the beginning of something new…
I started my journey with electronics this past summer at the Walden School’s Creative Musicians Retreat, a week-long event culminating in the premier of my work for solo flute and percussion “ i think i can move on now.” I cannot understate how impactful this summer experience was on my journey as a composer. Never have I been surrounded by such incredibly talented faculty, but also never have I been in an atmosphere so prosperous with creativity and exploration in my whole life. I realized a lot on this short week-long retreat, and I don’t think I will ever be the same (for the better). I left Walden knowing the type of people that I strive to surround myself with for the rest of my career — realizing this, I, quite literally, cried tears of joy the day I arrived back in Boston.
While at Walden I had the amazing opportunity to take classes with Sam Pluta, faculty at the Peabody Institute, on Musique Concrète. Although this class was short, it left me with an insatiable curiosity about the world of electronic music and the combination of that with instrumental music. Thus began my start in the electronic medium. I had already known about basic editing and mixing thanks to Berklee and past experience, but electroacoustic music to me felt foreign and too complex for me to even touch. Now, I sort of realize part of the thing that makes electronic music so compelling: you don’t need to understand everything. Don’t get me wrong, understanding the basics of sound design, signal processing, and computer science is fundamental to knowing precisely what is needed to achieve the sound world you are looking for. However, I had thought that to even do the most basic Max/MSP work I needed to know everything and understand it as completely as I could. Now I realize that computer music, like many other artistic mediums, is the combination of the building of knowledge over time (technique) and the creative implication of the material to create original work (inspiration and intuition).
So, after this realization, I thought I would try out this electronic stuff no matter how daunting it was. I downloaded Max/MSP (for the 2nd time because the first two times I got panicked and uninstalled it haha) and decided to try and figure out what exactly I was doing. Starting with simple operations, you quickly begin to build a basic library of objects in your head and what you can do with them. This exploration was riveting! After a while, you find out that a delay chain can do quite a lot musically and that the cverb~ object is rather trash on its own. This exploration was incredibly compositional and I was so ecstatic to keep learning more. Before I knew it, I had just enough knowledge to try and improvise with live electronics after just a couple of sessions exploring Max.
Fast forward just a month and a half months to today, I just completed my first trumpet and live electronic improvisation with a collaborator for a class, Ecomusicology, and it was an AMAZING experience and feeling to perform like that. My patch was relatively simple, just a homemade distortion and delay chain with a lowpass filter and some reverb (yes, I used cverb~ on its own, it was easy; don’t judge me). The work comprised of my improvisation on trumpet being picked up by a silent brass mute to be routed into my patch and the work of my friend, Tomas, on a Moog synthesizer and sampler routed through a reverb pedal. Our collaboration centered around technology being a barrier and force of disconnection from our forests and, more broadly, our surrounding natural environment.
Check out a video of it here:
My next goal with improvisation and electronics is a set based upon the auditory documentation of the Charles River from its origin in Hopkinton, MA at Echo Lake to its end in the Boston Harbor. The path of the Charles encompasses an impressive breadth of sound and it is my goal to converge the many soundscapes into one improvisation set with the goal of raising awareness of the Charles River estuary. I hope to have it completed by next Spring for a public performance in collaboration with the Esplanade Association or another eco-friendly nonprofit.
Heres a little bonus photo of Tomas and I performing:
