An Interview with Edmund Campion
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Keeril Makan An Interview with School of Music University of Illinois 1114 West Nevada Street Edmund Campion Urbana, Illinois 61801 USA [email protected] Edmund J. Campion was born in Dallas, Texas, in Time (ACWOT) for two pianos, was unlike any 1957. (See Figure 1.) He received a doctorate in music I had ever written. Since then, the computer composition at Columbia University and attended has been my playground and teacher, a testing site the Paris Conservatory where he worked with com- for ideas. The questions I ask, the pieces I write, poser Ge´rard Grisey. In 1993, Campion was se- the locations I choose for musical presentation lected for the one-year course in computer music at have all been rethought. It’s easy to get lost in the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acous- technical issues, but my focus remains music crea- tique/Musique (IRCAM). He was eventually com- tion. Rhythm, timbre, and spatial studies are cen- missioned by IRCAM for his work Natural tral. Still, I’ve always felt a need to contextualize Selection and the evening-length dance piece Play- my artistic output in relation to the larger social back with choreographer Franc¸ois Raffinot. In picture. None of us wants to live in a computer 1995, Hillary Clinton presented him with the music ghetto. Rome Prize in Music Composition at the White Makan: How did working with two such different House. figures as Davidovsky and Grisey challenge you as Mr. Campion is currently Associate Professor of a young composer? Music at the University of California at Berkeley, Campion: Davidovsky was New York; Grisey was where he serves as the Co-Director of The Center Paris. The clash of those two musical cultures was for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). as much a challenge as anything. But what good He has been recipient of the Nadia Boulanger fortune to experience such well-formed and con- Award, the Paul Fromm Award at Tanglewood, a trasting points of view! Both were highly critical of Charles Ives Award of the American Academy of my work; that made the difference. Grisey and I be- Arts and Letters, and a Fulbright scholarship for came lasting friends, and it was a meaningful coin- study in France. Upcoming projects include a cidence that I came to teach at the University of Fromm Foundation commission for the San Fran- California at Berkeley where he had been a profes- cisco Contemporary Music Players, a work in 2005 sor long before. Now that he’s gone, I miss him. for the percussion sextet Les Percussion de Stras- bourg, and a new interactive computer environ- Makan: What sort of musical parameters were you ment with violinist David Abel and pianist Julie exploring with your early attempts at computer- Steinberg. This interview was conducted from 15 assisted composition? December 2003 to 25 May 2004 by electronic mail. Campion: I was shuffling pitch class sets, rhythmic Makan: When did you first begin working with models, and timbre assignments inside a graphical music technology, and what was the attraction? sequence editor. I based everything on immediate perceptual feedback, which dovetailed with my in- Campion: As a graduate student at Columbia in the terest in improvisation. I wanted to compose com- mid to late 1980s, I cut tape with Mario Davidov- plex structures while at the same time avoiding the sky and saw the advent of the personal computer. typical university-based music that surrounded me. The results of using a MIDI-based studio and sim- So the project was defined: to marry the strengths ple computer-assisted techniques blew my mind! of formal composition with the flexibility and When I moved to Paris in 1989, Ge´rard Grisey en- adaptability of free improvisation. The instrumen- couraged me to apply these methods to acoustic tal suite A Treasured Collection of Eddies (AT- composition. The outcome, A Complete Wealth of COE) was the piece. Makan: You studied and worked for several years at Computer Music Journal, 28:4, pp. 16–24, Winter 2004 IRCAM. How did this experience change you as a ᭧ 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. composer? 