My take on 'Star's End'

So I was thinking of the piece I was talking about in my last blog entry, and thinking just in general about how much I appreciate the lack of light pollution in Dartington. I mean, you can see the milky way. That's pretty impressive, and I do appreciate it. I was thinking of this other composer, David Bedford, and his piece Star Clusters, Nebulae and places in Devon. It's quite easy to be inspired by this place, not only when you have a beautiful clear night sky, but when your surroundings on the ground are equally pleasant.


While I haven't been able to get a recording of this piece, I do have in my possession a copy of Star's End, a piece that he wrote in 1974. I contacted Mr Bedford via email last year when I came across this piece, as the CD sleeve didn't have much information surrounding the ideas behind the music. He wrote:


"The title is actually taken from a novel by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. The piece itself is to do with the idea of 'entropy' which is the idea that everything rus out of energy and becomes the same, so that at the end of the universe everything will be the same average temperature and everything will be smooth. So the piece starts really jaggedly and gets more and more quiet and peaceful towards the end."


I have to say, I'm a little disappointed that I have to quote a well established composer as describing a piece of music as "jaggedly". Did I get him on a bad day or something? Nonetheless it was nice of him to reply to my enthusastic email, but just a pity that he didn't have much else to say about this piece.

Star's End (for large orchestra and guitars) is in two parts and part one opens with a rising string glissando which crescendos into a 4 quaver motif played brashly on all parts. The string glissandi then continue to rise and fall, creating a somewhat placid setting until at 1'07 an unexpected (well I didn't expect it) electric guitar arpeggio is suddenly featuered which, hald a minute later, reappears inverted. An autonomous sounding oboe also stands out over this anticipating environment. The electric guitar is featured before a timpani beat then brings the woodwind and strings into a fluent and rapidly repeating melody which then changes harmony after another timpani roll. These changes continue with a repeated note on guitar. This cluent and fluttering atmosphere continues between strings and woodwind, while lower strings and brass often provide and underlying pedal note, contrasted with crescendo/diminuendo dynamics. Bedford mangages to maintain this atmosphere for quite sometime, gradually increasing the unison crescendo notes.

This section is somewhat striking of Paul McCartney's Standing Stone, with the pedal notes and random interjections from unecpected instruments. Small crescendos and timpani rolls prepare the listenere for something new but the music just seems to digress to a repeated atmosphere with extra input from guitar. From 15 minutes there is a straightforward thumping which is in unision with guitar while strings/brass play a rising and falling theme over what seems like improvisatory guitar playing. This reiteration of theme-crescendo-theme-crescendo quietly dies out into part two.


Part two opens with a very disjointed character before the strings decend into tonal anarchy (oxymoron?) with a rapid and somwhat syncopated rhythmic gesture which encompasses the middle to higher registers. The orchestration builds up and the very odd and out of place electric guitar playing enters. I just can't help shaking off the peculiar and ill-fitting role the guitar plays in this piece, and these anomalous and scale-like interjections continue over an unchanging orchestral atmosphere for a further two minutes before a conventional increasing rhythms throws the pieces back into momentary calm. As well as the somewhat jazz/rock input from the guitar there is also the occasional sound of a drum kit before it creates a modest crescendo marking the rise of a new atmosphere.


In this more mellow section the strings and brass maintain a pedal note as various instruments take their turn to play a faltering theme. The electric guitar plays a melodic riff accompanied by quiet and rapid tremolos on the strings. The rare descending guitar theme persists, sometimes inverted. The timpani signifies another orchestral change before the woodwind descends into a fragmented and crumbling theme which is then imitated by the entire orchestra and eventually the guitar. This gives a real sense of meltdown or total breakdown of something which originally seemed fairly solid and quite together (perhaps the idea of entropy is finally taking hold?). The upper strings then play a slurred ostinato over quiet glissandi on the lower strings, before playing tremolo scales to the higher registers.


The sound of consonant brass signifies a new atmosphere, as a shockingly fervent guitar enters. Upper strings maintain a pedal note while some previously featured themes (perhaps Bedford is treating this like a recapitulation?) before eventually fading out.


