this paper, you and I will take a brief tour, via several hops, skips, and jumps, through these different worlds of mine, the insane and the technical, especially as they relate to music presented in my Thesis Concert. The ordering and the emphasis will be dictated by my insane creative side, while the details and the syntax will be developed by my rational elaborator.
I emphasize the sense of discovery rather than construction, of attempting to capture, comprehend, and enhance something outside myself, as if I am not the sole author of my music. Basement Artifact #1, The Free Spirit, The Rat's Nest , and Back to Nothing are all collaborations, in a sense, with the computer itself as my partner.
I have repeatedly stated that I am NOT a "composer," as I prefer to naively, stubbornly reserve that term for people who begin with a theme in their imagination, then work with paper and pen to produce notation that will be performed later in a realization of their original conception. Somehow these three distinct ontological states, of original conception, notated score, and performance realization, seem intrinsic to the concept of a musical "composition" in my personal aesthetic. Therefore this concept does not relate very well to the kind of studio tape pieces I have presented in my Thesis Concert. Instead of "composer," some people who work in the digital studio nowadays prefer the title of "sound designer."
I prefer to think of myself as an observer, listener, experimenter, discoverer, interpreter and expresser, performer, programmer, studio engineer, producer, and presenter of events for audiences to enjoy. In some cases, for some of my pieces, I think of myself as more akin to a "sculptor," where unearthed raw material is shaped gradually into a finished product. In other cases, I compare myself more to a "photographer," where an external reality is captured in a moment, in a representation that takes on a reality of its own, distinct from the original, but still relating to it. I have never produced a piece in the manner of the traditional "composer" that I described above.
This series was my way of dealing with an intrusive sound which had taken up an obsessive position in my life, and which also resonated, in a strange coincidental way, with a sound from a previous composition of mine, Morphic Resonance #1 "Wail Concerto ," back in 1985.
The source material for the Basement Artifacts is a single sixteen second long recording, of a loud pump in the basement of the Mills College Music Building, under the Ensemble Room. This pump turns on automatically, for a sixteen second cycle, once every three minutes, twenty-four hours a day, relentlessly. Normally, the sound is muffled by some kind of noise-reducing outer shell.
When it was malfunctioning in the fall of 1991, the sound was so loud that it disrupted classes, performances, lectures, etc. in the Ensemble Room. My own practice room was also nearby and my practicing was constantly disturbed by the sound of the pump, repeating ceaselessly every three minutes. Inescapable, relentless, it resonated through the stairwell and the floor, a tone somewhere between a D-flat and D-natural.
Everyone who heard the sound was disturbed and annoyed by it. Professors cursed it in class, visiting guest lecturers (including Leon Theremin) were alarmed by it, and performances in the Ensemble Room were marred by it. Yet no one, for almost an entire year, did anything about it. Everyone I asked had a different theory as to what it was, but no one had actually investigated to see whether something could be fixed, or turned off, to stop the awful noise.
The situation was surreal, and I wondered if it was typical of people in California, where earthquakes, floods, fires, droughts are a part of the environment that must be accepted and cannot be "fixed." Perhaps the passive acceptance of it also showed the influence of John Cage at Mills College? I made a recording of the noise, using a pair of dynamic Shure SM57 microphones and a Sony TCD-5M portable cassette recorder, and resolved to work out my feelings through several pieces of music over the next year and a half.
Eventually, I found out who was in charge of repairing such problems, and the pump noise was gone the very next day, just in time for a concert I presented in the Ensemble Room. Now the noise is only a faint distant presence in the Music building, but it still lives on in my Basement Artifact pieces.
The noise in the basement took on an extra special haunting significance for me. Back in 1985, I had spent several months on a composition titled Morphic Resonance #1 "Wail Concerto" in the computer music studio at Carnegie-Mellon University. The Morphic Resonance project, including a series of four computer music pieces, dominated my creative life from 1984 until I arrived at Mills College in 1991.
I had created a sound, the "Wail," which resonated deeply in my life at the time (1984-1985), and I became obsessed with it, through my many late nights working in the studio on this twenty minute long composition. I used Roger Dannenberg's Adagio score language, in an exercise to show that I could produce a satisfying glissando out of fixed pitches, by adding tape reverberation to a rising series of overlapping steady tones. Morphic Resonance #1 (Wail Concerto) was played in electronic music concerts at Carnegie-Mellon University, Oberlin College, and the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1985 and 1986.
Strangely enough, the inescapable noise in the basement of Mills College in 1991 sounded alarmingly like the artificial "Wail" that I had painstakingly constructed back in 1985. This coincidence alarmed me, in the manner of a dream come true.
For the first piece in this new series, Basement Artifact #1, my aesthetic goal was to portray some kind of transformation, from one physical state to another, like that of a solid melting to a liquid and vaporizing to a gas. This idea was suggested to me by Chris Brown. I decided to transform the pump sound, from its original state, through modifications where certain features were emphasized, into more radical departures that would be unrecognizable.
In order to delineate my material clearly and distinguish this first piece from later ones in the Basement Artifact series, I limited my processing of the sound to some basic "external" type transformations -- excerpting segments of the original sample, looping the sampled segments at different points, and playing them back at varying sample rates, panning across the stereo field at various velocities. I meticulously divided the results into a catalogue of different sound categories, including relatively unmodified ones, long continuous segments, and various kinds of percussive attacks. I arranged these samples in an Akai S1000 sample playback unit, and arranged corresponding keys and programs on my Buchla Thunder MIDI controller so that I could perform elaborate gestural improvisations with them.
The piece begins with repetitions of the original sound, moves into a continuous segment, and then introduces percussive attacks that begin to take on a different character as they are grouped into undulating streams. By the end, the noise has mutated into a charming instrument which plays sinewy jazz riffs, dictated at breakneck speed by the random number generator in my Buchla Thunder MIDI controller, while I massage gentle streams of sound around it. My recording of the piece is a single live direct-to-DAT improvisatory session, a trio with myself, my Buchla Thunder controller, and the Akai S1000 sampler, each contributing some crucial part of the result.
I was originally inspired by Donna McCabe's presentation of a voice which was so elongated in duration, and lowered in pitch, that it took on a completely different character and became a new sound object. Metallic "artifacts of the analysis" emerged, which fascinated me. I compare it to electron microscopy, which reveals a universe of pockmarks and micro-surface texture in any seemingly common object which is subjected to its scrutiny. The choice of the original object itself seems almost irrelevant, for the artifacts of the most radical time-stretching procedures arise from details at a level of detail below our normal threshold of perception, and from consequences of digital sampling theory.
I spent months digging into the pump sound, selecting fragments as small as a few milliseconds, using the Macintosh Sound Designer II application to time-stretch and pitch shift them. Fragments which included moments where recognizable transients occurred in the original sound produced large-scale structural events when radically time-stretched. Fragments which had no main transient but which had small fluctuations in the original signal, when stretched out, turned out as beautiful sculptured, gestural sound events.
Several basic categories of sounds arose from my exploratory processing. There were more or less static "Skeet" textures, dynamic "Fleet" textures, the "bleating lamb" or "Bleat" sounds, and most surprising, the "Geet" heavy metal guitar-like sounds. It turns out that replicating a short series of sample bytes into a longer series, as is done in Sound Designer's time-domain method of stretching sample duration, results in square wave artifacts that are remarkably similar to the distortion effects used by heavy metal guitarists.
The Artifact #2? (ArtMix) is a short, succinct overture containing a sampling of these types of sounds. It begins with some "Bleats," adds some "Geets," then some "Fleets" and finally "Skeets" in its most dense part (the "Skeets" preserve the pitch and resonance of the original pump sound). Gradually, the texture thins out to the final "Bleats." It is a "crab canon" in the sense that it is the same whether played forwards or backwards. Each sub-mix track appears twice in the final mix, once forwards and once backwards. I first used this crab canon technique in my Morphic Resonance #0.
The sound quality of the ArtMix is extraordinarily crisp and clear, strikingly varied in nature, especially considering that it all originated as a single 16-second cassette recording. The RT program, on the NeXT computer, gave me accuracy and precision in time and stereo placement, maintaining high fidelity through multiple digital overdubs. Since no reverberation was used, the sounds are all dry and articulate.
The third piece in the series came as another insane inspiration, in which I brought radically opposing material together in juxtaposition with the Basement Artifact, yielding something new which cast a strange shadow.
Yun Wang's poetry is a search for beauty, truth, and clarity. Her voice is haunting, intoxicating and dreamlike, and her words are mysterious, inspiring, and meticulously crafted. I decided to juxtapose the high sounds of her voice, largely devoid of recognizable meaning by my tape technique, together with a long low stretched segment of the Basement Artifact.
Taking a single two-second long fragment (Bit #10) out of the Basement Archives from the pump sound, I used the Phase Vocoder, in F. Richard Moore's "pvoc" implementation on the NeXT, to time-stretch the fragment, from 2 seconds on up to 16 minutes in length. The slight fluctuations in the original fragment turned into worlds of delicate sonic nuance, worlds which I could never imagine composing by hand, but which struck me with their incredible beauty and power. The phase vocoder does its duration stretching using frequency-domain information, unlike Sound Designer II which uses time-domain information, so this stretched sound has a different quality than the sounds of the ArtMix. It lacks the square-wave "heavy metal" quality that is so prevalent in the ArtMix.
I made several variations of this Stretched sound, with different reverberation processes applied to them, some with the whole thing reversed in time. Then I "convolved" them with several different recordings of "impulse responses" in the hallway outside this concert hall, meaning that I clapped my hand in the hall, recorded the echo, and processed the Stretched sound with the echo sound, so it comes out as if the Stretched sound were taking place in that spot in the hallway where I clapped my hands. This convolution added a significant sweetness to the sounds.
These multiple tracks of Stretched convolved sound were equalized to bring out the low-frequency nuances, then mixed on the 24-track with multiple overdubs of Yun Wang reading poetry. She reads her original English poem "The Book of Ebony Night," and a set of Chinese Song Dynasty poems, both in Chinese and in her own original English translation. Mainly all that comes through, however, is the "sibilances" or high-frequency hissing from the "S's" in her voice. Five of her voices dance around, the high frequencies focusing attention on various spatial locations, richocheting through four delay and reverberation processors and panning around the stereo field, contrasting sharply with the more slowly moving textures of the Stretched sound underneath. The overall effect is of strange, unearthly beauty.
The only recognizable English phrases that come through from the Book of Ebony Night, towards the end of the piece, are:
1.) "... there are masks ..."
2.) ".... a silent monument on an alien planet....."
3.) "..... upon the ladder of music..."
Finally the voices exit with a repetition of the phrase, from a Song Dynasty poem:
"Let me splash this cup of wine, Offering to the RiverMoon," and the stretched, convolved artifact sounds take another several minutes to finally wind down to nothing.
The pieces I presented were all pre-recorded on DAT (digital audio tape), but they were intended all along for presentation in a concert situation, where an audience gathers together in the dark to share a public experience. The pieces can also be enjoyed on tape through speakers or headphones in private listening situations, and I encourage you to listen to them while you read this paper, but this is not the same as the original presentation.
I have thought and read about the aesthetics of concert situations, and I tried to make the audience's experience the best I possibly could. All the reactions I got that night indicated that I had succeeded.
In addition to the quality of the music itself, and overlooking environmental factors like the comfort of the seats and the time of night, I tried to think about all the other aspects of the concert experience, and see if there was anything I could improve. I feel that a Thesis Concert should be judged partially on the quality of the overall concert experience, in addition to the quality of the music itself.
For the concert audio equipment, I was quite privileged to use a pair of Meyer 833 loudspeaker systems, through the generosity of visiting artist-in-residence Maryanne Amacher and their owner, Ralph Jones of the Meyer Sound Company. These are said by some to be the "best speakers in the world." They are designed for optimally flat response through all conditions, and they use a special controller unit in a feedback loop with the amplifier to actively monitor and adjust the audio response. Their subwoofers produce thick, chocolate velvet low tones with no sense of straining, their midrange is clear and relaxed, and their high frequencies are so clear that they seem to live and breathe, in a physical space outside the speakers themselves. The use of these speakers was truly a treat for me and for the audience. They are a little tricky to use, because their special controller unit's inputs and outputs, when using unbalanced signals, are wired "hot-2" instead of the more usual "hot-3," so one must insert a set of converters in the circuit to transfer the signal from pin 3 to pin 2 in the XLR connectors.
