Doomed to repeat

In a class I showed the engraving video that has made its way around the music blogs lately. If you have a broadband connection you can see it here:


Part way through (and I'm serious here) a student said, "Wait, haven't they been using Finale since like the 19th century?"

I performed a sort of stuttering combination of sentence beginnings without any endings, "They uh, " "No um..." "What do you..." "Finale wasn't really..." Finally another student saved me by saying something like, "they didn't even have computers back then you idiot."

Now I'm pretty sure he realized how dumb his question was almost as soon as he uttered it, but I guess it is a common mistake all of us tend to make. That is, the impression that nothing existed before you were born. For instance, the 60's and the Civil Rights movement seems like history to me, and the cold war is something I barely know anything about. Why? Because the only people that would have told me, wouldn't have realized that I didn't already know. I can imagine myself sitting in a class at some point and blurting out, "Haven't we been traveling to the moon for like the last hundred years?" I imagine the previous generation knew little about the Great Depression, and the earlier one couldn't imagine a world without automobiles. Things are only changing faster and faster. Kids can't imagine a time before the internet, soon the time before cell phones will be history. You know, when I was a kid, Cars had wheels that were always on the ground. And we had to drive them ourselves!

e-biquitous

Now that I'm back in the college atmosphere, I'm interested to see the differences of today's students. I'm not claiming that I graduated all that long ago, but the changes are still striking.

People are connected.
Yesterday I was walking back to my parking spot (my quarter-mile exercise for the day) and I followed behind a couple holding hands. Aw, how sweet, good ol' college sweethearts. But when I got closer, I found they were each talking on cell phones. What?! Now who could you possibly need to be talking to while walking with your darling? Is it your high school buddy, or maybe your roommate? jeese.

Every day is the same; everyone I pass has a cell phone, iPod, or some other electronic device in hand. It is uncanny, like some kind of trippy Motorola commercial or something.

The other way students are connected is through IM. I have a few friends that I keep in touch with IM, but my buddy list is woefully small compared to most of the students. I don't understand where they find 50-60 friends to populate their buddy list. They obviously pass their screen name out without a care, whereas I've noticed people my age are a little wary of giving it out. Personally, I believe IM will become much more pervasive and useful in the future. I've already used it effectively in grad school. I posted my screen name on the computer in the lab and I had a number of times when a student would IM me at 10:00pm to say the MIDI is not working, or ask to have me walk them through a complicated process. I'm looking forward to the day when an IM device is embedded in everyone and we evolve into a race that speaks very little out loud. That way, when I zone out when people are talking to me, I will be able to later review everything they say in my cache browser.

See, it's not that I have a problem paying attention, it's just that I'm ahead of the technology.

A Puzzle for Finale geeks

I assigned the second movement to Francis Poulenc's Mouvement Perpétual to my Computer and Music students last week. The piece is simple for the most part until you get to the last measure:


I knew this was going to be trouble, but I also knew that nothing is impossible with Finale, (I wouldn't make that claim with Sibelius). Some of the difficulties were foreseen, such as the missing 32nd note, but there were some other surprising complications. For instance, the glissando word by itself does not come standard in smart shapes, and the cross-staved notes were a little tricky. But I got it, in under an hour. Test your chops, see how fast you can do it... Or just follow the instructions below:


1. Speedy Entry:
Speedy entry menu: check for extra notes to off
top staff 32 note D, 32nd note D octave up, dotted eighth rest (hidden), another 32nd note (high D) double dotted eighth rest
hide the dotted eighth rest (H), flip the high D (L)
bottom staff octave up, quarter, quarter, 32nd rest, double dotted eighth rest, quarter rest
2. Note Mover
note mover menu, choose "cross staff"
throw the a-flat down to the bottom staff
3. Special Tools -
reverse stem: flip the note on its stem in the second group of 32nds
beam angle: tweak the beams on both 32nd note sets
note shape: choose 202 for the note shape on the second 32nd note to hide it.
custom stem: choose 66 to hide the stem
4. Clef tool
double click in the bottom staff
choose create movable mid-measure clef
5. Smart Tools
option click the custom smart tool
duplicate the glissando with the wavy line
edit your duplicate
in the "Line Style" "Character" box, delete the tilda (~)
draw the glissando and tweak the placement
add the 8va's
6. add the breath marks using the Articulation tool (#36)
7. Tweak the spacing using Speedy entry and/or the Measure tool

Transitions are never easy

So it has been awhile, starting a new job, been busy, yadda-yadda...

