This spring the Media Lab class had the great privilege to work closely with three local composers/experimental musicians: Bevin Kelley, Geoff Mullen, and Vic Rawlings. Their work together culminated in a final performance in May at the Knight Memorial Library. The whole experience was a great opportunity for the kids to be exposed to music that they might have not played or heard otherwise.
Over two months each visiting artist came and worked with the class, each focusing on different aspects of electronic music. Vic Rawlings carefully guided them through the use of extended techniques and preparations on their amplified instruments. Bevin Kelley focused on having the kids play their instruments along with live and pre-recorded electronic sounds and video projection and Geoff Mullen explored ideas behind field recordings and creative uses of space.
The final concert also gave the opportunity for us to feature the work of one of CMW’s students, Malachy Hopkins, who created two pieces specifically for the concert.
Collateral Damage (live and prerecorded/manipulated cello)
The concert was a success! Despite having only a few short rehearsals, CMW students, alumni, teachers, and visiting musicians performed the four pieces beautifully to a sizable crowd. Listen/watch/read about them below.
PHOTOS (rehearsal and performance)
MUSIC
C.L. (Sakiko Mori, 2012)
This is music I wrote mostly in my head, hoping to make a scenery of sounds that’s there to live, being what they are and doing what they do, neither more nor less. Thank you to the performers for taking this music out of my head and giving it a life, helping it to grow.
This was a piece I originally composed mostly in the music program Logic. It was based on the idea of looping a recorded sound to create rhythmic texture. I recorded the sound of film camera’s shutter release and eventually added the violin/viola part you will hear.
In this live performance, the film camera is replaced by a digital camera, more capable of the fast shutter speeds used for this piece, and all the string parts are played by real performers and not looped by a computer.
Scratch is a composition for string orchestra and field recordings. The strings section is in C major and based on a melody first exposed in the viola section. Underlying the strings part, there is texture of sounds recorded at a string restoration workshop. The piece is largely in sonata form with an interlude in the middle that could most accurately be described as a solo by the operator of the cassette tape players, which contain the recorded sounds from the field recordings.
Big thanks to Gus from Zachary S. Martin, Luthier Contrabass & Cello workshop in Pawtucket, for having us record sounds in the workshop.
Creatures of the Night, for string orchestra and recorded sound (Forrest Larson, 2012)
Creatures of the Night, was inspired by a life-long fascination with sounds of the night. Sometimes the source of the sounds are known, but others have mysterious origins. Surely the critters who lived under my childhood bed made sounds. Maybe a few of them are in this piece. Thanks to Sakiko Mori and Community Musicworks for commissioning this piece, and the opportunity to work with some of the students. It has also been a joy to have participants from Institute for Musicianship and Public Service filling out the orchestra.
Composer, violist and electronic musician Forrest Larson has composed both
instrumental and electronic music. His work includes both strictly composed music and live improvised electronic music. Instrumental works include music for string orchestra, wind ensemble as well as pieces for unaccompanied violin, viola and cello.
He has had a life-long love of old pre-digital analog electronic instruments, and of collecting “found sounds” from both natural as well as urban landscapes. Analog devices such as oscillators, stomp box filters and shortwave radios are of particular interest.
Some of his works combine electronic sounds and live acoustic instruments. Other work includes electronic scores for abstract films and for solo dancer. His music has been performed locally at various venues in the Providence and Boston area such as the Pixilerations Festival, AS220, Firehouse 13, Mobius, Outpost 186, MIT, Brandeis University, and at the experimental music series CTRL+ALT+REPEAT in Providence, RI. Other performances have been at Carnegie-Mellon University, Washington and Jefferson University (PA), Mansfield University (PA), Southern Oregon University, in Ithaca NY and in Iceland. As a violist, he has played in the New England Philharmonic, Boston Chamber Ensemble, and other chamber groups. He also played violin in the Commonwealth Vintage Dance Orchestra, performed traditional Scottish fiddle music and was the musician for the Middlesex Morris Dancers.
Currently he plays analog electronic instruments with the quartet Sonic Sandbox.
Sakiko Mori
Sakiko Mori is a musician and a piano tuner currently living in Providence. She mainly plays piano, keyboard instruments, and drums. Sakiko has collaborated with film makers, animation artists, and dancers, as well as performed and recorded music with many individuals and groups. She co-runs the Experimental Music Lab at Community MusicWorks with Jori Ketten, CMW Media Lab Director.
Liam Hopkins
CMW student Liam Hopkins is a rising high school junior and enjoys playing the viola, composing music, and taking photographs.
