Voluminous Voices Six Compositions
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Transcript of Voluminous Voices Six Compositions
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Introduction
For my Master’s Degree in music composition, I wrote six composi-
tions. In this thesis, various aspects of my compositions are documented.
I applied traditional and contemporary compositional techniques to cre-
ate six new compositions. Each of the six compositions explores a dif-
ferent way of generating musical structure and coherence.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the six pieces. Here I discuss the
ideas which led to the creation of the pieces. I also introduce “clarity of
concept” and examine how all six pieces are inter-related.
Chapter 2 looks at the major impact of North Indian musical influences
on my compositional process. I discuss a number of important concepts
and techniques of Indian classical music, especially techniques bor-
rowed from the traditions of improvisational performance.
Chapter 3 comprehensively examines my compositional, as well as pre-
compositional methods. I give a compositional “history” of each piece. I
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also discuss the evolution of my own compositional methods, especially
in reference to the role that “clarity of concept” has had on my music.
Chapter 4 explores how I have attempted to imbed content into my
music. Music, like poetry, dance and other art-forms, can be used to
express or convey ideas to the audience. Here I examine how my music
expresses content. I reflect on what I have learned at Wesleyan
University, how I have grown musically, and my musical prospects for
the future. I also briefly discuss what someone else may perceive in my
music. I discuss various concepts of my influences, where they have
taken me, and the direction they are taking me now.
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Chapter 1
Clarity of Concept: NewWays of StructuringMusic
What unifies my six compositions? I (as the composer) am one unifying
factor. Another unifying force is Indian musical thought. The most
important unifying concept is that in all six pieces, I explore new ways
of giving structure to my music. Below I go through each of the pieces
and describe the idea behind each work (“clarity of concept”).
The composition, Oh my Friend in Word, is a choral piece. My original
intention was to compose a choral work with a Bahá’í text, devotional in
nature. The main conceptual feature is an intermittent traveling from one
style of music to another. In a few measures, one type of choral writing
(perhaps evocative of some specific musical style) flows into another.
Different “genres” of music influenced different sections of the piece.
Instead of arranging these sections according to melody or rhythm, I
arrange them by genre. I already had the text, so the starting point was
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the “structure” of the Hidden Word. The Hidden Words, by Bahá’u’lláh-
the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, are considered by Bahá’ís to be sacred.
26. O MY FRIEND IN WORD!
Ponder awhile. Hast thou ever heard that friendand foe should abide in one heart? Cast out thenthe stranger, that the Friend may enter His home.(Bahá’u’lláh, 31:1862).
Because it is usually important that the text constrains the rhythmic and
melodic phrasing, the text doesn’t leave much room to free-write. When
I had first finished the music, I didn’t like the form. It didn’t flow
together well. I was about to rewrite most of the music, except the first
and last ten measures, and to devise a way to connect the two sections in
a coherent manner. Then, fortunately, my advisor Professor Alvin Lucier
suggested that I take out any music I disliked. I then re-arranged the left-
over sections so that they would flow together more smoothly. I alsorepeated some sections to give continuity. I thus create structure in this
piece through the act of re-arranging and repeating seemingly unrelated
sections. (See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion.)
To Jerusalem with Love: Themes and Variations is a tape piece of
sounds I collected in Isräel. The concept was to create a theme and vari-
ation form. The theme consists of the unaltered sounds that are placed
together in a collage (using ways to multi-track sounds together aestheti-
cally). In the variation of the theme, I used digital audio software pro-
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grams to manipulate the original sound files. I processed the original
sounds in two specific ways: (i) I manipulated the sound so that it was
still similar to the original, and (ii) I manipulated the sound so that onecould no longer tell from where a processed sound originated. This leads
to a quality of “hide and seek.” In this work, I create structure in a tra-
ditional way, but instead of pitched material, I use sound-bite material
(i.e., I do it with soundscape instead of notes).
The concept behind Monstera Deliciosa was to create structure within
free improvisation. The players have a great deal of freedom, but I give
them some constraints. In my first realization of the work, I had fewer
constraints than in the current version. After listening to a performance,
I decided that it was missing something. It seemed the players were not
being challenged to extend their musical boundaries. I added one ele-
ment: visual shapes for the players to interpret. The extra constraint
seemed to create an added level of structure, and paradoxically also
freed the players from themselves. So the concept provides a new way
to give structure within improvisation. I create structure within free-
improvisation through the interpretation of shapes.
The concept in Bahá was to find an interesting picture, dissect its com-
ponents and plot the parts on a graph, with time on the horizontal axis,
and pitch on the vertical. I call this a “line abstraction.” This creates a
graphic notation from which the performers interpret the music, and
therefore, the picture. The concept is similar to shape interpretation. It is
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also directly related to John Cage’s Ryoanji (Cage, 1983:2). I chose
voice and flute to create a “mysterious” quality of sound. I also wanted
improvisational qualities: the performers have to decide where to followthe line. Each must know where the middle of their vocal/instrumental
range falls in order to execute properly all the ranges in the graphic
notation. The purpose is not to match and harmonize. The notes aren’t
set, rather they are relative to the middle range, so a performer must
improvise placing each note in a performance. Moreover, the performers
take the material at their own rate. This creates a different performance
each time. The line abstraction of the picture creates the structure of the
music in this piece.
In Bombay, I translated the Braille alphabet into music notation. I had a
goal: I want a person is fluent in Braille, and knows my algorithm for
translating Braille into music, to be able to “hear” a text which has been
translated into Braille, and then into my musical algorithm. For Bombay,
I wrote poetry which I translated into the Braille alphabet (for more
information on the Braille alphabet, see Appendix B) and then adapted
to music. I chose percussion instruments because I felt that percussion
well represented the “dot” of the Braille alphabet and its percussive feel-
ing. Thus, structure here arises from the Braille translation of a poem.
The title, Fracticalis, refers to John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis. There are
no similarities to the work, but I feel I do much of my composition work
in the spirit of John Cage. My decision to compose Fracticalis began
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when I heard and became enthralled with Alvin Lucier’s work Queen of
the South. In the latter piece, the performers are amplified. The ampli-
fied signal is routed to a mixer which is then routed to two loudspeak-ers. Each of the loudspeakers is placed under a frame with canvas
stretched over it. On the surface is placed a granular substance which
Lucier calls “strewn material.” When the loudspeakers output a signal to
the canvas surface, the signal causes the strewn material to vibrate and
move. Eventually, the substance jumps around and gathers together into
a shape because of the sound. This shape interested me. Was there a way
to do something similar and be able to control and change the shape? I
asked myself. I spent some time wondering about the possibility of con-
trolling that shape, changing it and creating different designs (i.e., a
visual concept). I thought of different ways to do this, e.g., somehow
inputting sound into a complex computer program, having the sound
affect a visual aspect of some kind. Coincidentally, my husband attended
a physics conference where Dr. Bernard Sapoval did research on a con-
cept similar to that of Lucier’s Queen of the South (Sapoval:1990).
Instead of canvas stretched over a rectangular frame, it was cellophane
stretched over a fractal frame. Without going into details, a fractal is an
object with “self-similarity," i.e., a part looks like the whole. Dr. Sapoval
found that the fractal shape exhibits interesting properties that neither a
circle nor rectangle exhibit. When sound drives a circular shape, the
material will form concentric circles and bounce around within that con-
straint. In the rectangle, the material creates one type of shape and
approximately stays in that shape. What the physicist found was that if a
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granular substance is placed on a membrane stretched over the space
with a fractal frame, with a speaker was placed underneath that surface,
then the granular substance did not form into one stationary shape (likeon the rectangular shape), but moved in and out within the fractal
boundary, according to the frequency. The vibrations on the cellophane
cause the granular substance to become “spatially localized” according
to pitch. The lower a pitch, the more the material gathers in the middle
(see figure 1).
