Composer Roundtable No. 7

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THE COMPOSER ROUNDTABLE
No. 7 - May 2007
BY CHRISTOPHER M. WRIGHT

Composers David Arbury and Asha Srinivasan join AIM in discussing how composers today blend old and new and how computers are changing the face of music.

Asha Srinivasan [www.twocomposers.org] won the first Women's Music Commission from the BMI Foundation in 2007. A composition doctoral student and teaching assistant at the University of Maryland, Srinivasan holds music degrees from Goucher College and the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. She combines Indian classical music with Western and electronic elements. Her other awards include the 2006 Walsum Competition for her string quartet Kalpitha and 2nd Prize in the Prix d'Ete Competition for a flute and computer piece. The latter, Alone, Dancing [presented below], was invited to a SEAMUS conference in 2005 (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States). Srinivasan has participated in other national conferences (EMM - Electronic Music Midwest and ICMPC - International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition). Performances of her music have also taken place at the 60X60 project in New York City, California State University, the Peabody Conservatory, the H-Street Playhouse in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maryland.

David Arbury's musical experience is nothing if not varied. He sang in a boys' choir at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. and was later a drummer in a punk rock band. He worked in the Music Division at the U.S. Library of Congress and co-founded an independent record label. He holds music and composition degrees from the University of Maryland, Arizona State University, and Haverford College. He has attended master classes with well-known composer George Crumb. Arbury was Composer-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, Arizona and has received commissions and grants from the American Composers Forum, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Phoenix Arts Commission, among others. His works for concert hall, church, dance, and theater have been performed throughout the United States. [www.davidarbury.com]

Chris: Tonight, we're in a music lab at the University of Maryland in College Park. Welcome to you both. David, let's start with your piece, Element B.

David: This is the second in a series of electronic pieces I'm working on called Elements. I've done other works that involve multimedia or live performers, but here I'm really exploring purely electronic music. Most people in audio synthesis use CSound, but I've become enamored with the SuperCollider program.

Chris: What's it do?

David: It's text-based. You can start with a sine wave and use commands to apply filters and envelopes and other standard manipulation techniques. Other audio synthesis programs will do that, but what I think is very powerful about SuperCollider is that it has an excellent ability to randomize. In this piece, I created every sound in SuperCollider and set every element of the piece to have a random aspect to it. The opening sequence is a simple chord progression, ten chords I had written out. They tend to be triadic [three pitches], with some 7th chords and the occasional 9th chord [adding 7th and 9th scale degrees]. Some of the notes repeat in different octaves. The root progression is fairly traditional and follows more or less a tonal framework.

I had the program randomly select one note from the eight or ten notes in each chord and sustain it. I ran that process about a dozen times in the same patch [sound], and did this for five different patches. So now the computer is sustaining a number of notes which I cross-fade into notes the program selected from the second chord. As the piece progresses, there is clash and dissonance, purposely, as the chords overlap. The most dissonant moments are when the chords change, the ten or twenty seconds when you're shifting from one chord to the next.

Chris: That goes back to Chopin who liked to end musical phrases, not on the first beat of a measure, but on the second beat. He delayed resolution and created dissonance by putting a nonchord tone on the first beat.

David: Interesting, I hadn't thought of that. I think that's definitely part of where that comes from. I love Chopin. I also was a punk rock drummer for a long time, and one of my favorite tricks was to come out of a chorus and put the big cymbal crash on beat two instead of the downbeat. So, Chopin or punk rock, definitely one of the two.

Chris: Was there an inspiration for this piece?

David: I really started from a very mechanical place. I forced myself to use everything the computer gave me. I didn't reject anything even though it selected some notes I didn't want it to select. I was so happy when it chose to end on the lowest note of the entire piece.

Asha: It's amazing to hear you say that because, wow! that's how you did it? It's really gorgeous.

David: I love doing this kind of randomness which is only possible on a computer. That's one of the things that really attracts me to electronic music.

Chris: Let's hear it. [Element B stereo version - the four-speaker surround sound version is available for concert presentation from www.davidarbury.com]

Chris: I have lots of reactions. It's hard to believe that 12 minutes went by. I was engrossed in it even though, ostensibly, so little is happening compared to other pieces of music. I'm amazed it held my interest. Did you have a model in mind for the structure of the piece?

