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Pogus 21042
Nick Didkovsky
Tube Mouth Bow String
These pieces are about the details of musical evolution that emerge from rule-based compositional systems. Using electric guitar, string quartet, electronics, and computer software, we explored territories held together by systems of agreements, forms specified in software, real-time musical choices, and notation.
Two of the compositions here, She Closes Her Sister With Heavy Bones and What Sheep Herd, are process pieces whose scores fit very economically on one page. Each score specifies melodic material and a short set of rules. The music precipitates from the interaction between the score’s specifications and the decisions that the musicians make during performance. By contrast, Tube Mouth Bow String is a through-composed piece which notates foot pedal movements, vocal behavior, and bowed string performance, overflowing very uneconomically onto many pages which we pasted onto large poster boards and set before each player. Though this piece leaves no real-time performance decisions to the ensemble, Tube Mouth is a process piece in a very real sense, as the process was first specified, executed, and auditioned in software, and finally transcribed to common music notation for live performers. Improvisation (simultaneously the easiest and the most difficult of all real-time process pieces to perform) is included here as well, with a solo MachineCore performance providing a bridge between She Closes and Tube Mouth. Closing the CD, Just a Voice That Bothered Him sounds like it could have been composed systematically but evades rules instead, being composed intuitively by ear. The piece emerged in opposition to one vividly frustrating weekend of fruitless systematic composition, and for that, gets the last word.
Listen with care.
Nick Didkovsky, October 16, 2006, NYC
She Closes Her Sister With Heavy Bones, for electric guitar and string quartet.
A melody is introduced by the electric guitar. Notes are selected, octaves transposed as desired, and sustained freely by each member of the string quartet. When the guitar drops out, the piece dissolves into an apparition of the source melody, which is implied by the rest of the ensemble.
The score for this piece is available at: http://www.doctornerve.org/nerve/scores/SheCloses/BONES.PDF
A similar treatment of a different melody, controlled by real-time software can be heard at http://www.punosmusic.com/pages/sabbathbride/sabbathbride.html
MachineCore, for solo electric guitar and computer
I brought my laptop on tour with an improvising electric guitar quartet (Hans Tammen, Erhard Hirt, Keith Rowe, and myself). During the long drives, I adapted software I’d written for The Monkey Farm (http://www.doctornerve.org/monkeyfarm/), to process my live electric guitar. This software has a plug-in interface and includes contributions from Phil Burk and Robert Marsanyi. Featured in moments of the performance on this record is Marsanyi’s “Magyar Instrument” which imparts a Hungarian accent to my electric guitar, and foreshadows the vocalisms of Tube Mouth. Recently, I made the MachineCore software available on the web. Called Music for Hotspots, you can play with it directly in a web browser by visiting http://www.punosmusic.com/pages/musicforhotspots
MachineCore was written in Java Music Specification Language and JSyn. Visit http://www.algomusic.com/ and http://www.softsynth.com/jsyn/
TUBE MOUTH BOW STRING, for string quartet and live electronics
Tube Mouth Bow String reshapes the sound of the string quartet with the resonances of the mouths of the players. Each musician uses a “talkbox”: a device which sends the sound of each instrument through a plastic tube and into the player’s mouth. There, the sound of the instrument is altered by the shape of the mouth as the players quietly voice vowels specified in the score.
The piece also uses harmonizer pedals, which smoothly sweep the frequency of each player’s instrument from an octave below pitch (in the pedal’s heel position) to an octave above pitch (in the pedal’s toe position), creating harmonic glissandi. The harmonic structure of the piece evolves over the course of the piece, rising steadily in complexity and then receding again, while the density of the vowel activity steadily increases from beginning to end, and the density of pedal activity peaks 2/3rds of the way through the piece. This compositional form was defined in Java Music Specification Language, which generated the final score.
Each performer reads three staves: the top staff specifies vocals, the middle staff is traditionally notated for stringed instruments, and the bottom staff notates the pedal movements. In live performance, the musicians have their hands (and feet and mouths) full executing three independent notated parts. For this recording, we broke down their tasks, recording each activity separately, and ended up with a precise execution of a very difficult piece.