Anyway I'm back, I'll try blogging again semi-regularly... um.. weekly maybe.

The new job:
My predecessor, Josh was still around part-time for two weeks to get me oriented with the system and the many varied duties. We also had some goals to accomplish when I arrived: transition to the newly updated Mac server, make live the new department website, connect to the campus LDAP system. Unfortunately we weren't able to do these until the last day (afternoon) that Josh was there.

You've heard that it is surprisingly easy to fly a plane once it is in the air and cruising; it is the taking off, landing, and other troublesome maneuvers that require all that time and money in flight school. Well, somehow the LDAP binding maneuver wiped out the users on the server. So while I thought I'd have time to study and tweak the system ever so cautiously, I found myself throwing levers in the cockpit and wildly making adjustments in mid-flight, meanwhile speaking calmly in the microphone to the passengers, uh.. don't be alarmed, I will have things back up and running shortly.

I exaggerate. But that is close to how I felt. The first week I was at school eleven or twelve hours a day plus working well towards midnight from home, but I now feel like things are back to normal and I can start working on the things I have been putting off for two weeks (like sleep... and blogging).

Florida in January

I realized last fall that it was the first time in almost 25 years that I was not preparing for school in some capacity or another.

As a Kindergartener, I was excited to get on that yellow bus but also intimidated by the big kids that surrounded me. Ooh, bus rides can be cruel. Throughout the years I had grown out of being excited and became more bored, wishing for the day I could drive myself. College was different. One fall I packed my things in the evening, expecting to leave first thing in the morning, but since I was so eager to go, I decided to drive through the night. After college I went straight into teaching elementary and middle school band. I loved the job and working with the little ones, but I must admit, I experienced a little bit of dread when the calendar broke into August or when I would glimpse a yellow bus on its way to the shop. Grad school followed that and the thousands of things that needed to be done in an impossibly small amount of time consumed all of my energy.

And so, I took a deep breath last fall. I watched the hectic parents and students grabbing school supplies. I smiled at the sight of teenagers slouching at bus stops. I waved at the bus as it passed. It was like golfing during a business day, or enjoying a Florida beach in January. Oh what a feeling of freedom and peace.

Now it appears that I'll be heading off to Case (Western Reserve) in Cleveland this August to work in the Music Department as the Music Tech specialist. I'll be running the lab, the Mac server, and the multimedia classrooms, and I'll get some teaching in as well.
Ooh, I need to go get some school supplies.

Fives

When I was an undergrad freshman, I stumbled into the campus chapel to hear the Messiah College Concert Choir directed by Linda Tedford. This was before I was a music major, I was by myself on my way to the library or something and decided on the spur of the moment to listen. When I sat and heard the tone of the choir I was immediately impressed. There was just something that I had never experienced before in that sound. The next year I auditioned and joined the choir (and the music department officially) and had some of the best times of my life there.

Looking back, the thing I heard was beautiful intonation. The perfect fifths and fourths were rock solid, but I don't think that would have made the impression. It must have been the major and minor thirds that were performed unlike anything I had previously heard. You see, as a piano player, I would have been used to hearing a close approximation to perfect fifths (the triple ratio), but the quintuple relationship would have been foreign to my equally-tempered ears.

Well tuned thirds are the primary difference between equal temperament and what is called Just Intonation. As I've explained earlier, equal temperament is a crude and artificial slicing of the octave(2:1) into twelve equal parts. Just Intonation however takes into account the ratios of 5:3, 5:4, 6:5, and 8:5 otherwise known as the minor third, major third, minor sixth, and Major sixth respectively. In a choir, string ensemble, and wind ensemble, performers can and should adjust each tone of the chromatic scale to accommodate different keys and tonalities. In other words, Just Intonation is fluid and flexible, which is highly inconvenient for fixed pitch instruments such as the piano and marimba but for these types of ensembles, it can be dramatic and... life-changing.

My kind of humor

My wife evidently knows how to make me laugh out loud. In an email from her:

There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't.