David: I borrowed something very traditional and something new. Overall, you can tell there's an A-B-A structure to it. There's the dark sort-of string sound I created in SuperCollider at the beginning and at the end ....

Chris: With percussion in the middle.

David: Right. A contrasting 'B' section that uses the pingy percussion sound, the whistling sound, and the harsh almost-siren sound that begins the section. All of that is supposed to set itself off from the bookending 'A' sections. I'm almost embarrassed by how traditional that structure is. On the other hand, I really have been influenced by the electronic music of people like Tom DeLio, professor here at Maryland. He and his colleagues incorporate a lot of silence in their music, interspersed with electronic events. There's two moments of silence in my piece as an hommage to that idea.

Asha: Your silences seem shorter, though, and they seem to fit the structure of the piece really well.

David: You're right. As much as I was inspired by that kind of avant-garde sense of silence, I clearly changed things into my own sensibility, but even that was too much silence for some people. My teacher at the time I was working on this piece was Robert Gibson, who's another composer here at Maryland. He hated the silences. He wanted me to take them out. He seemed annoyed but resigned when I refused. [Laughter]

Chris: He would have liked it if it were a different piece, is that it? [Laughter] It's interesting you're referring to periods of silence as avant-garde but I was sitting there struck by how similar your percussion section is to how medieval motets are structured - you've got four or five voices going and each starts and stops and starts up again without reference to what the other voices are doing. In motets, some of the lines were even sung in different languages. The only rule was intervallic counterpoint - each vertical stack had to be consonant, had to agree. In your piece, you can really see this on the computer screen. [see screenshot]

David: That's absolutely right.

Chris: Were you consciously emulating this?

David: It would be hard to say. I sing a lot of early music.

Asha: A lot of electronic music is like this, so maybe it's general to the field. When you use a sequencer, what are you doing but layering? A lot of us do that kind of layering. Maybe individual line counterpoint has come back now in a way with electronic music. I've never thought about that.

David: I hadn't either but I think that's definitely true.

Chris: The other aspect I really liked, I like percussion a lot and you've got cross-rhythms going between the voices in the 'B' section. That to me was really exciting. You hear that a lot in Gershwin's music. How much of that was by design and how much was random?

David: That was one of the most fun parts to work on. I created an array of rhythmic possibilities, but the computer randomly chose each rhythm from those programmed choices. I fired the first patch, listened to the rhythm the computer gave me, then decided when to fire the next patch, and I'd have no idea what the next rhythm was going to be that it would add on top of the first one. So it was kind of an improvisation with the patches talking to each other. The entry of each rhythmic pattern, that's all I was controlling.

Asha: In this case also, did you use all of the material the computer generated?

David: Yes.

Asha: You were talking about a string sound earlier, but the first section almost sounds more vocal to me. It reminded me of a chorale. It's just so nice - I don't know what it is about it, it's very simple - that could be the entire piece if it were made longer. In the same way, the 'B' section could have been much longer. I feel like there are three pieces here. It goes to show how different composers work. There are composers who would have just given us the 'A' section as the entire work, but perhaps you might have felt like, 'OK, that's enough of that, let's do something different now, and come back to that later.' I work like that, too, but, more and more, I'm hearing pieces which really just do one thing, they're very meditative.

David: That's definitely a direction this could have gone, but the point of the series is to explore electronics, so a contrasting structure worked best for me.

Asha: The middle section has similar chords and a similar language so, overall, the piece has a cohesiveness. But every time I hear that first part fade out, I wish it had gone on longer.

David: It's interesting to hear you say that. On the East Coast, composers have that 'New York minute' mentality and some people get a little antsy by the end of that first section. But I agree with you, I could have that go on for much longer. I spent several years in Arizona. It really amazes me how much that changed my music. It made my sense of time grow much longer. It made me a much more patient composer than you would think given that I grew up a city boy in D.C. I went out to Arizona as a much more, you know, efficient ..., 'let's get through these themes and manipulate these ideas [chop-chops with hand], and then we're done with the piece.'

Chris: Staring at the sunsets and the mountains....