As the pitch moves higher, the material starts to move away from the
center, creating a new shape (related to whichever fractal shape is cho-
sen) (see Figure 2). As the pitch goes even higher, the substance moves
still further from the middle and closer and closer to the edges (see fig-
ure 3). The process created varying dance-like patterns. I knew I had to
create a fractal drum and compose music for it. I had a very simple
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Figure 1. Fractal drum with low
frequency exciting the granular
substance on the membrane.
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concept: I discovered by experimentation that a rich and complex sound
source (from a synthesizer), with a wide dynamic range was optimal for
exciting the membrane and creating the various patterns the fractal drum
produces. The synthesized sound had to have 3 qualities: (i) The ability
to cause the sound to get louder and softer over time using the continu-
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Figure 2. Fractal drum with
middle range frequency exciting
the granular substance on the
membrane.
Figure 3. Fractal drum with
higher frequency exciting the
granular substance on the mem-
brane.
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ous MIDI controller called “volume;” (ii) The ability to cause the sound
to get brighter and darker by changing the frequency cutoff rate, also
over time; and (iii) To be able to do pitch bending on the sound to alarge extent such as an octave or even two. “Pitch bend” is the continu-
ous MIDI controller to use for this effect. The idea is that the physical
property of the fractal drum “composes” the music: it controls what the
player will do. There are pitch, timbre and volume choices that the play-
er will choose by looking at the material and interacting with it accord-
ing to some simple rules. It’s a new way of improvising. The physical
properties of the fractal drum can thus automatically and naturally gen-
erate musical structure.
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Chapter 2
Influences of North andSouth Indian ClassicalMusic
Other than my six compositions, I also chose to perform traditional
Khyal (a style of classical North Indian vocal music) at my graduate the-
sis recital. I did this to highlight the influence that studying the music
has had on my performance, improvisation and composition skills.
Indian music has influenced so much of my musical compositional prac-
tices that I thought it would be appropriate to present the source in the
traditional setting.
How has North Indian Classical music influenced me? There are many
techniques for creating improvisational lines within Hindustani music
that may be used in music composition. Five such examples are
described below: merukhand, accenting, raga, tala and ornamentation.
The process called merukhand, defined by Warren Senders as follows:
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A system originally discussed in the “Sangeet Ratnakara”of Sharangadeva - a mathematical ordering of all possiblecombinations in a given pitch set; 2!, 3!, 4!, 5!, 6! and 7!
respectively. (Senders, 1997:1)
A system of deriving all the permutations of a given set of notes. For example, the notes [in Indian sargam notation]SRGM can be played in the following combinations:SRGM, SRMG, RSGM, RSMG | GMSR, GMRS, MGSR,MGRS | SGRM, SGMR, GSRM, GSMR | RMSG, RMGS,MRSG, MRGS | SMRG, SMGR, MSRG, MSGR | RGSM,RGMS, GRSM, GRMS, a total of twenty-four groups. A setof five notes gives us 120 combinations! Not all of thesemay be admissible in a given rage, but with variations in
phrasing and note length even a few combinations can bemade into many minutes of music. (Senders:1992)
I use a type of merukhand in Oh My Friend in Word . Rather than using a
sequence of notes, I use a sequence of rhythmic patterns. I go through
the process of merukhand with a pattern of 3 quarter notes, in a time sig-
nature of 3/4 (pattern 1) (see Figure 4), a pattern of three eighth notes in
3/8 (pattern 2) (see Figure 5), and a pattern of an eighth note triplet and
an eighth note rest, also in 3/8 (pattern 3) (see Figure 6).
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Figure 4, Pattern 1 of the merukhand
Figure 5. Pattern 2 of the merukhand
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The process gives the folloing result:
123, 132, 213, 231, 312, 321. I chose to disrupt this process near the end
of the merukhand to give variety.
Many times in North Indian music, performers will use accenting to cre-
ate two lines at the same time in a monophonic phrase. For example,using sargam notation, take the following line: SRGMPDNSNDPM-
GRS. Another line may be created at the same time, using the same
sequence of notes: SRGMPDNSNDPMGRS. There is a second line,
RMPDSDMR, which happens at the same time. This is especially effec-
tive if the line moves quickly. In Monstera Deliciosa, the computer
sequence uses this accenting concept. In one section, I use the following
sequence of notes: CC#D#F#G. It is repeated over and over again. After
a few repetitions, I begin accenting every fourth note, starting with “C”
(see Figure 7).
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Figure 6. Pattern 3 of the merukhand
Figure 7. Accenting structure
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I further develop this line to accent the ascending notes of the line, and
back again, accenting the notes of the descending line (see Figure 8).
The concept of raga has also influenced me greatly. The definition of
raga is elusive. It has been defined and re-defined many times through-
out the ages. The definition from the Ali Akbar College of Music is as
follows:
Raga: literally “that which colors the mind;” the melodicform associated with definite time of day or season, onwhich classical [sic] player improvises his performance;there are tens of thousands of ragas in Indian music.(Cheyney, 1992:34)
Warren Senders has another way of defining raga:
A raga is a collection of notes. Some notes are more impor-
tant than others; some may have special rules for their treat-
ment (e.g. “the flatted third is to be used only in descent,
and played with a slow, undulating vibrato”). The raga may
be expressed in scalar form, but in essence it is a flexible
set of rules for melodic improvisation. (Senders, 1992)
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Figure 8. Development
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In Monstera Deliciosa, the concept of raga influenced my choice of
notes for the players to use. My choice of notes didn’t come from anysingle raga, but is related to numerous ragas (e.g., bhairav, yaman, etc.).
I also did not require the musicians to follow any chalan (literally mean-
ing movement, the chalan may be described as the unfolding of a raga’s
structure and syntax), but rather to let the shapes create a chalan for
them.
Musicians like myself, trained in the Western European classical tradi-
tion are taught the concept of time signatures, with a certain number of
beats in a measure, i.e., four quarter-notes (4/4), three eighth-notes (3/8),
etc. In India, these time cycles are called tala, but they conceptualize it
very differently. Again I cite Ali Akbar College of Music:
Tala: fixed rhythmic cycles with regular pattern of beatsand accents; there are hundreds of talas.(Cheyney, 1992:34)
I have not yet used this area of Indian music in my composition, howev-
er, it has inspired me, and is a rich area for exploration.
Ornamentation is also performed differently in Hindustani (and
Karnatak) music than in the Western European classical tradition. One
technique of ornamentation I utilize from both traditions, north and
south Indian, is gamak or gamaka. Gamak is similar to a very exaggerat-
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ed and controlled vibrato. Bahá utilizes this concept, although no raga is
used as a guide.
As I learned traditional Hindustani music, it occurred to me that it was
possible to apply this knowledge to music composition. When a student
of Indian music studies for years, he or she is learning a warehouse of
techniques for creating improvisation during performance. Effectively,
the student is composing during the performance. Indian musicians pre-
pare all the elements ahead of time (as a “composer” does), but rather
than write it down for a performer, they put the elements together in per-
formance. Part of the practice regimen before the performance is to
practice putting the elements together, as an orator will rehearse before
presenting a cohesive speech. There are many pre-compositional
processes that go on during the preparations. Choosing a raga and a
bandish (song form) and a tala is a performance version of pre-composi-
tion. The chalan will dictate many choices a performer will make when
preparing for presentation. These elements all contribute to clarity of
concept. Learning Indian music, in turn, has been instrumental in help-
ing me achieve such clarity.