Performers
Participants in the Institute for Musicianship and Public Service
Eve Boltax, Brianna DeWitt, Isabel Escalante, Joshua Burgos Gonzalez, Mari Lee, Taylor Morris, Lauren Nelson, Maggie Schenk, Jaunter Sears, Andrea Sisco, Jared Snyder, Bryan Susma
CMW Teachers and Mentors
Carole Bestvater, Jesse Holstein, Robin Gilbert, Laura Cetilia, David Lee, Sakiko Mori
CMW Alumni
Joshua Rodriguez, Sidney Argueta
CMW Phase II and Media Lab Students
Heather Argueta, AlexisMarie Nelson, Jose Baez, Angie Descollines, Liam Hopkins, Andrew Oung, August Packard, Paola Pena, Alana Perez, Matthew Ricci, Alondra Rivera, Ian Rosales, Natasha Rosario, Jaxine Wolfe, Jesse Woodbury, Emily Cabreja, Aiden Sullivan, Malachy Hopkins
We have been hard at work preparing for our June 2 concert at Knight Memorial Library. Featuring new pieces by local composer Forrest Larson, our teacher and composer/performer Sakiko Mori, and two pieces by CMW student Liam Hopkins, this is a concert not to be missed!
Today we went on a field trip to Zachary S. Martin, Luthier Restorations in Pawtucket.This is a workshop specializing in repair & restoration of contrabass and cello, by Zachary. (He is also known as Gus, so we’ll call him Gus!) Gus showed us the workshop and gave us a basic but thorough explanation of how string instruments are made and repaired. He showed us all the different stages of the whole process.
Gus also told us that he always loved to play music and make things out of wood, and that’s how he became a maker of string instruments.
Then Gus let us do recordings in the shop while he worked on instruments. There are so many interesting sounds happening! He also introduced us to his friendly dog and let us all play his contrabass. The recordings we made will be used in our piece for the final performance on 6/2. Thank you very much Gus, for such an inspirational tour.
Here are some photos of our trip by Brandon L, and more photos on CMW’s Flickr in the slideshow below!
“I’ve never attended a show of this type of music, or sound art, or whatever it is referred to as. It mostly had the same effect on me as meditating – forcing me to confront uncomfortable thoughts or acute self-consciousness. It was very different than listening to it recorded. I was really effected by the one with four or five percussionist around room, and the one with the guy reading cage writings and kids eating carrots and cereal and people playing checkers. Those kids were cool.”
Thanks to Laura and Mark Cetilia for organizing the show!
Today we ran through the Cage piece with the timings we set through a chance game last week.
We talked about stage presence, performing, meditation, and timing.
We noticed that it felt uncomortable or awkward or boring to sit in silence for some people, and felt nice, quiet, and relaxing to others.
The piece is 19 minutes, and we get to run it through one more time next week before the performance (at 8PM on the 23rd at the Arsenal on Benefit Street – hope to see you there!).
Last week we talked about a composer named John Cage. We watched some videos about him and looked at scores he composed and got a feel for how he is as an artist. He’s famous for “reinventing the musical playing field” (Malachy). We tried some of his scores in class together because we have been invited to perform at the Arsenal on March 23 as part of a Cage Centennial concert.
This week we planned our performance. We picked durations for each of the scores we will perform by picking dominoes out of a pile. The numbers on the dominos told us for how many minutes we would perform each score.
We are most excited for eating cereal and bringing skateboards to the stage!
We watched a documentary about “the changing concept of copyright” RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, over a couple of classes.
After watching this documentary we discussed what we learned and what inspired us. We talked about copyright, open source and how remixing music (or any other media, such as film, literature etc) has been done.
Then we decided to work on our remix project.
Each of us picked any pieces of music we wanted to remix, from the genre of “classical music” or “christmas songs”. We Imported the songs to LogicPro and altered them. We worked on this for an hour- couple of hours.
Here is the remixed songs!
Aiden S [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/such-a-tyler-christmas.mp3|titles=such a tyler christmas]
Gabriel V [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/gabrielremix.mp3|titles=gabrielremix]
Liam H [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Liam-Noitorious-.mp3|titles=Liam Noitorious]
Malachy H [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/MalRemix.mp3|titles=MalRemix]
Today we had a class of vocal & instrument improvisation with a local composer/musician, also a leader of the women’s choir group Assembly of Light Choir, Chrissy Wolpert.
Chrissy started the class with voice warm up.
“As loud as possible”
Then we sang a round: “Ah Poor Bird”
After the warm up, Chrissy took us into the Media Lab where she set up microphones with effect pedals. Each of us got a microphone, and experimented with vocals (singing, talking, whispering, making funny and unrecognizable sounds) with different effect pedals such as distortion, octave, reverb, echo. We also tried to sing “Ah Poor Bird” again through the pedals.
Then Chrissy introduced us to a loop pedal. Everyone separately recorded 3 seconds of vocals and ended up with layers of vocal loop recording. We did this a couple of times – one of them turned out to be all speaking words (which sounded like a poetry reading battle), and another one turned out to be a tower of complex harmonies.
We each got one homemade contact microphone, which we first taped to our throats and then taped to our instruments. Contact microphones are much more sensitive than regular microphones because they directly attach to the sound-making object and delicately pick up all the vibrations made.
What a class! Possibilities of finding different ways of sound making, even on the same instrument, seems to be limitless. Our experiment with sounds and music making never ends. Big big thanks to Chrissy!
