Context / expressivity
When I started out, I had experience modulating my saxophone with FX pedals when playing live and I was modulating music through my DAW (Pro Tools and Cubase) more and more when scoring films for my studies. I was feeling more and more like it was a sound I wanted to explore when producing for film, also because we work so much on the computer and with samples or home recordings and I think in this case it really helps me making something convincing for myself. In Autumn 2021, I was focusing more on the expressive possibilities of electronic modulation applied to acoustic sounds, and I started investigating how composers would use them and to what end. I learned a lot from this and still feel passionate about the subject, but at the time I felt I first had to slightly shift the focus to developing the tools that would allow me to express the specific ‘feelings’ I attached to hybrid sounds. I therefore decided to explore the modulation of acoustic sounds by focusing mainly on the instrument I knew the best, the saxophone that I had been playing for over 25 years… this would be my best bet at finding out what these hybrid sounds meant to me, and how I could create and use them.
I then tried out various ways to manipulate my acoustic sound and recordings of other acoustic instruments that I was borrowing from friends and colleagues at ArtEZ (violin, voice, piano and percussions). I quickly realised that it was fundamental for me to stay respectful and true to the sound source. I wanted to create new, hybrid sounds but I needed to make sure they were clearly derived from the acoustic source and that they would translate, and if possible expand, the technical variations the original instrument allows. A good counter-example is the way I was using guitar pedals on the saxophone for many years before. The blend I was making was that when playing live, my acoustic sound was mixing with the effected sound, but the effected sound didn’t keep neither the subtle inflections I was making, nor the ‘airy’ character of my acoustic sound on the saxophone. Learning about this, I realised that the technical aspect needed my attention because my processing was still a very basic one and that electronic modulation had many possible roles in composition outside expressivity itself which I wanted to research on. Focusing on how I could create my own modulation schemes that would serve my personal purposes and offer to everyone options that would ‘stay true’ to the acoustic qualities of the source was closer to me as a person and a musician today. this being said, the expressivity of hybrid sounds is central to my research because it is my quest for new expressive schemes that guides me in the development of my own ‘hybrid instrument’. The sonic experiments of composers like György Ligeti and his musica ricercata for example, Georg Friedrich Haas and his hommage à Ligeti for 2 pianos tuned a quarter tone apart or his string quartets, or John cage and his sonatas for prepared piano also influenced me immensely. Probably as much as the artists I listened to that were using electronics. Their approach really stimulated and inspired me to question my instrument’s sound and how intense and poetic the sound ‘textures’ could be.
Talking about poetry, one big turning point in shaping my reflection was the discovery of Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard lectures series. As far of electronic music as they are, I learned a lot from his talks on Musical Phonology and how we can use semantic and linguistic analogies to understand the master’s ‘compositional languages’ and recognize parallels with poetry in the way they have been manipulating sound and notes. I realized analyzing my own use of FXs through this lense would help me understand how, and to what end I wanted to use them, and design new roles for them by imitating poetic tools. They function very similarly to the other musical tools at our disposal. To name but a few, they can provoke phonological variations by altering the sound qualities, semantic variations (with reverse delays, stutters etc…) and are a powerful tool to create dissonance, in the same way composers used harmonic dissonance, chromaticism… His reflection on how the level of poetry of a composition can be linked to the use of these tools also inspired me to consider hybridisation of the sound as a way to make music more metaphorical, to augment its poetic (and therefore abstract) character, and extract it from reality. This inspired new sound processing schemes for me, emulating linguistic tools (aliteration, augmentation) and made me more aware of what was happening. Bernstein also described how Stravinsky or Satie were somehow detaching themselves and the listener from the music they wrote, and I believe FXs, and particularly reverb can have that effect. For example, Hildur Gudnadottir’s score for the film Tár is recorded incredibly dry, and I think it gives it a very intimate feeling, as opposed to many other scores where reverb puts us ‘in observation mode’. In that regard, electronic music artist Murcof chose Erik Satie’s music as material to manipulate, when Satie can probably be regarded as a precursor of ambient music and called some of his own music ‘tapestry music’ or ‘furniture music’. Murcof also reworked György Ligeti (who I could also think of as a ‘detached’ composer, at least sometimes) to experiment with electronics, like in his very inventive, highly distorted version of Ligeti’s musica ricercata. I would also like to mention here Jóhann Jóhannsson whose integration of electronics into rather minimalist orchestral music was a source of inspiration. I would also consider him a quite ‘detached’ composer and his beautiful use of electronics in Last and first men (which I’ve seen live this year) and of a vocoder style voice with orchestra on The Sun’s gone dim are for me examples of successful integrations. The minimalist aspect is certainly attractive for sound modulation, but I think their ‘distant’ character also combines fruitfully with electronics. All these relfections make me think electronics should somehow be analysed like other composition tools, with the same polemics, analytical flaws and problems, but also with some interesting discoveries to make…
I listened to huge quantities of (good and bad) hybrid music, read books and articles about it, listened to interviews of artists explaining their view on the subject and I found out that beside being an interesting compositional tool in the way mentioned above, my personal feeling that electronic sounds are particularly efficient at expressing dehumanisation, despair, and to ‘take us out of reality’ and open new horizons seems to resonate with many people. To close this chapter about artists I read or listened to, I will cite 2 more composers.
Max Richter in ‘Score - the Podcast #13’ describing his film score in the following terms: “This soundtrack is very electronic to suit the atmosphere of the film but there are ´glimmers of hope’ which are very tactile acoustic instruments recordings.”
Colin Stetson - The hybrid character also changes the way the music interacts with the image, altering our perception, our position towards what we see and how we feel, like Colin Stetson describes it in ‘the Film Scorer Podcast’ : “Obscuring the source makes the music a vehicle for affectation of mood and state of mind, of the listener’s own emotions and mood, rather than saying to everyone this is a violin or a chainsaw.”
Like them, I don’t believe they are limited to these particular range of emotions, but that they are particularly efficient in these realms, and I am using them to this end but also looking for many more expressive nuances they have to offer.
I am not going to talk any longer about a subject that turned out not to be the actual focal point of my research, but it is definitely the its starting point, and the reason why I naturally stay away from demonstrative, ‘boombastic’ electronic sounds but rather try to walk the fine line between poetry and modernity, warming humanity and digital emptiness, between acoustic fragility and alienating glitches and between what’s real and what’s extrapolated or dreamed…