At the beginning of the 21st century, listeners are inundated with music
that wafts through every commercial space. Shopping malls have become tasting
centers, wherein a book shop will pipe in a muzak-ed The
Beatles tune while the clothes boutique next door is barking
bass-heavy electronica. A little further down the stroll, light classical is
shouldered alongside hip hop, creating a garbled omnipresence. There is no
silence any more, only a miasma of unrelated ideas.
Paul Dolden coheres such babble in a single,
densely packed meta-narrative. This is his voice, his style, condensing the
shopper’s day, explicating the aural plague, giving it shape and substance.
Since the 1980s, Dolden’s vision of the present has
made the musical community prickly. His output does not tidily emerge from
the austere modernist tradition, which has long lost its currency, except
among composition instructors and their students. By today’s
techno-standards, the musical descendants of Webern
and Stravinsky sound nourishing up close, quaintly
non-electric at a distance, and not quite real any more.
With his history of layering hundreds of recorded tracks, aggressively
recalibrating the limits of orchestration, Dolden
attacks classical music’s tail-eating inwardness and the weak fibres by which
it clings to artistic relevance. 1989’s Below the Walls of
Jericho, with its bristling fabric, was bent on enlivening the
audience’s blood flow. It was a nasty shock in the concert hall, where shocks
have been in short supply. Now Dolden offers a new
sound in Entropic Twilights, a barrage of now, in the
form of myriad musical genres, packed smart and tight like Bach’s counterpoint or Ligeti’s
mircropolyphony. Entropic Twilights is tonal, less
dissonant and longer than any previous works (49 minutes) and welcomes comedy
back to serious music. Listen for when the dark, pulsing orchestral tensions
melt into speedy jazz guitar at the end of the first movement and try not to
smile. Let’s return to the humour aspect later.
Entropic Twilights begs a reappraisal of the
vocabulary around Dolden’s music. Particularly, his
often-touted ‘aesthetics of excess’ no longer seems to apply; the millions of
notes heard on this recording, uncharacteristically, do not overload the
listener. There are exactly enough of them.
‘Composer’ is another problematic term, because its classical inferences
do not encapsulate what Dolden does. Other composers
compose for the open air, only rarely with electronic assistance.
Dolden composes for cyberspace, and this is best
illustrated through Entropic Twilights. Gone are the
raging blocks of scintillating klangfarben heard in the Jericho triptych.
Entropic Twilights works instead with four brief
melodies, stretched and compressed, beginning and ending at different
positions around the body; you can actually feel one tune coming down into
the top of your head as another strain spirals upward toward your jaw. This
creates a unique sensation of panoramic space: the listener’s body feels like
a magnet, drawing together musical Diaspora. At other times, there is a
perception of physical movement, as if the listener was moving through audio
chambers featuring walls of only recently imaginable timbres, among other
individual melodic currents cruising at their own distinct tempos.
Dolden does this by composing in stereo and
realizing his ideas through recording engineering of the highest order.
Composers compose for the open air, while Dolden
composes for recording technology, and this is a pertinent distinction:
mediation becomes muse. During his suburban upbringing, young Dolden heard almost all music through radio and recordings, as
did we all. His youthful compositional approach came under fire for its
‘unnatural’ fixation on microphones and loudspeakers over pure, unblemished
instrumental sound. Ironically, live instruments are today a rarer treat than
their electrically mediated facsimiles. ‘Nature,’ it would seem, is being
overrun by reality. That irony is critical to Dolden’s approach. Responding to media mediation is, again, his
style, an enterprise distinct from traditional composing. It is media
art.
Dolden the media artist has also been called a
maximalist, though that term means little more than containing more. There
certainly is a lot of music in Entropic Twilights, but
that is also true of every Mahler symphony. The term
is misleading: ‘maximalist’ implies a school of composition that does not
exist in any meaningful way. As for the use of different musical genres
concurrently, Dolden is using genres the way
Bach, Haydn, Schönberg, and Bartók used folk tunes.
