O comes from a profoundly amusical family. Their
home contained a windup gramophone and a violin. Both were never used.
O remembers the sharp styli for the gramophone, but
does not remember there being any records to play. The violin (belonging to
his father) was a device even more indecipherable. His father would, at
times, exhale a vaguely tuneless whistle. Not a pursed-lip whistle
(O’s mother often said that kind of whistle was the
worst thing one could do) but rather a hiss of air passed over the tongue,
brought close to the roof of the mouth, through the top incisors, and out; an
almost tuneless whistle. His mother, for her part, would occasionally sing a
single line from one popular song or another.
Perhaps the earliest sound he remembers noticing was the summer cicada.
Later there was a dilemma (similar to when his father misinformed him that
clouds were all the same height in the sky; which was contrary to what he
thought he could see) — was the cicada biological or electrical? Where did it
come from?
What other remembered sounds? A ringing bell on the milk wagon, pulled, he
remembers (perhaps inaccurately) by a snorting, clopping horse; the
calliope-pistoning of a push mower across the lawn; a phone ringing; the
metal tongs of a fan rake pulled through fallen leaves; the crackle of these
leaves as one tossed oneself into their heaps; fire in its fireplace,
thrombing, snapping wind in its many sonorities. Talking he remembers at
first not understanding; he would soon discern that his grandparents used two
languages, German and English. Later, the deep-throated wattle of the sedan
parked next door, similar to an inboard motor launch. The family lived
inland, although he learned that his parents had wooed by a small lake. And
later, one week per year was devoted to living by one of the Great Lakes,
waves; boats of all sizes. O was able to swim at the
age of three, and then he forgot how.
The neighbours next door with the throaty car also had a piano and
O received a couple of lessons there from the
neighbouring matriarch, of which he has no other memory.
The family procured a television set, and there were evenings of music
playing in the house, particularly the fiddling, dancing and singing of
Don Messer’s Jubilee. And Sundays the portable organ
warbled during church services held in the Empire Public School gym. And
everyone singing, approximately the same tune, each singer varying in
temerity and accuracy.
A new family car came with a built-in radio. This was soon followed by his
very own eight-transistor portable radio receiver. This radio had a choice of
two bands, AM and SW. O spent hours, particularly
evenings, carefully advancing the serrated, gear-like plastic tuning dial;
finding, between locations of foreign voices, many mysterious sounds to be
interpreted. The rapid pitch blipping (data transmissions) he mistook for
satellites in earth orbit; the harmonic roar (signal jamming) he interpreted
as the propeller and engines of airplanes, and he listened to long stretches
of these seldom-varying drones, waiting to hear pilots asking for landing
instructions. To pass the time, he would adjust the tuning dial fractionally,
by millimetres, and thus sweep up and down through the frequencies, and the
glissing whoops of carrier sines. In the AM band he would gradually adjust
the frequency from station to station wondering where the stubby red
diamond-shaped pointer would centre on the call numbers (1490, 1050)
pronounced by each ‘standard broadcast’ vicinity in relation to the
mysteriously spaced numbers
[ 54 6 v 7 8 9 1v2 16 (x100 kilocycles) ]
printed above the tuning trough. He’d open the back of the radio to see how the dial and
pointer were attached to a much more elegant looking turbine thing.
And then there was the volume dial. O had to open
the brown leather case to see the indication LOUD < — OFF. The LOUD was
brash; OFF was indicated by a click; and just next to OFF was a secretive
miniaturization of sound. A similar tinny tinyness could be attained by
canceling the radio’s main speaker. a paper cone hidden behind a gold metal
fine-perforated faceplate behind the coarser perforation of the brown leather
case, by plugging into the 2nd of two receptacles provided for the earplug
speaker jack attached to a white-plastic-coated pair of wires attached to a
white pill attached to a white finger with a nostril at its tip — the tiny
sound would emit from the nostril; or, if the plastic finger was fit into
one’s ear, the sound was louder, and private. There was only one earspeaker
provided with the radio so O would have to choose
which ear to plug. Left or right? What was the difference? Why, when the
voices from the radio were as loud as himself talking it seemed way too loud,
even though his own voice was not a very loud one.? He mumbled. He still has
this radio. It still works, although the once teaming short-wave band is now
almost deserted. He still mumbles.
The next device of disembodied sound to enter his life was a four-speed
automated phonographic record player in a cardboard case. the four speeds
were 16, 33 1/3, 45 and 78. The phonographic records purchased for
O were labeled 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm, but there was
nothing to limit any of them from being played at any of the four speeds. The
transition from 33 1/3 rpm to 45 rpm transposed the human voice to chipmunk
range, an effect popularly exploited by rodent puppets, as he heard on the
Ed Sullivan television show. The more evocative
transformation of a woman’s voice into a man’s was simulated by a transition
from 45 to 33 1/3rpm. This and the approximate doubling in speed and duration
to 16 and 78 eventually led to some of O’s favourite
plunderphonic effects, and the concept of harmonic speeds.
This 4-speed time machine would eventually be replaced by a hi-fi
two-speed semi-automatic phonograph, which was followed by a two-speed manual
turntable. These successors eschewed the exotic speeds of 16 and 78.
The device which came next into his life was a solid-bodied guitar. It was
designed to be magnetically and electronically amplified but O never obtained the requisite amplifier, so this guitar’s
dynamic range was restricted to (but not limited by) the approximate range of
a clavichord. Each week a guitar teacher would plug this guitar into an amp
and tune it. After a few weeks, the guitar teacher dissuaded O from further supervised study. O
never tuned the guitar again but continued to play it for years, unamplified.
It was quiet. It was private. It still has some of its original strings.
The unamplified guitar and the record player were the instruments which he
brought to his first musical ensemble, a mixed-media quartet. The other
musicians were boys from the same block as O. they
rehearsed in houses on the street and performed in the backyard of
O’s house. The other instruments were trumpet and
bongos.
