Palindromes

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.

score excerpt

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…

Hendrixing it out in the name of mateship (mate-ship)

The storyworld and MOD’s design for the galley is to show the camaraderie that is so often described by the crew over the decades that HMAS Vampire was in service.

Crew of HMAS Vampire

Good old Aussie mateship on Vampire over the years

I’ve decided to take a double approach to achieving this in sound. In the MOD specification, they suggest the kinds of sounds that would have been around the galley – laughter, shouting, chatting – but my brief is to abstract didactic sounds everywhere. So my plan is to head into a bar, find some boisterous Aussie-accented blokes to record, and then to make those samples sound like distorted memories – long ago, swirling around the space, but also still recognisable as voices. I captured some speaking on the internet today to mock this up with (I’m not going to tell you where it’s from, but if you recognise it you’ll see I was being very cheeky), and was pretty happy with the results…

 

The second part of the double approach is to return to the playlist, or at least the concept of having a playlist from the time that the vessels were in service, and to write a piece that mimics the rock-funk of Jimi Henrix, but in this case for Ensemble Offspring, adding to the abstracted and even surreal nature of the sound. I’ve made a few sketches and I’ll complete a digital draft to share soon.

Using the onboard spaces – Navigator’s room

We’ve now settled that we’ll need at least two recording dates with Ensemble Offspring – one (probably two) in the studios at the Sydney Conservatorium and one onboard the vessels. The Gun Room percussion will be recorded in the Gun Room (funnily enough), and the engineering wheels for Crossing the Line in the steam room or somewhere similar on HMAS Vampire.

7th Secrets score excerpt

I’m keen to make the most of recording in that space, so I’m planning to use the sounds that we discovered in the workshops in some of the other works. The mock-up above is for a piece for the Navigator’s Room, which I’m calling Seventh Secrets. The narrative behind both the Navigator’s Room and the Officer’s Cabin feature secrecy, mystery, and the unknown. Since these spaces are right next to one another, I am planning for bleed and creating two ‘movements’ that will fit together should someone be standing in the corridor between the rooms.

The material in the bass and flute parts is like a “time-stretched” version of melodic snippets from the playlist. The bass flute and the bass clarinet have two four-note patterns each which they can repeat and move between at will. However, tempo is not up to them – they must hold each note for a complete breath.

The bass flute and bass clarinet parts are to be recorded and triggered against the live performance. This can be achieved in a number of ways, for example:

  • pre-record the flute and bass clarinet lines, and trigger them like a traditional “tape” performance (for the recording for the installation, record several takes of these repeated lines, and assemble them in the studio)
  • for the installation, the procedural player can bring lines in and out with random variables
  • record the flute and bass clarinet lines live in performance, and play them back after a certain length of time
  • triggering could be done live by the performer (e.g. pedal or computer switch) or by a producer/recording engineer/DJ.

This creates a slowly shifting harmonic field with four voices.

The percussionists punctuate this process with orchestral-like crashes, but in this case, they’ll be improvising on some of the bigger objects on the ship or submarine that make good sounds… as usual, in the mock-up above I’ve just used some samples to approximate what I think it will sound like.

Brand new draft

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.

Combining recomposition with the heavy metal

Ensemble Offspring

Ensemble Offspring

While the metallic canon of “Vampire” in morse code that I made two days ago wasn’t exactly something catchy that you could tap back to me, I thought it was really effective (and I’m really pleased with the rather expensive metal samples and reverb that I purchased a few months ago now!) and so today I thought I’d try to extend it with some pitched material that uses some musical material from another song from the songlist, recomposed. I don’t think this is very successful, but then that happens in composition. Sometimes you can improve things, and sometimes you have to throw them away (and usually that decision is best left for another day) – so I honestly wanted to include some material that probably won’t get into the final project.

So, why the bass flute and bass clarinet? Well, I’m imagining myself composing for core members of Ensemble Offspring, so it will include Lamorna Nightingale (flutes) and Jason Noble (Clarinets) – you can see them in the photo at the top of this post – and I was thinking that using the lowest of those families of instruments would be really effective for two reasons. One, because the percussive metal-hitting will probably result in lots of high frequencies, and so I’m thinking in two different frequency spaces, and two, because the submarine goes down low, and the destroyer is big, and these are big rich sounds that fit these visual metaphors in some way.

I will be very impressed if anyone can guess which song from the songlist this is. I’ve just taken two little elements, and the whole flute and bass clarinet parts improvise around them. To record this, I improvised in Ableton live from a MIDI controller, playing around with different samples for these instruments from a big sample library, for several hours until I was happy … or, at least, decided to abandon it for today!

Reich talks Radio(head)

I have to admit to being a huge Radiohead fan, and I’ve always been interested in minimalist music, especially the work of La Monte Young and John Adams, as well as Steve Reich’s earliest work around phasing. So even without the ‘recomposed’ thread that has come up in this project, I’d find this work interesting. Here Steve Reich talks about why he decided to work with Radiohead’s material. I bet he didn’t have any problems getting copyright clearance, either!

Here are some more excerpts:

 

Filmic music goes filmic

I had a little fun today with the filmic piece that I wrote a few days ago. While doing some research on the history of HMAS Vampire, I found some amazing footage of her crew returning to port in Australia, with very joyous and romantic welcomes-home. So I slowed the footage down, added my soundtrack, and I think it’s quite effective.

Recomposing a mystery song

As promised, I’ve had a play around with one of the songs from the songlist. This is a little more slushy than something I’d normally write, but I’m thinking about the filmic aspect of the project, plus the song that I took a little bit of musical material from to ‘recompose’ (you’ll just have guess which one it is!) is fairly up tempo and happy, and I wanted to make something from that same material that had the opposite feeling.

So, without further ado, here is a very short “filmic” excerpt, with material recomposed from something in the songlist…