Playing a Virtual Orchestra

Although I seem to write mostly music notated on paper for live performers, I’ve always been interested in computer tools for composing and sound design. I started my recording business a few years ago because I wanted to put my audio tools to more use. Last year, I decided to invest in the sophisticated sampled orchestra sounds that are now available and spend some time learning how to create natural-sounding demos that I could use in my online catalog.

My series of Poetry-Inspired solos started as an orchestration exercise for these orchestra sounds. I wrote the first solo for flute to provide the musical material and I began learning how to program an expressive MIDI performance using the great-sounding orchestra samples that are available these days. I bought East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Gold last year which used Native Instruments Kompakt Player for playback.

This year I got Native Instruments Kontakt 3 for playback because Kompakt no longer worked
on Mac OS 10.5. When I first got the East West sounds, I loved them, but as I tried to tweak the sounds into an expressive melodic line, I found their flaws. Working with a solo instrument is a very good test. The more spare the orchestration, the more of a challenge to shape an expressive phrase. There are no other sounds to hide behind.

The East West library has a lot of articulations - various staccatos, accents, bright sounds, and covered sustained sounds. This is great for providing variety, phrase by phrase, or even note by note. The biggest problem is the variety of ambience for many of the sounds. Some are very dry and others have a lot of reverb. They don’t sound like they are in the same room. Sometimes I can cover this up by blending sounds - most but not all of the various articulations are in tune with each other. I can also add reverb to the dry sounds. The result might sound acceptable over speakers, but over headphones it’s hard to hide the ambience change.

I was having particular trouble getting a natural feeling on the clarinet solo “Summer Into Winter”. The East West clarinet sounds were too uneven and weren’t working in this exposed situation. Then I discovered that the Kontakt 3 library had Vienna Symphonic Library sounds. Those clarinet sounds were warmer and were smooth and even, giving me a good blend from note to note. The Kontakt 3 Vienna sounds don’t have as many articulations as East West, but I could add East West sounds for some accents and short notes with minimal blending problems.

The tempo of the performance is just as important as the sounds. Even if the sounds aren’t perfect, you can shape an expressive performance by manipulating the tempo. In my first pass at creating a free cadenza-like feel for rhapsodic solos like these, my tempo was too fast and the pauses and breaths too short. I might think it sounds dynamic and energetic, but later I’ll listen and it will be hectic. It’s interesting to learn how much adjustment one can make to the tempo of individual notes in a phrase to get a more expressive flow. I had to make pretty extreme slowdowns on the first note of a group to get an expressive leaning on the note.

I’ve got to give credit to Peter Alexander of TrueSpec Systems and Alexander University
for giving me the idea for the Poetry-Inspired series. He designed orchestration exercises with poetry as the stimulus for creating the musical material. His poetry picks were wonderfully succinct and appropriate. He now offers this material as an online orchestration class.

After the concert

The concert for The Future of Life went beautifully. The chorus sounded great, the trombonist was superb. The rest of the program sounded fine too. I was moved by the text and I was pleased with the way the music, the sung and spoken words, and trombone declarations came together. Audience members, who were moved by the music's message, spoke to me about it. I basked in remembering the sounds for several days.

I wondered if I could keep up writing this blog once the excitement of the performance was over. The marketing work has taken over and it is less inspiring, or at least it's a more uncertain process. Who will be interested in performing the music? I've edited the score and the rehearsal audio and it's available on my web page for any and all to check out. I've begun the process of contacting whoever I can think of who might be interested.

Even issues such as pricing the vocal score feel complex. It costs more to produce an 80-page book than most of my chamber music scores, but the chorus needs 30 to 60 copies, so I want to price it affordably. I've thought about contacting a choral music publisher, but I'm a do-it-yourself kind of person. I'd rather not have to beg them for scores, for publicity, for discounts for choruses that would perform the music but can't afford to buy it. I may be way off base and just don't know what sorts of things a publisher will do for the music as a usual business practice.

So now I've got do some of these business things before I immerse myself in the next volume of Body and Soul songs. That concert is coming up February 29.

The Future of Life almost ready for premiere

On Wednesday, we had the next-to-final rehearsal of The Future of Life and I met the trombone player. I had hoped to work with him during my composing phase, but I never made contact. However, he is spot-on with his interpretations.

The chorus had progressed a whole lot since the week before. Some of the hardest moments are the spoken phrases, solo and group, and they are no longer sounding so tentative. I have coached them to call out their text as if they were at a rally. We're talking about preserving the species of the world, after all! How much will it cost "only 28 billion!" if we do something now; "trillions, trillions, 33 trillion" if we wait and have to "recreate, manufacture, reinvent what Mother Nature used to provide."

It is ironic to grin when the chorus shouted strongly and forcefully "we are inside a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption". It's a very, very serious topic, but I was really pleased artistically with their rendition.

Tonight's the dress rehearsal, and Sunday October 28 at 4pm is the performance in Lexington, MA. I hope to see you there!

Snow Geese Arriving in Vermont

We thought about going to Vermont this weekend to Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area near Middlebury. The snow geese are starting to arrive. There are about 3000 there now, the ranger said on the phone this morning, and they were very camera-friendly, staying near the fence, instead of way back in the marsh.

Last year we saw about that many snow geese at dawn, rising up with all their glorious honking. I recorded a snippet, but I would have liked to have another go at it this year. But this weekend I continued to have this dreary cold. We wished to see closer to the 10,000 or 15,000 geese they sometimes have. I hope there are still that many snow geese around to make that spectacular gathering.

I also wonder, knowing I should be in perpetual energy-conservation mode, whether we should drive up to Vermont for an overnight trip. But it's not enough to just know the birds are out there. I really want to see them!

And this is Blog Action Day...are you writing, or talking, or thinking about the environment too?

Inspiring Myself for Conservation

I am excited about this new choral piece The Future of Life. I always am before the premiere. But the theme, biodiversity, is particularly resonant in the real world.

Since I wrote it, I've felt a bit obsessive about wanting to be better about conservation and energy efficiency. There's a lot going on in my town, promoted by the Global Warming Action Coalition, particularly the Low-Carbon Diet project. We already do a lot of little things - recycle, cloth grocery bags, organic food, new refridgerator, lots of compact flourescent light bulbs. I try to use the clothes dryer for only one load a week and hanging the knits on the bathroom rod. I should install a clothesline. The next big thing is fixing our leaky back cellar door. I'm getting quotes for that now. Check out the Stop Global Warming page.

According to the Low-Carbon Diet book, the biggest thing I could do is to buy renewable energy, instead of the standard offer, from the electric company. NStar claims they will offer that option in January 2008.

Birds and Spiders

I love watching birds. This weekend we're hoping the snow geese have gathered at their traditional place in Vermont- the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area - because it's the only weekend I have free.

But it's spiders that have crept regularly into my choral music. First Weaving the World, with text by Janisse Ray... "Each night spiders weave the world back together" In my latest piece The Future of Life, spiders ride the wind to Hawaii.

It's hard to suppress the feeling of repulsion when I see a big spider. I guess it's because I just don't know if they're a biting kind, and it's gross to get webs all over my face when I walk in the woods. But if I stand back and just look at them, they and their dew-covered webs are dramatically beautiful.

Notes on writing "The Future of Life"

It's never been easy for me to find poetry that I want to use for choral music. Most seems too intimate. Essays have been what grabs me. It seems that choral music with all those voices needs to be about something big. So after reading The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson, entomologist and conservation writer extraordinaire, I was really taken with the idea of using its themes in a piece of music.

I read the whole book a second time, making notes on the passages that really moved me, or that sounded like rhythmic, settable verse. And there were plenty. I had to find what I wanted before I could as Dr. Wilson for his permission to use his words. So I was very glad when he did say yes.

The first choral movement came from his Prologue, a "letter" to Thoreau. He confesses to Thoreau that we have brought our world to a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption, that so much has changed since Thoreau's time. It was Thoreau's writings that taught us to think of nature as a refuge and a place/concept worth protecting.

It was a challenging text to set. I worked to find pithy rhythms without taking out the multi-syllable science words. I could edit the text a bit, after all I had reorganized the prose into more verse-like structures, but I didn't want to go far from Dr. Wilson's phrases.

I could go on about each of the movements. They are very fresh in my mind, but biodiversity itself is more important. Read the book! I've got some web pages about the piece
and a page that lists links for learning more.