43 Eclyptic 1996 For Chamber Orchestra 5m
Eclyptic was written for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s Composer’s Workshop 1996. It harmonic material and its title are derived from an earlier work Fantasia on the Trial of Ern Malley. The basis for Eclyptic was a set of harmonic analyses of the voice of baritone Andrew Foote that I made in 1995. I have tried to capture some of this complex and chaotic inner life of sound in the realm of orchestral colour and effects. Formally however, Eclyptic’s roots are far more traditional: it is a kind of passacaglia, where the harmonic sequence is enriched by addition with each successive reiteration.
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42 Fantasia of the trial of Ern Malley 1995 Baritone, Piano and CD 20m
The Australian poet Ern Malley never existed. His poems are the centre of one of the greatest literary hoaxes of the twentieth century. Ern Malley was created by two conservative poets wishing to discredit the highly influential Angry Penguins Magazine in the 1940s. The conspirators submitted the collected works of Ern Malley (along with a cover note from his fictitious Aunt) to Angry Penguins and they were duly published by editor Max Harris with great praise. When the hoax was revealed it made news all around the world, but then things really became complicated. Firstly Harris stood by his claim that the works were of great literary merit no matter how they were written. Literary critics from around the world including Herbert Read also leapt to his defence. Albert Tucker also obliged by painting a portrait of the first great (if non-existent) Australian Modernist poet. And secondly, despite the claims of the authors that the poems were completely meaningless the South Australian government deemed them to be indecent and charged and tried Harris for publishing obscene literature.
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This fantastic tale seems to me to sum up a great deal about the Australian psyche: a desire to cut down tall poppies and expose pretentiousness versus the defiant individualistic pursuit of modernity and experimentalism; and belligerent misunderstanding by the public.
I propose to write for Andrew a cycle of songs from the sixteen poems of Ern Malley to be accompanied by Piano and 'Virtual Piano' (a recorded part consisting entirely of piano sounds altered in various ways that are reproduced by small speakers inside the piano) I choose this instrumentation because it is easy to reproduce in concert and because the real and imaginary piano is analogous to the real and imaginary figure of Ern Malley.
I see this as a first step toward a projected larger music theatre work dealing with the circumstances surrounding the Ern Malley affair.
I propose to write for Andrew a cycle of songs from the sixteen poems of Ern Malley to be accompanied by Piano and 'Virtual Piano' (a recorded part consisting entirely of piano sounds altered in various ways that are reproduced by small speakers inside the piano) I choose this instrumentation because it is easy to reproduce in concert and because the real and imaginary piano is analogous to the real and imaginary figure of Ern Malley.
I see this as a first step toward a projected larger music theatre work dealing with the circumstances surrounding the Ern Malley affair.
41 rendez-vous: an opera noir 1995 2 Sopranos, Mezzo, Baritone, Boy Actor and Male Actor, Violin, Cello, Saxophone, Piano, Percussion and electronics 75m
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Rendez-vous: an Opera Noir is based on French Post-Modernist author Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Djinn. Adapting prose for the stage is never without difficulties, but this work presented some very particular challenges. Most of these challenges flowed from the fact that Robbe-Grillet had cunningly contrived to make it questionable whether Djinn was a novel at all. The work was the result of a commission from an American university to create the text for a didactic French tutor - complete with progressively challenging French grammar and vocabulary. Robbe-Grillet's conceit was to use this normally non-literary opportunity to create a true anti-novel - an ambiguous narrative – circuitous and non-linear but with enough coherence to suggest a story hidden beneath to the unsuspecting French student.
Analysis of the elements and ordering of Djinn's narrative reveals a disturbingly recursive sequence of often slightly varied events (a technique found in many of Robbe-Grillet's works most notably his Recollections from the Golden Triangle (Robbe-Grillet, 1978)). |
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It is as though the unknown narrator were turning these events over in his mind, toying with the reader or perhaps just "getting the story straight." Here, as in the crime novel, it is arguably the desire to discover the "true" story that drives the narrative. However, whether the reader finds them tantalizing or exasperating, Robbe-Grillet's clues frequently point towards divergent solutions or implausible non-solutions.
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The preceeding description might suggest that Djinn is a "difficult" text, however the author's playful nods to US Pop-culture - in particular 50s Noir, Sci-fi and Supernatural film genres - and his thinly veiled tongue-in-cheek linguistic tips to his potential American college audience, make Djinn one of Robbe-Grillet's most approachable and good humoured works.
The key to a successful adaptation then seemed to be to capture these qualities from the original text: familiarity through references to known genres; and tightly knit structural principles that give the audience a sense that there is some "real" story submerged below the constructed details that are presented to them and not just an indecipherable random collection of events. Opera came into existence rather suddenly in Renaissance Venice around 1600. It was a synthetic construction and its emergence was driven by the contemporary ambition to restore Europe’s greatness by reconstructing the cultural pillars of antiquity. Its originators, the Camerata ‘sought to recreate antique tragedy in its original form, on the supposition that the ancient Greek drama was sung from beginning to end. Already at its very origin, opera was caught between the demand for a rebirth of a mythical past, the loyalty to an ideal standard, and the need for innovation required by its rebirth. (Dolar, M., and Zizek, S., 2002 P.5-6) |
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Opera was dominated by formal structures derived from Classic Greek rhetoric. Within a short period opera had settled into a standard three act form: a first act introducing characters and themes; a second posing a problem; and the third resolving the problem. This structure, already established by the time of Handel was still very much the organizing principle at the beginning of the 20th Century even in radical works such as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1921).
Presenting a text such as Djinn as an opera requires a different form of narrative structure in order to draw the audience into its world. Theorist Janet Murray has identified such a new structure to illustrate this type of form. She terms this structure the "violence hub". Murray describes the violence hub as a structure in which 'a violent incident is placed at the center of a web of narratives…that explore it from multiple points of view'. (Murray p.135) This concept can of course be extended to any significant incident. (I would in fact prefer to term it an 'Event Hub' in recognition of the wide variety of circumstances, not merely violent ones, that one is cable of obsessing over.) Its power as a narrative form lies in its psychological resonance. |
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Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek identifies the potency of this novel formal structure by placing it in Lacanian terms as referring to the ‘trauma of some impossible Real which forever resists its symbolization (all these narratives are ultimately just so many failures to cope with this trauma). (Zizek 2000 p.38).
The text of Rendez-vous is structured in a similar way to that proposed by Murray’s ‘Violence Hub’. At heart of the story (as his name suggests), is the central irreducible question of the principal character Simon Lecoeur's "real" identity. (For detail on Djinn’s labyrinthine plot refer to the short synopsis attached at the end of the paper.) Already in the work’s prologue Lecoeur is ‘missing’. (The ‘story’ proper is the contents of a text left by the absent Lecoeur – the only clue to his whereabouts.)
During the course of the novel’s tight 140 pages (Robbe-Grillet, 1985) we are given a number of explanations for his absence including: that he is the long-dead (“lost at sea”) father of the two main child characters; that he is really from the future and only exists in present because of the malfunctioning brain of one of the children; tha he and the principle female character Djinn are actually one and the same person; and finally that he is not human at all but some kind of sophisticated robot.
The text of Rendez-vous is structured in a similar way to that proposed by Murray’s ‘Violence Hub’. At heart of the story (as his name suggests), is the central irreducible question of the principal character Simon Lecoeur's "real" identity. (For detail on Djinn’s labyrinthine plot refer to the short synopsis attached at the end of the paper.) Already in the work’s prologue Lecoeur is ‘missing’. (The ‘story’ proper is the contents of a text left by the absent Lecoeur – the only clue to his whereabouts.)
During the course of the novel’s tight 140 pages (Robbe-Grillet, 1985) we are given a number of explanations for his absence including: that he is the long-dead (“lost at sea”) father of the two main child characters; that he is really from the future and only exists in present because of the malfunctioning brain of one of the children; tha he and the principle female character Djinn are actually one and the same person; and finally that he is not human at all but some kind of sophisticated robot.
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The audience’s hope of finding a solution to the question of Lecoeur’s identity and perhaps by implication, whereabouts is undoubtedly the narrative’s driving force. But they must do this within an environment where the characters, to paraphrase from Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), ‘like to see things their own way.’
On the (admittedly bumpy) surface this strange tale appears to unfolds sequentially – the story for the most part makes sense as a linear progression. (The French version’s subtitle translates as “The red gaps between the uneven cobblestones”.) However Robbe-Grillet has also embedded a circular progression of localities that repeats almost four times throughout the novel. This repeating sequence of locations (warehouse, café, apartment, café, taxi, warehouse) and the correspondences between the events that happen in each locale, undermines the sense that linear time is unfolding. This creates the nagging feeling that we are privy to some inescapable loop of time being played out. The author confirms our suspicions in the final epilogue that concludes with the line “Having quietly intercepted that overzealous guardian of law and order, they brought him back, once more, to square one.’ |
An underpinning musical structure In the initial stages of creating the opera I was concerned with finding some underpinning musical idea that could bind the work together in a way somehow analogous to the cyclic pattern of locations Robbe-Grillet had embedded in the text. It seemed desirable for this musical idea to have a ‘natural’ quality to it - some form of ‘disguise’ - in the same way that Robbe-Grillet’s cycle of locales hid behind the apparent contingency of the unfolding plot developments.
