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.