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Chapter 3
Compositional Methods
I have learned that most successful composers never just sit down to
begin writing music with no concept of what they want to do. Maybe acomposer receives divine revelation to get the concept, and maybe even
to “fill in the blanks,” but I don’t think one will begin the writing
process without a goal (without clarity of concept).
When I first began composing, however, I tried a sit-down-with-nothing-
and-wait-for-divine-revelation technique! I found it to be both
time-consuming and frustrating. I would start and stop composing and
then leave the music untouched for months or years. When I finally
returned to a particular work, I would become further frustrated because
so many things had happened in my musical life during the hiatus. I
wouldn’t connect as much to the original music.
Moreover, as I began the compositional process, I would “doodle.” This
process involves sitting at a keyboard with a sequencer or singing into a
4-track recorder. I would create a line by improvisation, even by trial
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and error. Then I would either record that or input it into the sequencer,
and would sing or play over it until I came up with another phrase or
passage. Sometimes I also tried this process with chords on a keyboardto achieve harmony. I layered these lines together until I felt I had used
all the voicings within my chosen orchestration. I would also arrive at
an orchestration by trial and error, choosing different synthesizer instru-
ments until it all sounded “good.” It was usually at this point that I
would have come up with 10-20 measures of music, and I would leave it
alone for months or years. Then I would start the process anew for a
new section and try to fit the two sections together: two pieces of a puz-
zle not quite meant for each other. This would cause one section of
music to flow into something that sounded entirely different, and that
would again flow into something altogether unrelated. It gave an effect
of wandering with no place to go. This is how I define lack of clarity of
concept.
This is how I began Oh my Friend in Word . I started the writing three
years ago, and by the time I had finished writing, I was ready to scrap
the whole thing! With Oh My Friend in Word, I started a "backwards"
approach to composing; I composed the last ten measures first. The
process of writing Oh My Friend in Word began in 1994 while I was a
lab monitor in the Music Synthesis department at Berklee College of
Music. I wrote the first ten measures while I was studying at California
Institute of the Arts (CalArts). I wrote most of the middle parts between
my times at CalArts and Wesleyan University, and finished composing
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and arranging over the two years I attended Wesleyan. I was still in my
“doodling” phase of composition when I wrote much of this work.
Fortunately, over the past three years, I have developed a way of com-
posing which makes it easier for me not only to write a piece, but also to
finish it. Sometimes a concept will come to me when I am consciously
trying to think of ideas. At other times something I am doing triggers an
idea. For example, when I first came to Wesleyan, Wesleyan ethnomusi-
cology Ph.D. student Harriotte Hurie and I were house-mates. She is
visually impaired and does much of her reading and writing via the
Braille alphabet. I became fascinated with the ingenious manner that the
alphabet transfers the Roman alphabet into symbols which are read in a
tactile fashion (For more information on the Braille alphabet, Appendix
B). One night, I was sitting around thinking of how I wanted to learn
more about the Braille alphabet. Then the idea struck me that somehow
it could be translated into music. I mentioned the idea to Harriotte and
she liked the idea, so I kept it floating around inside my head for some-
time. When I decided to write the piece, all I had to do, as described ear-
lier, was to devise a way to make notation and music from the Braille
alphabet. The music and structure laid itself out easily, and Bombay was
finished within a few weeks.
Now when I compose music, the most important part is to get the idea
which will then grow into the full musical structure. I can explain this
method of composition using an analogy. The “idea” or concept is like a
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seed, which when “watered” with the many techniques available to a
composer, can grow into a mature fruit-laden tree: the finished composi-
tion. Like the seed which grows into a tree, the idea expands naturallyinto the finished piece .
Below, I describe briefly how I composed each piece.
Oh My Friend in Word
After composing all of the sections of Oh My Friend in Word , I man-
aged to find certain characteristics which stood out. As I wrote the
music, I seldom thought harmonically, but rather melodically. This cre-
ates an interplay between texture (voices as background pastiche), and
gesture (one voice, either in the foreground, or solo). E.g., in the first ten
measures, I utilize a slow counterpoint to give the feeling that the voices
are independent of each other. It is all texture here. In measures 13-21, I
introduce one voice (alto and then soprano) in the foreground, while the
others are texture together underneath. In measure 92, I utilize a meruk-
hand , as described above. The last 10 measures are a homogeneous
blend. I mix modes with the same pitch center. In this case it is all ges-
ture. No one is in the background.
To Jerusalem With Love: Themes and Variations
In To Jerusalem with Love, I knew I wanted to create a soundscape with
digital audio, but it needed to be different from other soundscapes. It
was at this time that I really began understanding not only the impor-
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tance of clarity of concept, but also how actually to achieve such a
thing. It was my first chance to put my new understanding of clarity of
concept to action. I knew I was going to Isräel, so I decided to recordsounds I heard while I was there, with a very cheap recording device.
Once I made that decision, I immediately made the second decision to
make the theme and variation style I mentioned above.
To Jerusalem with Love is a tape-composition of sounds which I gath-
ered while visiting my family in Isräel, and also in the staircase of the
Rehearsal Hall building in the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan
University. Recorded on a lo-fi micro cassette recorder, and a portable
cassette recorder, I gathered many sounds from sources all over the
country. The collection incudes an Isräeli accordion player playing
Klezmer music in styles from around the world, my brother Kevin and I
roaming the old city at 2:00 A.M., bats that were making noises during
the walk with my brother (not the echolocation sounds, which are ultra-
sonic), my little brother Andrew (at age 6) singing a love song he wrote
to his then six year-old sweetheart, and a recording of a Wesleyan ethno-
musicology Ph.D student, Peter Hadley, and his student playing dijiridoo
in the staircase of Rehearsal Hall. Of course it may be a little strange
that this last element was not recorded in Isräel, but I use the argument
that it represents the abstractness of a foreigner recording Isräeli “aural”
happenings.
When I returned to the United States, I had the task of sorting the
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sounds, recording the sounds to DAT, and deciding which sounds to use.
The sounds that eventually ended up in the composition were self-evi-
dent. They had the variation and organization I was seeking.
One recording was done while shopping in the Old City, not far from
where my parents live. There are recordings of Arabic music (there is no
Jewish music, as I made the recording on Shabbat), market hustle and
bustle, sales transactions, vehicles, chanting Christians (following the
path of Christ on his way to crucifixion), little Palestinian boys playing,
a small boy playing a loud flute (with only two notes!), bells of the Holy
Church of Sepulcher (where Christ was crucified), and a shop owner
playing a Palestinian violin-like instrument. The other recording took
place at my parents’ former apartment in Abu-Tor, Jerusalem, where
they held a party. As my father and his wife are both musicians, they
invite many musicians to their parties. They mostly play American folk
music. That was true this particular night, with few exceptions. One
exception was a small demonstration of Bulgarian chants, and another
was when they played an Irish Jig. Besides the music, there is also
laughter and typical party noise.
As I described in Chapter 1, the piece is organized in a theme and varia-
tion style. There are four movements. The first and the third movements
use un-processed sounds, while the second and fourth use the processed
sounds.