While collecting sound effects for the soundtrack I hit upon a remarkably fortuitous solution. In the novel Robbe-Grillet describes sonic world of the opening warehouse scene in some detail. Prominent in his description is the continuous dripping of some unknown substance. (Pools of unknown liquid are a recurring theme in Djinn.) The ‘drips’ of one of the samples I made happened to distinctly outline a little melody. On closer inspection the melody turned out to have quite singular qualities. Western music is based on a repeating set of twelve chromatic semitones (C, C#, D … B, C). Because of this, the greatest interval possible between two different tones (pitch classes ie any C or any C#) is six semitones
While collecting sound effects for the soundtrack I hit upon a remarkably fortuitous solution. In the novel Robbe-Grillet describes sonic world of the opening warehouse scene in some detail. Prominent in his description is the continuous dripping of some unknown substance. (Pools of unknown liquid are a recurring theme in Djinn.) The ‘drips’ of one of the samples I made happened to distinctly outline a little melody. On closer inspection the melody turned out to have quite singular qualities. Western music is based on a repeating set of twelve chromatic semitones (C, C#, D … B, C). Because of this, the greatest interval possible between two different tones (pitch classes ie any C or any C#) is six semitones
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By a remarkable coincidence the dripping tap I had chanced upon contained all the sixpossible intervals from one semitone to six semitones between its first seven notes. Even more fortuitously the number corresponded to Robbe-Grillet’s repeating sequence of locations. The dripping tap music provided a 'deep structure' in which the location in the narrative could be reinforced by the musical structure. The complete sequence of twelve drips created the melodic sequence in Example 1 – almost a parody of the type of theme Mancini or Morricone might have written for a 50s Film-Noir.
The complete dripping tap sequence contains a total of eight out of the twelve possible pitch classes. The ‘scale’ created provided all of the pitch content for the entire work. |
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Each location then, was associated with a particular interval that in turn restricted the number of scale notes that could be used. Like Robbe-Grillet’s location cycle this level of structure takes place ‘under-the-hood’. Although most audience members would not be consciously aware of the changing intervallic parameters, we could rely on the fact that all but the most tone deaf would notice the changes that they cause. Due to cultural conditioning as well as the physical nature of the interaction of sounds, different intervals create different psychological responses.
In broad terms the smaller intervals (one and two semitones) have a more claustrophobic/cramped sense; the central intervals (three and four semitones commonly know as ‘thirds’) sound more natural –they are the building blocks of most of the music we know; the five semitone interval has a machine-like resonance (the most common interval given off by refrigerators and washing machines) and the six semitone interval is the most stretched and unnatural (this interval was known in mediaeval times as ‘the devil in music.’) |
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The music aims to simultaneously evoke a familiar soundtrack-ambience while at the same time creating a structuralist level underpinning and undermining it. The necessity to synchronize the live musicians with the video (via a click-track) also lends a strange inevitability to the work. From the audience’s point of view the music is unfolding freely and naturally and yet is able to coincide with disconcerting accuracy with the video, adding to the sense that the events being witnessed are part of an elaborate plan. A curious thought, that the audience distinguish between ‘natural’ events on stage and ‘staged’ events. Work was begun on Rendez-vous in 1994, however it wasn’t until 1998, that the idea of presenting the work with ‘projected sets’ was mooted. The authors had collaborated on another project that year and the lushness and immersive quality of video seemed a perfect means of rendering Robbe-Grillet’s hermetic world for a number of reasons. The highly cinematic texture of the work was already highly laden with film references.
