Well, it’s recording day today. I woke up at 4am with an idea for the one bit of scoring I hadn’t been able to do … the contrasting section in Family. And it just flowed out … so here’s what I wrote (the new section begins at 1:30):
Now to go and record it!
As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve planned the Navigator and Officer’s rooms sound to work together when they bleed. The narrative for both is one of mystery and secrecy, so the mood is consistent, and I’ve balanced them sonically by using low, slow sounds with unpitched percussive metallics in the Navigator’s room and, today, by creating a texture using higher sounds and pitched percussion in the Officer’s room… here’s a mock-up:
The musical material in this space may remind you of the 2s against 3s from hmas voyager : in memoriam that I shared in July, but actually the inspiration again is from Howard Skempton, and in particular his work Surface Tension. There’s a fantastic recording of this piece on Mode Record, but I’ve also made my own MIDI recording so you can hear it:
The influence, as you’ve probably guessed, is not in the piano figure, but in the simple melodic writing in octaves – in my case, the flute and clarinet rather than flute and cello. I can remember when I first heard it thinking that the flute and cello, with the flute low in range and the cello in mid-range, made a new sound, not a summed sound, when they played such simple material in octaves. Typical Skempton, to find such beauty and originality in simplicity…
P.S. Wasted most of yesterday trying to find a good sample of rolled vibraphone. In the end purchased the full Vienna vibraphone, so appreciate how amazingly realistic it is in the above video!
Last month I posted a mock-up of movement i of what I hope will be a four-movement work (using the same strange instrumentation), crossing the line. The idea is that in the installation the four movements are played back in a random order, for random lengths of time, perhaps even overlapping, so that no two listeners get the same experience.
crossing the line movt. ii waterphone solo
MOD call this the “procedural player”, which I can give instructions like “play one track for 30 to 120 seconds, then crossfade to another track randomly, then repeat” or, if they’ve got a sensor, respond by changing the sounds to e.g. someone’s presence in the room. Pretty cool stuff.
The above track is a mock-up using the same sample set that I made for movement i. What I have in my head is much more pretty and subtle, using the engineering wheels on the vessel, but this is good enough to give MOD some placeholders as they trial out some key spaces to see if the installations will work.
Back in March I blogged about the ideas in the Storyworld to create magic realism, and then posted a rough draft of something Satiean that I felt would evoke just the right mood for the Gun Room, where the visitor will engage with the idea of sailors’ memories of their families, and the experience of being away from your family while at sea for long periods of time. MOD’s design for the space expands on this idea, including animations & samples of sounds that make us think of children, so today I sketched a little more of the first theme and mixed in some audio of a child giggling.
In the installation, the sounds (I’m thinking a music box too, and perhaps something else) will be triggered when someone leans-in to the bunks in the Gun Room to look at the animations. The animations themselves are like drawings in a children’s book, and they move along with the extra sounds, responding to the movement.
This piece still needs a contrasting theme and further development, so that someone staying in the room for a while won’t hear it as a “loop”, so that will be next.
As discussed in the last few blogs, the instrumentation for Crossing the Line is to have three members of the ensemble hitting engineering wheels in the steam room of HMAS Vampire, or somewhere similar, and to have Claire playing waterphone too.
Funnily enough, there aren’t many commercial sample sets of “destroyer and submarine engineering wheels”, so I’ve been through East West’s “Stormdrum 2” collection of samples and have tried to find similar sounds, as well as some waterphone samples, in the above mock-up. This should help us get an idea of what it will sound like once installed into the space.
When we did the workshop with Bree and Claire onboard the HMAS Vampire, we were lucky enough to get below deck into a steam room, where the public usually can’t go. This was a pretty amazing space, and the sound that I loved the most that they found in there was the engineering wheels, which rung like bells if hit with the right mallets:
Trying to think of a way to notate these “bells” so that exact pitch wasn’t important, I thought of Morton Feldman’s Intersections scores. In these, notes and duration are shown on a grid, simply in relative pitch (think high, medium and low) and timing and note length (the grid represents the MM, and the squares how long the note goes, from left to right).
An excerpt from Morton Feldman’s Intersection no. 3
Using this approach to notation will mean that Ensemble Offspring’s players can find at least three wheels that they like the sound of, and then hit them in time, relative, but not necessarily “in tune”, mixing musical “composed” elements with industrial, “in-between the notes” pitches.
I think many people imagine that a piece of music just pops into a composer’s mind, complete and ready to write down. I mentioned Skempton’s process in an earlier blog, and mine is similar. For the Operations Room, the epicentre of the action, I wanted something exciting and adventurous, and decided to play around with Mission Impossible ideas combined with morse code rhythms and playlist harmony. The result? Well…
Somehow the influence is obvious, but the piece sucks. While the directness of the filmic style works when it’s serious, there’s too much obvious humour (or satire) in this for it to work in an exciting space (which MOD are designing really amazing changing lighting for).
So there you go, composers don’t always get it right first time, and the first sketch of this piece is still a “to-do” on my list…
I’ve spent the last two days taking the morse code rhythms generated thus far, and some more (around the names of the vessels), and thinking about how I could re-use those rhythms and develop them (like a series of variations) using the sounds Claire and Bree discovered in their workshopping in the actual gun bay. I’ve not only extended the score, but I’ve created a “map” of the gun bay in three parts, so that the performers can move around it, in a circle, playing in concert, just as the original operators would have worked together. It looks like this…
The three colours on the floor plan indicate the three areas in the circular gun bay that the players will move around.
Each section has a more detailed page with photographs and diagrams showing exactly what each object mentioned in the score is, and where it is found.
The score is based on the established morse code rhythms from the names of the vessels, including subtle rhythmic development and variation.
Bree referred to the white capsules shown here as “100% asbestos” in the workshop when she played on them. They sound amazing, sort of like deadened claves. So that’s what I called them in the score.
I’ve already blogged quite a few times about using Morse Code to create rhythm in music … and which space should more be inspired by morse than the Communications room? I’m still in England, and today I composed three sections of a piece called Codes for that space which Ensemble Offspring will be able to rearrange in any order. Here’s a mock-up using some fairly dodgy MIDI playback…
In the installation I also intend to have “actual” morse code over the top – perhaps triggered by the presence of someone in the space, or by pressing the button on a straight key…
My father is just recovering from an eye operation, so I’ve popped over to the Lake District in the north of England to keep him company for a week or two. A 30 hour flight was the perfect time to compose the most filmic music that I’ve planned for the installation … and here’s a mock-up.
As I may have mentioned before, the plan for the main sailor’s dining space is to remember the tragic 1964 sinking of HMAS Voyager, resulting in 82 deaths and a terrible, life-altering experience for those who survived. Here I’m responding to Hamish’s desire to emotionally engage in a filmic way with the story … drawing on the music of Philip Glass and adding sampled strings and a live piano player to the Ensemble Offspring line-up. I have done some harmonic re-composing, too, but not from our playlist this time. Instead, I looked at the music that was in the charts at the time of the actual disaster, from the US, Britain and Australia, and used portions that I transcribed from several different songs as the basis for the whole piece (which eventually will be longer).