Dolden uses unorthodox instrumentation to capture
those genres accurately: heavy metal through electric guitar, and gamelan
through those gorgeous gongs.
Dolden is a staunch post-modernist, eager to play
with signifiers and, luckily, he is witty enough to make genre splices splat
or glisten. The jazzy guitar part that concludes Entropic
Twilights’s opening movement, Twilight’s Nomadic
Desire, almost goofily caps the more brooding, percussive choral stuff
beforehand. It is a sudden shift, deliberately snuffing out a darker kind of
tension in favour of something more exuberant. It is a pratfall, and also a
serious demonstration of how to refresh the listener’s experience. The icy
trance beforehand had been well prepared; the dreadful atmospheric integrity
explodes while the music’s integrity holds fast. (Remember, we are dealing
with very finite musical materials constantly reappearing in new garb: a
four-melody Idée fixe.) The anticipation of the listener is mangled but the
music’s logic remains intact, which seemingly goads the audience to listen
less as academics and hear more as adventurers and joy riders.
Serious music has been skimpy on visceral thrills for a long time now,
perhaps because popular music often is so good at evoking them. But 18th and
19th century listeners attended piano concertos in part for the wild ride of
a virtuosic performance, a lively accompaniment, a yee-hah! This recent
absence has cost the classical tradition dearly. Dolden’s Entropic Twilights livens up the
situation, for all music. Entropic Twilights is a
rejection of music’s pervasive tameness, via velocity and scale. Just as the
healthiest artistic genres of today — film and the novel — appeal to the guts
of the audience as much as they provide cerebral edification, Entropic Twilights evocates the breadth of our actual living
experience, supercharged and relentlessly entertaining.
Entropic Twilights is a challenge to the classical
scene and to those polite, piped in tunes, those vague prompters of
commercial well being. It is ill to reduce music to a mere sickness imposed
upon our sensibilities, to allow music’s value to be whittled away by flabby
ubiquity and frippery. Dolden’s rebuttal is an
action-packed tonic of fortifying, electric irony and multifarious, heads-up
reality. Enjoy.
First the work was composed on 140 pages. I remember it took me 137 days
to compose the work. While composing I created the click tracks since many of
the sections involve complex rhythmic phasing and I needed to see how the
bars lined up to control the harmonic rhythm.
Next the individual parts were written out and musicians and singers were
hired to perform the individual parts one at a time. I performed all the
bowed and plectrum string parts. All the parts with sustained note values
(i.e. melodic work) were performed four times each. All the parts were
recorded in stereo using two AKG 414 UBL-S microphones. The microphone
pre-amp was a tube amp made by Peavey (VMP 2). The signal was then placed
through a Klark-Teknic Parametric Equalizer with different EQ curves for each
instrument (These curves I have developed over many years of recording). The
signal was then placed through a phase angle correction unit, the Barcus
Berry BBE. Finally the signal was digitized using a Digidesign 882 I/O. All
the performances were edited for greater accuracy. Next all parts involving
the inharmonic samples (i.e. pitch shifted saucepans, bowls, wheel rims,
various poles, bass drums, various gongs and tams and many types of bells)
were created. In the case where samples doubled a performed part, the samples
were edited following the rhythm of the live part.
The piece was originally premiered in September 2000. However I was still
unhappy with the sound of the piece. For the next two years I re-mastered my
three previous solos CDs: L’ivresse de la vitesse #1
and #2 and Seuil de silences (originally called
The Threshold of Deafening Silence). During this
remastering period I learned a lot about the new digital tools available to
me. Secondly I began to realize that for Entropic
Twilights I needed new types of production styles. I spend a great
deal of time listening and studying other people’s productions and mixing
techniques. However I may be alone in the inherent problems of dense
multitracking. Moreover I may be really alone in my orchestration ideas. For
example, in this work, I have 6 cymbal parts, 3 guiros, 3 shakers, castanets,
maracas, 2 snares and I still want the flute part played softly in its first
octave to cut through. Obviously a few sonic comprises have to be made. Here
are a few engineering “tricks” I developed for this work.
