In the 1940’s, Pierre Schaeffer realized that the electronic medium opens up music composition to the whole domain of sonic phenomena. Technology enabled the composer to work directly with sound itself as opposed to an abstraction of it, operational signals on a sheet given to performers that could interpret them and realize the piece. For him, this reversal of the compositional process meant that we would need a new vocabulary to describe the whole reality of music, that notation only rendered a part of while all the while being prescriptive ; a language based on the premise that musical sounds are most importantly perceptual realities rather than acoustic ones. His idea was that we could use this framework to describe, discuss and reflect on our perception in a more objective way instead of relying on references to the origin of the sounds or onomatopoeia. This would in turn enable composers to identify and classify their materials based on their perceptual characteristics before manipulating and combining them into a piece of music.
Buchla’s 200e, to me, embodies these concepts in a single, open-ended instrument that allows me to generate, shape and articulate sounds into musical objects for both composition and performance.
This piece is an exercise in acknowledging my influences as well as a display of the way in which I have been using my 200e system in composition. It is organized in three parts :
Part 1 :
A dynamic and busy system, where the ‘humanized’ noise of the 272e provides changing and unpredictable timbres accumulating in parallel to the 261e's shapeshifting waveforms. The 223e allows my hands to guide the flow of the processing and impart intentional gestures among the chaos of the patch. Sounds disintegrate, coalesce and resonate as they move around the different channels of the (mixed down) quadraphonic space.
Part 2 :
A pulsating drone swells and brightens as it iterates. Here, I am trying to coax the slowest movements that I can out of the 200e, as I open a filter on a rich sound being continuously shaped by the 296e. At the time of composing this section, I was listening to a lot of Eliane Radigue’s electronic works, which are often based around the careful exploration and subtle control of the movement and beating that stems from phase relationships between oscillators. I chose to pay tribute to her unique form through this progressive reveal of the spectral content of the sound, making its various components gradually percolate and collide across delay lines.
Part 3 :
Part 2 blends into part 3, wherein sorrow gives in to a more hopeful colour. The 272e is sampled and then manipulated. Repetition, like an attempt to eternalize things I know have to die, disperses faint echoes that become more distant and fade in and out, gradually, like memories.
Thank you to Kyle and Robert for the podcast and for providing me with an opportunity to share this. Thank you for listening and keep on patching!
Bandcamp : https://davidpiazza.bandcamp.com
