On 20/12/2005, at 18:45, mIEKAL aND wrote:
Just got my son one of Moog's Theremins for his birthday & it was
really hard to part with it, what a blast to play, it worked really
well for communicating with my parrots.
An Etherwave? They're cool. I'm thinking of one of those spare parts
kits they sell you (for more or less the same price). I just feel
like welding things together. It's nice.
The Ethervox (no longer produced) was the one with MIDI connectivity.
I got a toy one as a birthday present from my girlfriend (a musician
here in Madrid makes them as a hobby). I real pain to tune and
adjust, but, indeed, hard to part with at any time of the day.
Your parrots? I'm sure your son won't mind sharing it with you.
Best,
Kamen
~mIEKAL
On Dec 20, 2005, at 5:10 AM, Kamen Nedev wrote:
Hmmm, has anybody here ever tried a Theremin? Moog used to make a
MIDI-compatible one, two. Sound...
Best,
Kamen
On 19/12/2005, at 6:58, Alan Sondheim wrote:
Re the first paragraph, my apologies as well; we're going to Utah
tomorrow and I'm a bit tense, also feeling physically ill. -
Needless to say I agree with you. I also think there are things
like the old Casio midi sax - you blew into it, and so there's
all sorts of possibilties for interfacing. Most Midi people
though use keyboards; they can be taylored (misspelling but it's
a great pun!), but the tendency is of course towards either
cleanliness or controlled/chaotic noise...
Then there's granular synthesis which seems something else
utterly different and exciting - Alan
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, mwp wrote:
(Thanks for the clarification, AS. I sometimes tend to read an
implied hostility into people’s writings where it is not
intended, as I am sure they sometimes unintendedly read it into
mine. I’m very tense tonight for some reason. Sorry if I
overreacted.)
My short, silly list was meant to apply to written compositional
variables, or to switches on a foot pedal for live performance.
For instance, you want a particular passage you are playing on a
MIDI instrument to sound breathy, you press the ctrl-B button on
the pedal. Crude, simple stuff, like a guitarist has with
fuzzboxes, wahs, etc. only more localized and nuanced in the
effect.
I don’t think that an Ayler of today would feel too deprived of
his “black spirituality” if he was playing a MIDI instrument of
sampled sounds. He simply would find workarounds to create the
effects he wanted, and while he wouldn't be the Ayler we know
and love, he still would sound marvelously human. Look at
somebody like Sun Ra, who was playing a clunky old DX7 when I
saw him a few times. I don’t think that the rise of session
players using digital instruments has much to do with the
coldness of today’s music, as there were plenty of cold, boring
session players working in places like Hollywood and Tin Pan
Alley many decades before there were commercial digital music
programs and instruments. I see today’s “coldness” has as much
to do with a basic shift in attitude towards performance, --
from an existential “being-in-the-world” attitude, such as you
described so well, to a more aloof, canned one that you get in
rap, raves, etc. I don’t see the latter necessarily as a musical
regression of any kind, or as a diminishment in music’s
spirituality. If that causes Ayler to spin in his grave, well,
every new generation has that effect on its elders!
I haven't addressed your point about live vs computer at all,
even though it was fundamental to what you were saying, because
I basically agree with you and see nothing to add.
m
being preposterously verbose, as always, and now I will shut up
and go into a long self-imposed glottal hibernation...
On Dec 18, 2005, at 8:46 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, mwp wrote:
[Arggh, I feel the hostility meter starting to flutter into
the red… If that’s the case, I’m outta here.]
No hostility intended.
Don’t know why such a list of commands wouldn’t cut it to
bring some sense of life to a piece. Composers use such
notations all the time to indicate precisely what they need
from performers, and Talan M’s work is a composition, not a
performance, however much he may intend it to sound
“performed.” And there’s no reason these controls couldn’t be
implemented live in real time with foot pedals or something,
so there’s plenty of room for overlap between composition and
performance.
It may well bring life into a piece. That's not what I was on
about; of course I agree with you here.
I don’t believe improvisation can ever be totally in the
“moment.” Improvisors are always recycling and borrowing from
buried experience and spinning motifs, etc. The idea of the
mind as blank slate creating order out of nothingness just
doesn’t “cut it” for me.
No one ever said improvisation came out of a blank slate; of
course it doesn't. But it is in real time, and all that
recycling etc. - more important where you are in the piece -
can't be a second-take; what you do then is what you get. And
there's no 'nothingness' - there are chops and what you're doing.
There's a whole politics behind this, which Ayler and New Thing
music in general came out of. It came out of the black
revolution of the 60s as well, and the rhetoric around it was
part of it; with people like Baraka it entered linguistically
into the pieces as well. And this politics was connected with
notions of black soul, black body, black spirituality, even the
black church. At least for myself, I can't put this aside. In
other words improvisation - being-live-in-performances was
_inherently_ part of the music of these musicians.
And by ctl doesn't cut it, what I meant was, take your commands -
SAXOPHONE:
Flatten the pitch in the upper registers YES
Squeak SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-S
Pad SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-P
Breath SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-B
Force virtual fingering SELECT PHRASE + ctrl-V
Etc.
- Take the first. How much flattening? In relation to what? In
what phrase? What do you do about the control and dimunition
with the upper overtones that occurs when you slack the reed a
bit? Etc. etc.
This doesn't mean you can't 'set' an Ayler-type solo, note-by-
note modification; you could always build something out of sine-
waves note by note. It's not magic. But it is missing the point
- when 'squeaks' are used, they mean something about the soul
and positioning of the musician at that point; they're not
devices. It's also very hard to program a squeal (if that's
what you mean, you generally don't get pad squeak, so I think
you're referencing the reed?), which has incredibly-fast
changing overtones resulting from teeth/lip/pressure/moisture-
degree/breath/-
pressure - all changing dynamically at an equally incredibly-
fast speed.
I do agree with Talan's take, which seems a bit different than
yours. In any case I've heard a lot of electronics, as I'm sure
you have as well, and the types of sonority that Talan uses
seem fairly accessible; on the other hand, I've heard nothing
approaching, say, Bells, in that regard.
- Alan
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