O is not sure which noise-producing device came
next, a Spanish guitar with nylon strings, or his first tape recorder. He
remembers working the two together: dropping the tape recorder microphone
between the strings, into the hole of the guitar; then shaking this
concoction and recording it; and playing that back, backwards.
The tape recorder was a portable, monophonic reel-to-reel, a present from
O’s father, who repaired typewriters. O soon modified its recording function by disabling the erase
head, a magnet on a movable arm. With the eraser out of the way he was able
to record layers of time. To the sound of the shaken guitar he added the
sound of the strings being scratched by various things. The heads of the tape
recorder were half track: designed to play the tape through in one direction
and then the ‘flip side.’ But O wanted to go
backwards through time. Until he discovered how to wrap the tape deviously
around the motor capstan, he would twist the tape around moebiusly and listen
as the reversed sounds muffled through the acetate backing to the magnetic
layer. Sounds would present themselves tail first, but it was particularly
with reverse talking that he found a foreign language of interest to him.
O began to create fictionalized musical
documentaries. He once taped himself and a friend playing penny whistles and
household percussion, and presented the result in music class at school;
passing it off as a field recording from the jungles of Africa lent to him by
an uncle on safari.
O began planning technically idealized pop songs,
which would, for instance, have tempi in simple rations to 33 1/3 and 45 rpm
— the result being that vinyl scratches would be rhythmically co-ordinated
and would not phase in relation to the rhythm of the content.
Eventually O entered high school, where he was
not accepted into (nor allowed to audition for) the school band. Using an
insider as a conduit, instruments were borrowed or purloined, and
O started his second musical ensemble. At first this
fringe school band was open to all comers. Their intention was to play rock
music (with tubas and timpani!) but the ensemble’s arrangements were never
other than entirely improvised. Since then, O
personally has always approached the performance of music and dance as an
improviser.
And that’s another story.
Meanwhile, after leaving high school, O briefly
attended several universities. He traveled for the first time to the West
Coast to study Communications with the composer R Murray
Schafer, and consequently worked with Schafer’s World Soundscape Project for a summer. While there, he
created several projects in the WSP electronic sound studio, including the
first of many swarmfields (sounds time-staggered and multi-tracked so many
times that they become drones) and sculptural sounds (drones that vary
relative to the aural equivalent of viewpoint — hearpoint?). He also
developed his Burrows series, a group of short
compositions using the reading voice of author William S
Burroughs as the sole source material. With the exception of a film he
made in high school, now lost, these would be his first examples of the
massive and meticulous editing and reorganization of time. In one, for
example, a mediation between backwards speech and forwards speech was
presented. Another featured an acoustic palindrome. The pieces were all
intentionally reversible and O briefly published
them on full track reel-to-reel tape, so the listener could explore the
reversions.
These compositions were part of O’s early
explorations in plunderphonic procedures (documented in the 69plunderphonicS96 box set — a retrospective of compositions from
1969 to 1996), which relied exclusively on transformative quotation.
O has seldom been one to disguise his sources.
A little later O began developing, with
Marvin Green, Pitch,
presentations in absolute darkness. Their perceptual research manifested
itself in performances, sometimes with, and sometimes without aural content,
curated variety concerts, with ushers and performers using elaborate systems
to ‘see,’ while the audience remained in utter black. O also created, with Emile Morin, a
Pitch installation, for one participant at a time, which encouraged an
absolutely sightless journey from hard gradually to soft, and from hearing
the outside world to an entirely insular experience.
From then on the ongoing obsessions with improvisation, perception, and
transformative appropriation would continue as independent, parallel
investigations.
During the last quarter of the 20th century O
founded and developed Mystery Laboratory (a.k.a. mLab) a perceptual research
facility and recording studio in a small attic atelier, in Toronto. At first
there were no multitrack tape recorders in the studio. O preferred the way film sound was put together on sprocketted
reels, each of which could be time-shifted in relation to the others; but
instead of sprocket-synch, he preferred wild synch, in which various tracks
of sound, on independent machines, would be started in relative
co-ordination. Synchronization was approximated in performance.
O continued to exaggerate the time-base of
existing music; either slowing pieces down a dozen times, or speeding them up
to the spectral threshold of audibility, particularly with mono-harmonic
examples such as a raga or the opening of Mahler’s
First Symphony.
With the acquisition of some synchronized multitrack recording machines in
the mid-’80’s and computer audio technology a few years later O entered a renaissance period of plunderphonics development.
Many of the techniques he developed were applied to a broad range of popular
music and the techniques of popular music were applied to less-than-popular
fare.
Norman Igma [vi-03]
Interview with John Oswald (part 1 of 2)
by Norman Igma|imed_0368-0002|
In the autumn of 2002 mLab observer Norman Igma
spoke with John Oswald about aparanthesi
i: We’ve talked in the past about your activities in
terms of categories, such as improvisation, plunderphonics, discosphere, etc.
This will be the first time you’ve asked me to discuss with you a single
composition. If one were to take at face value your assertion that
aparanthesi consists of just one note, then it would
seem that there isn’t much to talk about.
o: I thought you might be interested in discussing
something simple in great detail…
i: … with the result, I expect, that it will seem less
simple. So, where would you like to begin?
o: Well, let’s begin at the beginning. But not, for now,
at the beginning of what’s on the CD, particularly since there are two
beginnings, and I would first like to describe my concepts at inception,
which I think will help explain why there are two versions of more-or-less
the same thing.
i: You received a commission from Réseaux [with support
from the Canada Council for the Arts] for its “Rien à voir” concert series in
Montréal…
o: … to create an electroacousmatic composition of
approximately fifteen minutes in duration for their festival in the winter of
2000.
I usually already have an idea of the tangent I would like to take when I
accept an invitation, and in this case it was the one-note idea. I was hoping
to find an interesting way to follow a single specific pitch gradually
through many states; it would be, in a sense, the morphing of a pitch through
various instrumental, acoustic and electronic forms.