Ratios Summary thus far

We have the duple relationship, such as 4:1 and 2:1, which are known commonly as octaves and are basically the same note. We have unison, 1:1, which is actually the same note. We have the triple relationship, 3:2 and 4:3 which are the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth respectively.
Pythagorus derived from the triple ratio the circle of fifths F,C,G,D,A,E,B. C is F times three, G is F times three times three, D is the triple triple triple of F, etc... These pitches, when translated to the same 2:1 or octave becomes our diatonic scale: C,D,E,F,G,A,B. Around the 15th and 16th century the use of sharps and flats came into practice and the idea of the chromatic 12 note scale surfaced, followed soon after with Equal Temperament. For the last 400 years we in the western world have been infatuated with, immersed in, and frustrated by the equally tempered twelve tone scale.

The problem is this:
There are other ratios to be heard. Our twelve tones are only an approximation of the richness that could be possible if we could break out of our cocoon. I wouldn't dream of saying Pythagorus is to blame. I think the biggest factors that have led to our situation is our constraining notation system and the composers who have failed to think outside of its box.

next time:
the drama of fives

Roll over Pythagorus

The ancient Greeks, around 550 BC, believed that there was something mystical about the number three, that it must be godly somehow. Since music was also important, it must be related to three. (btw, this also seems to be a reason why our Christian Church fathers were so adamant about defining to the smallest iota the theology of the Trinity. The Greeks were neurotic about anything related to threes, especially religion.)

Pythagorus utilized a monochord, a crude, one-stringed instrument useful for taking measurements of the precise ratio of the vibrating string. When he halved it, he got the octave above the original plucked string sound. When he divided the string in thirds, he got the perfect fifth above. Okay, that's the end of his experiment, he decided to deduce everything we know about music from that. Yeah, those Greeks were thorough. So he built a scale based on fifths which is our way of saying the ratio 3/2. So, as the ages went by, western music ended up with a scale based on the notes of the circle of fifths: F, C, G, D, A, E, B and the chromatics went beyond that. Of course we added those names to the pitches much later, like 2000 years later. The important part is that if Pythagorus had decided to maybe try the five ratio instead of just threesies, we would very likely have H, I, J, K, and L added to our keyboards today.

Up to around 1600AD western musicians were infatuated with the perfect fifth and perfect fourth, both of which are ratios involving 3 (3/2, and 4/3 respectively). It may also be interesting to note that our current popular music revolves around the I, IV, V chords, the roots of which are the same as above.
Hmm..
Now you can say, "That band is sooo... 6th century... BC."

Ratios and music

I've been reading Harry Partch lately. Great stuff. It became much more enjoyable after I printed my GRE vocab list and kept it nearby. Here is my book report on Partch's Genesis of a Music: This guy is neurotic.

I respect the work that he put into this stuff and all, it's just that he is overly thorough. The sad part is that his invented instruments are now quite obsolete as a result of technology.

Anyway here is the start of what may become a series of posts based on intonation.

Ratios.
Music is most correctly described as ratios. All those lines and dots and squiggles that is all the rage in today's music conservatories are misleading, erroneous, artificial, cumbersome... oh, don't get me started on notation.

The first rule of ratio music is two's are perceived as the same note. Tell a choir to sing an "A," the altos with perfect pitch, that is, all of them, will sing A440, which is a tone that vibrates at 440 times a second. The tenors will sing A220, the basses will sing A110, and the divas among the sopranos, that is, the entire soprano section will sing A880. 110, 220, 440, and 880. Halved or doubled, they're all the same note, just different octaves.

Now through a convoluted and arbitrary historical process that will wait for another day for thorough explanation, an octave on the piano contains 12 chromatic keys. This equally tempered scale is a perversion of the ratios that occur naturally in sound. The mindset behind equal temperament is, "Well, since its too hard to get most of the notes in tune, we'll just make all of them out of tune and they'll be close enough."

As a result, none of the ratios that you hear on a "well" tuned piano occur naturally except for the octave, the 2 to 1 ratio. Some knot-head about 500 years ago said to himself, "Hey, let's just forget about these inconvenient ratios and divide the octave into 12 equal segments."

Then he said. "That makes cents."

Sound and performance

One characteristic of electronic music is the way the music is divorced from the performance gesture. That is, the sound does not necessarily relate to the performance of that sound. For instance, watch Bela Fleck and his Flecktones sometime. You'll hear percussion though there is no apparent drummer on stage. The percussionist is actually Future Man, playing his drum axe, or whatever he calls it, wait, let me check... "synth-axe drumitar." It's basically a guitar like thing with a whole lot of buttons all over it, triggering whatever drum samples he programs for each song. It makes sense to me, he has ten fingers to work with instead of just four limbs. Also the bassist, Victor Wooten, doesn't appear to play half the notes you hear, but that's not electronics, that's just crazy-mad skill.

