During January I revised Landscape 1: Forest by adding a musique concrete layer. The sound sources I used include horn recordings from Landscape 7: Mountains, as well as bass harmonica recordings from Landscape 4: Sand Dunes. In all cases, I used Audacity to change the pitch level, as well as to stretch out the samples. My plans for February include revising the pedal steel part for Landscape 2: Snow. I’ll leave you with an updated realization of Landscape 1: Forest, including the new musique concrete layer.
Landscapes Update: January 1st, 2020
So I finished the composing for the Landscapes project on December 14th, 2019. Or did I? My wife, who teaches writing, would tell anyone that the key to good writing is revision. Any part that has already been recorded I will consider to be finished, but I plan on making at least one revision every month to one of the Landscapes movements. One of the things I may add is a layer of Musique Concréte to some movements, as it may make the pieces more marketable to festivals and conferences, and it’ll add another layer of timbral interest.
I plan on writing a grant for 2021 that will fund recording efforts for the Landscapes project. Until then I intend on continuing to record parts for the movements on my own. Accordingly, in December I finished a recording of the bass part for Landscape 5: Marsh, which is included below. Today I have made a YouTube playlist of the Landscapes project, so if you wish to hear them continuously, you may. I will continue to post updates on the Landscapes project every month or so, and will update the playlist as I add more recordings. Anyway, as promised, here is a recording of Landscape 5: Marsh featuring Carl Bugbee (from the prominent Rhode Island cover band Take it to the Bridge) on electric guitar, and myself on electric bass.
Landscapes Update: December 1st, 2019
Landscape 12: Autumn Forest is complete, and I have started the first phrase of Landscape 13: River, which will be the last piece in the series. I edited and mixed an orchestral reading of Landscape 7: Mountains. The reading, which was done in early November, was by the Musiversal Lisbon Orchestra https://www.musiversal.com/).
There’s been some changes on the Musiversal front. They are discontinuing the 30 piece Lisbon orchestra, and are adding a different 30 piece orchestra. This comes with some good news and some bad news. The bad news, as a consumer, is that they are raising their prices a bit. However, this is really good news, when you worked out how little the musicians were getting paid, they really do deserve more money. On the good side of things, they are allowing composers to purchase only seven minutes of time again, rather than having a 14 minute minimum, making it a bit more economical.
They’re also changing the instrumentation a bit. The new 30 piece orchestra only has 2 horns instead of 4, but they are adding a harp and percussionist. I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about that change. I don’t get to write for harp much, and who doesn’t love some timpani? Accordingly, I recomposed the orchestral part I wrote for Landscape 10: Rocky Coast, which I will hopefully have read in late winter 2020.
I’ll leave you with the new realization of Landscapes 7: Mountains with the added orchestral part, as well as Carl Bugbee’s guitar tracks. This piece was a bit tricky. Four phrases in work have orchestral backing. Two of these feature a dotted quarter hemiola, so I rewrote these to be in a compound meter in a different tempo to avoid syncopation in the orchestral part. Another difficulty for the piece is that it is in Gb major. However, only one of the phrases was easily notated in concert Gb major. Given instrumental transposition, it made the most sense to notate the other three phrases in E major, and add sharps where needed. Ultimately it made the most sense to write each phrase with a measure of rest of the entire orchestra between phrases, and to put the phrases in a different order than they appear in the piece in the arrangement. Even though two of the phrases segue into each other, it was easier to have the orchestra record them in separate passes, and edit them together in LogicPro.
Landscapes Update: November 3rd, 2019
Hello all! I have finished my writing quota for October, so Landscape 11: Farmland is complete. I’ve started working on November’s goal, Landscape 12: Autumn Forest, completing the first phrase. I have also written an orchestral part for Landscape 10: Rocky Coast, which will likely get recorded in Spring 2020.
Last month I finished spending the budget for my grant, with Carl Bugbee recording the guitar part to Landscape 8: Palm Glade, and Nara Shahbazyan recording cello parts for Landscapes 2 and 6 (Snow and Beach) respectively. Next weekend the orchestral part for Landscape 7: Mountains will get recorded by Musiversal’s Lisbon Orchestra. Thus, there will be some great musical updates that I’ll share with you all in the future, but for this month, I’ll share with you Landscape 8: Palm Glade featuring Carl Bugbee’s guitar tracks!