I have come to believe in heavy compression of most instruments and voices
because otherwise when all the tracks are together, you only hear the strong
or penetrating parts of each instrument. (i.e. high notes on brass and
flutes/piccolo, the low notes in saxophones, clarinets, vocal vowels which
have high pitched formants, etc.). The problem with extensive compression of
all tracks is that you start getting that static wall of sound. Secondly,
percussive sounds with exponential envelopes cannot be clearly perceived
through this wall of sound. (One tends to only hear the tick of their
attacks). Therefore I developed dynamic settings for compression with
optical-style compressors. One example: Attack: 100 (milliseconds) Release:
12 Ratio: 20:1 Threshold: -30 dB. These types of settings produce an
articulation similar to a musical articulation of sfp (Fast loud attack and
quick decay to soft). This is emphasized by the fact that optical compressors
emphasize lower numbered harmonics as they go into deep compression. (In this
case the soft or last part of the sound). Partially to offset this
“darkness”, a dynamic treble enhancer was used after compression that kicked
in as the signal became too dark. The quick reduction in level after the
attack of each note or phrase allowed the short envelopes of the percussion
instruments to be perceived in the final mix. In short I made the orchestral
instruments more percussive.
Likewise I realized the pitched percussion instruments (metal, bowls,
poles, gamelan instruments, plucked strings, gongs, tams, vibes, marimbas
etc.) needed to become more sustained and less percussive. I designed extreme
low level compressors for each instrument type. These compressors left the
peak of each sound where it was and severely brought up the decay portion of
the sound. To this decay portion I often added dynamic noise reduction and/or
treble enhancers. I also added many short delays, in the 5 to 50 milliseconds
range to these instruments in order to imitate the “timbral density” of the
orchestral and voice parts. This timbral density for the orchestra
instruments was created by recording each part four times. In addition for
these pitched percussion instruments I often used multiband compressors and
expanders designed to pull down the upper register during the bright attack
portion. Lows and mids were brought up or down in conjunction with the
previous low-level compressor.
Another sound quality problem I had in previous mixes was the build up of
resonant peaks resulting in a muddy sound when many tracks were playing fast.
In particular the resonant peaks of particular instruments become an almost
steady hum or drone killing the rhythmic drive. For example both the piano
and cello have strong resonant peaks between 85 and 110 Hz. When you have
many tracks of the same sound source you get this sonic sludge in these
resonant regions. In previous works I had worked with finding numerous
resonant peaks and using notch filters to remove them. However acoustic
instruments often have many closely spaced resonant peaks and by the time you
are up to 10 or 20 notches you are starting to get a very thin sounding
cello, piano, toms, etc. I realized I needed more of a gap or space between
each note than was possible with human performance. In other words an extreme
short staccato. This was done through fancy applications of gates in order
not to cut off the initial attack transients of each note. First an extremely
fast optical compressor was used to darken the sound after the initial
attack. The next unit, the gate, was triggered by seeing only the bright
attack transients. Next, another fast attack VCA high ratio compressor was
used to even out the levels. Often a dynamic treble enhancer was added and/or
a “de-clicker” to remove the clicks that did occur by gating. Often somewhere
in the chain of plug-ins a multi-band compressor/expander was needed. For
each part I also produced a very fat or full sounding compressed version
which did not use gating. In the final mix I would have the staccato or gated
version and the legato compressed version at the same time. I would achieve a
balance between the two and sometimes vary their mixture levels. In some
passages only the gated versions appears in the final mix. When only using
the gated version identification of the instrument is often impossible.
However following the pitch pattern is possible because the gated short notes
ended up being around 20-40 milliseconds long.
