- Please note that these compressed downloads are mixed down to stereo from the original 4-channel composition
In early spring of 2007, Alison Roth of the Cantor Arts center at Stanford university approached Chris Chafe's Research Seminar in Computer-Generated Music (220c) with a collection of field recordings taken in Niger of the Tuareg people, in conjunction with an exhibition entitled: "The Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World." Offering the audio material as a possibility for composition, myself and two other students in the seminar jumped at the chance to delve into this rich and varied material. Over the next 6 weeks, the compositions were created, and then premiered alongside the exhibition.
May 30 - September 2, 2007
Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World
This exhibition focuses on silver jewelry, leather bags, and other items crafted by the nomadic Tuareg people of Niger, Mali, and Algeria. Art of Being Tuareg contrasts historic objects, which reflect Tuareg life in the Sahara, with modern objects created within urban contexts for Tuareg and non-Tuareg people. Catalogue available. Co-organized by the Cantor Arts Center and UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. The exhibition opens at UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, then goes on view at Stanford. After viewing at Stanford, the exhibition travels to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Immersion is a digital tape piece composed in the tradition of Musique concrète, and focuses solely on arrangement and manipulation of the source material. Meant to mirror the metaphorical journey of coming to understand the sounds of this culture, Immersion embarks on a journey that is at first quite literal and frenetic, moving subsequently towards a more sparse and abstract space. The piece is composed of two movements; the first moves the listener through a sampling of the many and varied sounds, as if walking/driving past, as would a casual observer. No single sound can be put into a proper context, and each new impression fights the others for dominance. The next section moves at a slower pace, allowing the listener to concentrate on less, and focus more. At the same time, the audio becomes more and more abstract, and the overall soundscape becomes meditative and calm. In between these two sections is a transition that illustrates the process of coming to familiarize oneself with a new sound, bringing a single motive in and out of obscurity.
In my experience, when a sound becomes intimately familiar, it is deconstructed because of that familiarity, and begins to transform into something new. Any exposure to a different culture will be full of many first impressions, and indeed this piece is necessarily made from many of my own.
The first step in composing for this material was to spend as much time as possible with the sounds. With nearly 2 and 1/2 hours of raw material, it was a sizeable task to sort through and digest the range of sounds, music, and speech that were contained therein. Much of the audio was taken from a variety of musical performances, from large drumming circles to intimate guitar, and even an amazing violin-like instrument made from a single string over a gourd. Other sounds were of day-to-day life, working etc. There were also some terrific environmental sounds that describe the landscape and area beautifully.
Once I had my head wrapped around the sounds, I began to experiment with basic collage techniques. I originally focused on rearranging the unprocessed sounds, to find things that rhymed or dovetailed well. There was so much to choose from , however, that the hardest part was narrowing down the scope of the project into something manageable.
The piece began to take shape as I latched on to a few key environmental sounds that would serve as the glue or common thread throughout the piece. My goal was to keep the composition relatively easy to digest, since the audience would not be versed in the intricacies of computer music, but rather would be visiting a museum to learn about the culture of the Tuareg. Therefore, the manipulations had to be subtle, and couldn't obscure the sounds to the point of becoming unrecognizable.
My piece was hardly composed in solitude. Indeed, I had a captive audience in my peers in the seminar, and I took every opportunity to survey them with my new ideas and experiments. Upon prototyping a new idea or movement, I brought it in to the class, and could see immediately what was working, and what needed to be redone or scrapped entirely. The constructive criticism of my peers was invaluable.
In addition, the help of the professors in the department served to guide my efforts as well. Chris Chafe was constantly helpful in providing feedback and steering my efforts, and I also had the rare privilege to learn from Jean-Claude Risset, who was visiting CCRMA for the term. Taking his lecture series on computer-music composition, I learned several techniques and ways of thinking about audio that show up directly in the piece. Prof. Risset also met with me privately, and offered me some tremendously helpful critique.
The timeline from inception to completion was about 5-6 weeks, and the piece premiered at the Cantor Arts center on May 30th, alongside the other compositions from the class, by Nate Whetsell and Miriam Kolar.