David: Right. Seeing that vast desert stretching before you, it looks like not much is going on, but there's so much depth and so much activity.

Asha: I'm actually struggling with that right now. The piece I’m writing, I started with really long chords and wanted to keep that texture going but I started to think it might get dull so I went on to do some different things, different textures and sounds for variety.

Chris: David, there isn't really a melody in your piece. What are your thoughts on that?

David: There's a melodic structure we can explore as composers which goes beyond our traditional use of melody. What I think is melodic about this piece is it's changing texture. The listener can follow the contours.

Asha: The texture is moving, so I follow that like following a melody.

David: With melody, you're following the most obvious surface thing.

Chris: Copland wrote a book about following the 'line' through a piece as the melody gets tossed from one instrument to another. I guess the guiding feature doesn't necessarily have to be a melodic line. Texture is another thread that could be followed. Let's go on to Asha's piece but, first, it must be very exciting to win an award from a national organization, congratulations.

Asha: You'd think it would give you more confidence but it doesn't really work that way. You worry that the next piece won't live up to the expectations of the people who gave you the award because you have no idea what they liked about the first piece. The piece I'm presenting here tonight was done while I was doing my master's degree at Peabody [conservatory in Baltimore]. This was my first instrument-and-electronics piece. It's for tape and flute, everything's sequenced.

Chris: It's a flutist accompanied by tape?

Asha: Exactly. Which is fairly common in electronic music. The piece was invited to a SEAMUS conference [Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States]. It's the major electronic music conference in the U.S. and Canada. It also won second prize in the Prix d'Ete Competition.

Chris: Let's hear it - Alone, Dancing [full-length - Kyungmi Lee, flutist] [score]

Chris: The set of notes you started with, what would you call it?

Asha: I work a lot with what I call scales, it's probably more proper to call them 'modes'. It has to do with Carnatic music, South Indian classical music. I don't know it very well so my sets may not necessarily be exact, but I've definitely been influenced by that. It's my way of having a pitch system.

Chris: Did you pick the pitches beforehand, or get into the line and end up with something vaguely like an Indian mode?

Asha: I'm creating pitch sets beforehand more now but, in this case, it was a more intuitive approach where I was playing around on the keyboard. I wasn't consciously picking notes from an Indian mode.

David: It sounds like you started out playing by ear and inspiration.

Asha: Exactly. And I also sing, not professionally, but I sing in choir and singing is sort of the way I compose all the time and I think most composers do that. I sort of sing everything out, so that probably has a lot to do with it. I also think of the flute as having a very vocal character.

David: It does, but I think flute is very difficult to write for now because there's pressure in new music to not just write a pretty melody and accompany it with tape. There's a lot of pressure to get away from having, really, any sense of melody. I think you strike a really good balance in this piece between having melodic lines but not having it be traditional. A big part of what makes that happen is the tape.

Also, there's a real tendency with a lot of electronic, and even acoustic music these days, to go arrhythmic - no bar lines and have sound floating in time and there isn't really a rhythmic aspect to it. Your piece manages to a capture a real rhythmic element without it being metrical and ...

Chris: Square.

David: Square, right. You can see from the score where you have specific spots where the chords in the electronics line up with the flute and that gives the whole piece a sense of harmonic rhythm, hearkening back to standard classical music. That gives a real rhythmic sense overall, even while everything else can be rubato [timing loosely interpreted by the performer]

Asha: I think people are surprised when they first hear the piece, especially in the beginning, because the electronics is really just harmony. I think that surprises people in a fun way because you don't get that a lot in electronic music, it's rare. The way I got that part, I was working with a Kurzweil and I really liked the 'Glass Bow' sound. I was playing chords under this melody I liked. I ended up processing the sound but literally the whole first part is the chords I played in. So it wasn't conceived 'electronically'.

Chris: This is new to me. You say the standard procedure in electronic music now is not to have the tape provide harmony. What does it usually do?

Asha: A lot of electronic music may have multiple sounds together which might then create a kind of harmonic feel, but in this piece I started with the traditional idea of chords.

David: Tapes are usually much more ambient now, where sounds just float. That's the aesthetic of a lot of composers now.

Chris: Brian Eno finally conquered the world, eh? Are there any other influences from India in the piece?

Asha: There's a rhythmic section in the middle that has an odd meter. An Indian tablist [drummer] had come to the school and was giving a lunchtime concert. He was explaining to the students that one of the songs was in long 3 - medium 3 - short 3, or 3/4 - 3/8 - 3/16 as I broke it down later. I was really fascinated by this so I decided to put that in.

David: That kind of overlapping rhythmic pattern is a very Indian thing.

Asha: Both flutists I worked with had trouble with it at first, but they got comfortable with it because it's like a groove, you kind of fall into it.

David: How much of the tape is recorded flute?

Asha: That's a very good question. A lot of the percussive sounds are flute key clicks, a special effect that came up in the 20th century.

David: If you slam the key down hard without blowing, you'll get a pitch sound.

Chris: So it's like tapping on the guitar or plucking the piano strings.

Asha: That's a newer aspect of my piece because people would have just called keyclicks noise before, like guitar fret noise, something that's not desirable in music. But here you're actually using it in the music as an event. I didn't record any sustained notes from the flute, but there are some long sounds where I actually recorded my voice and time-stretched the sample using audio editing software.

Chris: Let me challenge you just a little on the keyclicks. Henry Cowell started fooling around, tapping on the piano and plucking the strings.

David: Right, with pieces like Aeolian Harp and The Banshee.

Chris: It just strikes me as inferior. Here you've got this wonderful instrument and you're making it do these different things and the results you get are nowhere near as good as what was intended.

Asha: Have you heard a piano plucked inside?

Chris: Yes.

Asha: And you're saying that's inferior? I love that sound.

David: [laughs]

Asha: You put the pedal down and you pluck it.... It's much better than a guitar.

David: I think it depends how it's used. When those sounds first happened, they were exciting for their own sake.

Chris: A novelty.

David: Right. Now they're part of the standard repertoire of sounds and composers should use them as part of the piece, instead of trying to continue the novelty 50 years later.

Asha: I've definitely heard some really nice pieces....

David: Absolutely.

Asha: Especially the plucking inside the piano, because it does have a really nice sound. And where you strum a glissando [sweeping through most or all the notes nearly simultaneously in ascending or descending pitch], you get this beautiful rumbly thing. One piece I like takes a rubber ball and drops it inside where it bounces around. I've heard such things being effective many times. When it's done in concert, though, it's really obvious - the performer stands up and hits the side of the piano. I almost just want to hear it on CD where you can just concentrate on the sound as the composer intended it.

David: I would disagree with that. Again, it needs to be used well but I think one of the crucial elements is the theatricality of it. That can be just as important as hearing it on CD. All of these elements need to combine. As far as famous living composers now, one of the people who is most effective with this kind of writing and theatricality is George Crumb. I find almost all of his special effects with piano and other instruments to be effective.

Asha: A keyclick on the flute is a really wonderful sound. It's very different, it's a percussive sound. Why would you use pizzicato on a violin when bowing the string makes a very beautiful sound?

David: The string example is very good. Why would you play col legno [playing with the wood of the bow] like Berlioz did in Symphonie Fantastique? There are a lot of special effects on stringed instruments that we now take totally for granted as standard practice.

Chris: Like harmonics [audible overtones above the fundamental pitch when a violin string is touched, not bowed, very lightly in certain places] Interesting, I'm learning something here tonight.

Asha: There's this thing in electronic music, you see it in a lot of program notes. 'The composer created all the sounds in the piece by manipulating just three recorded sounds,' like that's supposed to give the piece coherence. I'm like, 'so what? it doesn't sound like it to me.' So I've never done that. I don't care where sounds come from. I take sounds from wherever just because they sound neat.

Chris: A couple of other questions. You end Section 7 with an expected note in the melody but, underneath, the harmony changes. Debussy does that a lot. Did that occur naturally to you or was it a conscious technique?

Asha: It goes back to one of your earlier questions. The set of pitches changes at that point. I start using F-sharp and G-sharp there. Remember we had F and G natural before. The set changes, and I did do it deliberately to give it a little 'oomph', we're going somewhere else. It's like a key change.

David: That's like a pivot.

Asha: Exactly. 'A' is the pivot. The flute lands on 'A' where you expect it, but the 'A' is taken in a new direction.