I had often before explored slow transformations, particularly in
2 Crossfading Stills and a Shifting Multiple
Transparency [1986], and the sonic image of a concert pitch 440 Hertz
sine tone transforming into an orchestra tuning has been used to begin
several of my pieces, including WX [1980],
’Plause [1986] and Tune [1989].
Minus the sine tone it also is the beginning of my first string quartet,
Spectre [1990] and my first full-orchestra piece,
Orchestral Tuning Arrangement [1994], co-composed with
Linda Catlin Smith.
It’s almost the same gesture in each of these pieces: a single uninflected
A, whether it’s begun with a sine tone or an oboe or a cello, transforms into
a broader timbral spectrum, with the A as the spine. That thickening A is all
that happens in Spectre, which was composed for the
Kronos Quartet with a thousand recorded images or
reflections of a string quartet playing an A which is very gradually
inflected with an increasing degree of subtle tremolo and vibrato, which then
slows and broadens into wandering glissandi. Spectre
has the same macro-wave form as my analogue tape meditation on fire
Skindling Shadés [1987], which also features this
wandering-gliss effect multiplied hundreds of times, to create a rather
massive sine composite. I first began this approach, which I called
swarmfields, around 1973 or ’74.
A pure sinusoidal tone is my favorite electronic sound. In fact it’s just
about the only electronically generated sound that I ever use in making
music.
i: So you’ve been attracted to 440 Hertz pure tones for
quite some time.
o: Another oft heard tone is 1 kilohertz. This is a
common test signal. That’s the signal broadcasting stations play when they’re
off-air. It’s a soprano pitch. 440 is alto. It’s the pitch reference that
almost all music, of the sort that has been influenced by equal temperament,
use as a reference. But it’s not what any of the worldwide electrical grids
are tuned to. That would be 480 Hz (which is 3 octaves up from the 60 cycle
hum we often hear in North America) or 400 Hz (in Europe) — about a quarter
tone sharp and flat of 440, or A. So quite often music is out of tune with
the noise generated by amplified or electronic musical instruments. It’s out
of tune with the lights and ventilation in concert halls.
We can come back to this when we talk about version B of aparanthesi, which is tuned to the North American electrical
standard. In any case I initially followed the concert norm and tuned this
piece to 440. I do try to be conventional when there’s no good reason not to
be.
Now when I say that aparanthesi is one note I mean
that it is one specific pitch and manifestations of that pitch in the various
audible octaves. For A there are ten audible octaves, from the lowest note on
most pianos (A=27.5 Hz) to 5 octaves above A 440, which is 14,080 Hz. These
ten manifestations of simple halvings and doublings of a set frequency are
the entire harmonic content of aparanthesi — any
deviations from this frequency gravitate back to it, by various means.
i: Tuning.
o: Yes, tuning. There’s are two human solo
instrumentalists in this piece. One of them is an anonymous piano tuner. The
other is a cellist, Joan Jeanrenaud. And then almost
everything that has a broad range of frequencies, or noise elements, is
gradually filter-tuned to this tonic. A thunderstorm becomes a thunderstorm
in A. All the birds in an aviary sing in A. The 88 notes of a piano are all
tuned in forced perspective to one A.
i: How did this odd instrumentation of piano and cello
and birds and weather…
o: … and a foghorn and cattle.
i: Cattle?
o: Yeah. There were some distant cattle in the source
recording for the thunderstorm. It was a prairie storm. I tuned the moos to A
and then I changed my mind and suppressed the cattle sounds; they were
distracting. And I forgot about them until just the other day I heard them
again when I was listening closely — I have a pair of in-ear monitors which
have been custom-made to sit about half a centimetre from my eardrums. It’s
hard to miss anything when listening with those and the cattle are still
there, in both versions.
Which leads to the subject of subliminal images and sounds that are at the
threshold of audibility. They are not necessarily quiet because they can be
buried in a loud sound. When I was first formulating this piece I was most
interested in creating audio morphs; an identifiable sound which would
gradually transform into something intangible on its way to becoming a
different identifiable sound. I got particularly interested in that
intangible area, by which I mean when a sound on its way to changing into
another sound, becomes something in the middle which is neither the original
sound nor the destination sound, although the listener might already guess
that destination sound, or they might begin to hear something similar which
is neither of those two sounds.
I had been researching the various attempts that were being made to
metamorphose sounds — to, in effect, create an acoustic analogy to morphing
robots and the effects that happen to women’s coiffures in hair conditioner
commercials on television. I wrote to a few pyscho-acousticians and
programmers who have worked on this, but no one seemed to be very interested
in my situation. Eventually I figured out that this was because, in cases,
such as mine, where there is no pitch change, morphing can be accomplished by
simply adjusting the dynamics of the harmonics. For instance, by applying the
shape of harmonic spectrum of a dull sound as an envelope filtering a rich
sound, you can make the rich sound imitate the dull sound. Morphing two
sounds of the same pitch is simply a matter of crossfading over time from one
to the other. If this is done with active filters (I mean filters which
progressively emphasize or suppress the frequencies which constitute the
characteristics of that sound) one can go from a sound to another in a really
lovely gradual sort of way.
The original premise of the piece was that there would be an initial
sound, probably a sine tone, same as I’ve used in the past, and this would
transform into the wind which would transform into a flute which would
transform into a highway heard through a narrow drainpipe which would
transform into a human voice, and so on through a multitude of
transformations.
I started by making a catalogue of orchestral instruments playing steady,
sustained A’s, sans vibrato, and we (Phil Strong did
quite a bit of work on this) expanded this catalogue by adding these
instruments with their different natural pitches shifted in time so that they
also became A. Then I did some of the morphing technique I just mentioned. I
particularly enjoyed working with winds, because, in listening, I could
imagine the physicality of the instrument transforming, so a conical clarinet
would curl into a French horn for instance, and then straighten out into a
didgeridoo.
