If I had composed these pieces and they were played by musicians rather than the computer triggering samples I think the qualities you mention would be there...
Throughout most of my life I've played music and have been surround by players... The [N]+Semble stuff is a sort of therapy for dealing with not being around musicians at the moment and needing to produce sound. The pieces are not improvisations, but a way of also honing some composition and arranging concepts... What you hear is a sonic reproduction of the score, rather than the piece played by musicians (especially with most of the Blue Node tracks)... Though, I try my best to make the tracks sound good, and more than just scratch tracks for my own purposes... If they were the latter, I wouldn't put them out there. The sampling thing is understood, of course... The sax seems particularly difficult in terms of even slightly sounding authentic... because of the things you mention... On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 19:13:18 -0500 Alan Sondheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi - I think it would be quite difficult to program the noise elements - which are signifiers of organism, of the physico-inert world of material labor, production, and living-in/inhabiting music as an ongoing activity - for a number of reasons. You won't be able to find _any_ sample able to reproduce them; they're different for every note (i.e. noise changes as valves change); they're different because the same note can be played with different fingerings; they're different because every time the same note is played with the same fingering, it's: a. coming off perhaps of a different note, and b. coming off of different breathing, etc. This is Benjamin's 'aura' in a sense at its worst, but in some jazz, I'd say people like Coleman Hawkins or the Aylers or even Coleman, it's critical; jazz is a lived experience. I know even in the 60s that changed w/ things like the Boston School of Music producing a lot of session people, and one of the ideas of session of course is more or less exact reproducibility which is why so much programmatic music and even 'fusion' is digital. For myself, maybe it's one area, i.e. guitar, where I can step away from the computer, where I'm dealing with the material world in real time, where an error remains an error (if I'm recording, of course even if not, but then it's only my own), where I'm shape-riding as if falling down a vortex and swimming at the same time. So we have different approaches to sound; when I was recording the different recent cds, I recorded each piece directly on the heels of the other; they're completely improvised but there's going to be an 'influence' from one to another, and less and less from the outside. It's a kind of breathing - Alan For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt . Contact: Alan Sondheim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] General directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .
