Music for Days

Okay, a day and a half, but really, this is a breathtaking project: 



I'm very proud to have participated in a new collection through the Lines community.  The parameters were pretty loose:  compose a long-form (30-90 minutes) ambient piece.  As you can see on the album page, there were over 50 submissions, totaling about 34 hours of music; it's simply monumental.  (It takes me back to Music on a Long Thin Wire, a piece that was part of my first introduction to contemporary art music in my late teens.  It was arguably one of the first long-form ambient works, literally lasting for days.)  Put it on in the background and let it color your day (and a half!); mine is the fifth track, about 2 1/2 hours in.

Some notes on my contribution:  Back in October of last year, there was a discussion on Lines about ambient music theory and whether there was such a thing or not.  In the course of the conversation, several things happened:  a number of people made the points that a) music theory is retrospective, not prospective (Debussy's comment that theory does not make art was referenced a few times) and b) that the best resource for understanding how to make the music you want is to listen to and deconstruct that made by those who inspire you, and, lastly, Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie was mentioned (referring to it as a progenitor of ambient music), reminding me of a specific example of b) for me.  Additionally, this discussion happened at a time when I was already exploring (more than usual) how to guide myself compositionally, especially in terms of vertical and horizontal structure.

As a result of this, I was in the middle of taking apart La Cathédral Engloutie when the long-form ambient compilation suggestion arose and decided to run with it:  I selected some of my favorite chord progressions, leaving a few as is and reverting/inverting and reordering others, voiced them in various ways, and chopped them up into clips.  I don't normally use Ableton Live's clip-launching performance function (despite having and regularly using a Push 2), but decided that this would be a good opportunity to experiment with it -- building up a 30-minute-plus composition clip-by-clip seemed likely to produce something really boring.

I spent a lot of time playing with the clips, listening to how they interacted and experimenting with different overall structures; at a certain point it seemed like it needed a human voice, specifically men's choir, and even better would be chant (in keeping with Debussy's ecclesiastical reference).  I'm far from religious (nor even Christian), but I have always loved Kyries.  Simple, sweet, direct, the Greek is beautiful and the spiritual message of the text maps onto metta meditations and other mantras and prayers of compassion.  I found a recording of one that I especially liked and, realizing I would likely be violating copyrights if I simply dropped it into my piece, I transcribed it and built up a choir of my own voice.  I think this was the first time I have ever sung on a recording; it is, of course, a very long way from the heavenly tones of the Monks of Notre Dame, but I am ultimately satisfied with the effect.

Further inspiration came from Debussy's title, variously translated as the "sunken," "engulfed," or "drowned" cathedral; the phrase evokes in me a sadness, a lostness, a wonder of discovery of a great but forgotten past, but also an exploration, an inward-turning, a deep and surprising spiritual experience.  The piece is structured making the spirit of this into the following fantastic metaphor:  a bathyscaphe carefully wends its way through a deep oceanic canyon when its passengers detect distant echoes of music; following this, they come upon a grand and ancient cathedral and, entering, discover a prayerful choir.  The sonar "ping" is intended to evoke both a sense of depth and of exploration, a literal "sounding" of the numinous world into which the listener is invited.