This sort of thing occurs as a quick transforming figure in aparanthesi [A.12:20->12:50 or B.30:00->31:10], and very
slowly in the voice horn fog [A.13:24->15:40 and B.15:48->19:45], which
I’ll talk about when we go through the tracks sequentially.
i: The orchestral instruments and voices all seem to
blend together, but the piano sticks out, which makes the whole thing feel a
bit like an electroacousmatic piano concerto.
o: In 1999, when I was finishing up aparanthesi I was also beginning to work on what I call The Idea
of This, for the Glenn Gould ballet, Disembodied Voice [1999], choreographed by James
Kudelka for the National Ballet of Canada. The starting point for that
was my plunderphonic creation Aria [1989], based on Glenn
Gould’s final recording of the intro to the Goldberg
Variations. It was interesting to hear, in Aria, how a particular machine would interpret Gould’s performance somewhat inaccurately, and I liked the
resulting music a lot. Then subsequently, a composer acquaintance of mine,
Christos Hatzis, employed a fellow named
Ernest Cholakis to attempt to make an accurate
MIDI transcription of the Goldbergs. I
was curious to see how far one could go with this. I had the idea that there
could be a, in-a-sense restored recording of this performance which would not
be heard through loudspeakers, but through a piano which would be played by a
reproducing mechanism, and ideally that that piano would be the same one that
Gould made the original recording on.
Quite conveniently Gould’s piano was a Yamaha,
and Yamaha has developed a line of player pianos called Disklaviers.
Gould’s Yamaha is on permanent display in Toronto,
which is where I live and work. I set about to try to convince Yamaha, the
Gould Estate, and a bunch of other people to convert
the Gould piano into a Disklavier, so that it could
be more of an active musical museum piece, rather than an inert one. This was
a long shot, and in the end it didn’t happen, but meanwhile Yamaha graciously
lent me a decent Disklavier grand for a year, and another one for Ernest, who
perfected our reproduction on a piano at least similar to Gould’s.
So all the piano sounds in aparanthesi come from
this Disklavier, which arrived towards the end of the composing of it.
i: Did you know before then that piano sounds would be a
pervasive part of the composition?
o: I don’t think so, although I might have. I seem to
remember that I wanted to start the piece the same way as the aforementioned
compositions WX, ’Plause, etc.,
with a sine tone fading in and becoming gradually harmonically richer. As it
turns out a big piano chord, [A.00:00 and B.00:00] is my other oft-used
opening strategy; a piano chord (an electroquotation of the end of
The Beatles’ A Day in the
Life) is the beginning of the Plunderphonic CD
[1989] as well as its successor, the 69Plunderphonics96 box set [2000], and I reversed it for the
beginning of one of the dance scores I made for choreographer Bill Coleman [1993]. Also the big strummed piano chord at the
beginning of the Gordon Monahan CD I produced [1992]
is one of my favorite beginnings. That disc in particular increased my
interest in the acoustic image of the piano. A piano is difficult to record
because it is big. The classical solution is to always record a piano in a
room. This also applies to recordings of orchestras. The listener is never
really close. We were able to record very close for the Monahan disc particularly because of the material, which focused
on particular regions of the piano, sometimes a single pair of strings. I
developed a physically and electronically moving soundfield microphone
technique which we tagged O.M.N.I.V.E.R.S.E. [orbital microphonic
navigational imaging via ecotonic radial stereo eccentricity]. In effect we
treated a piano as if it was a landscape in a film. We panned, tracked and
zoomed continually over this pianoscape. The effect is aurally much more
subtle than you would imagine. Our achievement was to record a whole piano
the way pop crooners are recorded — in-your-ear close-up.
This sense of landscape, or more precisely soundscape, was present
throughout the composition of aparanthesi. This
particular soundscape is both inside and outside. Many of the sounds occur
obviously outdoors, such as thunder and birds. Some of them, for example the
rain storm, were recorded from a sheltered position, and then the piano,
other instruments and voices were recorded in small isolated rooms. Because
most often these inner and outer states are occurring simultaneously, and
particularly because all the inside sounds were close-miked, which
de-emphasizes room ambiance, there is little or no apparent division between
environments. I was consciously trying to make it seem as if the listener’s
perspective is not moving around, but, instead, different states are evolving
from one point of aural perspective. This is somewhat akin to what
Stockhausen described as seeing the same thing continually under differing
light, rather than the usual cinematic method of seeing a variety of things
under the same light.
There’s another angle that comes to mind about this outside/inside thing,
which is related to the first public audition of aparanthesi, which took place at the Ex-Centris cinema in Montréal
for the “Rien à voir” festival.
i: Which is the same as track 2: aparanthesi B on the CD.
o: Approximately yes. aparanthesi
A [track 1] is the final revision of this piece, idealized for home
listening. It is the result of almost two years of sporadic revision of the
composition.
aparanthesi B [track 2] is a dynamically compressed
stereo realization of the eight-channel concert version of this piece which
was created with that particular premiere performance in Montréal in 2000 in
mind. It had a different title back then.
i: What was that?
o: It’s gone through more titles than anything else I’ve
created. The most pervasive one during its conception has been the symbol A).
The title aparanthesi is a slightly modified spelling
out of that equation. But for some reason that escapes me now, for that
performance only, it was called Just or Jeus, depending on who you ask.
But before that, the festival organizer, composer Robert
Normandeau, seemed to be slightly amused that I made a special trip
from Toronto to Montréal two weeks before the performance, particularly to
observe the characteristics of the lobby and the entrance way to the
theatre.
