Stockhausen's Kontakte at SICPP in Boston

This week is SICPP at New England Conservatory (Summer Institute in Contemporary Performance Practice, also known as Sick Puppy, I didn't make that up. They call it that!). Along with the seminar activities during the day (I participated in 2007), there is a fabulous week of free evening concerts -- the big, hard-to-program, fascinating works of the 20th-21st century avant garde.

Last night's program included Stockhausen's Kontakte with Stephen Drury, SICPP director, on piano and Mathias Reumert on percussion. It was another world, an alternate universe, a whirl of sound, a rich, immersive sound-world in the quad tape part, accented by a multitude of instruments on stage: gongs, drums, antique cymbals, marimba. Small gongs were on a rack bridging the piano and a tam-tam and a large gong were in the center. The players went to them for crashingly loud sounds as well as edge scrapes and taps with many beaters. It was among the most riveting performances I've ever heard, of anything.

The first half of the program was great too, with Jo Kondo's Dandelion-clock-work for 2 pianos, tuned a quarter-tone apart, with interludes for bass flute, cello and percussion. Two Italian guest performers, Francesco Dillon, cello, and Emanuele Torquati, piano, performed works by Scelsi, Sciarrino, and Solbiati. The first two I especially liked, with minimal, slowly developing materials and a beautiful control of sound and silence.

I'm in awe of Stephen's organizing energy. He has put together a whole week of concerts that are just as exciting as this one. And he performs in most of them too, along with many guests. Stephen Drury believes music should be an experience. It was an experience I'm glad I heard and saw. And a friend commented that for hearing this repertoire, Stephen's SICPP seminar and his ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, are the only game in town (the town being Boston, MA).

Storing Old Vellum - Why?

Why do I still have a pile of vellum for music copying? I’ve got sheets with layouts for quintets, quartets, parts, chorus.

It’s such old technology. I never want to go back to copying music by hand with pens on transparent vellum, which are then copied using a diazo machine. For those of you who haven’t heard of these, it’s like a blueprint, but diazo copies had black lines. The resulting copies stank of ammonia. It was part of the process. Did blueprints use ammonia too?

At Eastman School of Music in the ‘70s, composers stayed up late using clogging technical pens to write on vellum. The music staves were on the back so when you had to erase, you wouldn’t erase the staff lines. Erasing was really hard to do neatly, far too easy to make a hole in the paper. When the score was finished, we went to a tiny room on the 9th or 11th floor of the Annex where composers could make copies of their carefully written scores. I don’t remember if the room itself smelled of ammonia, but the copies sure did. They kept a characteristic smell for years.

I’m glad that technology has dropped into the past. The magic of editing on the computer and reprinting corrections may waste paper, but it beats hunching over vellum trying to erase a blotch of ink.

So, now that I’m cleaning out my overcrowded little house, what should I do with my small stack of like-new vellum that I’ve saved for almost 30 years?

The Classical Improvisation Circle is up and running, hosted at First Parish Unitarian in Lexington, MA. Join us! More info at this Spindrift Music web page...

New Year's Resolutions

A New Years Resolutions thread at Sequenza 21 reminded me about making New Year’s resolutions. There’s so many needs tugging at me, but all I want to do is make musical plans. I want to remedy my lack of momentum of the past few months.

Everyone knows - economic times are tough. They’re tough here right now. Do I have to look for a good paying job? Go back to technical writing? I still have lots of music ideas, and I don’t want to give up that kind of time. I have my parents to look after too, and that has taken a lot of my emotional energy away from composing. I’m no super woman. I don’t do well at trying to do it all.

So these are the resolutions I’d like to make, and I hope the coming year will let me keep them:

• Actually write music regularly, instead of getting distracted by others, by email, by self-promotion efforts, by housecleaning, by avoidance. My custom is to clear those other tasks first, but those tasks never seem to get done. Instead, I ought to write first each day, before the other tasks, or schedule specific blocks of time, although once I get involved in writing I don’t want to stop to do those other things.
• Don’t neglect networking, just don't do it instead of creating--write in my blog; write the newsletter I’ve been avoiding; contact someone and follow up every week.
• Increase income--promote improv workshops to music teachers and recording services to chamber music presenters; arrange for commissions, maybe through Spindrift Commissioning Guild.
• Continue recording pieces for a CD.

Then there’s the would-be-nice stuff:

• Make my studio a more pleasant place to be -- clear out stuff and make the filing storage work.
• Get some of my neglected titles ready for publication, especially sets of parts for my larger pieces.
• Practice ear training -- there are good tips about that on the Sequenza 21 blog. Andrea mentions Transcribe! from SeventhString. David Salvage mentions MacGamut.
  
• Write about music -- reviews concerts how-tos.
  

Oh dear, this sounds overly ambitious. Maybe my only resolution should be to focus on one thing at a time and gain the satisfaction of finishing it.

Turning Raindrops into MIDI

I spent way too long last night trying to find a free tool to translate my recording of rain dripping beside my window into MIDI notes. I wanted to capture the rhythm and the varying volumes so that I could map that onto musical timbres.

I didn't come up with anything free, and I didn't want to buy software that probably was designed to make all the notes in tune and nicely quantized.