Chris: When I interviewed William Bolcom, he reinforced my impression that university music schools are pretty much captive to atonality. He finds the professors at such schools completely unmusical and only concerned with writing abstruse, complicated journal articles about the 12-tone system. Yet, here we are in the middle of a university music school lab and both of you - Asha an instructor at the school and David who recently left the school - presented pieces here tonight that are not atonal. What's the prevailing ethic here at Maryland with respect to atonality?

David: Let's draw a distinction between serialism and nontonal music. It would be really difficult to go into any music program and expect to write like Haydn the entire time you were there. But outside of that, there's a lot of flexibility, more so nowadays. It's my impression that the top, most established schools - like Michigan where Bolcom is - are the most captured by atonality because they're trying to protect the academic standing they have - and nothing is more academic than serial atonal music. There is pressure to go in that direction and, in a negative atmosphere, that pressure manifests as 'you must be writing in this style and all other music is worthless.' In a positive atmosphere, like here at Maryland, you are pushed to get out of your comfort zone and explore new ideas. As a young composer, I was neo-romantic to the core. The best thing to happen to me was teachers here and elsewhere nurturing that but pushing me outside of it.

Asha: All composers need to contend with the fact that a hundred years of music not in the tonal language has happened. You've got diehard people who think that anything even slightly outside the tonal framework is noise. And you've got the exact opposite in academics who say 'catch up with the times.' But I think it's been changing, starting with my teachers' generation. It's interesting to hear them talk. They had to rebel against their teachers who told them they couldn't write octaves. They had it really bad. My generation is lucky to have teachers like them. They say, 'look, you need to accept the fact that this music has happened and look at this music,' but they never pressure you into a style. The new thing is to try to understand your own style. How else are you going to do composition these days - everyone has their own language, their own way of writing. At least atonality is a system, something to grab on to. We don't have a system anymore.

Chris: It's the same way in the visual arts. It's all splintered. There's no strong school that everyone adheres to at the moment - it's strong individual voices and students have a long cafeteria menu of styles to choose from. The interesting question is whether a single school will ever dominate music or art again and, if so, whether there's anything on the horizon that might qualify.

Asha: I don't think we'll live to see it. We call all the music of 300 years 'the era of common practice' but that's because we have the benefit of hindsight and can find the commonality. We won't see another common practice in our time, either because there won't be one or we won't be able to recognize one if it does take hold. Common practice is exactly what people like Schoenberg were against; they wanted to destroy common practice.

David: True, there is no more common practice as there was in classical music. But what we are seeing, rather than a total destruction of the tonal system, is the rise of nontonal music that doesn't fit into either the tonal or atonal category.

Asha: Both pieces here tonight had tonic grounding but, if I were to call them tonal pieces, some people would be really confused. Neither were 'functionally tonal' [V-I cadencing, etc.] in the way Mozart or, say, Schumann were.

Chris: One of my best pieces, I started with the octatonic scale, but I couldn't write strictly octatonic music. I ended up with a fusion of octatonic and regular tonality. I had a teacher one time who wrote an opera fusing 12-tone with tonality. So one of the things that is happening is that composers take these other languages and combine them with the tonal system in some way. There's also the thought expressed by Bernstein in his lectures at Harvard that we will never escape tonality completely, the pull of it is just too strong. Asha, you surprised me by saying that you start by singing everything out. As long as there are composers that start with a vocal core, there will somehow be tonality.

David: I think you're right. There's a physical connection when you're singing. And I write a lot of choral music. It's incredibly difficult to write choral music that goes outside the tonal box.

Chris: You'd have to have really good singers, too.

David: Right.

Asha: One of my professors thinks that there won't be any new techniques. People went wild in the 20th century and went to the extremes of what you can do, where anything that was done was like, 'wow, that's crazy, that's great.' And now it's kind of like, 'wait, let's come back and pull some things together.' It goes back to what you were talking about, Chris, fusing different musical languages together.

Chris: I was a political science major and there's a basic way of thinking about ideas - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You start with an idea, a contrary idea arises, and you end up with a fusion, a synthesis.