This is what we did for the concert. The first part of the programme was
an appropriately psychedelic diffusion by Julien Roy
of the Cease Tone Beam section of Mirror Ashes from my Grateful Dead set
Grayfolded [1995]. The audience was then invited to
leave the theatre. In the lobby, which is a rather large multi-storey atrium,
I had the actress Pascale Landry standing on a
loudspeaker pedestal facing away from the audience. She was very, very slowly
turning towards the audience. There was a very slow crescendo of a drone
which turned out to be a reversed reverberation, or preverberation, of her
speaking a single syllable, “la.” This was followed by progressively shorter
preverb ramps to progressively closer spaced syllables and words of a text
which she appeared to speak eventually in a continuous stream without
breathing, by which time the reverse reverberation had disappeared. The
preverberation resonated from loudspeakers in the upper balconies of the
atrium. Pascale’s voice came from the speaker she was standing on. In fact
what the audience heard was a recording of her voice to which she was very
precisely lipsynching. If she hadn’t been pre-recorded, it would have been
impossible to anticipate her vocalizations for the preverb and it would have
been impossible for her to speak continuously without breathing.
i: You cut out the breaths.
o: In fact each word of the text had been recorded
separately, so all those spaces had to be cut out.
Anyway, following this performance the audience returned to the
auditorium, but the doors were closed. Ushers then opened the doors precisely
synchronized with the sounding of the initial chord of the piece, which
erupted from the doorways. In the theatre itself this sound was at an
extremely high volume. It would have been unpleasant and perhaps harmful to
experience this degree of volume directly, but from the lobby one got the
impression that something powerful had just occurred in the room.
We replicated this beginning for a hearing a year later [in 2001] at the
Festival Archipel in Geneva.
The chord itself consists of the eight A’s on a piano, including its
lowest note, played precisely synchronized on the Disklavier. And for this
performance everything was pitched up to approximately a quartertone flat of
a B natural, which was my choice of tuning for that room.
Then the audience entered the aftermath of the initial chord and found
their seats. In the B version the piano decay is fairly quickly replaced with
a ten-octave sine-tone chord. Each of the tones independently and slowly
varies in volume, sort of a one-key sine organ, with variable stops. Because
the tones themselves are pure and absolutely in tune with each other, the
chord sounds remarkably still, but the audience is moving, because they’re
still getting to their seats. It’s a period of adjustment.
One thing that did happen in an obvious way in the concert version was
that things became gradually very quiet. I worked on the first third of
aparanthesi for several months. The piece was
auditioned with an extreme dynamic range. And most of that extreme was
extremely quiet. Most CD releases use very little of the 90 dB dynamic range
available in 16 bits, except when there’s a final reverb decay. I was working
with the increased dynamic range of 24 bits, and I was very interested in
having things happen at the threshold of hearing, where and when you are not
certain if you’re hearing something or imagining it. So I was working with a
very precisely set range of dynamics in a fairly quiet environment, and I
would bring people in to test what they were hearing. The concert dynamic was
also quite extreme. The initial sound was huge, and then by the time the
audience was settled in their seats they may have not been sure whether the
piece was still playing or not. There was also the low level prominence of
the highest tone which would be 15,360 Hz, which some of the older members of
the audience, myself included, may not have been able to hear but which, by
the very fact that it was moving air, could be sensed in some way.
For this CD release I have no way of instituting set playback levels for
every listening situation, nor would I want to, so I’ve reduced the dynamic
range considerably, to allow playback situations to be more flexible. I’ve
also reduced high and low pitch levels relative to the general increase in
volume in proportion to Fletcher-Munson hearing sensitivity curves.
Norman Igma [vi-03]
Interview with John Oswald (part 2 of 2)
by Norman Igma|imed_0368-0003|
i: Didn’t you say that the piece also divided into eight
channels then?
o: Yes, and ideally I should have used more channels than
that, so I could have assigned each of the sine tones to its own speaker and
spatial path. I’m not going to go into the multi-channel aspect much in this
conversation, partly because it was a subsidiary aspect of the work which I
didn’t follow through on to the extent that I perhaps should have, so when I
went back a year later to try to spatialize the piece I found it frustrating.
I think the closest to ideal versions of this composition are these stereo
realizations. I will come back to the difference between multi-channel and
stereo in a moment, when I describe the coneflapper [A.02:30->04:00 and
B.5:40->6:45]. First let’s finish talking about the opening gesture.
In aparanthesi A the initial piano chord is
reinforced both by the thundercrack and by an extension of the piano sound
through conventional reverberation and by more extreme sound freezing
schemes. The piano itself is naturally not as in tune as the sine tones and
there are non-linearities built into conventional reverberation algorithms to
make them sound more natural. This more unsettled quality I think goes nicely
with the rumbling of the thunder decay, which almost segues into the
crescendo of the coneflapper.
The coneflapper was created by overdriving the pedal tone [27.5 Hz]
through a subwoofer; physically massaging the distortions with my thumb on
the cone of the speaker, and rerecording the result. Initially, in B, the
coneflapper was a monophonic signal which was directed exclusively at a high
level to a special small speaker I placed in the centre of the concert hall.
The intended effect was that that speaker was being seriously overdriven and
was coming apart. When I reworked this sound for A, I decided to make the
instability a stereo effect — like the giant hummingbird [A.18:09], it won’t
stay still.
The coneflapper apparently rides off into the distance — I almost didn’t
say that because in fact it’s just a dynamically filtered fade with no
echo-location cues, but in the context of the scene I’m trying to set, which
is of a very open space, this would be consistent with a sense of retreating
into the distance. I suppose the stereoization of the coneflapper in fact
reduces this sense of breadth — in free space everything is mono.
The inspiration for the aftermath of the coneflapper was seeing the
Hollywood disaster farce Earthquake in an old theatre
in 1974. The film was billed as being presented in Sensurround. Sensurround
was the addition of a special subwoofer in selected cinemas. This was a two
or three-metre square wooden baffle in the back of the theatre. This
subwoofer wasn’t connected to the movie soundtrack; instead there was a
dedicated noise generator which the projectionist would flip on during the
earthquake segments of the movie. And the major earthquake segment lasted
continuously for almost ten minutes. The effect was quite intense, you shook
in your seat. I was surprised that we weren’t rained upon by bits of the
ceiling. I worried that the two elderly ladies sitting near me weren’t going
to make it through alive. And then it stops and you hear some cellos playing
a quiet pedaltone, embellished by a couple of harp figures. Of course this
was mixed in with the physiological results of ten minutes of acoustic
bombardment so there was a very peaceful ringing quietness.