So, for my 3-minute recording, I'll just do it myself. In Digital Performer, I'm looking at the raindrops in the waveform and adding notes to the MIDI track at each waveform peak. I decided to approximately map different raindrop loudnesses to pitch, with random durations -- there's lots of ways to map the sounds. Using the pencil tool in DP to add the notes means they're all the same MIDI velocity, so I'll have to find some way to vary that later.

Keyswitches in a Kontakt 3 Virtual Instrument

If you have a multi-timbre or multi-articulation instrument, but no documentation, how do you figure out how to switch between different sounds?

What is a keyswitch?
One common technique is a “keyswitch”. Playing a MIDI note of a specific pitch turns on a particular timbre. The MIDI note is out of range for that instrument so the MIDI note is silent.

Unfortunately, MIDI keyswitches make it harder to switch between different libraries, because even if a substitute patch also uses keyswitches there is no standard for asociating timbres with MIDI pitches. One library may use C0 for sustain and D0 for staccato, and another might assign tremolo to D0.

To discover what keyswitches are set up in a Kontakt 3 instrument:

1. Load the instrument.
   
   
2. Switch to Instrument Edit Mode by clicking the wrench button.
   
   
3. In the panel just below the instrument header panel, click the Group Editor button.
The list of groups is displayed with checkboxes.
   
   
4. Open the Group Start Options panel, by clicking the Group Start Options tab.
   
   
5. Click a group to highlight it.
   
   
6. In the Group Start Options panel, you see the the settings for that group.
   If the group is enabled by a keyswitch, you’ll see a line “Group Starts on key”, followed by the MIDI note or note range that you need to use to play the samples in that group.
   

In your sequence, program that MIDI note just before the notes that you want to use that sound.

Group Start Options
start on key - specify a range of MIDI notes that enable this group. If the instrument receives a trigger assigned to another group, this group is disabled.

start on controller - specify a controller and a range of values from that controller that enable this group. A controller value outside the range disables the group.

cycle round robin - (used in combination with “start on key”) specify an order for this group in a set of groups that are enabled by a specific MIDI note.

cycle random - all groups that are enabled by the same MIDI note(s) for “start on key” and have the “cycle random” start option will be selected at random

slice trigger - for backward compatibility; don’t use

always - The group will always play; or if there are other conditions on the list, it marks the end of the list but has no other effect.

Selecting always from the dropdown deletes any other conditions below it. For the last Group Start option line, selecting anything other than “always” from the dropdown adds a final always line, so there’s always a “blank” line for adding more options.

Use logical operators and, or, and not on the right end of each Group Start line to combine several start conditions. For example, use or to specify two separate ranges of controller values that enable the group.

Mapping Editor Basics in Kontakt 3

In the Mapping Editor you set up Zones for each sample that will be part of an Instrument.

A Zone is a sample, plus its root MIDI note and the range of velocities that trigger it. The manual doesn’t say so, but it seems to me that the Zone also includes the range of notes that trigger, and possibly transpose, the sample. You can also specify a Zone Envelope for the sample that controls volume, or panning, some other parameter. But this is hardly a basic, so no more about that here!

Note: A sample’s root is the MIDI note that plays the sample back as is, without transposing.

Simple sample mapping

To quickly learn how to get around the mapping editor, try these steps to create a simple instrument and learn a few of Kontakt’s shortcuts for specifying a sample’s range and velocity.

1. Find a sample in the file browser. Look for WAV files, not NKI files. Use the Audition button at the bottom of the file browser to hear the samples.
   
   
2. Create a new instrument by dragging the sample into the rack. 

   Note: The mouse cursor doesn’t give the right feedback. It shows a “Do Not Drop” icon over the rack, but when I let go of the mouse button, it changes to a plus.
   
   
3. Click the wrench button to put the Instrument into Edit Mode.
   
   
4. Click the Mapping Editor button just below the Instrument header.
   The Mapping Editor opens. We’ll be working mostly in the mapping grid. You’ll see a big yellow rectangle on the mapping grid, which shows the sample mapped across the entire keyboard and the full velocity range. You’ll also see the sample root shown in yellow on the mapping keyboard. By default, the sample gets mapped to C3.
   
   
5. Figure out and set the sample’s root note. The intended root may be specified in the sample’s name, or you might have to listen to it to figure out its pitch. If you don’t have perfect pitch, you can use the Reference tone in the Master Editor for comparison.
   
   There's more than one way to set the sample’s root:
   
• Drag the yellow key on the Mapping Editor keyboard to a a new note.
• In the Sample Info bar above the map, type the new root in the Root field. Use sharps, not flats, to name the note. OR, use the arrows to scroll to the note name.
  
  
6. Change the range of the Zone.

   
   • Drag the sides of the yellow rectangle to change the range of MIDI notes that play back the sample.

     
   • Drag the top of bottom of the yellow rectangle to change the velocity range that triggers the sample.

     
   • You can also set the key range and velocity in the status bar above the grid.

Now you have a simple one-timbre instrument!

More efficient sample mapping
If you have a complex set of samples to map, you’ll want to have Kontakt help get the Zones right. More on that later!