Whereas in the past a violinist creates a beautiful tone by applying the precise amount of pressure at a carefully consistent speed, today I re-create the same beautiful tone quality by choosing an appropriate sample from my hard drive. However, the point of electronic music is not to duplicate traditional (obsolete) instrumentation, but to expand the sound palette to include entirely new sounds(John Cage, Silence, pg. 4). Who needs mallets and bows and air pressure when the crack of thunder or crashing ocean wave is at my command. Why limit myself to chord progressions to intensify drama when I can include the sound of a wailing child, or exploding rocket. I can be as subtle as the beating of a butterfly's wings or the crackle of smoldering charcoal (Iannis Xenakis, Concret PH, 1958) .

But, the question remains, is all this a good thing? Perhaps the thing that makes music the most valuable for most people is the human connection between audience and performer. People like to visualize (auralize) the rosin contacting the string, the desperate breath required for the trumpet entrance, the effort involved in maintaining pitch on the oboe, etc..

This is why I believe, as much I value electronic music, live performance on acoustic instruments will never completely go away.

Another idea taken

I think the choir is a sadly untapped resource as far as sound capabilities. I mean imagine the variety of sounds that someone like Bobby Mcferrin can accomplish with his voice and multiply it by 60. Endless possibilities. It highlights one of the true challenges of composition, perhaps the greatest challenge: imagining and sculpting a sound that has never been heard before. This is why I like composing electronic music, I experiment with sounds, move them around stumble on something great and then craft the work. How I wish I had a choir in my basement, on which I could call to try out new ideas: "Okay, altos I want you to click your tongue against your front teeth randomly, tenors sustain an 's' sound according to this notation...." Now you have some understanding what the term "Experimental" means when it comes to early twentieth century composition.

Now to illustrate some of the possibilities of "choral sound-design."
and for those of us with dial up, some .mov, and .wmv files here.
check out the "making of" videos on this blog as well.

The Dayjob

So I stumbled across Sequenza 21 a couple months ago and have been a fan ever since. So here I am, fresh out of grad school with a degree in composition looking at a blog featuring an experienced contemporary composer. This is what I read: (paraphrased) Don't get a BM in composition. Get a worthwhile degree, a decent job and compose nights and weekends.

Wow. So much for all my dreams and lofty hopes. So much for all that tuition I paid and continue to pay...

When I think about it, though, perhaps he has a point. I mean having a day job might be ideal for a composer. If I want my music to be truly independent, my own voice, then I should not rely on others to pay me according to how much they like the sound. I don't need to have credentials and publications and awards in order to write great music. Someday I will plunge into the highly competitive world of academia, but not right now.

When I was an undergrad, I told a professor I was interested in teaching higher education someday. He said, "Well, someone's gotta do it."

I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but after helping my supervising prof get her tenure, and witnessing the irrelevant hurdles required, I think I know exactly what he meant.

So that's where I'm at. I'm helping my dad with his small business in a small town in rural Pennsylvania. I have composed more things in the last six months that I like personally than I composed in my final year at school. I spend quality time with my wife, daughter and newborn son.

Mission accomplished, so far.
I'll keep you posted.

Between the Lines

When I was recording my flute and electronics piece, Oasis, I fell in love with the sound of cracked notes, and the unintentional whistle tones produced when the flutist played extremely quietly. As I mixed the piece I tended to emphasize the breath sounds and all of these other "noises" that inevitably occur with live playing. I know the reason I was drawn to these sounds so much... normally in my electronic world they are absent. So much of my time in mixing and recording my files is spent on the making it sound like a realistic performance, adding the imperfect human element. Detuning, adding noise, finessing the vibrato and performance techniques.
Since then I have based entire compositions on these often unwanted sounds or "noises." My Digital Construction suite includes sounds of a bowed violin. Don't get the wrong impression though, I bowed every surface of the violin except for the normal position. The strings behind the bridge, the strings by the posts (listen to the end of #2, it sounds like a creaky swing-set) the bridge itself, the neckpiece, the posts etc...
I like to think of these sounds as those which are beyond the notation, impractical to place on the lines, between the cracks of our steadfast notation system:
Between the lines.

About me

I compose Electro-acoustic music.
You can listen to some of it here:
www.tedsmoker.com

Thanks for reading,
Ted Smoker