Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category

Unruly Music/MiLO/C-Squared Residency

A recap of the Unruly Music festival, presented Sept. 8 – 10 at Vogel Hall in Milwaukee:

On the first night, Susan Bender presented Georges Aperghis’ Recitations along with Cage’s Aria/Fontana Mix. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend, but heard it was great.

On the second night, I performed with the rest of the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra. Along with a few small group improvisations, we played Steve Nelson-Raney’s Sextet 1998 and Kevin Schlei’s Languid Flow of Imaginary Vapors. Most of the pieces were accompanied by some sort of live visuals by Chris Burns, Brent Coughenour, or Kevin Schlei. The evening closed with an improvised soundtrack to Underwater Noise of Rain, a film by Lane Hall and Lisa Moline.

On the final night C-Squared, the flute/cello duo of Lisa Cella and Franklin Cox, performed a concert of contemporary music, mostly by “new complexity” composers. I was also able to work with them a bit on my current project, which they will premier during the second Unruly festival, in April, 2010. They’re both intelligent, helpful, friendly people, and the work session was fruitful – I’ve got a bunch of new ideas for the piece, both sonically and formally.

2009
09/11
CATEGORY
Electronic Music
Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra
Original Music
Uncategorized
7 comments

Max as an Algorithmic Composition Tool

You know, since making the switch to Max/MSP from Pure Data, I’ve been quite pleased with what Max has to offer. One area that I think is generally overlooked by Max users is the ability to use Max as an algorithmic composition language for acoustic composition.

I’ve stumbled upon these abilities after playing around with a few different languages/environments that function as compositional tools. PWGL and Common Music are both nice, I’ve even taken a course in Common Music, but they’re both Lisp-based (which for me makes them awkward – C is my first language, and I still think in terms of nested loops and function calls).

PD doesn’t really have any built-in tools for anything, which is good and bad – it forces you to really think through a problem, thus ending up with a totally unique and personal solution, but it also takes forever to accomplish complex tasks.

I tried using straight C/C++ to build my own tools, but that was ridiculous. I am not interested in spending more time than I have to for coding.

Max has the [zl] object, which provides a bunch of list-processing functions, many similar to some of the methods found in SuperCollider. There are sorting and comparing functions, along with iteration and scrambling capabilities. I mean, try using PD to make a random tone row generator which assembles a random list containing no repeated elements. In Max, it’s literally like two objects. Simple.

Now, not to sound like a Cycling ’74 ad, because proprietary software still kinda sucks and makes a lot of things more difficult for us, and because the help browsing in Max 5 is broken in Snow Leopard, but I think this is a fruitful area to explore.

You might want to check this out, too: Karlheinz Essl’s: RTC-lib

2009
09/03
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
9 comments

An Exercise in Transcription

Decided to do a realization of the piece I posted about here a bit ago.

Since the rhythms are proportional, I had to break out the ruler and calculate the actual notated rhythms, rounding to the nearest 16th. The idea being that this, along with more control over pitches, will allow me to put more of a personal stamp on the material. Right now I’m planning on retaining the same cueing system used before, we’ll see how that changes.

So, I went from this:

rhythm_one_proportional

To this:

rhythm_one_notated

Both images are the same rhythmic material, though the second is obviously more precise.

Not sure how I’m going to handle pitches yet, or if the linear structure of the piece is going to change.

2009
09/02
CATEGORY
Acoustic Music
Original Music
Uncategorized
6 comments