A similar approach was used on cymbals, shakers, guiros, hi-hats, toms,
timpani, bass drum, low gamelan tams, electric bass, acoustic bass, contra
bassoon, tuba. A short gated version and a fat compressed version were
produced for each performance. In the final mix the gated version produced
the rhythmic articulation and compressed version produced a resonant big
sound. In the final mix there was a tendency to use more of the gated version
when the two rhythmic sections had “pulled apart” either through the use of
phasing or two different tempos. The most time consuming part of all this
work was when I had sounds for which I could not gate electronically. For
example, all the electric bass parts I went through and edited in a silence
between each note. Therefore the gate had a chance to identify each note
separately and then shorten each that note accordingly.
There were other processes involved to get the sound of Entropic Twilights which are too numerous to mention. However I
would like to mention one recording innovation I used for drums. I first used
this idea during the remastering of older works phase (2000-2002) (in
Beyond the Walls of Jericho and Physics of Seduction. Invocation #3). My problem with drum
recordings previously is that I had been using standard industry procedures.
When I got to the final mix I found I did not have enough level control over
individual drum pieces, because of the bleed of sound. (i.e. sound of the
hi-hat in almost every microphone etc). I realized I needed to record the
drums in the same manner as I did every other sound: one piece at a time.
This allowed for individual level control in the final mix and individual
settings of compression and equalization for each drum piece. Moreover having
the player free from playing the entire kit at the same time allowed for
certain articulations that are not otherwise possible. For example the six
cymbals parts play a continuous ride in the feel of the musical section. In
addition I had the player (Phillipe Keyser) play two
bars normal and then two bars where he choked or stopped the sound of the
cymbal after each stick stroke, with his free hand. This prevented the
buildup of the cymbals in the mix that you often hear in a typical rock mix
in which once the drummer starts bashing on the ride cymbal everything else
is masked because of the 300 Hz to 20 kHz broadband noise of the cymbal.
Likewise having 6 cymbals, like the 3 guiros and 3 shakers, is to create a
timbral density equal to the instrumental parts.
My intention in Entropic Twilights was to produce a
beautiful recording that constantly varied its sound and therefore the
production procedures (for example sections that are very “orchestral”,
sections that seem to swing like the best big bands, sections that “rocked”
you into the ground). Unlike most composers or producers who create one type
of “sound world” this is still my biggest challenge which means developing an
extremely flexible audio production technique. In addition I am doing sound
constellations that cannot occur with acoustic ensembles.
As a final comment I realize my music, particularly since L’ivresse de la vitesse, has become about the same musical
materials being performed by a constantly changing instrumentation. In this
piece, the four melodies are only developed in a limited manner, and no other
melodic materials are introduced. Contrasts are created by each section
having a unique orchestration that is never repeated again in the work. By
contrast, the instrumental composer normally deals with a fixed
instrumentation for the duration of the composition, whether it is a string
quartet, orchestra, or solo flute. In most styles of writing the
compositional decisions and tensions are based on the introduction of new
material and/or more extended variation/development of existing material.
Clearly my working method elevates the art of orchestration coupled with
audio engineering to a dominant compositional concern. At the point of this
writing, the obvious question is whether I want to change this balance.
Paul Dolden, Montréal [ii-05]
Featured Musicians in Entropic Twilights
Paul Dolden: electric and acoustic guitar,
electric and acoustic bass, violin, viola, cello, dulcimer, sitar, banjo,
tams, gongs, bowls, wheel rims, metal poles, metal plates, various bells,
gamelan orchestra instruments Phillipe Keyser: drum kits John Korsrud: trumpet Derrick Christian: bass voice Hamish Gordon: oboe, english horn Johanna Hauser: clarinet, bass clarinet Liz Hamel: alto voice, tenor and bass recorder Brock Campbell: tuba Nick Apivor: marimba, vibes, congas, shakers,
guiros, castenets, maracas, timpani Elliot Polsky: bata drums, timbales Lorraine Reinhardt: soprano voice Bill Runge: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone
saxes Jason Cook: boy soprano Ingrid Chiang: bassoon, contra bassoon. Rod Murray: trombone Jonathan Quick: tenor voice Chenoa Anderson: flute, piccolo Jeff Nelson: french horn
[ii-05]
electrocd.com Paul
Dolden: Délires de plaisirs (CD): liner notes