This is the sort of setting that I’m trying to evoke in the wake of the
coneflapper. The sine organ is still there [A.03:40->06:50 and
B.06:40->09:34], in completely different proportion, with emphasis on the
high A [14,080 Hz] and a touch of a comb-filtered allusion to one of the
swarmfields we’ll encounter in the final section.
If you’re following the timings of these two versions you’ll see that I’ve
time-compressed this whole first ten minute selection by about a third. The B
version would be even longer if it was pitched down to A. (Listeners with
pitch tuning controls on their CD players can, of course, try this.) When I
first formulated the first section I wanted it to be, at least on a casual
listening, extremely long and apparently tedious, with the idea of picking up
the pace gradually through subsequent sections of the composition. But in the
end the majority of events take a long time throughout. So when I had this
perspective I went back and proportioned the first section
[A.00:00->06:50] so that each subsequent section should feel a bit longer,
as if maybe time is slowing down.
The aftermath of the coneflapper subtly settles down [from
A.03:40->04:15] and then there’s a long slow crescendo and accumulation of
elements [A.04:15->06:50] which is inspired by orchestral bits like the
overture to Wagner’s Lohengrin or the Buffalo Springfield’s
Expecting to Fly. There are various voicings which are
progressively added at the threshold of audibility which resonate
sympathetically at increasingly more obvious punctuation points. The first
[at A.04:33] is just a slight hump of the 440 Hz sine tone and then each
subsequent one [880 Hz at A.04:43 and 220 Hz at A.05:04] sounds more
articulated and [as of A.05:30] obviously piano-like. The notes over the next
bit more or less take turns being exciters or dampers for the sine tones,
until the final arpeggio of piano dampers [at A.06:50]. In the B version
[B.09:34] this is a sounding arpeggiated piano chord in reverse which is
meant to foreshadow the crescendo to the final chord [B.31:11].
By different means in each version we are brought to the first moment when
there’s a rest from tone, and here we are introduced to the piano tuner.
We went through several tuners for the Disklavier, and unfortunately I
can’t remember who this one is. The recording was made surreptitiously. In B
you hear a straight documenting of some tuning preparations
[B.09:34->10:39] along with all sorts of aural room cues, particularly [at
B.10:24->10:39] where he shuffles away from the piano to unzip his case to
get some tools (there’s a resonant high/low piano interval [at B.10:22] — it
sounds like the high note was superimposed later, which unfortunately, I now
tend to think, distracts from the documentary effect). Given that the whole
first section occurs in outdoor, or free, space, I at the time wanted this
interlude to sound as much as possible like a contrast, casual, perhaps even
a different place. It’s not an absolute arbitrary jumpcut [at B.09:34]
though, because the piano elements both before and after link the two scenes,
but I think that, for a moment, before he steps on the pedal and you hear the
piano again, that it sounds like something has ended and you’re hearing a bit
of unintended shuffling around, as if you were between movements in a
concert.
And in fact another guiding element in this early version of aparanthesi was concert ritual, particularly the orchestral
tune-up, which you hear later [B.29:56->31:11].
i: I really like the point in this version where the
tuner pumps the sustain pedal of the piano [B.09:53] and you hear the first
distant rumblings of the coming thunderstorm…
o: … as if the piano activity is initiating a
meteorological response, or that there’s a synchronicity happening. And then
by the time you get to a rather obvious little edit [at B.10:39] before going
into the hammerdown, the gradual resonant focusing of the storm by comb
filters is just becoming apparent.
In the new version of aparanthesi this interlude is
handled quite differently. The roomsound clues have all been eliminated.
After what is almost like a sigh by the tuner the pedal pumping soon begins,
accompanied by a variety of piano string articulations.
i: And a frightened bird taking wing [A.07:30]…
o: Which leads me to another digressive anecdote. This is
one of the last things I added to the piece. I wanted to put some avian
indication earlier in the piece than the arrival of the tuned flock [A.15:35]
and the giant hummingbird [A.18:09]. I had a vague image of an albatross,
very large slowly flapping wings. Sound designer Peter
Thillaye, who had supplied me with the hummingbird source, suggested
we visit a foley artist named Andy Malcolm, who had
converted several buildings on a farm outside the city for the expressed
purpose of recording sound effects for movies.
Unfortunately Andy’s collection of bird wings had been recently decimated
by the arrival of some moths hidden in a hawk specimen. We worked on the big
wing sound using gull wings I think (I had to conduct because he wasn’t used
to working without a moving picture) and we got some okay results but nothing
immediately satisfying. As a way of, I guess, letting off some steam Andy
began to make these little haiku of bird activity — brief take offs and
landings. I remarked that that sound reminded me exactly of a scene in a
movie I had heard fifteen or so years years ago, Agnes of
God [1985], in which a bunch of doves flocked about in a belfry.
Peter Thillaye laughed at my recollection and said
that he and Andy had done the sound for that film.
Anyway I thought the piano tuner could conceivably have something up his
sleeve, and presto…
The hammerdown, which is again from the documentation of the piano tuner
adjusting something in the piano is inspired by another recording image. In
1974 the World Soundscape Project created a series of radio works for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), our
national radio. Barry Truax did one with the theme
of time. The part I particularly remember is a segue from descending
footsteps on a wooden stairway (it’s interesting to determine what are the
cues which enable us to hear the difference between descending and ascending
footsteps) to a slowing of the recording of these footsteps as they continue
to descend to an emptying drain slowing, to the tocks of a grandfather clock
which is also slowing down and then it chimes very slow and getting lower and
slower [this sequence recurs on the mystery tape GX].
The piano tuner hammering on the soundboard is mostly non-pitch-specific,
although there is a bit [A.07:51>08:01, B.10:59>11:08] where the
strings sound in descending pitches in B, which I think I’ve fixed in A;
there’s a sense of getting bigger and slower and more thunderous. Each time
the hammering hits a nodal A there’s a reinforcing note from the next lower
octave, until we hit bottom.