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Once I chose the sounds described above, I began processing either
entire recordings, or elements of various sounds. I recorded the sounds
into Sound Designer and used Sound Designer, SoundHack, Lemur andDeck II to process them. Sound DesignerII is digital audio software
which digitizes sound for storage in the computer. Once the audio is
recorded, Sound Designer allows for many techniques, e.g. cutting, and
pasting, reversing, utilizing graphic and parametric equalizer functions,
etc. Many of the techniques are related to tape splicing. In Sound
DesignerII, I took the recording of the Bulgarian singing and broke it
down into each note. I used the notch filter of the parametric equalizer
to isolate certain overtones of each note, to create a new tune. I would
also sometimes edit the edited note, to make harmony out of one note,
again using the overtones inherent in the note itself. I also used Sound
Designer to remove as much noise from the sounds (processed and un-
processed) as was possible.
Tom Erbe, creator of SoundHack explains his computer program:
SoundHack is a soundfile processing program for theMacintosh. It performs many utility and esoteric sound pro-cessing functions available nowhere else. These functionsmake SoundHack invaluable to computer musicians, soundeffects designers, multimedia artists, webmasters and any-one else who enjoys working with sound.
Utility Functions:Play almost any type of soundfile (including AU,
AIFF and WAVE).Record any size soundfile from the Macintosh sound input.
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Import soundfiles from audio CDs.Convert between different types of soundfiles with
optional gain scaling and sample rateconversion.
Change values in the soundfile header (sample rate,number of channels, loop points and markerinfo).
Read and write Sound Designer II, Audio IFC, AudioIFF, BICSF (IRCAM), DSP
Designer, Microsoft WAVE (RIFF), NeXT .snd, Sun .au, TEXT and headerless (raw) soundfiles.
Sound Processing:Time stretching [without pitch shifting] or pitch
shifting [without time stretching] with thephase vocoder or varispeed.
Spatialize with the binaural filter.Cross-breed two soundfiles with soundfile
convolution, ring modulation or spectralmutation.
Perform more spectral “hacking” with the spectraldynamics processor and the spectral extractor
(Tom Erbe:1996).
In SoundHack, I used the phase vocoding, spectral mutation, and spec-
tral extraction functions. I used phase vocoding in various ways. Phase
vocoding is described earlier. I use the definition of the spectral muta-
tion function in the program Lemur (because it applies in the same man-
ner to SoundHack’s spectral mutation):
Timbre Morphing [spectral mutation in SoundHack] is theprocess of combining two or more Lemur (SoundHack)
files to create a new Lemur file with an intermediate tim-
bre. For instance, if a long loud tone with a fast and narrow
vibrato is morphed with a short quiet tone with a slow and
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wide vibrato, the morphed result should be a medium
length, medium loudness tone with an intermediate vibrato
speed and width. This process differs from simply mixing
the two tones; only a single tone, with some of the charac-teristics of each of the original tones, is audible in the mor-
phed tone. (Fitz and Haken, 1995)
Sometimes I used Sound Hack to expand or compress the time, some-
times the pitch. Sometimes I used the drawing function to change the
time expansion factor or the pitch transposition factor during processing,
the result being a change in scale over time. I used the mutation functionto transform one person’s laugh to another (in this particular case, I also
stretched the sound on the time domain). One of the sounds on which I
used spectral extraction sounded like a circus organ, so I used it to con-
vey that feeling in the beginning and end of that particular movement.
A description from the manual of Lemur is as follows:
Lemur analysis consists of a series of short-time Fourier
spectra from which significant frequency components are
selected. Similar components in successive spectra are
linked to form time-varying partials, called tracks. The
number of significant frequency components, and, thus, the
number of tracks may vary over the duration of a sound.
Synthesis is performed by a bank of oscillators, each oscil-
lator reproducing the frequency and amplitude trajectory of
a single track. Phase accuracy is maintained using cubic
phase (parabolic frequency) interpolation between spectra.
The Lemur model allows extensive modification of the
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sound using Lemur’s built-in editing functions, or using
other customized editors to modify the intermediate analy-
sis file before re-synthesis. Lemur provides tools for time
and frequency scale modifications, partial editing and prun-ing, timbre morphing, and many other manipulations in the
model domain. Time-variant manipulations may be per-
formed at synthesis time using control files. The Lemur file
format contains only amplitude, frequency, and linking
information for each track, making it easy for users to write
customized Lemur file editors. Third-party implementations
of the Lemur model are available (here for example), and a
real-time controllable implementation of a bandwidth
enhanced synthesis algorithm is under development. (Fitz,et al, 1995)
I took advantage of Lemur’s spectral editing to edit many sounds. I
chose to draw a narrow-band sweep filter on one of the sounds. On
another, I took out everything but the most fundamental elements of the
sound. The effect was startling, as even with almost everything
removed, it still sounded very much like the original.
I also used DeckII, a multi-track digital audio program for the computer.
Deck is both a mixer and recorder, and has full automation features. It
utilizes many of the same features as Sound DesignerII, but with less
precision. It also has more digital signal processing tools, such as delay,
chorusing, etc.
Deck is the program I used to organize the sounds together, both
processed and un-processed. Since I had Sound DesignerII available to
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use, I did many of the fine edits necessary for the audio to flow together
without sound artifacts. I also utilized Deck’s automation features (pan-
ning and volume changes over time) and the effects processing.
Below I describe some technical difficulties in DeckII 2.5. Although at
times tedious, To Jerusalem with Love was fairly easy to set up. It was
when it got to the fine editing, using Deck II that it became difficult. I
had a final mix ready to go, when I noticed many sound artifacts. In
some places, the artifacts were a result of sounds not being put perfectly
next to each other, in others, it was actually a result of the automation
quantization, and in places that used the effects processing, there was
evidence of clipping. I learned quite a lot about this recording environ-
ment. Something I learned was that in fine editing, one should use head-
phones instead of listening from the speakers. Had I done this earlier, I
would have caught the defects sooner. It took several weeks to find a
solution to these problems. I found that some problems had very easy
solutions (although not always immediately evident), but for others, only
tedious work would refine the sounds. In Deck it is almost impossible to
play regions of sounds next to each other to meet together at the zero
crossfade point. The zero crossfade point is where a waveform reaches
zero volume. Edits should always be done at this point, if it is not, there
is an artifact of noise created when one waveform or region of sound
moves into another. One solution to avoid this is to create crossfades
between the regions. Crossfading is a function in most digital audio pro-
grams for fading from one region into the other. The name comes from
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the process of tape splicing, and creating various types of crossfades
from one section of tape to the next. A problem with this solution is that
the crossfade function actually has its own section of memory, and whenit is used up (which, in a large soundfile, doesn’t take long), that func-
tion can no longer be utilized. Another solution was to draw in automat-
ed volume, emulating the crossfade function, but this was usually less
successful. I found yet another problem with Deck’s digital signal pro-
cessing unit. It is easily over-driven, creating clipping at normal vol-
umes. The only solution I found for this was to turn the processing vol-
ume down until it stopped clipping (at the expense of the interesting
effects). Since this is a new feature to Deck 2.5, it seems to need more
work. The solution to the automation problem was the easiest, but took
the longest to figure out. I simply mixed the soundfiles down to the hard
disk (which creates a Sound Designer file), and the problem was no
longer there.
Mixing the soundfiles to disk creates a Sound Designer soundfile. I then
went back to Sound Designer and created one file for all four move-
ments. I placed the movements in the proper order, with the correct
amount of space between them, and recorded the result to digital audio
tape.
