Example of the Score for Voltage Controlled Passacaglia

If you were wondering what the players were looking at during the performance, check out an example page of the score below.

Each player is assigned to a panel on the synthesizer, except for the spatializing player, who performs on a laptop. The potentiometers on each panel that are used in the patch are assigned names (such as LFO-A-1), based on their function in effecting changes in the perceived sound of the patch. In the case of LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators), frequency modulation was their most common use. Generally speaking, LFO 1 was very slow, used for large shapes such as glissandos, LFO 2 was medium speed, used for things like vibrato, and LFO 3 was in the audio range, and was perceived as FM distortion.

The players then look on the score as the piece progresses and adjust their parameters according to quantitative and qualitative instructions, using stopwatches for synchronization. On the color scores, numbers and a "depth of color" express the changes in parameters. These players are executing control "envelopes," in the same fashion as automated parameters in Reason or ProTools.

Voltage Controlled Passacaglia finally on YouTube

After languishing in obscurity on MySpace video for nearly three years, Voltage Controlled Passacaglia has finally defected to YouTube... where it will presumably continue to languish in obscurity, but at least it now takes its rightful place in my channel, PHIntermedia. More importantly, this also means that you can view it in the Videos tab on my website. I had to cut the video in half to make it fit within YouTube's draconian ten-minute time limit.

I'll also post the NWEAMO version of the piece, which was performed in October of 2007, at some point in the near future. Unfortunately, I failed to train one of the three cameras on the projection during the NWEAMO performance, so the visual aspect of the performance is only augmented by Autumn Bjugstadt's excellent lighting.

Notes on Descent into the Amygdala

I presented Descent into the Amygdala to a class at the University of California at San Diego last week, and more recently I submitted it to a festival in Miami. Writing and thinking about the piece has produced something that may be of interest to visitors to my blog or website:

"I often wish to capture the essence of the sublime in my works. In previous centuries, the sublime experience required pitting the insignificant human observer against the beautiful, awe-inspiring, yet horrifyingly powerful effects of nature. This type of experience fascinated artists and philosophers of the nineteenth century, and in particular, landscape painters often attempted to reproduce the experience of the sublime. Many of my works focus similarly on the sublime in relation to the natural world; in particular, my works Nyx & Eris, Archaeopteryx and Jökulhlaup deal with fleeting human experience in relation to the incomprehensible time and space scales of astronomy and geology.

A new era of the sublime has dawned, as humans have gained the ability to transcend the boundaries of the natural world with technology and machines. Now, manifestations of our great technological strength, such as the hydrogen bomb or space flight, instill the observer with the same feelings of insignificance once reserved for the apprehension of natural phenomena. The essence of the technological sublime is the foundation of Descent into the Amygdala.

Musical precedents in artistic manifestations of the technological sublime include George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique, and Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. Some works use existing performance technology (ie. acoustic instruments) to relate the composer’s experiences of the technological sublime with an audience, an example of which is Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231, a symphonic work about a steam engine. Others actually use technology itself to induce the sublime experience in the listener directly, as if the applied music technology was the steam engine. This is my approach. Nancarrow’s music, when played on the original pneumatically driven Ampico player pianos, certainly falls into this later category, also.

Descent into the Amygdala is sound about sound. It is inspired by the visceral and sublime impact of a pervasive form of music technology: overdriven tube-amplification. Using complex tempo-relationships, grinding dissonances, extreme loudness and distortion, this work descends into the fear producing parts of the listener’s brain, directly producing an experience that is both beautiful and horrifying."

New Videos Tab

I've finally added a videos tab to this website. Within you can find a YouTube video player containing all of my major works within the last three years. I had to sacrifice the aesthetic pleasure of having a slightly transparent website, and I also had to shrink the labels of my tabs down quite a bit.

The next step in development of this page will be to find some better file hosting so I can put all of my recorded compositions in the player at the bottom of the site.

Settling into San Diego

I'm settling into my new place in Cardiff by the Sea, a neat little neighborhood of Encinitas California, which is about 20 minutes away from the University of California, San Diego. Orientation mercifully starts on Wednesday, which allows me a few days to fix my car and start the process of becoming a California citizen.