The idea of a harmonic relationship of different speeds of playback of a
recording is realized very clearly in another piece of mine, Bell Speeds [1983, 1990; available on empreintes DIGITALes, IMED
9604] which is also all in octaves. The chromatic version of this technique
is coming up in the third region of aparanthesi
[A.16:06->25:01, B.20:35->28:12].
Meanwhile, during the hammerdown, the storm has begun to gradually
resonate in tune. I programmed some comb filters with which I could
individually vary the prominence of each of the teeth of the comb, so I was
able to play the storm in a similar way to the sine-organ we heard earlier.
The resonant storm sounded pretty interesting on its own, and the event
envelope of that particular storm has determined the pacing of this section.
And then I’ve added a few flavours. It’s raining on the piano.
i: The rain drops begin to sound like piano notes.
o: Ah. Well this goes back to the initial klang (to use
Tenney’s term) of the piece. As in the homogeneity
of pitch choice, I think any homogeneity of sounding sources is good.
There are two harmonic glisses in aparanthesi A at
this point [A.10:30->11:15, 11:22->:52] which are like curtains of
timbre dropping over the storm resonance. Once I got involved in the image of
this landscape I began trying to paint in aspects with sound, and this aspect
is like those sheets of rain one occasionally sees traversing the distance.
There’s then a distinct dum-dee-dum rhythmic figure [B.15:07] which was
naturally occurring in the source storm. In B I use it to initiate a drone,
but it sounds so artificially played, even though it’s purely filtered
thunder, that you can hear the extent to which I decide to de-emphasize it in
A [A.12:22]. And then there’s a third harmonic gliss [A.12:49->13:22]
followed by [at A.12:38] a string tremelo which will be repeated later [at
A.19:30]. Then there’s feminine vocal formants followed by masculine followed
by a reiteration of the initial piano chord which initiates the man/fog morph
[A.13:24, B.15:58]. The piano chord doesn’t happen at that point in B but I
thought it was a good idea to have that pianistic reminder at this point, to
not stray too far from any of the principal elements; and, also, I thought
that male “Ho!” in B was too much of a new thing which doesn’t get emphasized
or reinforced elsewhere in the piece. In fact there are human voices
throughout the piece, subliminally. Anyway, in B [leading up to B.15:58]
there’s a clearer exposition of that single wind instrument morphing line and
then the morph of the male chorus into the foghorn [A.13:24->15:35,
B.15:58->19:40] is a much slowed down morph. This was originally
considerably longer than even the four-minute version in A. I wanted to take
as much time as necessary to give the listener the impression that nothing
ever seems to be changing, but then you come out of it in a radically
different place from when you went in. But this seemed empirically like too
long a time for the rest of the composition; I’ll do it again someday with
different elements as a separate piece and I’ll make it real long. For now
hopefully I get away with rushing through this transition in two minutes. The
disappearance of the rain is a rather obvious fade, but perhaps not that
noticeable because it’s not the focal element. In any case, when you come out
of this drone the storm is over, the rain has stopped, and perhaps the sun is
out, because, for the first time, birds are singing.
i: This is the particular moment in aparanthesi that does sound like a scene change. Like, during the
man/fog morph we went somewhere else. The tonality even changes with the last
note of the foghorn.
o: That doppler reflection. In aparanthesi B you are once again alone with the piano tuner. He
sighs again, perhaps because he has to retune that note to concert pitch yet
again. I added the surf and leaves, wet and dry to aparanthesi A. I like how the frequency sweeps down with the
downturn of the foghorn. In either case our tuner returns us to our
tonality.
The birds were initially tuned by Phil Strong.
It’s a fairly rare bird that only sings one constant pitch, so the choices
here are all relative — they are relatively tuned to the tonic. I don’t know
how much of Phil’s set I ended up using. It’s a fairly subtle effect, but I
don’t think you’ll find a more harmonious bunch of birds anywhere.
i: Do you mean each bird was tuned individually?
o: Yes there are a few other examples of this kind of
swarm field assemblage elsewhere. We’ll find some of this multiplying of
individuals into a mass coming up in this section.
Another transition is from day to night over the next couple of minutes.
Night creatures are introduced and the number of birds increases until it has
more of a nocturnal ambiance.
Now in B there’s a silent piano tremolo which leads up to the
forced-perspective 88-keys-of-one-note piano (that’s the thing which in the
beginning sounds like a three-inch long guitar). The silent piano is another
function of the Disklavier. By flipping a switch you can introduce a felt
rail between the hammers and the strings which prevents the two from meeting.
You get a tuneless thump. At the same time there is a MIDI
piano module which is engaged which allows one to hear the notes played via,
for instance, headphones. But the silent hammering on its own can be quite
effective. This is a one note tremolo, where you can hear the string being
engaged near the end.
Also coming in from the distance is a mosquito. This is a stock sound
which comes from a commercial sound effects collection. I’m of the opinion
that it’s a real mosquito. Others insist that it is an electrical device.
The mosquito fluctuates around the tonic, until it seriously begins to
lose fly power, by which time we’ve been introduced to the forced perspective
piano. In B it’s just the notes below the initial one, but in A you first
hear the lowest notes of the piano. Each of the 88 notes will be pitched up
(if it’s below) or pitched down (if it’s above) that one A. It’s the kind of
scaling that occurred in Bell Speeds where a tiny bell
the size of a pea could be made to sound huge. Well here you have to imagine
an exact 1/8th scale replica of a grand piano — it would be just over ten
inches long. The initial sound you hear (at A.16:06) is the lowest A of that
virtual miniature piano. Then as we work our way note by note up the
keyboard, each time the piano gets a little bit bigger, so each string stays
at that constant pitch of A. As you go above that central A the piano gets
bigger, until it’s over one hundred feet long for playing the high notes.