Monstera Deliciosa
I originally wrote Monstera Deliciosa with very little structure. It con-
sisted of almost everything in the current piece. People improvised
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freely and I had devised a system in which the players stared at each
other to start and stop playing. The end result was incoherent, unstruc-
tured and random. I wanted to come up with one additional constraintthat would add structure, but not take away the freedom of the improvi-
sation; that would add theatre, and not take away from the music.
To get that new idea, I drew from my experience working with Professor
Anthony Braxton. I had performed in an opera he wrote called Trillium
R: Shala Fears for the Poor. One of the elements in that opera involved
three shapes (squares, circles and triangles) each of which had its own
significance. In Braxton’s thinking of shapes, the square represents sta-
ble logics (composition), the circle represents mutable logics (improvi-
sation), and the triangle represents correspondence, synthesis, ritual cer-
emony, etc. (interaction) (personal communication, 1997). The singers
wore extensions on their costumes. On the extensions were the three
shapes. The singers were instructed to “interact” with these shape exten-
sions throughout the performance. This gave me an idea to create the
additional constraint for Monstera Deliciosa. I gave the musicians the
same constraints which already existed in the previous incarnation, but
also asked them to look at and play shapes which I had created (see
Figure 9). It generated many new ideas, and forced them to come up
Figure 9. Shapes for Monstera Deliciosa.
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with new approaches to free improvisation (which is rarely, if ever, truly
free). In most cases is rarely free of structure. Not only is there structure,
but the player who is interested in free improvisation will likely practicemany hours to create a storage of ideas from which to draw in perfor-
mance. The same musicians played the work very differently after the
addition of the idea of shape interpretation. They didn’t get stuck in one
idea, since each section had a different shape, and the shapes gave them
ideas to develop in a very different way.
Along with the added musicality I achieved with shape interpretation
came theatre and ritual. The theatre added a new dimension of interest
for the audience. When we used glances to control the start and stop
times, it was very subtle and difficult for the audience to notice. But it
was much easier to understand and much more interesting to wonder
who would pick up a shape next. To whom will the player give that
shape? Who will pick up the stop sign? That is an interesting shape, how
will that person it? It also has a ritualistic aspect. There is a pile of
shapes. The person always gets a pile of shapes, and, like passing a can-
dle from one to another in a candle-lighting ceremony, or placing a gold
medal around the winner’s neck in an olympic ceremony, the shape-
receiver is chosen to play the shape. The order never matters. Everyone
is equal.
Shape interpretation is one step past graphic notation. It is no longer
necessary to have any notation on paper. This piece can be expanded
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into other ways of interpretation. A suggestion from Professor Braxton
was to play a theme of real shapes, unlike my abstract shapes. For
example, a good set of shapes would be the in the theme of a forest, orthe theme of a farm. The musicians could look at the object and play
what they see. This concept also occurs in Indian music. The great
Hindustani vocalist Bade Ghulam Ali Khan would look at waves, and
sing a raga whose chalan (which I explain in Chapter 2) matched the
waves, or look at a flock of birds, and improvise in a manner that
seemed to show a flock of birds (Deodhar, 1993: 249-251). I am thank-
ful to Professor Braxton for the useful discussions we had on these sub-
jects.
Another way I drew from Indian music in Monstera Deliciosa was to
use scale forms that sounded like ragas. I used these for the acoustic sus-
taining instrument and synthesized sustaining instrument. Yet another
example of the influence of Indian music on my methods can be found
in the computer sequence. I move from one raga-like structure to anoth-
er, using little snippets. These snippets may be related to any raga with
those notes, as there are many ragas with those notes in common. The
idea I used here was accenting. Like in the example I give in chapter 2,
each group of notes is ascending. I chose to accent notes of that repeated
ascending passage to obtain at the same time, a descending passage,
moving more slowly. Sometimes I also chose to accent notes of that
repeated ascending passage so that I had, going at the same time, the
same ascending passage, also moving more slowly. At other points in
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the short sequence, I accented notes to create a melody moving through-
out the ascending passage. This comes straight from my Khyal lessons
in sargam exercises (similar to solfege exercises), meant to build impro-visational skills.
Bahá
I composed the music for Bahá by creating the line abstraction I
describe earlier (in Chapter 1, see also Chapter 4) of the Bahá’í
Ringstone symbol, using it as graphic notation (much the same way as
John Cage did in Ryoanji). I became interested in this type of notation in
a class I took with Alvin Lucier in composition, when he played the
above mentioned Cage piece. I later was able to know the piece better
by performing it at Wesleyan. The way Cage achieves a graphic notation
is by tracing over stones in a Zen garden. The singer sings these trac-
ings. Two excerpts from the directions in Cage’s score to Ryoanji struck
me:
Each two pages are a “garden” of sounds...
The score is a “still” photograph of mobile circumstances.
(Cage, 1983:2)
I love the grounding quality Ryoanji has. There is a true “Zen” sense
about it. I wanted to create something that grew out of that line of think-
ing. Thus I created Bahá.
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Bombay
In order to obtain the music for Bombay, I of course needed to translate
the poem I mention in Chapter 1. I first translated it into Braille, includ-ing all punctuation, letters, and word spacing. I then devised a way to
translate the Braille symbols to music. First I chose six instruments for
each dot. I labeled each instrument 1-6 for each dot position. I devised a
way to divide each Braille symbol and word over time. I also added
extra space after each sentence to provide more clarity, although this is
not provided by the Braille alphabet. I gave each symbol a time signa-
ture of 5/8. On the first quarter note, instruments 1-3 play when called
for in dot positions 1-3 of a particular symbol. Sometimes there will not
be any dot position 1-3 in a symbol, in which case, there is a rest for the
first quarter note. The second quarter note is reserved for instruments 4-
6 as called for in the symbol. Sometimes they are also not used and
there is a rest. The last eighth note represents the short space in a Braille
symbol before the next symbol. It goes on like this until each symbol
completes a word and the punctuation. I gave the last symbol of a word
a time signature of 3/4. The first and second quarter notes are as
described above in a 5/8 measure, but the last quarter note represents a
slightly longer space that denotes the end of a word in the Braille sys-
tem. I gave the last symbol of the last word in a sentence a time signa-
ture of 4/4, so that the pause is now 2 quarter notes long (as mentioned
above, this is to provide clarity). I then selected a seventh instrument, a
drum, to keep time. This takes the place of a conductor. I chose instru-
ments which could be easily distinguished from each other, if not by
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timbre, then by pitch. I chose instruments in the slendro scale from the
Javanese Gamelan orchestra. I had many reasons for this choice. One
reason was that I feel the amplitude envelope of the Gamelan percussioninstruments is representative of the Braille raised dot. The sharp, distinc-
tive quality of the percussion is analogous to the sharp, well defined ele-
vation of the Braille raised dot. The second reason I chose Gamelan
instruments was that I dedicated the piece to Harriotte Hurie, and she
and I were singers together in Gamelan. I used peking to represent dot 1,
saron demung for dot 2, bonang barung for dot 3, celempung for dot 4,
saron barung for dot 5, and gong for dot 6. The drum I chose was the
khendang.
Once I chose the instruments, I needed to devise a way to choose pitch-
es. I did this by representing rising and falling voice inflection with
high, medium, and low pitch ranges. When I spoke the poetry and my
inflection went higher in pitch, I chose to have the instruments go up in
pitch. If I spoke at a lower pitch, the instruments went lower. When I
came to the middle, I chose pitches in the middle. Therefore, there were
three pitch ranges, which could be applied in relation to each instrument.
