Business Model, a Piece for Violin, Cello and Live Electronics

This paper presents Business Model, a recent piece for violin, cello and live electronics. It focuses on the compositional elements and live electronic techniques employed. Interpretation and live interaction issues with respect to the written parts are discussed. The main ideas and underlying concepts of the piece are also exposed. 1. COMPOSING AND PLAYING MIXED MUSIC Mixed music is a term often used for music composed for traditional instruments and electronics with a certain amount of interactivity. Business Model is a trio for violin, cello and live electronics. The violin and the cello part are both scored. Live electronics is pre-composed and performed by the composer with a tactile screen interface and laptop. Electronic elements of the music are to be written and specified with indications in the next score update. 1.1. The question of interpretation Interpretation is a crucial intention in music and electronic music is no exception. Nonetheless when considered for mixed pieces, it becomes an important but underestimated issue. Most composers focus more on the interpretation of the instrumental parts, and less on the electronics, despite its concern. Electronic music is often shadowed during performance by the acoustic scene provided by human players. The situation worsens with the usual absence of electronic musicians on stage alongside acoustic musicians. To address this absence, I will review a few hypothesis that might possibly explain this situation : • The ephemeral aspect of electronic instruments What is an electronic instrument? Although it is not easy to answer the question, one can say there is a need for electronic music to be interpreted via some actions or means. These means can be called controllers, devices, or more generally electronic instruments. As software and hardware are evolving very fast and are continuously changing, how is it possible to define a continuity and a standard in this field? This is one of the main drawbacks of electronic instruments : they are often too experimental and are likely to be somewhat ephemeral. • The electronic musician as a performer It is sometimes useful to consider the music not only from the listener’s point of view but from the musician’s, and more specifically from his listening and performing place. On stage, the electronic musician should hear himself as clear as the acoustic musicians does. Sound monitors are essential, but might not be ideal when sound diffusion in the hall requires a multi-channel system for sound spatialization. Being on stage is not always the best place to control the sound projection. In any case, the musician needs to conduct and anticipate his own sound emission and projection as a traditional musician does with the cultural background that guides him to play in any concert hall. The cultural aspect of playing electronics – at least within the context of mixed music – is not yet well developed. It is not so easy for the electronic musician to find a natural place in the music, and for the composer to manage spontaneous performance actions. • Interpretation vs triggering and automation issue Most composers reduce interpretation to the triggering of sounds, or to the use of automated parameters controlling sound processes or sound synthesis. Such choices are often justified as means of absolute or ideal control over music. Live electronics requires different levels of interactions in its elaboration : the more there are, the more it opens music to interpretation. • parameters’ complexity in electronics Sounds parameters are often too numerous to be handled by one person in live performance. Moreover, finding the best range for continuous parameters is a hard task both during composition and performance. A traditional musician manipulates dozens of micro and macro parameters when playing his instrument, but all of them even unconsciously have been accurately embedded into his actions through learning. Control devices and scoring can’t always, or hardly draw benefits from such instrumental culture and practice. Besides, what we may call digital instrument maker, for a generalized computerized instrumental process, has not yet found a stable state of development as traditional instruments have. And it is not likely it reaches one considering the diversity that electronics brings into music. The above points lead first to the question of scoring music for traditional instrument with electronics, and second to its execution and interpretation. The dilemma for a composer interested in live electronics for mixed music with traditional instruments, is to find a right balance between the amount of information or data concerning the electronic part, with respect to the traditional score writing. Musicians are accustomed with their instruments through decades of practice and learning, and have internalized the cultural aspects of graphic notation for interpretation. Interpretation is thus central as it makes the bridge between the symbolic elements and the sonic production as a result of undertaking these instructions. There is also an issue concerning the composer with regard to the control of the output. It is appropriate to make a comparison with the classical concerto cadenza that was dropped out by 19th century composers because they were loosing control on the music improvised by the soloists. In analogy to this, electronic composers might be afraid to loose control of the music if they give too much freedom and possibilities with the electronic tools in the hands of electronic musicians although we have reviewed the difficulties to score electronic music because of its inner construction. If it is true that the use of electronics with traditional instruments raises the question of its interpretation, and to a certain extent the question of improvisation, this issue might be finally more cultural than technological, as some might still have in mind the icon of the classical 19th century composer. 2. ELEMENTS OF SCORING IN BUSINESS MODEL This section describes some central ideas of the piece and presents some elementary vocabularies that are used in the score. I also provide the connection with the sound and electronic transformation processes. Talking about a musical piece for me is indeed exploring the intricate and close relations of its numerous components, both material, as being constitutive parts of the scoring, and ideal as an expression of ideas or processes of thoughts. There is always the risk, by disclosing ideas and inspirations of a work, to reduce or over-simplify the creation process of the piece. It might also guide too strongly the listener into the given categories of thoughts although his imagination would have probably lead him to others, but it enables to take a certain distance with the piece and can provide at the same time and at least some clues to understand the proposed music. The musical ideas, in the last works I have written, find primarily their origin in graphic works, and paradoxically are trying to suggest more of a visual or plastic impression than a sonic one. Mental images are built within a pair of opposed but immersive processes of both contemplative and dynamic movements or items. This idea is suggested by the pictorial images of background and foreground objects or phenomena evolving at different speed, with different strength, shapes or colors. I like to see these different planes as different surfaces of sound, with different textural and plastic qualities, from flatness to roughness, hardness to softness, colorful to invisible, each layer detached one from the other-ones, gliding between them so as to generate a vibrating and circulating energy in their superposition, relative movements or distances. Such considerations imply a need to delineate or isolate the ingredients, the components as existing individually as small units of sound, either tone or noise. Such a scheme of isolating processes and thoughts, combined continuously or in a discrete approach with a dynamic spatial motion and some in-time transformations, lead to a perceptive sensation of abstraction. The way this abstraction is built in my work, with elements revealing themselves independently from the others, but contemporaneously establishing a composed affinity in a subtractive and constitutive mode, brought me to unfold it under a concept I call subtract art, or making a neologism : substract art. Substract is either an accepted misspelling or a barbarism for subtract. Here it makes reference to abstract art and to the search for abstraction in two concurrent ways : the process the music, or the art piece, undergoes to achieve a form of abstraction, and the plastic images series it aims to make visible. The components of musical vocabulary I use in Business Model are different modes of playing on the string instruments as they extend the diversity of sound categories in the way they are produced. Moreover, they enable a rich exploration of their alteration. In the first part of Business Model, the violin and the cello undergo a continuous and gradual change of the playing techniques, exploring them progressively and each time in a dominant manner before switching and transforming into another. One could then listen to different uses of flautato [1] 1 (bar 22-43, Figure 1), pizzicato (bar 43-64, Figure 2), arco (bar 65-86, Figure 3), sounds with strong or soft noisy aspects (bar 87-108, Figure 4) , harmonics and glissandi (bar 109-130, Figure 5), reverse sounds also in combination with harmonics (bar 131-152, Figure 6), some relatively equal distribution of the previous 1as defined and used by Luigi Nono and Helmut Lachenmann techniques (bar 153-169, Figure 7) as in the beginning of the piece (bar 1-21, Figure 9). The first page of the score is also given in Figure 9 so as to have a more continuous view on the beginning.