The past three evenings, NMC has been rehearsing a new composition by Jeph Jerman.

Jeph and I walked through the dry bed of Barton Creek on Tuesday afternoon to collect dozens of riverstones for the piece. Various co-op members also collected bamboo, sticks, and leaves.

There is a score, but the gradual movement and open approach of the piece is such that reading from the score isn’t necessary during performance.

The rehearsals have been unusually relaxed and meditative. I wouldn’t say the piece is “easy” to perform, but the demands it makes are less technical and more about proper mindset, concentration, and very active listening.

In general, we’ve been going through a gradual process of extending the duration of the various sections of the piece and refining our approach to creating the sounds.

Some of the objects, like the larger stones, require a pretty simple approach, while others are a bit trickier. I’ve noticed that the pine cones require a lot of practice. Once you get your technique down, it is almost like playing a little Mbira.

Of course, one of the main challenges in this piece is avoiding pitfalls of periodicity and melody. Jerman’s work is, in many ways, attempts to parallel natural sounds. As musicians, we tend to approach sonorous objects as we would percussive or melodic instruments. For this piece, that is the wrong approach. “Randomizing” your actions or “intentionally fumbling” is a valuable skill here, and one that is rarely brought out in most pieces.

The next NMC concert Animist Orchestra should be very interesting. It manages to relate not only to our last concert in its focus on sound and listening, but to our 2003 Rock Music concert. The more I learn about Jeph Jerman, he seems like some sort of post-Cage naturalist shaman. I’m looking forward to meeting him in person.

Thanks to all who came out to the concert this past Saturday. It was a great show!

There was a nice review from the Statesman.

As part of NMC’s upcoming performance we are setting up an early version of Alvin Lucier’s Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas featuring unattended snare drums placed carefully within the room according to the crests and troughs of resonance of sine waves from two loudspeakers.

The process of setting up this piece is quite mysterious, and requires much trial and error. Charles Curtis, our guest artist, has pulled it off many times — but insists that each time is quite different as each room is a new landscape with unique constructive and destructive interference patterns resulting from different arrangements of walls, speakers, and the delicate adjustments of the snare assembly in the drums, etc.

The process goes something like this: first, you turn on the sine waves. Then you silently listen to the invsible waves of interference moving past you — a ghostly presence almost like the air pressure of the room is greater on one side of your head than the other. Then the wave front slowly moves around behind your head and continues past you. These areas of pressure excite the snares of each drum and they resonate quietly as the wave fronts navigate the room. If you manage to move the drums into ideal locations, the successive vibrations of the drums betray the route of the invisible waves as they move.

Rehearsing vespers…

We’ve been hard at work getting ready for the upcoming concert at Ceremony Hall. Since the pieces we are playing are very sensitive to the space they are performed in, we have been camped out at the hall trying out various speaker/instrument placements and exploring the space to find the optimum arrangement. Here is a photo of Charles Curtis playing his cello against an 82 hertz sine wave:

In 1969 Alvin Lucier wrote a piece called “Vespers.” Part of the inspiration of the piece came from a chance encounter with a product being marketed for the blind. The product was called the “Sondol” and is a small hand-held echo-location device. It sends a directional “click” (using a pulse wave oscillator). A person using the device can perceive things about the room they are in using the echo that bounces off objects in the room. For whatever reason, the product never caught on and almost no sondols exist today. Lucier, in writing the score, gives instructions on what to do if no sondols are available. NMC, never settling for the easy way out, decided to design and build a close approximation of the sondol for our upcoming performance on April 11th.

Building…

Bill Meadows, Bill Bridges, Josh Ronsen, Holland Hopson (advice from afar) and myself all contributed to the effort. It took many hours of design refinement, but we ended up with a set of very effective instruments to realize the piece.

Finished set of 6 sondols:

NMC is excited to present a full program of adventurous new music by influential minimalist composer Alvin Lucier. The co-op will be joined by virtuoso cellist Charles Curtis, a longtime colleague of Lucier and expert in his wonderfully innovative work. Through Lucier’s music, our audience will experience the physicality of sound while sine waves are frozen in time and performers use custom made electronic echo-location devices to reveal the unique sonic personality of the hall. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear the strange and beautiful music of this ground-breaking experimental composer.

more at http://newmusic.coop

Work is officially complete on the multi-year soundtrack project I worked on with filmmaker and friend Chris Immel. His two hour long piece features both original and placed music by me. The film will likely screen in New York sometime this summer. I have to say I’m very happy with it and, as with all long projects, its good to have it in the can.

Cadillac Moon Ensemble is excited to invite you to their next concert. They will be playing at the Gershwin Hotel in New York City (7 East 27th St. @ Fifth Ave.) on Thurday, March 12, 2009 at 8pm. Tickets are $10.

They will be performing two world premieres: Erich Stem’s Revisited and Jordan McLean’s The Eye is Closing on the Days of Driving. Also on the program is Travis Weller’s Maritime Suite (written for CME) and Phillip Glass’ Music in Fifths.