For example, the saron has six pitches, so there are two pitches in each
range. The celempung has over 20 pitches, so that number is divided by
3, and the number of each third is used for high, medium and low pitch-
es. Within each range, the players can choose what pitch to play. My
choice of the slendro scale was arbitrary. Once I came up with the para-
meters, I could just “paint-by-numbers” and apply the poetry to the
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instrumentation, time signature, and pitch. The poetry:
It was a hot and cold day at the same time.
Cold, hot, who could tell?If your fingers touched the air, they would be shattered.
Like stars.
I zipped out of bed like lightening.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear for the journey.
They laughed at me.
So did I.
So I went back to bed.
I also created a tape to be played along with the performance. As this
piece was written with the visually impaired in mind, I wanted to add
one more level of connection. Many people use a voice synthesizer to be
able to use computers. The voice synthesizer reads what is on a screen,
or what is stored in a file. I chose to have my poetry read by synthesized
computer voices. I used the Macintosh computer’s “Speech” voices
found in “Microsoft Simpletext.” I first recorded a sentence onto DAT,
read by one voice, the left some space, and had the same sentence read
again by the voice “Whisper.” I went through this process with a differ-
ent synthesized voice assigned to each sentence, always followed by the
voice “Whisper.”
Fracticalis
I began writing Fracticalis when I took part in an instrument building
seminar with Professor Fred Stubbs as part of my class work at
Wesleyan. I entered the class with the intention of building what I call a
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fractal drum. As I described in chapter 1, my inspiration for this came
during a concert of Alvin Lucier’s music when I heard his Queen of the
South played. In creating the drum itself, I chose ahead of time a fractalknown as the Koch curve (see Figure 10.).
I chose to make the drum out of maple wood. The dimensions of the
block of maple were 10”X10”X3/8”. I decided to create the space with a
bandsaw, given what I had to work with in the workshop. I made a laser
copy of the image (10”X10”), and glued it onto the wood. I then cut the
wood in half, (see Figure 11) as that was the only way I could use the
bandsaw to cut the wood. Then I cut away the image to create the fractal
space. When I had the fractal space cut out of both pieces, I then cut
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Figure 10: A Koch curve fractal
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each piece in half again height-wise (see Figure 12) down the middle (a
very difficult process). I did this to create two identical pieces of the
fractal placed on top of each other to contain the fractal shape, so the
granular substance didn’t fall off when the loudspeaker played into the
drum.
I glued the top pieces together from the original cut, and then the bottom
pieces. I then placed the two pieces together, clamped a membrane
between the two, and it was ready to write the music (see Figure 13).
I have written the first of many compositions for this drum and others
like it that I will create in the future. The composition is very simple.
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Figure 11. Beginning stages of constructing the fractal drum.
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From the Electronic Woodwind Instrument, a player plays single long
notes of varying complexity into the drum, and let the drum create a
pathway of notes, and expression. The filter’s cutoff frequency and vol-
ume are controlled dynamically. When the softest sound is played, it
should be a simple waveform, at its loudest, a bright more complex,
almost vocal sounding tone. This gives control over the height of the
shape. A tone with low volume and low filter cutoff-frequency will bare-
ly cause the substance to move. The pitch will change where the
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Figure 12. Last stage of fractal drum preparation.
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substance is within the fractal. The louder and brighter the sound, the
more dramatic the effect, and in this case, it is a time to exploit the
drama.
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Figure 13. The fractal drum.
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Chapter 5
Content Expression:Conclusion
Like highly metaphoric poems which have several layers of explicit, as
well as “hidden” meanings, my music expresses content on different lev-
els. In all my compositions, I attempt to convey meaning at many differ-
ent levels. I will now discuss how the music relates to the content of the
pieces.
Oh My Friend in Word has a devotional content. . This quality is present
because of the source of the text. In the beginning, I tried to create an
ethereal quality. I even ask the singers to sing mysterioso. At the end, it
moves to a joyful exclamation. It was difficult to tie content and music
together in Friend. Because I began writing it 3 years ago. It is almost
an “odd one out” in relation to the other works. It stands out because it
was written over many years and utilized compositional techniques
which (as discussed in Chapter 3) I have stopped using. But even then,
because I finished it recently, there is a very tight coupling between the
music and the content (e.g. both the text and music have the ethereal quality).
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In To Jerusalem with Love The sounds were related to the musical struc-
ture. The sound is the content . In this piece, there is no separate text ornotation; there is only the sound. Thus, there is no division of content
and form, of body and soul. One could say about the content that it is a
form of re-contextualization. The sounds are presented in their original
format and re-contextualized. I gave the original sounds a new light.
The content in Monstera Deliciosa includes the shapes and the idea of
structure and free improvisation. The inherent aspect of theatre is also
intrinsic to the working of that piece. The shapes reflect the content of
the piece.
The content in Bahá is again both devotional and ethereal. The
Ringstone symbol of the Bahá’í Faith (see figure 14) is a highly calli-
graphic symbol made from of the word Bahá. The word Bahá in Arabic
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Figure 14. The Ringstone Symbol of the Bahá’í Faith.
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means “glory” or “splendor”, but in the Bahá’í Faith, it has a more
abstract meaning. The word Bahá is the root of what Bahá’ís call “The
Greatest Name of God”. It has many forms: Bahá, Alláh’u’Abhá (a com-mon Bahá’í greeting meaning “God is Most Glorious”), Yá Bahá’ u’l
Abhá (Oh Thou Glory of Glories, an invocation to God), and
Bahá’u’lláh (Glory of God, the name of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith).
It is significant in that Bahá’ís believe there are an infinite number of
names of God, but these 4 variations have a special importance in the
Bahá’í Faith. Besides the meaning and symbology of the word “Bahá”,
the Ringstone symbol has another highly significant meaning. The sym-
bol is a metaphor of the relationship between the Kingdoms of God,
Revelation, and Creation (the three horizontal lines), through the opera-
tion of the Holy Spirit, (verticle line). The stars represent the two
prophets of the Bahá’í Faith (Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb). Therefore, the
foundation of this work is fundamentally devotional. God takes many
forms and appearances, and one of them is mystery. I attempt to emulate
this mystery in Bahá. The sounds of the flutes and voices together emu-
late an ethereal illusion. As in the first ten measures of Oh My Friend in
Word , I tried to capture an ethereal quality through both concept and
instrumentation, even maybe the lofty concept of the mystery of God,
which is inherent in the forms of the word Bahá. I was told by one lis-
tener that it sounded “ghostly” which may also be interpreted as
ethereal.
The content of Bombay is surrealistic. The content, i.e., the poetry from
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which I derived the music, is a surrealistic description of a bizarre expe-
rience I had in Bombay, India. The piece itself also has a surrealistic
quality to it. The content becomes the music because it’s translated intothe Braille alphabet and played. Here again, the content is expressed on
many levels. The poetry relays the atmosphere in a story of an experi-
ence I had during my first trip abroad. I was in Bombay, India, at my
Hindustani voice teacher’s in-law’s apartment. We had just finished din-
ner, and gone to bed. We made plans to begin the next day’s travel at
8:00 A.M. It was 10:00 P.M., and I fell asleep exhausted. After a refresh-
ing night’s sleep, I woke up with a start, thinking I had overslept. I
looked at my watch which said 11:00. But was it A.M. or P.M.? I could
not tell. I thought if I looked out the window, I would be able to tell if it
were night or day. I looked out the window, but it was still difficult to
tell. The street lights lit up the buildings just enough, that in my jet-
lagged state, I thought with certainty that it was 11:00 A.M., and that
everyone was waiting for me. I quickly got dressed, and re-packed any-
thing I had taken out of my bags. I went into the living room and found
Vijaya, my teacher’s wife. I whispered to her “is it 11:00 A.M. or P.M.?”