To be honest, I'm not completely sold that entropy is being portrayed in this music (each to their own, I know). Entropy is essentially the measure of the dispersion of chaos within a closed system. Within the Universe, the rate of entropy never becomes negative and energy cannot be used or composed without expanding existing energy. Eventually, the Universe may reach a state where all energy is dispersed evenly, cooling to a temperature of absolute zero and no longer being able to sustain life. I suppose this can be applied to Star's End if you point it out. The constant build up and renewal of themes can all be representative of renewable energy - energey produced from energy. It certainly does start 'jaggedly' as David Bedford puts it, and transforms into a drawn out but eventual smooth ending. The chaotic rhythms experiences at the berinning of the piece do point ssomewhat in the direction of the chaotic universe. Bedford is often described as an avant-garde composer and while this piece is (ever so) slightly on the unconventional side, it doesn't seem unconventional within the realm of avant-garde. The electric guitar playing (by Mike Oldfield) is just what makes this piece so bizarre and sordidly eccentric. At no point does it ever appear to fit in; not onlybecause of its timbre but also because of the differing harmonies and over simplistic rhythms. It would be interesting to hear this piece with guitar and drum omitted. Star's End is more often tonal than atonal, and quite often bitonal.

I don't like it very much.

The Geminids under a Devon sky...

The students have left Dartington for Christmas holidays, and the place is eerily quiet. I took advantage of this peace tonight, when I dressed myself in almost every piece of clothing I own, and took myself and an old rug out to the field in between higher close and aller park to watch the Geminids meteor shower. The visibility in this part of Devon is great, and the clouds managed to stay away for most of the twenty minutes that I was out there. But this wasn't just a pleasure venture; I was working on a new piece.

I saw 23 meteors in under 20 minutes, and for each one I recorded its position (simple terms: north, north east, south west, etc.) and it's intensity (brightness, duration, length etc.). It is my intention to use these records for a piece. I've recorded the duration between each meteor that I spotted, but will probably reduce the collective time (therefore instead of 20 minutes, bring the time down to 5 minutes, therefore reducing the duration between each meteor by a quarter). This will leave me with a 5 min long piece, during which I will have 8 string players playing pp microtonal passages with the inclusion of some harmonics. When the duration has passed that a meteor has been seen (in this case, heard), a string player will play a glissando (the dynamics of which will depend on the intensity said meteor had been recorded at). The piece will continue in this series, with each string player (labelled 1- 8) given a chance to play a glissando at some point. Here is as possible audience layout for this piece:

It's good to have an idea in the works. How amazing would it be to do this piece outdoors, under say, the Perseids meteor shower in august? You could have the string players play the music while one string player looks to the sky and plays improvised glissando each time they spot a meteor. I don't think there are any big meteor showers in july (which is when the MA show will be) so I'll have to stick with what I've got for this one!

Books

I've got the following books from the library:

Music of the spheres. Music, science, and the natural order of the Universe.

Music theory and natural order from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century.

Cosmic music: musical keys to the interpretation of reality: essays by Marius Schneider, Rudolf Haase, Hans Erhard Lauer.

Harmony of the spheres: a sourcebook of the Pythagorean tradition in music.

Harmonies of heaven and earth: the spiritual dimension of music from antiquity to the avant-garde

I was surprised at how many books there were relating to the music of the spheres, but also have a feeling that they are going to be quite similar in content..

Winds of Mars

I was talking to someone about this piece today. I can't remember how I came across it (probably typed 'music and astronomy' into google and scanned through the thousands of results) but I remember ordering it off amazon. So I brought it up on itunes, had a listen, and here's what I think:

'Winds of Mars' was created using the music of J.S Bach fused with sounds generated from the mars pathfinder (an unmanned craft launched in 1994 to analyse the Martian geology, climate, atmosphere etc). Now, there was no micrphone on board this craft, so the sounds were put together using data taken from sensors (so it was a realisation of sounds, really). There is a (ridiculously) large section about the creation process of this on http://www.windsofmars.com/ (no longer seems to be available) which goes into detal about the idea and planning of the piece. Apparently Kelvin Miller (the innovator of the work) approached a guy named Ed Stone (astronomer) who had given a lecture on space exploration and outlining the details of the mars pathfinder. Miller writes,

'As he was talking aboutt he winds of Mars, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach came into my mind, and I wondered, "What if?"'