Now if this was a straight forward exposition of what I just described
there would be 88 notes. In fact it is once more a documentary of a tuning
procedure and some notes are played more than once and so there are more than
88 notes. And there is muting of individual strings so often you’re only
hearing one string of each set of three which represent each of the lower
notes. Plus most of the strings are actively being tuned so you can hear the
fluctuations around A, like the mosquito.
And then there’s Joan Jeanrenaud playing the cello. It’s already been
there for awhile when you hear her take a big dip [at A.16:50] on the cusp of
a high string tremolo. In fact it’s a retrograde of one of the takes we did
for Spectre [1990]. Joan’s instruction was to play an
A uninflected, and then to very very gradually introduce a little bit of
vibrato, and then to just as gradually widen the vibrato until it’s an
appoggiatura within a semitone, then a wider portamento eventually into a
wide-ranging glissando. Here we come in about halfway through this transition
and work our way back to the beginning. I’ve also smoothed over most of her
bow changes and introduced a gradually narrowing filter until she
disappears.
i: But you still seem to refer to it as Ms. Jeanrenaud’s performance.
o: I hope that none of the sources completely lose their
original character in the transformation. It’s difficult for me to tell
because I have an intimate relationship to the history of each sound. But
that’s what I’m trying to do — retain some semblance of the original event.
There was something quite hypnotizing and dreamy about Joan playing that
A.
i: But she’s not responding to the rest of the music we
hear.
o: No. She was recorded in isolation. Almost all the
recording I do is of independent elements, which are then flown into a mix.
Any apparent correspondences are fortuitous.
i: You mentioned that there’s a transition to the
nocturnal here. In fact the whole piece becomes quite dreamy from here on
in.
o: And that’s probably the major reason I changed the
ending. The original climactic chord [B.31:11] was like an alarm clock going
off. I’d rather leave the audience to sleep in if that’s where they’ve
gone.
Once we get past the giant hummingbird’s investigation [A.18:04->18:33]
which is a reminiscence of the coneflapper (and then that filtered solo viola
tremolo [A.19:30] which is the last gesture of flight, now abstract) then,
indeed, everything conspires to dreaminess. Layers of elements are added for
their similarity to the existing soundfield. The piano notes naturally occur
farther and farther apart and become progressively more mellow.
In aparanthesi A I begin to add something to some
of the piano notes, first at note #77 [A.20:11] where I take the note which
has already been tuned down and add its reflection an octave below. Next [at
A.21:41] the octave above and below are added. It doesn’t happen with any
regularity but over the course of five minutes each succeeding chosen note is
reinforced with yet another octave reflection of it, so that [at A.25:00]
there’s an A played in ten octaves. It’s very different from the eight octave
chord at the beginning of the piece because, instead of being the original
eight A’s the piano possesses, it is only one note in ten octaves, a very
different sound.
At this point the piece begins to wind down, or fade. This takes another
five minutes. Or, in the case of B, there’s the penultimate piano note [at
B.28:12] which initiates the whistle breath, and then, following the, in a
sense, highest piano note there’s a reduction of elements [B.28:35->30:00]
leading to a gradual crescendo of a smoothed over orchestra tuning, which
leads up to a reiteration of the initial chord, only bigger!
Therein lies a problem. I don’t pre-announce that I will attempt to make
this chord big but I think there’s an expectation built in here. After an
audition of aparanthesi B at Naut
Humon’s studio in San Francisco, Jon
Leidecker said the last chord didn’t seem loud enough, and I agreed,
but any louder and Naut’s system would have distorted. And in this case there
wasn’t the set up of the huge initial chord in an empty room with the
audience outside; the proportions were about the same as on this CD.
Something else is needed here. Anyway I went in a different direction with
aparanthesi A.
i: That last chord lingers for over four minutes.
o: I’ve often ended pieces with unusually long decays.
Die Offnüng [1992] the ballet Bill T
Jones and I did in Berlin ends with a diminuendo chord which lasts six
minutes. When I did an orchestral transcription of this [Classic, 1994],
members of the orchestra left the stage one by one throughout this
diminuendo.
Then there’s the challenge of fading out all the way. Most digital
recordings contain something called dither. This is a broadband fuzzy noise
that’s always on at the lower threshold of the CD’s dynamic range. It helps
alleviate low level distortion. In aparanthesi B the
decay of the final chord eventually goes below the threshold of the dither
and becomes inaudible and then the dither shuts off and the CD is over
[B.35.33]. You can hear this if you play the very end of the CD very
loud.
Years ago I made a transition between the first track and the second track
on the CD Discosphere [1991] which I found very satisfying. The first piece,
Skindling Shadés slowly fades down, as the fire
depicted dies away; it fades down to digital zero, and as the last ember
fades and the last bit goes to zero the first bit of the second piece
Amina begins from digital zero in a slow fade up.
I fussed over the final decay of aparanthesi for
several weeks. While Jean-François Denis wondered if
I was ever going to deliver this music, I kept adding layers of complexity to
what is simply the going away of this drone. There are probably about a dozen
elements that I’m slowly removing and each one has its own independent fade
curve, including the dither. [At A.25:15] you can barely hear the piano’s
sustain sustain pedal lift. Then [from A.26:09->26:23] there’s the last
thing I added which is me whistling for one breath on the edge of forming an
audible note. It’s erratic, it’s the closest thing to a melody in the whole
piece. It’s a bit like a timid version of Francis
Bacon tossing a glob of paint at a portrait when it’s near finished.
It’s a causality casualty gesture which seals the fate of the piece.
i: I seemed to have missed hearing this.
o: All this is now happening at the threshold of
audibility. Perhaps I’m the only one who will ever hear these things or
notice them. Nonetheless, they’re there. After that last breath it’s just a
multiplicity of congruent fades for about three and a half minutes [to
A.30:00].
That’s it.
Norman Igma [vi-03]
electrocd.com John
Oswald: Aparanthesi (CD): liner notes