She looked at me like I was crazy, but laughed and said “it’s 11:00 P.M.,
go back to bed!” I laughed and went back to bed. The reference to the
hot and cold day at the same time comes from my childhood. I was nine
years old, riding in the back of a truck in New Mexico. It was winter
and about twenty degrees fahrenheit. One of my companions in the
truck was an older boy of twelve, and he said to me “it is so cold it feels
hot.” I knew exactly what he was talking about, because just the other
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day, I had put my hand under a faucet, and it was so hot, it felt cold. I
felt this line helped to relay the bizarre atmosphere of my experience in
Bombay.
In Fracticalis, there is very little explicit content because all that is done
is a wandering around, almost in a Lévy flight pattern (a special type of
random walk). Since what the player plays is dictated by the drum, the
content reflects the drum (or even exploits the drum). The content thus
reflects the exploitation of the instrument.
In all six pieces, there is a tight relationship between the content and the
music. I do not pick a melody or structure independently from the con-
tent, rather they are always tied together. Moreover, the content always
manifests itself on more than one level (and sometimes there is no sepa-
ration between content and form). This multi-level expression or mani-
festation of the content adds deeper levels of structure to the music.
My six compositions represent a composite of the musical ideas I have
absorbed over the last two to three years. There have been many impor-
tant influences that contributed to that absorption: the study of many
genres of music, the performance of many different forms of music,
from the Western European Classical Tradition to Gamelan to “experi-
mental” to jazz to North Indian music, etc. All this has helped me grow
tremendously musically, especially as a composer. There are so many
unique perspectives to be found. Many times, I find that the work I do in
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one genre of music can almost always be applied to another, both in per-
formance and composition. An example of this can be found in the
phrasing techniques in Western European opera and North Indian Khyal.I find that taking language into consideration, they are many times inter-
changeable.
Musically, these last two years have been excellent for me. I learned to
find ways to compose music that I didn’t know before or at least didn’t
think about before. I learned to have clarity of concept as a goal, and as
a starting point in my compositional process. I learned about field work
and studio work. I have learned from the mistakes (such as not using
headphones earlier in the digital audio process), and have analyzed in
my own head where I could do better. I can apply this knowledge to
future compositions, recording in the field, and even in other media such
as interactive music, acoustic instrumental and vocal, etc. I look forward
to my next project with this new knowledge in mind.
Finally we can ask: What can someone else get from my music?
Whether or not one likes the music, I feel that she or he will leave with
a “freshness” (almost a spring-like quality). There are not necessarily
ideas new and unheard of, but there is something about the choice of
orchestration and structure that seems fresh. Sometimes in springtime,
there are old things which come up new, like a flower which has spread
itself to a new spot, but is related to other flowers in the older spot. Or
like an old seed which when watered, brings forth a new tree. My pieces
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are a result of the influence of music from the past, either recent or
ancient. From this comes new appearances and expressions of old
themes. For example, Oh My Friend in Word is a choral piece, but verydifferent from older styles. This spring-like quality, in my view, is a
reflection of the new ways I create structure. The analogy of the seed
and the tree is especially thought provoking, since in each of my compo-
sition, a well defined idea (the seed) grows naturally into the full com-
position (the tree).
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Appendix A: An autobio-
graphical Sketch
I am the daughter of a musician and a visual artist, so the arts have
always been treasured in our household. My musical training began at
the age of seven, although I had shown a strong interest in music as
early as age four. When I was age seven, I learned flute in the elemen-
tary school. I was never able to take any private lessons as a child and
did not study any kind of formal classical music. I began studying voice,
again in the public school system, at the age of twelve, and taught
myself to play saxophone at age fifteen. The music that interested me
during those adolescent years was the popular rock and roll, and pop
music of that time, as well as the synthesizer groups of the seventies
(e.g. Tangerine Dream) and others. I did not know much about “high
art” music of any culture, not even my own. It was my goal, even in my
early twenties, to become famous in the pop music world. At age fifteen
I began listening to music within the pop culture that was considered
“different,” (e.g. “The Cure”, “The Smiths”, Kate Bush, etc.) and that
interest became greater as I grew older. I thank Berklee College of
Music (where I began attending at age eighteen) for introducing me to
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jazz music, which made a big impact on my musical tastes, and still
influences my musical choices in composition and performance today.
Also thanks to a former roommate, Penni Good, with whom I shared anapartment in Boston at age nineteen. Through her, I was introduced (via
Peter Gabriel) to “World Music,” i.e., music from cultures other than my
own American/British pop culture. I became more and more interested
in many different musics at that time, but still wanted to incorporate
them into my own pop/rock music. Through Berklee, I also began my
studies in the history of Western music and jazz, as well as a good
understanding of jazz theory and ear training, and traditional counter-
point and harmony. At the end of History of Music, I was introduced to
many new musics, much of which, at the time, I had a very closed mind
to and didn’t like, but I do remember one piece I loved, which was Lux
Aeterna by Ligeti. This introduction planted the seeds of my interests
today. I also studied film scoring, song-writing, orchestration, voice and
saxophone at Berklee. But it was music synthesis that kept my interest
throughout all those other studies, so I finished my degree majoring in
that. In the Music Synthesis department at Berklee, I had begun to come
out of my “fog” at Berklee (of being attached to “pop” music), as my
advisor, Dr. Richard Boulanger, introduced my classmates and me to
many new and interesting music. He was interested in and wrote musics
which I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t like much of the music at first. I
thought it sounded ugly or confusing. This lasted a short time, because
at some point, early in my studies with him, I began to understand and
then enjoy the music of Cage, Wendy Carlos (with her Balinese tuning
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systems on The Beauty in the Beast ), Varése, and many other contempo-
rary groups and composers, especially those of electronic music. In class
he gave us free reign to explore on our own, and not follow existingconventions. After age nineteen, my interest in music of other cultures
grew in intensity, and after I graduated from Berklee, I even joined a
pop band, Maniacal Choir, that blended many west African traditions
with rock. At the end of my stint with this band, I began to study North
Indian Hindustani vocal music with Warren Senders. It took me about
four years to get to this point. I would see his posters all over the place
and would tell myself almost on a daily basis, to start lessons. It wasn’t
until he gave a free workshop at Berklee that I became entranced with
the music. When I graduated from Berklee, I worked at the Music
Synthesis department, and did some private study in music composition
with Dr. Boulanger. Warren Senders moved to India with his wife Vijaya
to study with their teacher, Pandit S. G. Devasthali, for a year, and I
began studies with Mr. Senders’ first teacher, Kalpana Mazumdar in
Boston. I then decided to study with Mr. Senders’ teacher in India (dur-
ing the summer of 1994). Although Mr. Senders is Pt. Devasthali’s main
student (meaning the one to whom he plans to impart the largest amount
of musical knowledge), Pt. Devasthali has always been more than will-
ing to share as much of his knowledge with as many students as will
accept it. I studied with him 2 hours a day for most of two and a half
months. During that time, my musicianship expanded greatly, not only
in Hindustani music, but on all levels. I have kept up these studies with
Mr. Senders regularly. After I went to India, I began my studies towards
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an M.F.A.. in music composition at California Institute of the Arts
(CalArts). Here I studied composition with David Rosenboom. I began
to learn the importance of pre-composition to avoid a bad habit: writingmusic that sounds as if it is wandering. I also worked with Leo Wadado
Smith in improvisation. He helped me move my boundaries far away
from the typical straight-ahead style of playing jazz. He and I blended
jazz and Hindustani music together with a unique perspective. Since
CalArts supports the more experimental side of the arts, I began to
expand my knowledge of other artists in the experimental arts, such as
Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Harry Partch,
Schönberg, Berg and Webern, and to look at composers of the past such
as Brahms and Debussy with other ways of analysis besides the tradi-
tional analysis that I was taught. I was also encouraged to start singing
Western Art music, and performed with the CalArts Chamber singers in
many venues, including the home of Mrs. Walt Disney. With the cham-
ber singers, I learned about Carlo Gesualdo, who has become highly
influential in my music. As much as I loved my stay at CalArts, for vari-
ous reasons I had to leave. I was accepted into Wesleyan and began
work on my M.A. in music composition. It has been at Wesleyan that I
have been able to grow, and show the fruit of the last 7 years, since my
introduction to new music. I have performed there more than at any
other point in my life, and had a wonderful supportive atmosphere for
my composition work. As the teacher assistant to Ron Kuivila, I was
introduced to the idea of “clarity of concept”, which, I figured out was
what David Rosenboom was teaching me, but in different words. With
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Alvin Lucier as my advisor, I have been able to put the theoretical
knowledge of pre-composition and clarity of concept into action. I
developed a whole new style of writing, that both took less time, and Ihave found more enjoyable in the long run (see Chapter 3 for details). I
will still do much with creating sounds, and composing, but something
so simple as creating the idea, and finding a clear and musical way to
fulfill the idea, rather than blindly going in and not being clear about
where the music is headed, has freed me to compose many more works,
works which I feel are more about who I am as a composer. Another
influence on my compositional style is the music of North and South
India (see Chapter 2 for details). At Wesleyan, I have also had the boun-
ty to perform in many different genres and venues. Especially dear to
me was the Javanese Gamelan orchestra. I learned much from the expe-
rience of learning to sing outside either “just intonation” or “equal tem-
perament.” I also highly value the beauty the music and art offer.
