Realizing Musical Gestures with the Computer: Paradigms and Problems
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Realizing Musical Gestures with the Computer: Paradigms and Problems By Christopher Bailey I have a gesture, a musical shape, in my head, and I want to translate it into actual sound. A simple task, it would seem; after all, this is my job, I am a composer. Why should this process be more difficult on a computer (where I have, supposedly, complete and direct control over sound), than with live musicians, where my ideas are (at the very least) twice-filtered through the sieve of notation and through the sieve of the mind of the reader of that notation, with all of that mind's training(s), tradition(s), etc'? How do I approach the creation of a gestural language on this instru ment that has so recently blossomed into a real compositional tool? To an swer these questions, I will step back for a moment, and discuss briefly some aspects of the composition, notation, and performance of musical gestures for acoustic instruments. When writing for the latter, I am heir to what might be thought of as a huge bias-a lens, prism, or filter-through which any gesture notated in the Western system of notation becomes, as it is played by Western trained musicians, related or relatable to the vast repertoire of traditional Western musical gestures, built up over centuries. The action of this filter is reinforced through the traditional structure of Western (classical) music-making: (1) By the composer, because of the fact that I rarely (relative to the number of gestures I compose) choose to write something that isn't part of this inherited repertoire in some way, and because my mind, aiming for efficiency, instinctively guides me, whenever possible, toward making use of what I already know; and through the fact that notation itself also filters my compositional output. (2) By the performer, who interprets whatever events I notate, no mat ter how exotic, complex, or bewildering, into something at least dimly re latable to a traditional gesture. (3) Finally, by the listener, who, when trying to make sense of a per formance of my music, will, again, no matter how unfamiliar it might be, (try to) relate it to his or her own cultural experience (for most of my lis teners, the Western concert tradition). One can look on this filter with a kind of resignation, perhaps feeling that there is, and never will be, anything new under the sun. But let's take a look at some of the things that happen when a composer tries to resist Current Musicology 67 & 68 © 2002 Columbia University 7 8 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY the action of this filter, when this reliance by composer and performer on tradition is stretched nearly to its breaking point. The score to Megalomaniac, for solo cello, contains a number of pas sages of rather nasty-looking notation. Part of my purpose in writing these passages was to see how the performer would come to terms with the nota tion, to see what, in fact, the performer would do to "traditionalize" these hideous "things" (pieces of notation). That is, I wanted to see how the per former would pass (or perhaps, squeeze) the musical work through the filter that I've been talking about-·an action they must commit for the sake of sheer "survival," negotiating some way to wade through the com plexities of the musical moment. Here is an example of such a passage: Figure 1: Megalomaniac, for solo cello, excerpt. ~ _______ u)\.,J ______~ ~3~ ~h - r-;:c;,!:;~ ~ t 7 7' t ~ 5u1D/l1 ~ - - , ,., ~X"' ,,' h. ~ oj 'cello ~.f ~ pp1TlJ' fJ, 'f' pp solo ifmr=1}po;; ~fPf; sL : '+' " : m> 1 -' t '\Jrz 7 7 "m ( r : , 4:5 , underlying )l pulse 1 1 1 1 1 r r r r r r r r r r r r How might a performer approach this passage? I offer some advice in the performance instructions to the piece: The piece might be approached as follows: learned at first in a "lick by-lick" manner, perfecting each individual gesture and giving the said gesture a maximum of expressive and dramatic content as sug gested in the score. At this point in the learning process, the player should be concerned, more or less, only with the basic 8th-note pulse, and how the activity above relates to that pulse. In other words, at this beginning stage of learning the piece, it can be treated as a "graphic" score, rhythmically, with the stipulation that all ges tures be learned with respect to the underlying 8th-note pulse. (The pulse is indicated underneath the score.) CHRISTOPHER BAILEY 9 Mter the individual gestures are learned, the player then proceeds to string them together, into larger and larger formal units. At first, this process should still take the rhythmic point of view of "graphic score against basic pulse," but as the general flow of the work comes into fruition, the player should attempt to feel the larger-scale rhyth mic strands that are interacting. For example, in a