Veo Lux - The Allen Room

Juilliard's "Beyond the Machine" electroacoustic series culminated tonight at The Allen Room (Jazz @ Lincoln Center), with a diverse group of pieces and approaches to using technology in music. My piece went well, and the quartet deserves a huge "thank-you" for playing their arms off on it. Let's hope we can do the rumored recording session in the near future!

I don't have any good pictures of the quartet from tonight - they turned out too blurry. Here's one of the hall earlier in the evening before the concert, so you can get a sense of how amazing this place is:



That's Columbus Circle in the background, and the beginning of Central Park off to the left.

Here are some of my fan club (they don't know they're in it, since I just now made it up...;):


l-r: Maria, Craig, Newm, me, Mr. Wang, Tina, Dave

This is on the main concourse of the Time Warner AOL building where the concert was. We're gathered around an enormous, anatomically correct statue of some dude. Poor guy had scratch marks on his wang...

Anyway, the piece rocked out, and once I have a solid recording, I'll be posting it here, in full, for your ear-tickling pleasure.

Next up: finish the extended drumset part for RedLine for perc. quartet ASAP - they're premiering it soon!

Must sleep now, though...

Veo Lux premiere

The premiere was last night, and the players did a great job. The speakers and the venue weren't ideal - lots of midrange, very little presence, muddy, but the piece works, and this Friday at The Allen Room (Jazz @ Lincoln Center) should sound fantastic.


The Juilliard Electric Ensemble (l-r: Christina, Pat, Chris, Nadia) - many thanks - you guys have been working hard on a lot of music for this concert and I appreciate you rockin' out on mine.


Milica and Greg - the people who actually make everything happen for this concert series each year.


Onward to Friday!

Veo Lux - final recording session

Had a final recording session for the backing material last night, courtesy of the indefatigable Ariana K. After the last rehearsal, we decided to slow the tempo down from 136 to 126 - it locks in better there (if you ever use MIDI instruments to mock up a piece, you'll always end up pushing the tempo a little too much - remember that). This of course meant I needed to re-record some of what I'd done before (yes, I'm very well aware I can stretch and mold audio to different tempi, but why not get the real thing when you can?). Also, I had written some more music since the last recording session with Yumi (in other words, I'd finally finished the piece...), so here we are: a new session four days before the premiere.

Many HUGE "thank-you's" to Ariana for playing so many uninspiring tone clusters and melodic fragments sans musical context - I promise it will make more sense during the actual performance.

Today is my last chance to make good on that promise and assemble all of this stuff into some sort of non-embarrassing whole. Final rehearsal is tomorrow, premiere is Tuesday at the Chelsea Art Museum, and then again Friday, at Jazz @ Lincoln Center. Tickets are free, so if you're in the area, come on out! More info here and upcoming concert info is always here, as well.



Ariana wails on a John Zorn "romantic scrape"

Buffer size

Rehearsal was decent last night - the players will own their parts by the concert, but I'm worried about the computer. Works fine at home. Take it to rehearsal, plug it in to the exact same gear, same cables, same EVERYTHING, and it suddenly freaks out about a few piddly aux sends to some delays and granular effects, and 2 (count'em TWO) audio tracks. Not like I'm pushing it here.

Somehow the CPU is just more powerful when sitting on my desk than anywhere else.

So, I changed the buffer size from 256 samples to 512 samples, and it seems happier. That just means there's a little more of a delay between the time the sound from the string quartet gets to the laptop and when it goes back out. Hopefully no one will notice...

Meanwhile, Jim is speed-bloggin' while Newm eggs him on, and Mackey gets a monitor that just might actually be too big. Have to admit to a little jealousy there...

Veo Lux is finished... 7:30am

Just finished the parts. Finished writing the piece about 5:30am this morning. Long night. Barely coherent.

Second rehearsal is tonight. Much laptop programming to do before then.

Time to go to work...

Veo Lux - first rehearsal

Had a short rehearsal today to see how some of the electronics will work, and for the players to see the music for the first time (I still don't have the piece finished, but I'm closing in on it). It's going to be a fun piece - it uses some of the same types of rhythmic interplay between groupings of 4 and 3 16th notes that I used in RedLine, but not quite as difficult. I hope to finish the piece soon, since we have two more rehearsals, and then the premieres on April 19th and 22nd! The April 19th date is new - just found out it was added a couple of days ago. It will be at the Chelsea Art Museum. More details here.

Here's the Juilliard Electric Ensemble rehearsing this afternoon:



Must finish this piece now...

Veo Lux part 3

Ru-pei got stuck in traffic last night, so I recorded her tonight, followed by Yumi on violin. Special thanks to both of them for sight-reading on demand in front of the mic - you both rock! I have some good material on hand now, and just need to finish the piece in, oh, about 36 hours. First rehearsal is Sunday, 2pm. I've written precisely 1'28" at this point - I have a feeling it's going to be a short one...

Here's Yumi recording for me earlier this evening. I forgot to get a shot of Ru-pei, so she escaped this time...

Veo Lux part 2

First rehearsal is Sunday, and I'm not quite halfway finished. Egad. Here's a screenshot of the Digital Performer file - not really that interesting, but it's all I've got right now...

Veo Lux screenshot - April 7th, 2005

That's mostly automation - the laptop will be making very little actual sound - it just adds delay and gate/stutter/distortion/etc effects to the string quartet.

Tonight: violin recording session to test out whether this whole thing will really work or not...

Veo Lux

Frantically working on Veo Lux for amplified string quartet and electronics. The premiere is Friday night, April 22nd, at The Allen Room at Jazz@Lincoln Center in New York. The hall is incredible - it has a 50-foot glass wall behind the stage looking out over Colubmus Circle and Central Park. The concert is FREE, so if you're anywhere near the area, you should come. More info here. Note, there are two concerts earlier in the week at the Chelsea Art Museum - you should also check those out, but my piece won't be on those.

Back to beating my head against the creative brick wall...

Einstein's Dream - Cindy McTee

Went to the Dallas Symphony concert Friday night to check out Cindy McTee's new piece, Einstein's Dream, for string orchestra, percussion, and pre-recorded electronics. I studied with Cindy during my MM at UNT, so it was great to see her and get the privilege of hearing one of her world premieres.

This was a very different piece from her - extremely restrained, quiet, dreamlike (on purpose, obviously, given the title). Divided into several connected movements, the piece opens with a Bach chorale arranged for strings, and augmented by the electronics. I thought she did a great job in obscuring the border between the acoustic and electronic worlds. I think this work would gain from repeated listenings - I need to hear it again to appreciate the stretched recapitulation of the Bach chorale at the end. My only criticism at this point would be some of the electronic sounds - to my ears, they have a definite CSound/granular synthesis trademark sound to them which I associate with the 80s and 90s academic sound synthesis tradition, which I was never really a part of. That's probably simply a matter of my taste, however.

Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony gave a great performance and concert all-around. Cindy - bravo and congratulations!

The obligatory post-concert pic: