Week 12 - An Indian Summer

Today was a session full of epiphanies and turning points that changed the direction of the project in a hopefully positive manner.

3rd May Face to Face Meeting 12:00pm-4:00pm

One of the hardest tasks as a composer is to find 'good notes' (Goss, 2018). This is by far one of the hardest tasks when I sit down and compose music. Interestingly, in my Pathways collaboration, we didn't have to worry about that as much - given that we had notes down on a page and we were arranging material.

This gave me an idea - similar to the Guitar Rig Factor - it was a matter of limiting the notes we could use, just like the arranging task. After recently purchasing John Pitts' How to play Indian Sitar Ragas on a Piano for inspiration in my Composition B module, I decided to bring it in to today's session in case that sparked any inspiration.

It certainly did! There was a sense of reminiscence for me at this point with the pathways project - a real sense of excitement and synergy was present. We had notes to work with and given the improvisatory nature of the music - we were able to soon make it our own work by taking small passages of the music we liked and extemporised it further. To me, the book was the match we needed to light the fire.

Peer B questioned whether this was 'copying' given that we were directly taking musical material from a traditional piece of music. Bunting (1977) explains that a 'composer may seek out new ideas by speculating on accepted musical conventions', however this is dependent on whether they are aware of these conventions. Many composers like Richter, Zender and Busoni used previous music as a basis for their work before extemporising it in their own way. Besides - the original composers of 'Flowing with Honey' probably didn't expect an electric violinist, guitarist and marble run-ist to perform this work. In essence we were simply adding a contemporary spin on the traditional work and extemporising it to making it our own - there was no harm in that.

My Guitar-Rig Factor strategy paid off today when we only had to go through 24 presets. It simply meant that we could focus on more pressing matters such as the structure of the piece and what Peer A and Peer B were going to do. Performing the sounds live was an entirely different story and at the time still didn't know whether we were going down the live installation or recorded performance stream. Of course, a live sound that was effective was going to sound effective recorded (not necessarily true the other way) so with that in mind - we were able to reduce the number of presets down to 6. Once this was done it was a matter of reacting to the sounds from the other players and it didn't take long before I settled on 'JS Dreamscape and Ocean Spray'. These were both adaptable presets meaning that I could adjust parameters in a live setting to vary the sound being produced - useful for the textural changes we were planning to do.

Peer A and Peer B asked whether I had access to an electric violin - an interesting proposition and one that I hadn't thought about. It was something worth exploring as they both have different sonic qualities so I figured it would be best to go through my Surrey contacts to see if one was avaliable for our future rehearsals. A potential major turning point in our project...

It was only later on in the session that we realised we were slightly gliding away from the original idea of using the marble run. Peer B seemed to only use the theramin like sensor on the arduino kit, rather than using the motion of the marbles (our original project theme idea). Instead of trying to solve this problem directly - we adjusted our outlook on the project to simplify the issue. 

The musical outcome was successful so why change it? We were happy with the general outlook so we figured it would be best to split the whole performance into two movements. One that uses the theramin sensor and  one that uses the marble-run directly to create the sounds. This had numerous advantages - not only an opportunity to showcase our diversity in composing and performing but it also meant there was a higher chance of each person in the group getting an important role. So it was OK if Peer B was simply playing drones in the 1st movement if he was to have a more involved role in the 2nd movement. 

The biggest turning point of the project to date was towards the end of the meeting when we discussed yet again about whether to do an installation or recorded performance. Back in Week 6 we spoke about the logisitics required in a live installation and with the backdrop of COVID, it looked like it was going to be hard to pull-off. As well as this, I noticed that Peer B didn't feel entirely comfortable with the idea of performing live and only having one take (fitting in with his competencies mentioned here). Finally, the acoustics within PA11 (our only viable option to perform in) wasn't exactly great and the benefits of recording meant that it didn't really matter what acoustic we were in. At this late stage in the project we decided to switch over to a recorded performance - whether this was a good call is something we can only assess at the end when our project is completed. However, the relief in Peer B's microgestures was noticeable so for the benefit of the group - it looked like the right call.

References

Bunting, R. (1977). \The Common Language of Music". In: Music in the Secondary School Curriculum 6.