David: It also applies to what we were saying about special effects. There's the first person who reaches inside a piano and strums the strings and someone else writes the first piece which uses keyclicks on the flute. At the time, it's part of this huge exploration and you can write pieces that are all special effects. Now that all of that has been explored, and we've expanded that range, those things are now just part of the composer's toolkit and I think that's where we're at now. Everything we thought was exciting and new and could stand on its own turns out to be just extra tools in a toolkit.

Chris: On to my piece. I'm primarily a melodist. I get tunes in my head - it's part of my musicality and I don't apologize for it. This piece started with a melody that occurred to me. I don't write scores, anymore. But when I get to a hard part, I'll work it out on paper. Like here, I needed a transition between the melody which is in 4/4 time and another section I wanted to put with it which is in 3/4 time. It was the first time I was so scientific about a transition - I had to get from one meter to the other and from the key of B-flat minor to C-sharp minor. Later, when I wanted to restate the melody at the end of the piece, I found that it had morphed on me, I was hearing it in 3/4 in the new key. So I had a choice. I could try to force it back into its 4/4 box or restate it in 3/4. I ended up leaving it in 3/4.

All of that is pretty standard composition methodology. And the piece is tonal and lyrical. What's new here, other than the overall sensibility, which is definitely not from Haydn's time, is the use of electronic sounds that exist in their own right and are not simply bad copies of standard instruments. I belong to two composer societies. One is very much into traditional music and standard instruments. They don't know what to make of me. The other is a new music organization that does all this wild and crazy stuff and, to them, I'm hopelessly old-fashioned. So I'm a living embodiment of tonight's theme, blending old and new.

The title 'Dark Energy' is a scientific term I heard on the radio. You know how scientists believe there's more matter in the universe than is visible and they call all the stuff they can't find dark matter. Well, scientists now believe there's more energy in the universe than they can find and they call it dark energy. I heard the term and said 'wow!' - it really captivated me so I wrote music for it.

Asha: Neat.

Chris: There's one other aspect of the piece I'll tell you about, but let's hear it first. [sample Dark Energy].

David: One of the really compelling things about your piece is that 4/4 - 3/4 rhythmic tension you were struggling with. You say it's just in the transition, but I hear it pervading the whole thing. Your accompaniment patterns, particularly, subdivide into both 3 and 4. To me, the rhythmic aspect is the primary element of the piece, more so than the melody. There's one spot where a rhythm accompanies the melody. It was one of those nice moments where you have your primary theme but the rhythmic accompaniment is enhancing it so much that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Asha: The rhythm really drives it forward at that spot. You get to that point and you know you're at a climax.

Chris: Must be my high school English class. Great literature works up to a climax and the last bit is dénouement.

David: That's very much how your piece is structured.

Chris: A lot of Western classical music is structured that way, with the high note reserved for that moment. My piece also has some rock 'n' roll influence - it's 'got a hook and moves along.' It's very propulsive.

Asha: It's also that Germanic, European way of driving things forward that's common throughout traditional music. That's why, when we get to the beginning of David's piece which doesn't have that forward drive, it's so different, it's East Asian or meditative. It's like the medieval or Renaissance connections we were talking about earlier - it's stasis, it's this world of interweaving voices but it's not really going somewhere.

Chris: What about Indian ragas in this regard? I saw some performed recently. There were sitars and tablas on stage and they were jamming away for 15 minutes at a stretch and it was nice but it didn't seem like it was going anywhere.

Asha: You're right, but that's North Indian music and they are more apt to do that kind of thing. The idea of a raga is like a sonic world. It's not that you're going anywhere; it's that you're exploring this world in many different ways. South Indian music can be more directed but if you talk about the alap, that beginning exploratory section, a lot of people can't sit through it. It's natural for people to want a forward drive.

Chris: Is there a sense of climax in Indian music?

Asha: Yes, but it's different from the West in how it's created. A raga is essentially a set of notes, so you don't have modulation to another key - that kind of Western device goes away. And you don't have textural changes because it's really just one melody and the rhythm. So for the climax, the music gets faster, the rhythmic patterns get more intricate, and the singer usually, goes to a high point registrally or does something else people would recognize is more difficult. Similar in some ways to rock.

