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!
The crew of HMAS Onslow are at action stations. Sonar pings the submarine, which must move both quickly and as silently as possible. The act of real Noise Husbandry happens here, in the only musical content of the installation on HMAS Onslow which itself is blurred and atmospheric. This piece will set the scene for a game where visitors have to quietly explore the submarine to find clues to solve a puzzle. Too much noise, and the sonar locates them, and the clues disappear.
There are three collections of material, marked CABN-E, DPBR and IDGM. Each collection uses a slightly different collection of pitches. These do not need to be thought of as “sections”, they are only marked because choosing to play in the same collection or choosing to play in different collections, and making the decision to change from one to another may have an exact affect on the listener. Here’s a mock-up, though the piece will sound different every time it is performed…
The work is open, and can be performed for as long or as short a time as is required. Players do not need to play at all “in time” with one another – even the two vibraphone parts which have definite pulse. Each piece of musical material is palindromic – it would sound the same performed backward as forward, at least to one musical extent. Performers could choose a palindromic progression through their material, if they like, but this also isn’t necessary.
Again, the pitches for the ostinati were drawn from several songs on the playlist, but I’m sure you can’t tell which…
I’ve composed the rest of the sound for the sick bay today, using more metallic samples for the industrial sounds. This is indicative only…
Again, I used a Feldman-esque grid score for the engineering wheels, this time with 6 boxes for the 6 requested pitches, high to low…
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.
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.
One of the ideas from the original Storyworld Bible for this project was that of invoking magic realism in the installation. Music can be a big part of this. I immediately thought of the film Amelie, not only as a great example of magic realism in film, but because I loved the Satie-like version of Amelie’s valse in the soundtrack.
I’ve always loved Satie. He’s the original rebel and the grandfather of experimentalism. A dropout of the Paris Conservatoire, he played piano in cafes for a living and wrote music that is so simple but has such a distinct voice. Here’s the Satie piece you all know that Yann Tiersen is imitating in the above version of the valse:
So I’ve been working on some 3/4 chords and a melody which will be for the Gun Room where the theme is “family”.
More to come soon.
Having spent the whole week last week encouraging young composers to get creative, I thought it was about time I took a bit of my own advice, and digitised another one of my drafts for this project to share here. The above movie uses the compound (that’s where each beat is divided into 3) version of the rhythm you get when you spell “Vampire” out in morse code (for those who haven’t read many posts, “HMAS Vampire” is the name of the destroyer at the Australian National Maritime Museum), combined – yes, you guessed it – with the some pitch material inspired by and manipulated from one song on the song list. In fact, it’s the same song I used for the “flimic” excerpt back in June.