Performing many different experimental and new music compositions
has been rewarding, as well. Through Wesleyan University, I have made
my New York city debut in Anthony Braxton’s opera Trillium R: Shala
Fears for the Poor, under the composer conducting; am often a featured
soloist at the First Congregationalist Church of Waterbury; and have per-
formed John Cage’s Ryoanji; Robert Ashly’s It’s There; David Tudor’s
Pepsi peice; Alvin Lucier’s Music for Gamelan Instruments; Javanese
Wayang Kulit Pandawa’s Dice Game; and Robert Nasta’s Variations on
a Theme (by) E. E. Cummings and “Oh.” (Chant with Imitation).
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Appendix B
The Basic Workings of BrailleFrom the Visions Lab, Purdue, University, URL:http://www.chem.purdue.edu/facilities/sightlab/index.html
Braille is the written means by which many blind people communicate. Itwas invented in the nineteenth century by Louis Braille but has been slow to become widespread, and is almost exclusively used by the blind. Although atechnically magnificent form of information storage, Braille can be frustrat-ing to learn and is actually used by only a minority of sight-impaired people. The dots used in Braille are slightly raised off of the page that they are printed on, allowing patterns to be recognized bytouch. Braille is read left-to-right, just like English. Interestingly, atypical Braille page (which is 8*” by 11”) consists of 40 characters (orcolumns) and 25 lines (or rows), which is the same as a typical IBM DOS
screen (although Braille was most definitely invented first). Braille is oftendouble-sided to save space; that is, it is often printed on both sided of thepage (just like inkprint) and bound just like print books are bound.
In the United states, all Braille is composed of six-dot cells (except for afew unusual eight-dot codes like the Oregon State University Science AccessProject or Computer Braille Code), with the cells arranged in a 2 x 3 matrixas follows:
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This allows for (23)2 - 1 = 63 symbols total. While this sounds like a lot, con-sider that the standard for English documents is ASCII text, which has 255symbols, which is often barely adequate for practical usage. Although Brailledocuments are often longer than print documents (a typical literary Braille
document has 3-5 times more pages than an equivalent print document), theactual information density is higher. This is because Braille eliminates thenon-information containing bits, such as spaces and vowels, similar to thetechniques employed by software compression routines. In other words,there are very few symbols in Braille that retain their meaning when permut-ed, or spatially exchanged. In English, this is not the case, because vowelshave very little informational value, and many other symbols are redundant.Consider the following sentence:
Can you see the outline of the spirit?
Now, imagine removing all of the “nonessential” vowels, to get:
Cn y s th tln f th sprt?
This is reminiscent of several different types of word-puzzles (for example,the game of CNUCDC? = Can you see the sea?). With some thought, thissentence could be decoded by most people. While this form is more compactthan the original, an even better (and more easily interpreted) compactioncould be obtained by transforming this string of characters using a set of pre-set rules defined for common English words:
,c y see ! \l9e (! _s8
This string is two characters shorter, and easily understood when thefollowing replacements are known:
* , = Capital Indicator (the next letter is a capital letter)* c = can* y = you* ! = the
* \ = out* 9 = in* ( = of * _s = spirit* 8 = ?
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This is exactly what Braille does: replaces the alphabetic nature of theprint language with a morpheme-based system of coding. Thus, each symbolin Braille generally corresponds to a basic unit of meaning, rather than just a
single letter. However, native Braille code can be difficult to read by sightedpeople, since the decoding process is something best learned young, beforelanguage patterns are set. Many blind people learn to read Braille earlierthan sighted people can learn to read print, since print-reading takes a cer-tain maturity of the eye muscled for focusing and fine movement that doesnot generally develop until around age three. The sensory skills needed tofeel the raised dots of Braille, however, can be developed very early in infan-cy. This author is aware of several blind people who were reading children’s books in Braille when they were but two. Braille documents are large because the Braille “font” is a fixed-pitch 24 point non-kerned font, with an
interline spacing of 29 points (more than single-space.)
Braille comes in several varieties, as follows:
Grade I Braille is a letter-for-letter translation from print. It is easy tolearn, but is very bulky and cumbersome to read. It is comparable tospeaking sign language by spelling out each word as you say it. An example:
This is a test.
In Grade I Braille:
Its ASCII Equivalent:
,this is a test4
Grade II Braille is the standard format for the vast majority of Brailledocuments, and the format that is used for all documents produced by theVISIONS Lab. It consists of more than 200 abbreviations for common wordsand some spacing conventions that allow for the text to be compact and fast
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to read. Although some of these abbreviations appear strange in a modernsociety, most are carefully thought out. The relatively small number of abbre-viations is because of human limitations; imagine having to learn an alpha- bet consisting of 250 letters as a young child! Thus, Grade II Braille is more
difficult to learn than Grade I, since multi-cell abbreviations are used. Anexample:
This is a test.
In Grade II Braille:
Its ASCII Equivalent:
,? is a te/4
Grade III Braille is an advanced form of Braille code that usesabbreviations similar to stenographer’s shorthand to encode the text. Spacesand vowels are generally omitted, an there are literally hundreds of possiblecombinations of symbols to learn. This is where the true power of Braille as aform of information storage shines through. Unfortunately, Grade III Brailleis not widely used; in fact, only a few hundred people in the US can write inGrade III Braille. In this regard, Grade III Braille is like Esperanto: an ideallanguage that few have the patience to learn.
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ASCII to Braille table:
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