From poetic conception to technical implementation, or from technical conception to poetic implementation?

Bryan Holmes – [email protected]
  Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

In musical composition practice and (mainly in its) pedagogy, it is common to find an approach that favors a kind of general and more or less recognizable methodology, where the relationship between creative stages seems simpler than it really is (or could be). We commonly reproduce this view without too much questioning, reflecting directly on our compositions and those of our students. Not that such an approach to creative stages is necessarily counter-productive, because it may even vary from one style to another, from one composer to another or still between works of the same style and author. However, I consider it healthy to at least bring up a discussion on it. Through this paper I intend to reflect on conception and implementation in musical composition from a personal experience, illustrated by one work for solo instrument, one acousmatic work and one mixed work.

When we start a new composition or guide a composition student, it is common to think that the first step should consider the general planning of the work, whether based on some concept, form, poetic inspiration, text, amongst other musical or extra musical elements. Hypothetically, it is only after a plan containing the macro-idea of the piece, ensuring an eventual cohesion, that the work for motivic confection or other types of microstructures would come, as well as its adaptation within that general plan and the troubleshooting at the technical level, such as instrumental writing and idiomatism, motivic—harmonic development, ornamentation, sound edition and many others. According to Caesar it is usual that this process has a different, not totally linear order. Regarding common strategies towards instrumental and electroacoustic music, he states:

Composers usually identify two main stages of work that, as the composition progresses, eventually confound and merge into each other. The first corresponds to the production and selection of ‘objects’, or ‘units’ (sounds, motives, cells, etc.), which, in a second stage, are given some existence within a ‘structure’ of some sort. When already elaborating a work in this second stage, composers will return to the first: if one of the chosen 'objects' does not perform as expected at a more ‘structural’ level, it must be discarded, replaced or rebuilt. (Caesar 1992, 24).

Thus we can start considering points of view that question more and more the apparent simplicity of relations between the creative stages. In didactic terms, a more “Cartesian” view may be useful as for the first mentioned approach, nevertheless it seems increasingly necessary to warn about the complexity and/or diversity that such directions may take in a composer’s “real life”.

I have personally felt this concern since I was a teenager —-while making rock songs by putting together fragments that I had composed separately, or whenever my attention was caught by the fact of writing the lyrics after the music, unlike what others did—-, through the time as a composition student, until these days, when I tend to create musical structures in a more linear way, facing the difficulty of fitting the material into a larger preconceived structure that I have somehow considered limiting or less “organic” (in the absence of a better word) for my own music. Perhaps for that reason I have strongly embraced electroacoustic music despite the lack of formal lessons at my undergraduate course. There is some comfort in being able to immediately hear the exact results of what is being created, since that listening brings a concrete and detailed feedback that often suggests the material that should succeed the previous one. However, to a certain extent, writing-based music is also susceptible to this kind of process, thanks to the deconcretization of sonority¹ and the help that virtual instruments software provides currently (which in any case becomes futile without the corresponding instrumentation and orchestration knowledge, and is still limited to traditional performance techniques).

A creative dynamic like the one described above —-where musical material is created mostly from the beginning towards the end of the composition—- does not necessarily imply to be closed to a so-called “external” form, once part of the music has already been covered. For instance, if at some point the composer believes that a sonata form or a derivation of it seems pertinent, he can go back and adapt what has already been composed, project the recapitulation and so on. What's more, the poetic idea of the work may begin to emerge little by little, instead of needing an initial closed-concept before taking the first steps. In any case, all these procedures are much more flexible and interdependent than they could seem. Now I will explain a little more on how the creative stages were articulated in Punctum (2008), for bowed string instrument and wah-wah, Glosa de Clímax Púrpura (2012), acousmatic work, and Arak Saya (2013) for tarka and electroacoustic means.

Punctum was written for Australian violist William Lane, former student of Garth Knox in England that had worked closely as a soloist with composers like Lachenmann, Aperghis, Reich, Nunes, Kurtág, etc. Lane's experiences and improvisations I had listened to made me think that it would be a good opportunity to work on a piece where I could explore aspects of sonority, typo-morphology and, at the same time, would be open enough for the performer to contribute with his improvisation skills.

A first sketch for solo viola was adapted later to be played alternatively on viola or cello (since I had just met two great cello players and the tuning would only vary by one octave). But the third and final version was stimulated by more radical thoughts, resulting in the following characteristics:

• It can be played on any bowed string instrument (with at least 4 strings).

• The score does not represent pitches on a regular staff, but in a three-line staff whose lines indicate the low, middle and high registers of the instrument.

• The performer must choose a microtonal scordatura, thus to avoid the sonic “stigma” of the typical intervals produced between each instrument's open strings when tuned traditionally.