Well, it's at this point of reading this that I thought "What if what?" and "Why did Bach enter your head again?". As I read on I couldn't help feeling that this narrative was written as though they had achieved something absolutley groundbreaking - which in my opinion, they hadn't.

Anyway, I was still intrigued by the technological process involved in this album, and how they turned sensory data into the sounds of wind (because this didn't seem as straightforward as converting radio waves into sound). The pathfinder had been programmed to heat 6 wires, which would cool in relevance to the wind. The time it took the wires to cool was the data that could in turn process the speed of the wind, and their position determined the direction of the wind. The numerical data returned to earth was formatted into an ASCI file, which was later put through a MIDI sequencer which was able to translate the digital wind sample into sounds.

So, we have the sound of Martian wind. But I still didn't understand where Bach came into this. Roderick Kettlewell, the pianist who performed Bach's work on piano for the recording, shared his thoughts about why Bach seemed approriate. Read this (!):

'It was such a funky idea, but the more I thought about it, the more Bach seemed absolutley appropraite for such an interplanetary concept. Bach's works offer a balance between intellectual rigor and just the sheer beauty of melody and harmony, informed by a sort of vigorous rhythmic sense, so everything comes together in a beautiful form, a parallel with the beauty of form you see in the Universe. Beyond that, there's something about Bach's music, an ethereal, almost spiritual element, that takes us beyond ourselves and beyond our Earthbound consciousness, a purity of form that allows us to send our minds across time and space. In the midst of the barrenness, the pictures of Mars reveal a desolate but calming beauty, so Kettlewell selected compositions that he felt projected that. And, as I performed, I sought to capture in the music this ethereal stillness of Mars, the kind of calmness, reflective of the isolation you might feel if you were off on your own exploring this distant planet.'

Sorry for the long quote - but you need to read it in its entirety to understand just why I think this is going overboard. I think, to an extent, they've done something cool in creating a realisation of what the wind on Mars sounds like... but all this overboard reasoning for applying Bach just takes away from the project. Personally I think that a new composition comissioned for this project would have made the final result a lot more appealing. So how about you stop talking about this ethereal interplanetary appropriateness of Bach, and admit: "Well, we wanted to sell CD's, and everybody likes Bach" ??

Additionally, I can't help feeling that Kettlewell loses his case with his over-enthusiasm. In logical terms, no one could actually explore Mars 'reflectively' at all. In fact, the combination of solar ultraviolet radiation combined with the average temperature of -63oC means that an exploration of Mars would be a very cautious one. Perhaps the use of Holst's depiction of an agressive 'God of War' Mars may have been cliche, but would have stood up more in terms of reality.

I guess poetic license can be granted for the generation of the wind sounds, but also for the concept and more importantly, the atmosphere one experiences when listening to it. Play it to someone without explaining it first and they may think they're listening to a recording of 'Bach Outdoors', because, the Martian wind sounds like the wind we experience here in Earth!! So then I thought, 'Well of course, and what idiot thought it would sound any different?'.

I have come to the conclusion that Winds of Mars is interesting only for it's novelty, and not for its concept. It features a proficient pianist playing some of Bach's sarabandes and well known airs. The wind can be identified at the beginning and end of the pieces, however apart from the odd gust (!), it is sometimes difficult to define the rumble of this Martian wind - I suppose its subtlety may be part of its appeal.

There is also something almost paradoxical about using modern means to capture alien data, using technology to convert this into sound, and then combining that modern musical creation with musical antiquity - but perhaps that's where the charm lies.

Wonder

If only I'd known about this in advance!:

I'll listen to it on Radio 3, and hopefully I can get a recording of it within the next few months...

What a Jem...

So I've recently come across Jem Finer, thanks to David Prior. Apparently he visited Dartington a few years ago and talked about his projects. I cannot believe I haven't encountered his work until now. It's all pretty cool but i'm particularly interested in the work he did as artist in residence at Oxford Univeristy astrophysics department (my dream job). He built a radio telescope and spent weeks living in a shed next to it, listening and studying the audio. What's best is that he kept record of the entire experience!:

(cosmolog.org.uk)





One more project to add to the list!

Start the hoarding...

