[sdiy] new tune

[Dave Krooshof]

>Very clear: I was just wondering what quite you meant. The one where timbre
>changes introduce compositional changes is the hardest to achieve 
>(with electronic >instruments) but the most musical (because the 
>most natural), methinks.
I'm not sure if that is as hard as you suggest.
I just believe your fingerprints should be all over your equipment while
mixing it down, and not just on the mutes and faders.

>The use of FX to introduce sounds is pretty old hat, and would not 
>fit a composition
>where less is more; ie Paul could not have used an FX sound 
>(including drum roll)
>without compromising the minimalism of his piece.
I see. Good point. I do feel you narrowed my remark down a little too 
much if you
call it an effect, since that has the ring of cheep radio jingle 
"whoosh" sound.
But I do see how _that_ would violate the minimalism, yes.

>In his case, I think it is time to go back to time-honoured academic music
>composition with dissonances to introduce new sections and cadenza 
>to fade out.
>How that applies to idiophones (eg percussion) is an interesting 
>point raised by
>modern music which the Ancients didn't have to think about. Their 
>use of percussion
>was more an underlining or underscoring. As for the classical filter 
>sweep, well they'd
>never heard that. Could that be the historical importance of 
>Varese's sirens? There is
>certainly scope for much thought here;
Well, as I expressed before, I do feel the synthetic idiophones are 
an underscore
in this piece as well. They are not recorded as reverby as the drone, 
thus seem to
happen closer to you, but after all the events of starting new layers have
happened, my brain gets the rest of it and perceives them as the architecture
in which the drone lives.
The drone has a different sense of timing and moving. That is what separates
it from the grid.

Well, maybe, this perceived turnaround is what makes this music what it is.
Certainly after this discussion, it's what I'll be remebering it by.


<!-- getting a bit OT here, or are musique concrete composition issues
on topic enough? -->

>do you know if musique concrete ever saw any written theory on how 
>to use these
>special sounds (rather than philosophical waffling about the 
>importance of freedom
>from the diatonic scale, or any scale for that matter)?
Yes, it had. But then the question is "should you have a structure or not"
and "how can I tell your structure is good?" I simply leave out those 
questions.
I'm not interested in how a structure arises, being it math or intuition.
There've been several people who have been placing concrete over
mathematically organized grids. One of them is Klarenz Barlow:
http://www.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/archiv/sendungen/stukun/20010428.html
(text is in german, sorry, could find any english nor esperanto)

What he did was this: He made a trip around the world in 80 days, and recorded
2 minutes of sounds with a 24 hour interval (thus 81 in total).
Then he made a score in which he described when each of the pieces should
start, reach a peak, and stop. We didn't fade them in or out, we tried to let
them eat eachother spectrically with a 'dissolving' algoritm.
Unfortunately, to our ears, the ear still perceives it as fading to much.

One of the highlights: Klarenz managed to be in a plane, crossing the date line
on the 1st of january 2000/31st december 1999, thus being able to celebrate
the new millenium twice. The captain of the plane said "Ladies and Gentlemen,
we've just re-entered the 21st century".
Hows that for a mathematical composition?
It didn't end up in the composition, as it wasn't said around the 24 
hour interval
of recording for the piece.

Dave


-- 
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groets,

_          >^v<        _