Plug! Trio Scordatura Album release

Shameless plug, Trio Scordatura release their debut album on Ergodos records this month, including Marx, a piece of mine they commissioned in 2008. The launch event is in The Odessa Club in Dublin at 3pm on Sunday (July 25th).

Bob Gilmore got the trio together originally to perform the works of Harry Partch, but they have since expanded out to perform a variety of works that use extended tuning resources; from the quantised microtonal world of Just Intonation and beyond, through to cluster-based and sub-semitonal harmonies. I first came across Bob's work through his Keynote (pdf) at UK Microfest I in 2005. I didn't hear it directly, but I found that pdf the following year and loved his approach to "microtonal music", to de-ghetto-ify it and give it room to breathe outside the world of intonation nerds (I use that term with the greatest of respect).

[...] in this talk I would like to question the shelf-life of the term “microtonality” itself as a descriptive adjective, and of related terms (“microtone”, “microtonal”, “microto- nalist”), with their unfortunate connotations of “otherness” and “strangeness” and the general sense they give of microtonality as an outsider activity. Is the designation “microtonality” still useful today? Will it remain so, say, twenty-five years from now? - Bob Gilmore

I briefly saw the trio perform at UK Microfest II in 2007. Although we had to run for our train, I managed to see their fantastic versions of Tenney's Harmonium and Radulescu's Intimate Rituals XI. When Bob asked me to write a piece for them I went through a short period of nervous indecision before settling on a quasi-spectral idea where the voice and viola d'amore would play mostly sustained dyads, while the synth expanded this into clouds of difference tones generated from the voice/viola. Added to this, the text would act as a kind of formant-filter on this material, with the different vowel sounds defining which registers the synth material would be active in from sound to sound: the words are sung extremely slowly.

Here's a mildly edited commentary on Marx I included in my thesis.

I usually avoid writing for the voice, especially in a mixed ensemble, as it can be difficult to blend with other instruments because there is simply too much expression tied up in our relationship with and perception of the voice for it not to stand out of the sound mix. However, the opportunity to write for Trio Scordatura could not be passed up, so I elected to use the voice as both a primary pitch generator, and filter. The voice and viola sustain dyads together, these act

as generating pitches in a ring modulation process, the results of which are played by the synthesiser (as clouds of sine waves). The voice is used compositionally as a crude bandpass filter by allowing through only those pitches which fall within the formant of the vowel is being sung at that moment; an idea which unbeknownst to me at the time had been explored by James Tenney in his pieces Clang (1972) and Three Indigenous Songs (1979) [Wannamaker, Robert, A., 'The Spectral Music of James Tenney' CMR 27/1, Feb. 2008, 109.]

As with other pieces in this portfolio, Marx relies heavily on the structural device of evolution, where a sound object is repeated with successive alterations to different characteristics. In this case the object consists of an attack by the voice or viola, leading to a sustained dyad on voice and viola which is enveloped by a cloud of sine waves from the synthesiser. The compositional process of evolution owes a lot to Morton Feldman's memory processes. He describes this as a 'formalizing a disorientation of memory' [Sani, Frank, 'Why Patterns? An Analysis of Morton Feldman's “Piano and String Quartet”', (2000), , accessed 13/08/08.] where he would compose a page of music and then try to compose the same again without looking back to see the detail; he mentions this specifically with reference to Triadic Memories (1981) but processes of this nature seem to inform most of his composition from the mid and late periods. Marx and many other pieces of mine achieve similar results through indeterminate means. Form is achieved by repeatedly reformulating the sonic object to create local difference, and this stream of local difference creates large scale patterns from which form emerges.

In Marx, the synthesiser part is strictly generated through frequency modulation of the viola and voice parts. Depending on how close the original pitches are, frequency modulation can generate sets of sidebands with frequencies close to the main band, leading to microtonal clusters of pitches. The frequency modulation technique will be explained in more detail below, but as an example of clustering the first two sets of combination tone sidebands derived from modulating B1(61.7hz) and C2(65.5hz) are shown here in Illustration 30:

The psychoacoustic concept of masking, in which sounds are present but hidden because of our perceptual systems, presents a wealth of compositional possibilities; I wanted to make these phenomena audible, to focus on them and place them in the foreground. Early works of mine took a more literal approach to this idea. AfterImages (2004), attempts to sound the melody from the first movement of Schubert's B-flat piano sonata D.960 (1828) in difference tones (see Illustration 31 below), but my inexperience meant that I did not attempt to limit the difference tones to those required to form the melody; with no filtering of any sort, simply stacking frequencies and hoping for a melody to emerge with no prompting of the ear was doomed to failure.

Like Primes(2005), Marx generates a level of tension through contrasting the intonation of live players with a synthesiser whose intonational purity is unrealisable by human player. Each event in Marx is a harmonic system where the voice and viola d'amore sustain an interval and the synthesiser part is generated from their heterodyning. Because the synthesiser part is fully precomposed, the viola and voice parts must be an exact frequency match with the synthesiser in order to generate the same pitches as those of pitches of the synthesiser part. In the real world, this level of accuracy is impossible to maintain, as well as being beyond the resolution of human hearing, making the voice and viola parts most likely "out of tune" relative to the synthesiser. Whether the voice and viola actually generate some of the combination tones which make up the synthesiser part is dependent on unforseeable acoustic factors such as room size and reverberation, but if they do, these will almost certainly be different to the ideal combination tones of the synthesiser. This may seem like an error in calculation but even in this piece the accuracy is not the issue. Any difference in combination tones will only serve to increase the density of the sound.

Marx's voice and viola d'amore parts are in standard rhythmic notation, while the synthesiser part uses stemless time-space notation; durations are to be inferred from a combination of notehead size, ties and position within the bar: see illustration 32.

This is for two reasons: in practical terms there is no point being overly specific about relative temporal notation in the synthesiser because of its slow attack time—the synthesiser envelope is specified in the score—the part often demands more pitches than there are fingers available, it is up to the player to decide which of the pitches is producing the most interesting interaction with the other instruments in a given room. The synthesiser part is intended as a cloud of sine waves, and as there is no rhythmic element to this idea, it is unnecessary to impose one when an approximation under performer control will have the same result.

The metric order in Marx is not apparent to the ear and the rhythmic notation largely only serves to ensure that the viola and voice begin events together. The events are harmonically driven, with voice and viola forming a dyad whose pitches are used in a frequency modulation process to generate the synthesiser sine wave cloud. Once events begin, the constituent elements are quite amorphous and require no real co-ordination except in isolated cases of rhythmic interplay. Indeterminacy here is more a matter of simplification for the sake of practicality than aesthetic purpose.

Trio Scordatura recorded Marx in summer 2009 at Amplus Studios in the Flanders countryside with the excellent Johan Vandermaelen engineering.