I spent two nights alone in the concert hall, experimenting with speaker placements. The first night, I used the JBL 433 loudspeakers that are the standard equipment in the hall, and found a pair of spots that I felt provided the most expansive, projective sound with them. Instead of putting the speakers out towards the front edge of the stage as is frequently done, I found that by moving them back almost to the back wall of the concert hall, and moving them in towards the middle of the stage rather than too far apart, the sound opened up due to reflections up the back wall and up to the ceiling, causing additional diffusion. The second night, I set up the Meyers in basically the same locations, and drooled in ecstasy at how wonderful they sounded. I found the highest volume levels that would not produce pain, for occasional use at climactic moments, and found lower levels for appropriate points in the music.
I have included the entire Program Notes from the concert as an appendix. My favorite kind of program notes are the booklets that you get at professional opera productions. There's a whole story to read, with multiple acts. There are notes about all the characters, all the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, the composer and the development of the work, the opera company, even notes about the opera hall itself, including maps of the restrooms and the bars. There are lots of advertisements and acknowledgements and announcements. It takes the better part of an hour just to read carefully through the program. And it's all free with the price of admission.
My long program notes have also been influenced by the attitudes of Paul Lansky, David Stock, and other contemporary music composers. Paul Lansky, in a recent concert of his music at Mills Concert, talked extensively, informally, before each piece on his program. David Stock always gives a spoken introduction before each piece on programs for performances by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Both David and Paul share the attitude that audiences are comfortable with older music, especially "classical" music, partially because they are just more familiar with it and knowledgeable about it and about its composers. If audiences are to become comfortable with contemporary works by living composers, we must go out of our way to make the music inviting, to explain ourselves, to acknowledge the audience's discomfort with sounds and methods that do not always follow the long-established traditions of concert hall music. Understanding breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust. Not only do we increase the chance that our audience will appreciate our own music if we explain it to them in our concerts, but we also help to generate their interest in hearing more new music, and thus build an audience for the future. Through my years of service on the Board of Directors of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, I became committed to helping to educate and build the audience for new music, so with the program notes for my Thesis Concert I tried to continue this process.
8:00 PM, Saturday, April 17, 1993, Mills College Concert Hall
Larry Fertel, Acoustic guitar (only the first 10 minutes)
Steve Beale, Upper 3 electric guitar strings
Navarro Matthews, "Miles Davis" noisemaker, lower 3 guitar strings
CKK, Tenor recorder, transistor radio synth, guitar amp mixing controls
CKK's Dad, Special M.C. commentator at the very end.....
CKK's Dad again
CKK, SoundDesigner, Akai Sampler, Buchla Thunder, 24-track.
The October Surprise (1992)
CKK: HyperUpic, percussion samples, 24-track.
"I have been too much a free spirit to have cultivated artificial values of love" -- Yun Wang
voices: Yun Wang
CKK: phase vocoder, convolution, 24-track.
Mathematical musical energy radiated through human movement.
Julie Regalado, Megan Nicely, Troy Linsdale, Tracy Vogel, Sally Clawson, dancers/choreographers.
CKK: sequencer, sampler, direct-to-DAT realtime mix.
CKK, SoundDesigner, RT digital mix.
That's where I'm a goin' after she leaves me...
CKK, Sgran granular synthesis, RT digital mix.
For the little rat that shares the studio with me late at night...
source: NeXT Mach "swapfiles"
CKK, SoundDesigner editing and RT digital mix
A dying elephant sings so gently , to his lost love...
CKK, sequenced percussion and keyboards, real electric bass, 6 vocals
Megan Nicely, Video production
Julie Regalado, onscreen Dancer
CKK, Squeaky Chair Soundtrack (chair, 8-track)
Well, the first 7 rows of our Concert Hall are basically the "orchestra pit." So sit back somewhere, behind the cutout for the main entranceway. Actually the last few rows at the back also sound great. And sit towards the middle of the row, so you get the best Stereo imaging without the "precedence effect" of being too close to one speaker.
Enjoy the show!
These multiple tracks were mixed with 5 overdubs of Yun Wang reading poetry, her original English poem The Book of Ebony Night, and a set of classical Chinese Song Dynasty poems, both in Chinese and in her own original English translation. Mainly all that comes through, however, is the "sibilance" or high-frequency hissing from the "S's" in her voice. Recognizable English phrases, towards the end, include "there are masks," "embroidered patterns," "a silent monument on an alien planet," "upon the ladder of music," and finally "Let me splash this cup of wine, offering to the RiverMoon."
Basically, each of the twelve pianos is playing a phrase of a different length/time signature, although they are all playing the same tempo. Piano #12 plays a twelve note scale separated by one semitone each, piano #11 plays an eleven note scale separated by two semitones each, piano #10 plays a ten note scale separated by three semitones, and so on. Piano #1 just plays a single note ostinato (shades of In C!) Since the individual piano phrase lengths don't match up, their relationship is constantly shifting, producing a rhythmic kaleidoscope effect. Also, the highest pitches come from the middle pianos, sort of like a parabola shape. This particular incarnation of the piece takes its shape in three parts, each around three and one third minutes long. All twelve piano processes are actually continuously running on the sequencer (Vision on a Macintosh, controlling the Akai S1000 sampler), but I am manually muting and un-muting them for the mix.
The first part introduces the pianos one by one, starting with #12 on down, but "windowing" them with a maximum of three playing at once, so the oldest one drops out before the fourth enters. Finally only piano #6 is playing a solo. The second part adds pianos in pairs, going higher and lower numerically (i.e., add #5 and #7, add #4 and #9, etc.) and then "windowing" upwards, dropping out lower numbers, until only #12 is left. Then #12 drops out and only #1 is playing the ostinato. The final part adds pianos one by one, ascending numerically, slowly, until all twelve are playing at once.
I asked the dancers to do something that dancers don't normally do: to choreograph as a group, with no individual leader. They did quite well. They used the technique of "accumulation," to add gestures one by one.
I acknowledge the vague influences of Henry Cowell, Terry Riley, Conlon Nancarrow, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Cage, and Robert Fripp on this piece.
There are three parts to the piece: first a dense wall of noise that gradually breaks apart, then a deep droning which rises, and finally a loud falling cosmic burning sound, landing in sizzling smoldering. There are also melodic fragments woven in.
Compositional technique: I typed in some basic rhythms and polished them up in the sequencer and on the sampler, then recorded them, overdubbing across sixteen tracks. Then I listened and listened and waited for inspiration and a bass line fell out into my ears and fingers and I played that on my fretless Rickenbacker bass guitar. Then I listened still more, got another inspiration, heard the bass saying "All the Same To Me," wrote the lyrics, made six wild vocal overdubs in an all-night recording session. Finally I worked on the studio dubwise mix and the overall shape, working the twenty-three recorded tracks and five separate echo/reverb units in a " finger dance" on the mixing console, until I got it right. Each mixdown sounds very different -- on the original master 24-track, all the sequenced instruments are actually playing continuously, all the way through from the first note to the very end. So the choice of which combinations, or "choirs," of instruments to bring in and out of the mix, at which time, is the essence of the dubwise producer's game.
For the soundtrack, I thought of the rocking chair Julie sits in, of old people, of creaky squeaky things, and waited for the proper inspiration. Then I found the squeakiest chair in the recording studio (everyone at Mills' Center for Contemporary Music will recognize the sound), set it up on the concert hall stage at 2 AM, and overdubbed myself in a number of performances, squeaking back and forth around the stage in the chair. There's also some moments of heavy breathing, rattling the gooseneck stand of a podium microphone, and some Yun Wang poetry. I acknowledge the influence of Pierre Henry's historic piece Variations for a Door and a Sigh, although I hope I didn't imitate it.