Traces: Matthew (2017)
Mbira and Live-Electronics
Premiere: November 2017, Gallery 1412, Seattle
Traces 1-4 Streaming Concert on Wayward-in-Limbo Series
PROGRAM NOTES
Traces 1-4
One might consider them ghost stories. In my youth I was obsessed with Harry Houdini, especially his interactions with Sir Conan Doyle, and their arguments about spiritualism and the paranormal. From there I stumbled onto the practice of EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). As a young person with an obsessive relationship to sound and access to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, this seemed to give my life a purpose: to find and record “invisible” sounds and otherwise unheard voices. These four works for performers and interactive electronics are a remembrance of that period in my life, each a meditation on loss, grief, and memory. They are a search for what remains in the absence of known things, real things, loved things. They each began as an incantation, a conjuring, giving voice to the inaudible and form to the imperceptible. What emerges are traces and remnants of people, spaces, and memories – requiems for things lost.
In Traces: Matthew, the means for this result is two-fold. First, the Mbira is played through a MAX/MSP patch that includes a contraption that the composer calls the FILTERIZER. It is a pass-filter that randomly picks frequencies, both harmonic and non-harmonic, that are present in the sound but very quiet. Sounds occur for a very short time (1-3 seconds) before moving on to another frequency. The FILTERIZER also creates complexity with a random Q effect, which changes the "sharpness" of the filter. The result is a whispered, ghosty music that arises from the simple means of bowing and plucking the Mbira. Secondly, there is a fixed-media sound file that plays throughout the work (labeled in the score as MATTHEW) that has been manipulated by several processes that also emphasize inaudible parts of the original file. The original file contains the "traces" of Matthew. Together, these processes create a sonic landscape that is both new and old, living and dead, audible and inaudible.