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The use of video would allow us to create a resonance and a ‘look’ to the production that would help position it for an audience amongst works with similar atmosphere such as Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), Godard's Alphaville (1965) or Alain Resnais/Robbe-Grillet's own Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
Most important amongst the reasons however was the ability to manipulate the stage reality through the use of video. Djinn’s structure and narrative are particularly subtle - continually suggesting false explanations for events and in the end self-consciously drawing attention to the synthetic and deceptive basis of all fictional narrative.Projecting the locations gave us the opportunity to change locations abruptly, to follow character’s imagination rather than their surroundings and even to evaporate the environment we created on stage. Perhaps the most obvious example of this in the text occurs about two thirds of the way through the work. At this point Djinn appears suddenly out of character, addresses the audience directly and suggests that the entire story so far has been a fabrication. Her explanation begins with her entirely innocent meeting with Simon who she describes as having “a wild imagination that made him turn daily life into strange, romantic adventures, like those found in science fiction stories.” Initially her story is illustrated with occasional holiday snaps of her time in Paris. However as the events she recounts begin increasingly to coincide Simon’s version of story images from the first part of the work begin to insinuate themselves into the slide-show. The audience is given a signaled that this new account by the charming and plausible young woman is just as unreliable as all the rest. |
40 In Forgetting 1995 SSSAAA Choir 5m
Vasko Popa was born in 1922 in Grebenats, Banat, in Serbia. He lived in Belgrade where he was a Corresponding Member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and an editor of the publishing house Nolit. In Forgetting comes from a collection of poems called Landscapes. Popa is published in English by Persea Books and Anvil Press. This translation is by Anne Pennington.
This setting of In Forgetting was sketched out in 1988 as a study for a (never attempted) song cycle based on Popa's savage and passionate Give Me Back My Rags. In 1995 the sketch was filled out into a song for six female voices - influenced by vocal style of the incredible 'Mysterious Voices of Bulgarian Women' CDs that were appearing at that time. |
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39 27matrix 1995 Yamaha Windcontroller and interactive electronics MAX Patch 7m
27matrix is an interactive improvisation environment written in MAX. An improvising soloist (playing a WX series Windcontroller) provides the raw MIDI data that is transformed by MAX in real time into various structures.
27matrix combined live improvisation with the sort of formal processes that I had been using in my music between 1990 and 1995. These structures are rigorously governed by a principle of self-similarity - all material created by the computer draws on a nine-digit cypher (the same one used in DiceGame) as its generating kernel.
This type of formal structure originating in the works of Webern has found particular resonance in the field of electronic music where simultaneous control is applicable to an ever-increasing range of parameters – even to the level of the shapes of soundwaves themselves (Yadegari 1991). In interactive computer music one of the best early examples is Gary Lee Nelson’s Fractal Mountains (1988-89) which maps the performer’s notes via MIDI into a series of graphs that control a wide variety of musical parameters in real-time (Nelson 1994). In 27matrix the fractal algorithm is predetermined, but give rise to a diverse range of musical textures.
27matrix combined live improvisation with the sort of formal processes that I had been using in my music between 1990 and 1995. These structures are rigorously governed by a principle of self-similarity - all material created by the computer draws on a nine-digit cypher (the same one used in DiceGame) as its generating kernel.
This type of formal structure originating in the works of Webern has found particular resonance in the field of electronic music where simultaneous control is applicable to an ever-increasing range of parameters – even to the level of the shapes of soundwaves themselves (Yadegari 1991). In interactive computer music one of the best early examples is Gary Lee Nelson’s Fractal Mountains (1988-89) which maps the performer’s notes via MIDI into a series of graphs that control a wide variety of musical parameters in real-time (Nelson 1994). In 27matrix the fractal algorithm is predetermined, but give rise to a diverse range of musical textures.
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Like DiceGame, 27matrix comprises five basic environments that employ a number of different strategies to transform the live MIDI input from the Windcontroller. Each reiterates the cypher structure in the pitch and/or rhythm domain. They are discussed in the order in which they are heard.
Environment Five: This environment is an inversion of typical jazz improvisatory practice: pitches from the performer's improvisation are fed into the accompaniment and successive notes are gradually spread out over five octaves. The rhythmic structure of the accompaniment itself is constructed of canonic versions of the cypher rhythm. Environment Four: The soloist's improvisations are captured, and played back on different instruments, in different registers and at different speeds surrounding the performer with different versions of their material. The solo instrument is a flute-like sound if above a certain velocity and a gamelan type sound if below. Changes of instrument create 'stuck notes' that can only be turned off by playing a full velocity note. A full velocity note also triggers the cypher rhythm to be played. 
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Environment Three: The performer's incoming notes are repeated between two and five times depending on their velocity: the higher the velocity the more repetitions. The frequency of the repetitions is dependant on the octave in which they are played: the higher the register the faster the repetitions.
Environment Two: The first note played in this patch is captured and played in the original and retrograde version of the cypher rhythm. The performer’s improvisation is harmonized by between one and nine pitches (dependant on the note’s velocity). Every 27th note the soloist plays triggers a rapidly repeated note to travel across the stereo field. Environment One: The first note the soloist plays is captured harmonized and repeated in the cypher rhythm. On the cypher's completion another rapidly repeated chord travels across the stereo spectrum. |
38 Dice Game 1995 cl and DP-4 Effects Processor 5m
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My initial interest in this field began with the concept of live processing of an analogue instrument. DiceGame, like Mustard’s RoboSax IV, is a (mostly) traditionally notated work for clarinet with an added electronic component, in this case the Ensoniq DP/4 Effects Processor. DiceGame belongs to a series of my works dating from the early 90s, each using a short series of numbers (cypher) as a means for generating all musical parameters from the micro- to macro-scale. The work's fractal nature is augmented, and to some extent its definition is enhanced, by the addition of electronic processing.
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The interactivity in DiceGame is limited by the available interfaces between the machine and the performer. By far the most straightforward control is achieved through the use of a foot-pedal to step through processor settings, and CV pedal to make continuous changes in certain parameters. Despite the fact that in 1995 interactive signal processing was still in relatively early stages, some greater level of interactivity is achieved through simple use of signal amplitude measurement. The most obvious example is the use of Gate processors to limit, depending on their volume, what signals are passed on to other effect patches. This approach is somewhat analogous to that used by Todd Winkler in his work Snake Charmer (1991) where the modulation speed of a chorus effect is controlled by the changing dynamic level of the clarinet soloist (Winkler 1998 p.249 ).
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The DP/4 part consists of 14 separate patches that are ordered into a 24 patch sequence. The overall form of the work is of nine main sections, consisting of five contrasting types of material. The sections are in the order 532214451: and are relatively easy to hear as they have gradually diminishing pitch resources: section 5 uses a 15-pitch group, 4 uses 12, 3 - 9, 2 - 3 and Section 1 uses 1 pitch. During the repeated sections (there are adjacent 2 and 4 sections) the electronic processes help to define the structure through processing changes. For example the second '2' section is marked by a change in harmonization.
The processes involved are used to reinforce the work's structure - emphasizing the changes between sections and, to some degree, the sub-sections within them. |
The effects can essentially be broken down into combinations of pitch and time distortions of the live signal.
Some examples will suffice to illustrate:
• Velocity Octaver is the principal effect during the opening section '5'. It processes signals above a certain volume (db) adding four delayed semi-quavers each harmonized at the octave below the original note in tempo MM.= 90. Signals below that volume pass through with no effect. The aural result is that accented notes are doubled with a lower octave, which is repeated, as four delayed semi-quavers.
• Rainbody delays and pitch-shifts notes downwards by small amounts (in inharmonic intervals) with the aural result being a proliferation of asynchronous descending micro-tonal lines similar to Ligeti Micro-Polyphony.
• The Tempo Digital Delay delays the audio signal to four different degrees. Each is then panned hard right, hard left, middle right and middle left in the stereo spectrum. The length of the delay is determined by the position of the control voltage (volume) pedal notated in the part. The aural result is a five-part canon (including the live signal) panned across the stereo spectrum.
• ‘Ascending Whole-tones’ delays notes by a semi-quaver (within the tempo) with four repeats. Each delayed note is a whole-tone higher than the last, creating a four note ascending whole-tone scale.
Some examples will suffice to illustrate:
• Velocity Octaver is the principal effect during the opening section '5'. It processes signals above a certain volume (db) adding four delayed semi-quavers each harmonized at the octave below the original note in tempo MM.= 90. Signals below that volume pass through with no effect. The aural result is that accented notes are doubled with a lower octave, which is repeated, as four delayed semi-quavers.
• Rainbody delays and pitch-shifts notes downwards by small amounts (in inharmonic intervals) with the aural result being a proliferation of asynchronous descending micro-tonal lines similar to Ligeti Micro-Polyphony.
• The Tempo Digital Delay delays the audio signal to four different degrees. Each is then panned hard right, hard left, middle right and middle left in the stereo spectrum. The length of the delay is determined by the position of the control voltage (volume) pedal notated in the part. The aural result is a five-part canon (including the live signal) panned across the stereo spectrum.
• ‘Ascending Whole-tones’ delays notes by a semi-quaver (within the tempo) with four repeats. Each delayed note is a whole-tone higher than the last, creating a four note ascending whole-tone scale.
