When I first heard Gyorgy Ligeti's Atmospheres, which like most people was when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, it blew me away. Later, I learned that Ligeti wrote the piece as an answer to the question (I'm paraphrasing), "How might one write music if everything but pitch and timbre were eliminated?" I found this severe narrowing of the compositional toolkit very intriguing and even more in the when applied to the potentially vast timbral palette of electronic music. Thus, one of my goals in my current work is to explore this ground for myself.
I recently ran across Wim Merten's book on minimalism that includes overviews of the work of four composers from the 1960s and '70s, including LaMonte Young. Among other things, he was known for, on the one hand, a rather anarchical approach to music and, on the other, an abiding interest in the subtleties of sound. One piece he wrote that embodies both of these interests, and which is discussed in the book, is Composition 1960 #7. The piece consists of two notes played simultaneously, the B below middle C and the F# above it, and the instructions "to be held for a long time." As I understand it, one of the intentions of the piece is to direct the listener to the complexity of the sounds being made, without the distraction of melodic or harmonic movement. Imagine these two notes being played by a violin, for example: regardless of the skill of the violinist, the sound would subtly change with minute differences in the bow’s movement across the strings, as well as through small shifts of the player's left hand. These fluctuations in the sound would be objective, but additionally, the listener's attention can shift across violin's rich sonic structure, yielding subjective changes in perception of the timbre.
Young’s piece seemed like the perfect platform for an initial foray into the timbral vocabulary of the synthesizer -- or at least the ones I have on hand. There are only two notes in my variation, the B and the F# Young delimited, but I have doubled them several times, and I have purposefully varied the sonic playing field to a significant degree relative to that of an acoustic instrument. Given the complexity I have added to it, I suspect Young would consider my treatment of his piece to be counter to his initial intention; it is for this reason that I call it a variation on his theme, rather than an arrangement.
I invite you, nonetheless, to listen to this in much the same way as I understand Young intended his piece to be listened to: give yourself over to the sound, let it wash over you, and notice what presents itself. There is a great deal going on texturally, despite the melodic and harmonic stasis. You will very clearly hear in several places the 4th partial, D#, giving the sound a warm, major consonance. There are also two resonances that pop up fairly prominently in different places, one is a clean sine at D# and the other is a more ragged tone that includes a very high C#; both result from the electronic engines’ filters self-oscillating. And, of course, there are a great number of higher partials to chase.
I recently ran across Wim Merten's book on minimalism that includes overviews of the work of four composers from the 1960s and '70s, including LaMonte Young. Among other things, he was known for, on the one hand, a rather anarchical approach to music and, on the other, an abiding interest in the subtleties of sound. One piece he wrote that embodies both of these interests, and which is discussed in the book, is Composition 1960 #7. The piece consists of two notes played simultaneously, the B below middle C and the F# above it, and the instructions "to be held for a long time." As I understand it, one of the intentions of the piece is to direct the listener to the complexity of the sounds being made, without the distraction of melodic or harmonic movement. Imagine these two notes being played by a violin, for example: regardless of the skill of the violinist, the sound would subtly change with minute differences in the bow’s movement across the strings, as well as through small shifts of the player's left hand. These fluctuations in the sound would be objective, but additionally, the listener's attention can shift across violin's rich sonic structure, yielding subjective changes in perception of the timbre.
Young’s piece seemed like the perfect platform for an initial foray into the timbral vocabulary of the synthesizer -- or at least the ones I have on hand. There are only two notes in my variation, the B and the F# Young delimited, but I have doubled them several times, and I have purposefully varied the sonic playing field to a significant degree relative to that of an acoustic instrument. Given the complexity I have added to it, I suspect Young would consider my treatment of his piece to be counter to his initial intention; it is for this reason that I call it a variation on his theme, rather than an arrangement.
I invite you, nonetheless, to listen to this in much the same way as I understand Young intended his piece to be listened to: give yourself over to the sound, let it wash over you, and notice what presents itself. There is a great deal going on texturally, despite the melodic and harmonic stasis. You will very clearly hear in several places the 4th partial, D#, giving the sound a warm, major consonance. There are also two resonances that pop up fairly prominently in different places, one is a clean sine at D# and the other is a more ragged tone that includes a very high C#; both result from the electronic engines’ filters self-oscillating. And, of course, there are a great number of higher partials to chase.
Some technical notes for those interested: The two main engines here are Logic's ES2 and Greenoak's Crystal. The former holds two F#s with three voices one octave apart; the oscillators are a saw wave, a square wave, and a bright “wood” sampled wave, all oscillating both independently and in frequency modulation. These are collectively filtered with a 12db low-pass filter and a resonance filter controlled separately by very-low-frequency, sample-and-hold and random-wave oscillators. Crystal, holding two Bs an octave apart, is also running three voices: two saws and a synthetic voice sample. These voices are filtered independently using low-frequency oscillators and/or multi-point looping envelopes. Finally, the bottom end, a B one octave below Crystal's low B, is held down using Logic's EXS24 sampler playing a choir sample; this voice is run through a static low-pass filter just to get the color right but is otherwise left alone.