CSM 20: Electroacoustic Music Works by Pressing, Gerrard, Cary, Vennonen, Burt & Worrall
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Item Open Access Tristram Cary: Trellises (1984)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1984) Composer: Tristram Cary; Grafton-Greene, Michael"A hazard for the computer music composer is that a given piece tends to be tied to the technology that produced it. Trellises is now, in a sense, a part of history as the New England Digital Synclavier I System (manufactured around 1978-81) for which it was written is now obsolete. All music generators sound different, and to reprogram it for another set-up would in effect create a new piece. At the time I was writing the work in 1984, the System was running perfectly; I recorded a 12-minute extract of an infinitely long four-track piece as a test, planning to develop the idea of the piece further. Sadly, within a month the System had died. This 12-minute tape is all that remains, and the evidence of its analog origin (mainly tape noise) must be forgiven in this stereo reduction. For years, I had been floating the idea of an infinitely self-renewing piece, continually changing in shape and texture, but always showing enough constant characteristics to be recognisably the same piece however long it was played. By its nature, there could be no beginning or end, and I envisaged a fluctuation between fairly dense, busy textures and thin, reposeful passages with only one or two voices. In Trellises, a function is designed to draw waveforms on an oscilloscope (CRO). After an initial function is loaded, whatever is drawn on the CRO is read and used to control the instruments. There are 24 of these, a mixture of sines, additives and FM, and a single call can initiate an event of anything between one and 21 notes. Eight parameters are also controlled by the plot, overall volume, number of notes per event, highest and lowest frequencies for the event, ontime and off-time of notes, choice of instrument, and rate of decay of each note. The CRO picture changes continually, and my intention was to run the piece thoughout some public exhibition - a never-repeating performance of, say, a week. I did run it for about 15 hours on one occasion and this recording is a small part of that run. In its full form, Trellises is not intended to be listened to in the normal way, but visited a few minutes at a time, to see, so to speak, how it's getting on. In certain respects, it is always the same, but the chances of exact repetition, even if it ran for years, are very remote indeed." -- Tristram CaryItem Open Access Kimmo Vennonen: Mirage (1994)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1994) Composer: Kimmo Vennonen; Grafton-Greene, Michael"Mirage is an exploration of a technique I have developed that I call complex feedback. I used it on my 1989 CD with Jim Denley, Time of Non Duration, and Mirage is a further development. The technique involves linking digital and analog sound processors to a custom mixer with many patch leads - no synthesizers or sound generators are used. The result is a hybrid instrument with enormous timbral possibilities, having literally chaotic origins. The last time I assembled this instrument, I recorded two hours of interaction, mindful that nothing would sound the same again. Mirage was then composed from about ten minutes of the recording. These sounds have their own life, their own individual ways of moving and changing. Virtually no layering or further processing was used, so as to retain this original vitality." -- Kimmo VennonenItem Open Access Jeff Pressing: His Master's Voice (1990-93)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Composer: Jeff Pressing; Grafton-Greene, Michael"This work is for two solo performers: live voice, and vocal samples triggered and controlled by two MIDI keyboards. These samples are generated by an Akai sampler and signal-processed in realtime by a Max program written by Jim Sosnin and the composer. One keyboard selects the pitch of the samples to be played, and the other selects the processing type and parameters in the chosen processes. The vocal sounds focus on extended vocal techniques, ethnic borrowings, harmonic reinforcement, and phonetics of an imaginary composed language. The intention is to create a dialogue between live performer and samples, with the computer acting as a third agent. In formal terms, the piece is in three contiguous parts: the first is linear and abject; the second busy, variegated and whimsical; and the third is a codetta based on part one. This recording is of the live performance by the composer at the 1993 International Computer Music Conference in Tokyo, Japan." -- Jeff PressingItem Open Access Warren Burt: A Fig Tree (1990)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1990) Composer: Warren Burt; Grafton-Greene, Michael"Fig Tree (In a Post-Coltrane Environment 1 / f is Too Highly Correlated) is the final movement of a ten-movement piece called Chaotic Research Music, written in 1989-90, in which I investigated many different ways of applying chaos theory to music. The title of this movement refers to my critique of some musical works which used a kind of random structure called 1/f weighted noise for structuring music. While it may be true that this kind of structure possesses fractal qualities, and some mathematicians have pointed out that the melodic structure of much traditional music resembles that of 1/f weighted noise, these factors alone are not enough to guarantee my musical interest. Since John Coltranes sheets of sound, let alone John Cages or Iannis Xenakiss work, I have wanted melodic material of greater complexity and unpredictability than that which possesses 1/f characteristics. The sound of music structured this way often sounds too predictable, too normal for my ears. For this piece, the Verhulst equation xnext = rx(l-x) was used to generate motives from three to eight notes long. These motives were used as templates to transpose the motives into different tempi, loudnesses and pitch levels so that the motives could be extended into phrases. The phrases were then extended into longer melodies and then assembled into canons using the same principles. All of these canons were then transposed into a set of microtonal scales which I invented in 1987, and the structure of all the harmonics of all the sounds in the piece were determined by the structures of the motives in their various scales. Six of the canons control simple tones made with a technique called additive synthesis, while the other six control samples of the motives themselves, played with their appropriate timbre and tuning. This was my most rigorous application of concepts of self-similarity to date, where every aspect of the piece, from the timbre to the large scale structure of the canons, was derived hierarchically from the same chaos-derived source. In live performance, I select which of the canons is playing at what time, improvisationally controlling both the textural and large scale harmonic motions of the piece. The end result of all these quasi-mathematical workings, however, is a surprisingly gentle piece, made of resonant bell tones, which again and again grows from melodic simplicity into textures of greater complexity, and then returns to its initial, simpler state." -- Warren BurtItem Open Access David Worrall: Cords 2b (1994)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1994) Composer: David Worrall; Grafton-Greene, Michael"In its original form, Cords (1992) is a polymedia performance work for real-time computer animation and computer music using digital feedback techniques. In the original version, which I made with a student of mine, Virginia Read, the music emanates from 16 channels of loudspeakers in a portable performance space: a seven-metre-radius geodesic hemisphere, and the images are projected on large screens encircling the audience. Cords 2b is a stereo sound-only realisation with more sophisticated real-time analysis and response algorithms. The work is in three movements, a plucked drone softly pulsing throughout: I. Plucked string sounds with accelerando/decelerando percussion accompaniment; II. Percussion solo featuring simultaneous lines, each with different tempo schemes; III. Bowed string sounds with percussion accompaniment. The work was/is composed and performed using the composers real-time composition/performance software Streamer." -- David WorrallItem Open Access Graeme Gerrard: Passing The Bright Mirror (1992)(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1992) Composer: Graeme Gerrard; Grafton-Greene, Michael"Fundamental to our experience of ourselves and our environment is the interplay between cyclic or repetitious activity and aperiodicity (which is sonically manifested as noise). With these we ascribe value - the desire for order and predictability, the tedium and tyranny of repetition, the relentless increase in entropy, the confusion of chaos, the hunger for spontaneity and variety, the delight in the discovery of pattern, and so on. Passing Bright Mirror combines these two poles of experience, the title reflecting the ambiguity of just who, or what, is doing the passing - the uncertainty, and exchange, of subject and object." -- Graeme GerrardItem Open Access Anthology of Austraian Music on Disc: CSM: 20 Electroacoustic Music Works by Pressing, Gerrard, Cary, Vennonen, Burt & Worrall(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University) Campbell, Peter