Ok, I've got my plan. I am going to write a suite of pieces for a variety of instruments, and some of those pieces will include radio telescope sounds (possibly live, possibly pre-composed). My dissertation is then going to explore my ever-growing list of pieces of music that use astronomy in them. That's going to be tough. I've already started collecting recordings of this music (librrary, itunes, amazon, spotify, even youtube) but I still don't know where to begin, because writing about them chronologically doesn't seem to make any sense.

I've also downloaded some articles and checked out some books on writing about music. Sometimes if I don't like a piece, my humour comes across in the way I write about it and makes it all a bit journalistic - so i'll be civil in my academic writing and vent in this blog instead.

Le Noir de L'etoile

A final year sonic arts student from Queen's has suggested a piece to me. He knows I was interested in Music and Astronomy last year and thanks to facebook, is aware that I'm still looking into this area. He came across a piece where the composer has used a pulsar, so I have done some immediate research...

It's called Le Noir de L'etoile (by Gerard Grisey - I have never heard of him but apparently he studied under Messian and Xenakis). This piece employs the streaming of the sound of a pulsar in live performances (a pulsar is a fast torating neutron star which throws energy into space as it spins). I'm aware of how different pulsars can sound from one another; if they spin fast enough they create a blurred buzzing noise, but if they rotate slower they can create quite a rhythmic sound. Grisey used the well-known Vela pulsar, which is the latter type.

Le Noir de L'etoile is written for 6 percussion instruments and transmission of signals from outer space (the pulsar). The interesting thing about this piece is the live transmission of the pulsar sounds - which he employs using a large amateur radio telescope. The Vela pulsar is one of the more accessible pulsars (it is close and therefore easier to hear over interference) so it is easy for Grisey to do without the aid of a massive telescope. And there's something about this method that just seems, well, more live.

I have my own ideas about using live telescope sounds in a performance (via the internet) and I can't help feeling that I will be a much bigger risk taker than Grisey. To begin with, he is using the sound of a pulsar - a phenomena that will sound the same as it did the last time he tuned into it, and it will maintain the same strict rhythm for the forseeable future (but if it did explode during a live performance of Le Noir de L'etoile, it would be pretty exciting). This pulsar also sounds like quite a hollowing rattling beat, similar to the percussion instruments chosen to accompany it. It would appear that he has chosen the most un-alien sound in outer space. The craze of beats and drumming that are heard alongside it give the piece a tribal atmosphere... as though an eccentric drumming group have deicded that it would be outrageous to jam with a pulsar. It might be interesting to understand Grisey's compositional process involving this piece and to find out his objectives. It certainly doesn't conjure feelings of 'the black of the night' for me, but rather a group of percussionists who seem to be competing with a massive neutron star to see who can be louder. The fact that a pulsar was employed as an instrument in this piece is what grabbed my attention (obviously), however as far as radio telescope electro-acoustic pieces go, this one seemed rather dull to me.

Score!

I ordered scores from the library and they arrived today. Amazing! I wanted to look at these so badly when I was at Queen's but they always went on about funding etc. The staff at Dartington library got them without a problem.

I'll want to collect a lot of scores for my dissertation but these two I wanted in particular because they seemed so unusual. John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis looks especially interesting. When I've told some people about this piece they've thought it was a little ridiculous. A guy who just puts paper over a star chart and hey presto! We have a score. But on reading the preface page I can tell a lot of thought has gone into turning this into playable music. I wouldn't envy the performers though.

I requested George Crumb's Makrokosmos too, simply for the fact that I wanted to view the Spiral Galaxy score. I really like this piece, but I can't help feeling the spiral scoring is simply an aesthetic quality, as it reaps no performance benefits and only give the sight-reader a slight neck strain.

DIY radio astronomy

Well, my plans to build my own radio telescope have been scuppered. Firstly, I don't have the engineering or technological knowledge to know what these 'build you own ham radio' handbooks are talking about. And they're meant to be for amatuers. Also, I wouldn't know where to get half the material. I think it would consume so much of my time just to build this thing and it's only going to be an input into what I actually need to work on.

A great deal harder than it looks...



But the main reason is because an amatuer telescope could only really pick up solar activity anyway. These aren't very interesting sounds. So I can't capture the sounds using my own equipment, but that hasn't put me off. I've come across a site called http://www.radio-astronomy.net/ which streams live sounds from radio telescopes all over the world - which means that for the majority of the time, there's interesting sounds coming through. I think this might have some potential.