I am looking forward to a productive semester, though I am sad that I can't take Shlomo Dubnov's Musical Information Processing class, because it conflicts with my main composition seminar. UCSD gets it right when they give you 6 credits for composition, which is about half of the minimum load. I also can't take an introduction to critical studies, for the same reason, which is disappointing because I have been very interested in getting to know the major works in Critical Theory. I suppose I'll just have to read The Culture Industry on my own.

Hopefully sometime in the near future I will be able to either finish linking to all my YouTube videos on each of my composition tabs, or alternately insert a new tabbed panel with all my YouTube videos. I am still pleased with the efficiency of the Spry widgets in this page and the aesthetic appeal of the slight transparency of the page. However, in order for embedded objects to work properlly (such as YouTube videos), I'll have to make this page opaque again, or at least have the tab that contains the videos turn itself opaque. Yay web design.

Videos from The Antikythera Mechanism on YouTube

Finally I'm getting some videos up on YouTube from my master's thesis composition, The Antikythera Mechanism. Check them out at http://www.youtube.com/PHIntermedia/. More will hopefully be up within the next two weeks. Furthermore, all the audio from the concert is available in the media player at the bottom of my website.

It has been an extremely busy summer, as I have returned to trail work to weather out the recession (and save up money for my move to San Diego). I'm crew-leading for the Boulder County Youth Corps after a six year hiatus in trails, and I have a fantastic crew of teenagers who are slowly but surely absorbing a work ethic. It is great to be in the outdoors again, if only for a summer!

Modern Miscellanea

by Paul Hembree

Two weeks ago, my work Nyx & Eris was performed in a new version by the Playground Ensemble in Denver, and I am pleased with the changes I made from last year's version, as well as the excellent performance. Most of the changes stemmed from a composition seminar last year, during which there was quite a bit of constructive criticism, mostly lead by Brandon Vacarro. I find generally that composers are too soft to each other (in many of the contexts I've experienced that involved numerous composers interacting with each other - festivals, master classes, seminars, etc), and in order for us to grow as composers we should both give and take constructive criticism effectively. Though it might not have been a Paul Hembree love fest at the time, the criticism I received, particularly on the Eris movement, encouraged me to continue crafting the work into the improved version that now exists (I'll post a video when get all the material - check it out!).

Eris was changed extensively in the new version. That movement particularly suffered from a lack of breathing points - something have been prone to in recent years. Part of this stems from my almost obsessive-compulsive urge to fill all the staves on the page with some kind of material at all times, preferably contrapuntally independent material. However, considering the size of the Nyx & Eris ensemble (woodwind quintet, piano, and string quartet), this type of textural saturation was not as viable. The new version uses gaps in the texture for breathing points. Furthermore, I believe the orchestration is much more successful in the new version - typically only three layers are in play at any one time, and though those layers may each consist of many different components, they are united in gesture to form a single nuanced layer, with an "inner quality."

(A long tangent: The term "inner quality" I first heard from Wayne Vitale, a composer for and director of Sekar Jaya, the highly successful Balinese gamelan ensemble. My take on progressions or gestures with an "inner quality": they have an internal structure which reveals nuances that are perceptible only on the periphery of consciousness, while their entire outline is apprehended in the foreground of consciousness as a Gestalt unit. Debussy seems to be good at both this type of gesture, an example of which might be the opening chords of Nuages, and a much more "flat" gesture: "planing," that is, simply using successive, identical quality chords.)

The other main change to Eris that was a drastic improvement was the rhythmic simplification of sections of the piece that did not require a vigorous "aksak" feel (an asymmetrical rhythmic feel composed of chaotic alternations of groups of 2 or 3 eighths, creating a kind of kaleidoscopic Eastern European / Balkan dance). While the aksak rhythms created an appropriate intensity for some of the jarring chromatic lines of the movement, it was not appropriate for the "Tapestry" sections, during which the performers should feel much more relaxed and expressive. Though not tonal, the Tapestry material was certainly conceived of as being beautiful. The new version ironed out the aksak rhythms during these sections, instead employing a lightly mixed, pervasively compound meter throughout. The conductor, Jonathan Leathwood, described these sections as moments of "sanctus" - I feel that this is certainly an appropriate analogy. I love the balance of heavenly and hellish sound worlds, sometimes even simultaneously, because to me it is one of the best ways to express the feeling of apprehending something sublime in the cosmos.