The score and related info is available at
www.punosmusic.com/pages/tubemouthbowstring/
What Sheep Herd, for string quartet and computer
What Sheep Herd provides the computer performer with up to 8 voices of independently looping melody. The first 17 notes of a popular melody are available to each voice, and they all start by repeating the first note of the melody very slowly. The user can turn a voice on or off, change its octave, adjust the probability that the “beginning” of the loop will advance through the melody, and adjust the probability of the “end” of each loop will advance through the melody. This compact set of choices is rich enough to provide the user with an instrument that takes practice... one gets better after playing with it and figuring out various strategies for coaxing the voices through the melody, trying to keep these independent, stochastically advancing loops in the same general area of the melody. The live string quartet performers make similar choices, playing independently but simultaneously with the computer. Performing this as an ensemble is a challenge in mediating between individual choices and the overall arch of the piece. Tending to each voice feels like herding a flock of sheep, nudging strays back into the fold of coherency.
The software performs in Gamelan Son Of Lion’s tuning ( see http://www.punosmusic.com/pages/yudishthira/liontuning.html )
You can play a version of this piece yourself directly in your web browser, at
http://www.punosmusic.com/pages/whydontyouwriteme/
Just a Voice That Bothered Him, for String Quartet
This is a through-composed work which I originally wrote for the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet. Each measure contains four notes, whose order is permuted, whose durations are stretched and compressed, and whose pitches evolve in a non-systematic arch guided by intuition as opposed to a planned process.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Robert Rowe and the Steinhardt School at NYU for supporting the recording of this project. DigiTech and Rocktron for their generous Artist Relations support; we used Rocktron’s Banshee talkbox and DigiTech’s XP100 Whammy-Wah in our live performances and on this recording. Phil Burk and Robert Marsanyi for contributing to the catalog of sound processors used in the MachineCore software. Mark Stewart who spawned the idea of four players with four talkboxes during one of our many frenzied tour conversations. James Forrest for programming the vocal filters that I used to model the sound of the talkboxes while composing Tube Mouth Bow String. Thomas Dimuzio for lending his ears, which led to one last remix of Just a Voice. Michael Lytle for the camera. Phil Kline who curated an evening of “downtown composers writing pop music” for which I composed What Sheep Herd, and to Barbara Benary who premiered the piece with me. Al Margolis for his sense of adventure. Phill Niblock for the evening of Dec 17, 2002 which led to the creation of this record.
Tube Mouth Bow String was supported by a grant from Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program. Commissioning Music/USA is made possible with support from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and The Target Foundation.
This recording was funded by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music through the Harvestworks Commissioned Works Program.
Photographs:
Sara Garden Armstrong’s Excavated Landscape by Hugh Hunter, and Overture 5.
Nick Didkovsky by Dieter Kuhn.
Images of Sirius String Quartet captured from rehearsal video that was recorded by Phil Kline.
Basic tracks recorded by Eric DiPalma in Studio A at NYU’s Steinhardt School
and by Chris Howard at P.P.I Recording, NYC
CD Mastering by Tom Hamilton
Mixed by Nick Didkovsky at Punos Music.
Produced by Nick Didkovsky.
Contact nick@didkovsky.com
Layout and cover design by Matthew Schickele.
1 She Closes Her Sister With Heavy Bones, for electric guitar and string quartet 6:41
2 Machinecore, for solo electric guitar and computer 4:17
3 Tube Mouth Bow String, for string quartet, talkboxes, and harmonizer pedals 12:27
4 What Sheep Herd, for string quartet and computer 21:07
5 Just a Voice That Bothered Him, for string quartet 2:49
Nick Didkovsky – electric guitar, tabletop guitar, homebrew software
Sirius String Quartet:
Gregor Huebner and Meg Okura – violin; Ron Lawrence – viola; Dave Eggar – ‘cello
Special guest Barbara Benary – Chung Hu on What Sheep Herd
Listen to this record carefully, reasonably loud, and in one sitting.
Open your windows so your neighbors can hear it, too.
All compositions by Nick Didkovsky, ©2005 Nick Didkovsky / Punos Music (BMI)
p2006 Pogus Productions
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