passage that is composed of a 7-tuplet and an Il-tuplet strand interacting, "feeling" the passage "in 7" or "in 11" will reveal different shades of meaning brought about by different weightings of rhythmic strands. It is this kind of interpretive exploration that I hope the piece's complexity, in terms of its rhythmic notation, will inspire. (Bailey 1997) It is in the "perfecting [of] each individual gesture and giving the said gesture a maximum of expressive and dramatic content" that the filter of tradition will no doubt come into play in the strongest way. On the other hand, the "stringing together into larger and larger formal units" is where something new happens. I like to think of this piece (and others written in a similar vein) as a series of gestures, many with strong associations, musi calor extramusical, but ripped out of context, and with those associations "left hanging," perhaps posing unanswered questions, often with these gestures toppling over one another, frequently denying or canceling one another's associational implications. This makes for a difficult musical ex perience, for performer and listener, one which taxes one's ability to con centrate and give each gesture the focus it deserves. To pose that kind of challenge was, in this piece, one of my goals. With acoustic instrumentalists, this filter, this bank of assumptions is in operation. When you give them something different, something wild, out side of their experience and training, they attempt (assuming they ap proach it in good faith) to give it what is called a "musical interpretation," to render it as some warped form of (their) musical tradition. It is this in teraction that I often seek when composing for performers. It is important to note that many aspects of the filter are built into the physical characteristics of instrumen ts themselves, their methods of sound production, and the way a player moves to cause that sound-production. This is, in turn, passed on to notation. If I want to get a particular gesture out of an instrument or group of instruments, I know how to notate it, based not only on my musical aural training but also on my ability to imag ine the gesture's physiological instantiation in performance. With the computer, especially with synthesized (as opposed to sampled) sound, this is not the case. Everything must be done from scratch. When I first started to realize music on computer, the following would often occur: I would think and hear a gesture in my head-"oomph"-and attempts 10 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY to realize that gesture, through programming, sound synthesis, mixing of samples, and so on, would result in "aaamph" (so to speak)-not quite (or sometimes quite distant from) what I originally wanted. At that time I had little knowledge of acoustics, so it was often difficult to ascertain why a gesture wouldn't come out the way I wanted it to. Now, armed with a greater knowledge of acoustics, I often know why a gesture doesn't come out the way I want it to, but it usually turns out that the how of correcting the problem would lead me into a complex, low-level web of research into software and acoustics-a path that (although I have some interest in it) I'm not really qualified to follow, and I'm not really inter ested in following: as a composer, I want to be given a set of reasonably flexible tools, and make use of them to create effective music. It is, of course, possible to make quite effective computer music without losing oneself on that full-fledged programmer/acoustician path. But in that case, the approach one takes towards the creation of gestures, and thence to complete compositions, is fundamentally different from the one taken when writing for acoustic instruments. Put simply, I take less of an "I've got to get this gestural effect" kind of approach, and more of a "Let's experiment with what this machine does: generate some musical material consisting of gestures whose characters and effects I can't quite predict, and figure out how we can modifY the musical contexts in which we place those gestures so that the gestures 'work' (musically and dramatically)" kind of approach. The experimental process whereby I "generate some musical material" is partially an intentional one, partially an arbitrary one: I might begin by trying to get a certain gesture out of the machine; what comes out is some thing different from what I had in mind originally. I may then try to mod ifY the gesture to get it closer to what I wanted originally, changing the pa rameters I gave the machine to create the material; but eventually I change paradigmatic gears entirely, and I begin to think about how to shape context A to accept or fit gesture X instead of how to achieve ges ture X to fit context A-in other words, creating the context that will make things seem as if the accidentally created gesture was not accidental, but created for the context.