The Sparkling Box world premiere

Sparkling Box was composed for Athelas Sinfonietta, which involved for this piece bass clarinet, trombone, piano, cello and contrabass. The electronics consisted of my pre made sound files and a live patch made by Jamie Bullock, which reacts to how a musician changes his/her playing in certain parameters while improvising. The world premiere was at the Nordic Music Days in Norrköping, Sweden the 31st of August 2007.

After intense rehearsals with Athelas Sinfonietta in Copenhagen we arrived in Norrköping two days before the concert. The venue for the concert was the Norrköping Art Museum, and when first entering we were shocked about the very small size of the room itself and the ”stage”. So during the following preparations much time and consideration was spent on only solving the problem of fitting everything.

The program included also Danish composer Simon Steen Andersen’s work ”Next to Beside Besides”, in this version for piccolo flute, contrabass, snare drum and video, and my work ”Twilight Collider” for flute and electronics. The concert started with my installation for sound objects ”bortom bakom, bortom”, which was going on while the audience entered the hall. The end of the concert was the video/sound installation by Simon, called Looloopop, projected on two of the walls of the room.

We planned the form of the concert so that each piece ”melts into the next” without a pause in between. It was a huge challenge to make this work in the small room, but as a result the concert became very alive and focused, with a very intimate contact to the audience.

Sparkling Box now worked very well concerning the electronics. Since the workshop I had divided several of the sound files into smaller pieces to make the timing as exact as possible. From originally 14 cues there were now 35! The bass clarinettist Anna Klett was in charge of triggering the files and the live patch with a pedal, and mastered it perfectly, even while playing at the same time.

We found good levels for the live patch (see earlier report for details), so that the solos of each player got an appropriate amount of reaction from the patch, as well as a good mix of sound gestures. Lamberto Coccioli was taking care of the sound during the concert, and he managed to find a very good balance between the amplified instruments and the electronics, also in very powerful dynamics.

The only problem we had (which of course only occurred at the concert!) was that the first sound file of the piece didn’t start. We found out that the trigger list had to show another number than 1 from the beginning to react and change.

The musicians of Athelas and coductor Rei Munakata made a very expressive and incredibly strong performance of the piece. It was from the start very exciting to work with the group, since they immediately adopted new musical gestures and playing techniques and made an overall very personal and enthusiastic interpretation of the piece,

The electronic music workshop with the Athelas ensemble, conductor Rei Munakata and electronic programmer Jamie Bullock took place at the Birmingham Conservatoire the 10th – 12th of March 2007. It was the first time we put together the electronics and the instrumental elements of “Sparkling box”.

My aim with the piece was to create dialogues in different ways, using the electronics as a platform and a dialogue partner to the musicians. Each musician had told a brief story of an experience from which them a vivid memory. The fixed electronics distributes fragments from these stories and reflect musically of the content and atmosphere of the story.

The live electronics consist of an interactive patch created by Jamie, which reacts to the changes of different musical parameters in the instrumental playing. The chosen parameters are pitch, dynamics, speed, noisiness and pitch structure in a noise. This patch is used five times during the piece, during improvised instrumental solos. When the soloist makes a change in any of the parameters the patch reacts and presents randomly pre-stored sound gestures, relating to the parameter in question.

During the workshop we started with going through the piece with instruments only, checking different playing techniques and sound qualities. Afterwards we put instrumental parts together with the fixed electronics, with sound files triggered by the bass clarinettist, through a foot pedal.

It turned out to be a delicate task to make the interactive patch respond to the solos in a good way. It was important to find the perfect threshold value for each parameter to get an appropriate amount of reaction from the patch. Otherwise it behaved like an untamed beast, sometimes aggressively bursting out with reactions, and sometimes being suspiciously passive. The plan was from the start to produce a rather unpredictable patch, so it was very successful in that way! It would never repeat or echo anything from the player, but
present gestures and sounds which make sense in context, in a surprisingly refreshing way.

The session was brief and intense, but Jamie and I got a very good overview of the possibilities of piece and there were now only a few details to fix to make it ready for performance.

Malin Bång

On November 5th, Malin came to the studios at UCE Birmingham Conservatoire to discuss the composition of a new piece for small ensemble and live electronics.

Malin presented an idea about creating 'dialogues' among the musicians in the ensemble and between the musicians and the electronics (which could also contain recordings of the instruments).

She had composed a few phrases for each instrument, each having a starting point in a movement chart that was constructed from symbolic metaphor prototypes of different kinds of movement or motion. This chart contained different ways of increasing and decreasing speed or intensity, as encapsulated by the five symbols: wind, bike, squirrel, machine, and a cafe-bird.

Malin had made recordings of the instrumentalists performing these phrases, which also had space for the musicians to
improvise according to the symbols. She also presented recordings of them speaking about their 'wildest experiences' in both Danish and English.

Malin proposed that one of the key components of her piece would be the use of special dialogue moments, when a player is supposed to be able to instantly chose what instrumental material (from the electronics) she/he would like to dialogue with.

Most of the discussion during our meetings was concerned with the nature of these dialogues, and how they might be realised with the electronics. Possibilities discussed were:

* The electronics are controlled by a dedicated performer, who follows the score, and triggers changes at specific points
* The performers have some kind of physical interface (e.g. foot switches) through which they can trigger changes in the electronics
* Some kind of 'machine listening' is employed whereby the live electronics triggers its own changes via some audio cue (e.g. a change in pitch, dynamic or timbre)

Since this last option was closest to my own research and composition interests, I was keen to explore it. However, it quickly became apparent that the human performers each had their own interpretation of the five symbolic metaphors (wind, bike, squirrel, machine, and a cafe-bird), and that these interpretations would be difficult to encapsulate through measurable components. We concluded that it would be ideal to get the machine listening to operate on this metaphorical semantic layer, but in order to do this, we would need to distinguish how the symbols could be measurably separated.

At the end of Malin's two day stay, we came to the conclusion that it would be ideal to try a machine listening approach, but given the limited time available, it would be a wise strategy to also work with more reliable and conventional tools.