• Pitches should not be thought as part of an octave division that is limited to 12 equal intervals.

• There is no tempo designation, only character.

• There are important sections of improvisation, including a kind of cadenza in which already played materials must be explored.

• The instrument must be amplified and an obbligato wah-wah pedal must be used.

All of the above is due in part to the intention of manifesting the control of sound by means of “parameters” different than those of pitch or duration, parameters that, in fact, should be called “variables”². As a consequence, this work is very demanding in terms of bow techniques, familiarity with the wah-wah pedal and the performer’s agility at the gestural level.

The title Punctum evokes a relatively open concept used by Roland Barthes in his book on photography Camera Lucida. The punctum is in itself something intimate and unnameable (Barthes, 2004) and in this work the performer will deliver precisely a private, intimate view, contributing with his own idea of musicality. On another hand, punctum is also the name of the smallest musical unit within the ancient neumas, which represented the gestures in an old form of musical notation used in the Gregorian chant (a sort of transcription that preceded the arise of the four-line staff). The notation consisted of drawings above the text line, which in fact only aided memory, as the exact pitches and rhythms were indecipherable for anyone who did not know the chant beforehand. Something similar happens in this particular work, since the melodic design and the durations are only suggested in the score, while the articulations (in analogy to the text articulation) must be respected. Yet the idea of punctum as a minimal gesture is represented by the short sound objects, or attacks, separated by spaces, generating a discourse discontinuity, a punctuated discourse that makes it easier to contemplate these sonic “pebbles”³.

Glória de Climax Púrpura was first motivated by a Chilean acousmatic music concert I was invited to spatialize at the IX BIMESP (Bienal Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo) in 2012. The program included Federico Schumacher’s⁴ El Espejo de Alicia (2009), which I had to study exhaustively due to a percussion-resonance sound object that appeared more than 20 times during the music. The familiarity I developed for this work I personally liked very much, as well as La Misteriosa Terapia del Dr. Caverna y Otras Historias Líquidas (2011) by Aurelio Silva that was in the same program, made me leave that concert so motivated I decided to start a new acousmatic composition. Both pieces had a direct influence on this new one. And although not quoting them by the use of literal samples, it reproduces a personal view from some sections of both. More than musical commentaries, it could be said that it makes a gloss (glosa in Portuguese and Spanish) of those parts.

The first step was to listen and edit existing recordings —-sometimes with acoustic resources, sometimes with electronic ones—-, later complemented with other recordings especially made for the piece. The sonic material comes from different cultures and means: thunder drum, psalteries, Tibetan bowls, theremin, digital synthesis, field recordings (made by Fernando Godoy), brief samples taken from multitrack sessions of rock music and sounds from the Librería de Samples Mapuches⁵.

Just as in The Raven Edgar Allan Poe created, for dramatic purposes, the climatic stanza before all the rest of the poem⁶ —-believing it to be so powerful that nothing surpassed it—-, the first composed section of Glosa de Clímax Púrpura was deliberately its climax. And just like in Silva’s work, this apex is a strong section with repeated sounds that clearly stands out in the musical structure, marking a before and an after. In fact, La Misteriosa Terapia del Dr. Caverna y Otras Historias Líquidas has two large parts, the second of which is much more peaceful and begins just after the climax. My work, shorter in length, similarly presents a coda that also contrasts with the immediately previous climax because of its peacefulness and the use of new materials.

The beginning of the piece creates a structural analogy of the beginning of Schumacher's music. A percussive, resonant sound, preceded by a small “presage”, is followed by a compound of layers that includes punctual sounds of noisy or inharmonic spectra, accumulations and a maintained low fundamental frequency. Then we hear new single attacks of the initial percussive sound, and although varied at each time it is always related to that fundamental. All those features are common to the beginning of both works, mine being built of completely different source materials and condensing the section's length to half of Schumacher’s beginning part. Both are then followed by high sounds of crickets⁷, gradually resuming tension until they reach their respective climax points. As my climax had already been created, in the DAW session I had grouped those audio clips, coloring everything in a purple tone, hence the clímax púrpura in the title.

Arak Saya was commissioned by the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS) to be part of the Autoctofonías project, sponsored by Ibermúsicas and resulting in a set of 3 CDs by Latin American composers. The cross-cutting concept of the project was to create music which blended aboriginal instruments with the use of new technologies. I chose to make a piece for tarka and electroacoustic means. The tarka is a woodwind instrument created by the Aymará people⁸. I had played this instrument for several years in a university-born group called Lakas del Arak Saya, with whom I had the opportunity to participate, learn and perform, more than once, at a religious festivity in a Chilean Altiplano village.