16 Computer Music Journal Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0148926042728430 by guest on 29 September 2021 Figure 1. Edmund Campion. Photo courtesy Kathleen Karn. the sound design area I used AudioSculpt and resid- ual re-synthesis with Addan. Spatialization was paramount. The score was produced from transcrip- tions of processed MIDI data. I used rhythmic tem- plates like cookie cutters, superimposing them on time-pointed polyphonic sequences to extract lines. This resulted in most of the pitches in a sequence being discarded, but the harmonic unfolding would remain. Each section of the piece could be realized, tested, tweaked, re-made, and re-tested. Listening and verifying the results in simulation was part of the process. I was losing touch with traditional compositional techniques and training. IRCAM and Danielle Jaeggi of Les Films d’Ici (www .lesfilmsdici.fr) produced a documentary film called Losing Touch that goes into some detail (Jaeggi 1999). Makan: Between 1994 and 1995, you completed three works for solo instrument and tape (Losing Touch, Astronomia, and Mathematica). How do these works approach the musical problem of com- bining an instrument and recorded electronics? Campion: The electronic (akin to the artificial) and the acoustic worlds don’t naturally cohere. At the end of Losing Touch, the tape degenerates into a mechanical sequence that the musician cannot and does not care to follow. The fiction of cooperation is shattered as the human performer and the tape part lose touch with each other. All three pieces shackle the performer to a click-track to ensure synchronization and aid the illusion of integration. Campion: My technological naı¨vete´ ended with the I found that keeping the density of events high, IRCAM course in computer music in 1994. That self-similar, and constantly moving helped form a year I wrote Losing Touch for vibraphone and unified perceptual scene. Re-synthesis of spectral multi-channel tape (Editions Billaudot, Paris). Los- models based on the solo instrument was useful for ing paved the road for several future IRCAM com- sonic coherence. missions. The IRCAM people that influenced me the most included Jean-Baptiste Barrie`re, Mikhail Makan: How do you think of spatialization in these Malt, and Xavier Chabot. works? In what way did your exploration of the electronic sounds influence the forms of these Makan: Describe how the techniques you learned works? at IRCAM were used to create Losing Touch. Campion: The compositional process was similar Campion: Everything was an expansion of what I for all three. I started by constructing sample-based had done before, crossing the fruits of improvisa- orchestras made from recordings and hybrids of the tion and formalized composition—only at IRCAM, solo instrument. Then I invented a process for ma- I composed with Patchwork (now Open Music). In nipulating and writing MIDI files in Patchwork. Makan 17 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0148926042728430 by guest on 29 September 2021 This process led me to the creation of rhythmic, Campion: IRCAM’s Tom Mays and Richard Dudas harmonic, and formal models. In Losing Touch, the cleared the numerous technical hurdles that made model was of spatialized canons set on a fixed Nat-Sel possible. They had a big influence on the rhythmic grid. In Mathematica, evolving probabil- outcome but never interfered with the core ideas. ity tables controlled the rhythm, the harmonic un- Music—computer music, too—is always collabora- folding, and the spatialization. In Astronomia, tive. It goes both ways. I had to become a compe- aleatoric distributions governed the composition. tent Max programmer to realize the goals. The architecture of Losing Touch enabled an eight- Specifically, reducing latency and getting things to voice canon to be collapsed into a single melodic consistently happen in the right order was a chal- line or expanded into a full polyphonic surround- lenge. Robert Rowe talks about Nat-Sel and some sound canon. The computer and the process dra- of the Mays abstractions in Machine Musicianship matically influenced the outcome. Among many (Rowe 2001). All the Nat-Sel external objects made unexpected surprises, I found that time-scaling the by Mr. Dudas (quickthresh, nfilter, multisplit, etc.) canons turned them into short bursts of spatialized can be downloaded freely from www.cycling74 dust. In the end, I always went back as my own .com/share/dudas. I copiously documented the IR- ideal listener, filtering the material for the last CAM version for the Opcode Max 3.5 release. The time. documentation is downloadable at my Web site, www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/ϳcampion. (See Figure Makan: Natural Selection is the first piece in 2.) which you use real-time technologies. Could you describe the piece and how it was created at IR- Makan: You cite a number of different versions of Nat-Sel CAM? How were you approaching interactivity be- in your list of works. How has this piece tween the performer and the electronics? changed over time? Are you planning new versions in the future? Campion: Natural Selection is a computer-based Campion: The original IRCAM Nat-Sel featured musical instrument—a personalized performance full surround sound, a second Disklavier, several environment designed to adapt to changing tech- computers, samplers, and the Espace de Projection nologies as well as different performance situa- theater at IRCAM. Today, I perform the piece using tions. I play Nat-Sel with a normal piano that sends the Moog Piano Bar (originally developed by Don MIDI to a Max patch.