David: Chris, at the climax of your piece, right when it happened, I wished I was hearing it through a ten-foot high Marshall stack [amplifiers commonly used at rock concerts] [laughter]. Those big power chords.

Asha: You say you were inspired by the phrase dark energy. That makes sense because you can definitely hear the cosmos, other-worldly qualities in the sounds you chose. I assume that was deliberate.

Chris: Yes. This is the second in what will be a suite of semi-related pieces, so I used some of the same sounds I used in the first piece in the suite, the darker ones that fit the emotional tenor of the second piece - I wanted it demonic and devilish.

David: That's very rock 'n' roll.

Chris: Not all the sounds in my synthesizer are equally good, so I spend a lot of time sorting them out and combining them to see what I get. I don't have the patience to sit there and manipulate the waveforms and make my own patches, so I try to hear the musical possibilities in each pre-packaged sound the synthesizer came with. Each suggests something different to me and some are richer than others. The ones that are too thin, don't resonate, don't have overtones, I discard. But Asha, I wanted to ask you, were you born in India?

Asha: I was born in the U.S. but raised in India.

Chris: How much of the emotional context of Western music registers with you? I mean, when you hear a major scale, do you feel happy? And when you hear a minor scale, do you feel sad? When you hear Dark Energy, do you see devils dancing?

Asha: I'm too embedded in Western culture so I hear these things, but my mother would not. She sings in an Indian film music band and the music is heavily influenced by Western harmony and pop music. She doesn’t have any Western music background so it’s hard for her to figure out whether a song is in major or minor. When I tell her major is supposed to be kind of happy, she says it doesn't make sense because there are a lot of songs in minor in that genre that don't work that way. It's kind of like rock and pop music where they use minor but with a lowered 7th, so it gives it less of an edge. So it doesn't register with her at all. But I can definitely hear the dark aspects of your piece. But I wanted to ask you, is all of it dark and serious for you? In some ways, it was dark and at the same time it had a quirky, comical edge to it, too. This is one of those things with classical or art music on the academic side, we're afraid to let things be light or make music that make us laugh or smile.

David: Right. I think the piece has a sense of humor. What I think is interesting about that, you say you've been studying Debussy. Debussy has one of the best senses of humor of any composer. There are parts in Debussy that make me laugh.

Chris: You never know how people are going to react to your work. You find humor, but it's not intentional. One thing I don't like is music that's trying to be a joke. I mean, how many times can you listen to a joke and still find it funny?

David: I'm not saying that.

Asha: Me, neither. Even though it's dark, it's light. It's kind of interesting....

Chris: It did occur to me after I finished the piece that the ending is much more optimistic and light than the rest of the piece.

David: Right. The ending really recolors how you've experienced everything up to that point. How you experience the entire piece is colored by the ending. You have this very dark piece and this light ending.

Asha: Think about Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique.

Chris: It's got the Dies Irae theme in it....[from a 13th century hymn describing the Judgment Day when the unsaved would be cast into the eternal flames of hell]

Asha: Yes, but think about the witches cackling, there's a dark humor in it.

Chris: The other aspect of the piece I wanted to discuss is the special effects. I saw the synthesizer arrive on the scene in the 1970s and people were doing things with it then that were essentially novelties and not very musical. I'm only now beginning to explore electronic effects and I want to make sure that every one I select is in good taste and integrated into the music. I don't know if you picked up on it, but there's a steam sound I used and it rises and falls as part of the accompaniment in one section, and then I bring it back more punctuated at the end [heads shake no]. I think the steam sound fits and adds value, but that's as far as I want to go with special effects. I don't want them just to be like the silver rings and other doodads you see architects sticking on buildings these days just because everybody else is doing it. When it has nothing to do with the rest of the building, it annoys me. I feel the same way about special effects thrown into music, if it's not done for a purpose and doesn't enhance the piece.

Asha: That's an opinion. What you consider functional and nonfunctional others may not. The problem is getting a bias either way - refusing to use them. or - what we get in academia a lot - feeling required to use them because it's expected and your peers will think you're stupid if you don't. Personally, I agree with you it should be integrated.

Chris: Well, I must have succeeded because the steam sound didn't register with either of you. It fit. That's the way I wanted it to be. Thank you both. This has been grand; I had a really good time.

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