Ayamarás have inhabited essentially the Central Andes Altiplano, covering great part of Bolivia, south of Peru, north of Chile and northwest of Argentina. The ayllu was their core and their form of social, cultural, economic, territorial and political organization. Normally, an ayllu would be formed by kinship, proximity and affinity, and several ayllus would inhabit a same valley or expansion zone of the Inca Empire (zones they called huamani). In the Aymará society, organized by a direct democracy system and by the reciprocity of services provided to the community, the Arak saya (the upper part) and the Manka saya (lower part) divided the valleys and also ruled the economic activity. The exchange of products with the coast, for instance, was essential because of the harsh climatic conditions at the uplands, which allow only a small diversity of cultivation, breeding and hunting. But that division of Arak saya / Manka saya also reflects a typical duality within the Andean worldview, i.e. a complex set of concepts and myths related to religious cosmogony, natural phenomena, time, fertility etc., many of which existed before the arising of the Incas. Rituals and customs, clothing, celebrations, music and dance incorporate those concepts. This duality is reflected in my piece, which I consider a kind of electroacoustic concertino.

Organology studies on the tarka conclude that this instrument derives from the pinkillo, which is made from a drilled reed. The tarka is made out of solid drilled wood, usually tarko (white wood from the Oruro region) or mara (reddish wood from the La Paz region), with 6 equidistant holes and a mouthpiece made of an inserted little piece of wood and an open “window” at the front. The most commonly used fingering produces a non-tempered minor pentatonic scale. Par excellence played in tropas (consorts that can have roughly between 8 and 50 musicians), their sizes, from biggest to smallest —-between 60 and 20 centimeters—- are the taika, the mala and the tiple, typically joined by a bass drum and a snare drum. Mala’s melodies are thus reinforced with intervals of a 4th lower and a 5th higher. In the region of Jujuy, in Argentina, tarkas are known as anatas, which means carnival in aymará, because of the time in which they are played. Its “scratchy” and “aggressive” sound (with acoustic beats known as tara or richa) is very characteristic and is believed to scare away evil spirits and protect the community during festivity times. The instrument is also associated with the rainy seasons.

With so many symbolic aspects in this instrument's tradition —-besides the idea of complementarity and that, for the Aymarás, music is not practiced individually but in community—- I would have preferred to write for a tropa de tarkas instead of a soloist. Nevertheless, in my city there were no other musicians who owned and played tarka. For this reason I programmed a patch in Max/MSP software that, when playing single notes, produces the necessary transpositions in order to emulate the sound of a group.

Perhaps it would be futile referring to “extended techniques” when talking about the tarka, which already uses multiphonics, microtones and beats in its traditional way of playing. But there is a main, traditional scale and fingering in the tarkeadas (songs for tropas de tarkas) that is used at the beginning of this piece, after an introduction where the blowing through the window of the instrument produces a windy sound followed by the electroacoustic part. Then, a “typical” melody is presented in simultaneous contrast with the fixed electroacoustic sounds. In this dialectics the instrument and its transpositions (i.e., real-time processing) represent tradition, while the tape represents modernity. In the next section, the tarka uses alternative fingering trills with overblowing, leading to a first climax in crescendo together with the electronics, in a kind of synthesis of the elements thanks to their complementarity and transformation. This synthesis is even clearer in the second and final climax, through simultaneous and aggressive attacks of the instrument and the tape. Then, the ending includes the same windy sound from the beginning of the piece. However, at the beginning the instrument moves up and down, shifting between two microphones placed one over the other, producing a phaser effect. At the ending, on the other hand, the sound is produced only via the upper microphone, representing the upland: the Arak saya.

References

Barthes, Roland. [1980] 2004. La Ca´mara Lu´cida: notas sobre la fotografi´a. Trans. Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja. 9th ed. Barcelona: Paidos.

Borras, Gerard. 2011. "Organología de la tarka en la zona circunlacustre del Titicaca.” In Diablos tentadores y pinkillus embriagadores: Estudios de antropología musical del carnaval en los Andes de Bolivia, edited by Arnaud Gerard. Vol. 1, 41-67. La Paz: Plural Editores.

Caesar, Rodolfo. 1992. "The Composition of Electroacoustic Music." Thesis (PhD), University of East Anglia.

Gérard, Arnaud. 2007. "Sonidos pulsantes: silbatos dobles prehispánicos ¿Una estética ancestral reiterativa?" Revista Boliviana de Física 13: 18-28.

Guigue, Didier. 2007. "Este´tica da sonoridade: teoria e pra´tica de um me´todo anali´tico - uma introduça~o." Claves 4:37-65.

Holmes, Bryan. 2009. "Espectromorfologia na Música Instrumental". 2009. Thesis (Masters), Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

Lansky, Paul & Perle, George. 2001. “Parameter.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, organized by Stanley Sadie. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

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