First Things First
Allisyn has been home a couple of days now. She doesn't have a lot of energy, and is still in pain from time to time, but overall she's recovering. It may be a slow recovery.
Second Thing: A New Piece Today!
I composed a new electronic work today. In the interest of documenting my work, and also as this has a sort of interesting backstory, I'd like to share some of my thoughts about it.
It's entited "Canonica Eroica" and is based out of three loops from a 1918 (?) recording of conductor Albert Coates leading an anonymous orchestra through a condensed version of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. These are on three double-sided Blued faced Victors which I obtained in 1988 from Lisa Storie, who had further managed to inherit several sets of classical 78s from an older intellectual woman who had passed away. She had gotten them along with a large cache of books - she wanted the books, but not the records.
I listened to these records only once at the time, but they got into my head. I remember at one point going through a Karl Muck disc several times looking for the "Allegro con brio" of this symphony, not realizing that it was the Coates 78s that I was hearing upstairs. At various times then I thought it would be cool to extract some loops from this movement, but never gave it more thought than that.
In 1999 I got poor and sold the set to Bryan Bishop, a collector in Atlanta. At that time I recorded the discs to tape, but accidentally recorded over the tape with something else after I'd sent off the discs. About a month ago, Bryan wrote to say that he's lost his house and requested that I take the discs back for a time and please make him a disc. I was happy to.
Tuesday's show is to be an all-Beethoven program consisiting of this 7th and Eduard van Beinum's 1952 recording of "The Creatures of Prometheus", which I obtained recently as part of boxed set of CDs. As I transferred the Coates set to digital I took a short sample from the Allegro con brio in order to test my equalization settings. The sound of the sample reminded me of my earlier idea, and I thought "well, this is my chance." So I finished working with the original discs, and took three samples from the Allegro con brio movement that I decided to use for something original.
I decided to repeat the samples eight times each, and then redistributed the resulting segments in a pattern with which Beethoven himself would've been familiar: ABABCABABCC. The "B" sample was a "perfect" loop in that it was in 4/4 and represented a complete cycle of meaures from the original, whereas the other two were a bit more choppy and not of even length.
In the past repetition based pieces that I have done on my computer I have added variance (by means of "bicameral" mixing) to the loop structures through some internal delays and other features in SoundForge. This time I decided to go back to the old analog bicameral technique because none of the internal effects deliver as dramatic a flange as I'd like. I recorded the basic sequence of loops to a disc, and then copied the disc to cassette, finally running the two together to the computer, using the latter like a tape recorder. The finished piece runs 5:55.
I'm pretty happy with the results, although my wife, typically, does not agree. "You know this is very annoying" she said, "please try not to play it so much." And this was when I was stilll laying down the basic track! In any event, "C" sounds really good - like a zillion antique Albert clarinets playing in a frenzied fury as the timpanist lays down an impossibly fast pattern of drumblows. Oddly, the perfect "B" pattern, which was also the longest sample used, yielded the most unpredictable results and that part of "Canonica eroica" is less satisfying to me. But overall it's a good piece without being an Uncle Dave blockbuster like "Claudia".
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com