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The Electrotap Weblog

The Electrotap Weblog is a blog for clearing ideas, brainstorming, and reflecting on life - basically those things that don’t lend themselves well to more formal areas of our website. If you have any thoughts or reactions to any of our blog entries, please feel free to drop us a line…

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“Formulation of the Dissertation…“

**11/09/2004

On one of the concerts at ICMC I heard a piece by Jeff Herriot called Design for Bass Clarinet and Electronics. I was particularly captivated by it, which actually surprised me. I’m not sure I would have caught onto the piece like I did if it wasn’t after all of the performances on the conference, but perhaps I would have. I am hopeful that I can get a recording of the piece!

First of all, it had a beautiful, slow/calm, dark, peaceful, airy quality to it. The bass clarinet formed beautiful harmonies, harmonics, and sonorities with the tape part. The sonorities and harmonics seems to “pop out” of the bass clarinet as they were emphasized by the tape part which was timbrally similar. The result was extraordinarily gorgeous.

Another piece that I found very stunning, and in the same vein, was Larry Austin’s Threnos. It was absolutely beautiful.

I would like to create similar mood for one movement of my dissertation work. What I have in mind is to produce the movement with a solo bass clarinet with reverb, together with a piano part that is performed by silently depressing the keys and activating the strings with an E-bow. It may be the one of the percussionists would help with the E-bow while the pianist depresses the keys - I’m not sure quite yet…

The sound that this most resembles to me is the dirge-like scene from a track (or several) by Peter Gabriel - though I can’t recall off the top of my head which track (perhaps from the soundtrack for the Last Temptation of Christ?).

I had previously thought about a couple different forms/content for the work. This includes constructing a requiem without words, or producing a piece revolving around stories of my ancestors who were martyred or oppressed (such as family members being burned at the stake by the Church of England prior to the family moving to colonies). A new idea is that I could write a passion, but again, without words. Since I should hopefully be finishing the piece around Easter, perhaps I could even get a performance of the work at that time…

If I do use the passion as the formal center of the work, there are a few things that I think I will deal with differently than in a traditional (i.e. Bach, etc.) passion. One is that narrative linearity is not important. Rather, I would focus a series of non-linear snapshots. I believe that the passion does not need to be presented linearly, because when viewed from outside of the time-domain (i.e. hyper-spaces) the entire sequence of events can be seen at once (this being the perspective of God), thus any order through them could be taken. Additionally, human memory is non-linear, as is the sense of time experienced in humanity. There are number of interesting writings about this, which I read as a part of the Time & Music course I took a couple of years ago.

There may be some way to telescope through history to hit each of these concepts (requiem, passion, geneology) in some form of a layered structure. I’m not certain how this would work just yet, and it may be that this won’t all fit into a single piece. It could also be that the piece will expand in breadth. I was originally envisioning a 15 to 25 minute work. The concepts laid out above may push into something as long as 35 or 45 minutes - quite an expansion!

I can’t wait to get going on it - hopefully I can do this soon… -Tim

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