Landscapes Update: October 6th, 2019
Howdy! I finished my writing quota for September, and have written the first phrase towards my October quota. Thus, Landscape 10: Rocky Coast is finished, and Landscape 11: Farmland has been started. Unfortunately I had little time to record, but I was able to incorporate the horn parts for Landscape 4: Sand Dunes into the recording (the horn parts were recorded separately by Musiversal, as their horn players were not present at the orchestral reading).
I was also able to incorporate Carl Bugbee’s guitar recordings for Landscape 7: Mountains into the mix. I have an orchestral reading for this movement scheduled in November, but for now, I’ll leave you with the current version of Landscape 7, including Carl’s guitar tracks . . .
Landscapes Update: September 2nd, 2019
Hello all. I did well on my writing quota for the month of August. I finished Landscape 9: Desert, and am already 1/3 of the way through my September quota for working Landscape 10: Rocky Coast. Unfortunately I had very little time to do any recording, which I hope to get back to soon. So, I’ll leave you with a realization of Landscape 6: Beach that features Carl Bugbee from Rhode Island’s premiere cover band Take it to the Bridge on guitar, and myself on bass.
“Pantone” for Theremin and Video
I have been playing theremin for a little less than a year. The instrument has quickly become a passion for me. As a composer, it is desirable for me to be able to publicly perform some of my own works. Thus, the challenge is to write a piece for an entry level performer that is still going to engage an audience sufficiently.
Setting the piece at a slow tempo allows the theremin to focus on slow lyrical lines that are within my grasp as a performer. The fixed audio part, created using Apple’s Logic Pro, serves as a compliment to the slow, lyrical nature of the theremin. The fixed audio uses faster, often syncopated rhythms that add a surface level energy to the piece.
Another way to add energy and excitement to the piece is to add a visually engaging video to accompany the work. The concept behind the work attempts to bridge the visual and audio worlds. In the visual realm, pantone refers to a color classification system. In sound, I offer pantone as a description of an instrument, like the theremin, that can create any frequency that exists between its highest and lowest possible notes.
Creating a video for Pantone creates another set of problems, related to my relative inexperience as a visual artist. Years ago I wrote a chamber opera, Into the Cautious Season, that used projected images that were similar in nature to a graphic novel representation of the plot and libretto to both set the scene, as well as to display the libretto. I created the graphic novel version in black and white as well as a version using some color. Inspired by the water color skies used in It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, I used watercolor paints on the black and white images to create a limited color version.
Due to my lack of skill as a visual artist, I cannot say that the graphic novel version of Into the Cautious Season was successful. However, I can say that it was good enough to be a proof of concept, and that I believe a version done by someone with decent illustration skills could work well. Moreover, I began to think that simple scans of single color fields of watercolor paint could make an interesting basis for a video.
For Pantone I started with nine black and white images from the patent drawings for the theremin. Then, I used watercolors to paint single color designs that mimic the designs on top of the drawings. After scanning the images into a computer, I then made nine glitched versions of each, by changing each image file to a text file, copying, pasting, and deleting material before changing the file back into image files.
For each musical phrase of Pantone I superimposed nine of these glitched images on top of each other in Apple’s Final Cut Pro. I set each layer to zoom in and out and to move about independently of the other images. Furthermore, each layer was set to only let a percentage of colors through. This approach resulted in a detailed, yet slow moving texture of colors. One final detail added to the video involved adding an increasing number of visual accents that coincide with musical accents. These were achieved by exporting specific frames as images, glitching those image files, and superimposing them for about four frames over the video.
Sonically speaking Pantone is an homage to the future of my youth. When I was a child, commercially available analog synthesizers were relatively new. Artists like Wendy Carlos, Don Dorsey, Jean-Jacques Perry, and Isao Tomita created sonic palettes that will always sound like the future to me. In creating the fixed audio accompaniment for the piece, I emphasized timbres that emulated these analog synthesizers.
Ultimately I believe that Pantone offers several features that can engage listeners: lyrical melodic material performed on a novel instrument, a fixed audio part that is rhythmically energetic, a sonic palette that invokes a nostalgic science-fictionesque world, and a colorfully meditative visual component filled with detail.
(in performance in Pawtucket, RI on December 4th, 2016)
(in performance in Bridgewater, MA on March 1st, 2017)