On March 25th, 2011 at the Memorial Chapel at Wesleyan
University I gave the first and only performance of my
senior project "An Evening with Paul Linton." The pieces for this
performance offered a 'world tour' of some late twentieth century
works for the organ, with the particular intention to move forward
with these pieces and the concepts underlying them towards a model
in which the computer has an active part, using both the
computerized systems of the organ and external computers. The
concert was stuctured as a steady progression from least
involvement by the computer to the greatest involvement with Knee
Play 1 and Knee Play 5 acting as a comfortable easing in and out
for the audience. The pipe organ is a most flexible and adaptable
keyboard instrument that can interact fluently with the computer.
I encourage composers and performers to continue this exploration
of the interaction between a performer and the computer and the
role of the computer in performance. I also hope that the concepts
put forward in the performance challenge audiences' ideas of the
performer and the computer. A special thank you to all of my
assistants and most importantly to my tutor Ron Ebrecht!
Knee Play 1
The opening piece for the concert was one of my favorites:
Philip Glass' Knee Play 1 from
Einstein on the Beach. I also included the prologue which
involves playing an A to a G to a C in ratios of 2:3:4 starting
from when the house opens until the concert actually begins (the
video below only catches the very end of the prologue). The voices
were generated using the
Festival Speech Synthesis System, including the counting and singing voices
using Festival's singing mode which were generated into audio
files. I intervened in the spoken parts to create a reasonable
pacing but the singing parts allowed for computer 'interpretation,'
particularly by rushing each rest. I like the term interpretation
here, since everything, including errors, is a part of the
performance and if a human can create errors that are part of the
performance, so can a computer. Jason Jia assisted with page
turning.
Hands
With Alvin Lucier's Hands, we begin our examination of the
roles of the computer. The easiest place to start is to not have
a computer involved at all. Hands is a piece for an organist and
assistants where the organist plays two or more adjacent semitones
while the assistants place their hands in front of the mouths of
the pipes to change the pitches to be closer together. In a
musical world dominated by speakers, in which many organs are
actually synthesizers, this piece develops a subtle but powerful
awareness in the audience that the pipe organ is a wind instrument.
My assistants were Lana Lana, Aaron Veerasuntharam, Rain Xie and
Yvonne Lin.
Some of the Harmony of Maine
John Cage's Some of the Harmony of Maine provides an example of
the computer as an extremely simple assistant. Of the thirteen
original tunes by Cage I performed four for the concert:
Invitation, Harmony, the Lilly, and Alpha in that order. Whereas
normally I would have several assistants changing the pipes
manually, I instead had one assistant, Nat Leich, tell the
computer in the organ when to change to a different set of stops.
As a result, I have the computer acting as my assistant and the
results were subtle. Human assistants can change a limited number
of stops at a time, where as the computer could change them all at
once. On the other hand the computer had a slight delay in
changing, causing the changes to be very audible and slightly
behind the changes in notes at times. This piece is not meant to
determine which is better, as that is all a question of what the
asker is looking for, but merely to examine the differences.
Reverberations
This piece, by Ronald Perera, shows the performer and computer
acting equally. The computer plays a pre-defined track which
complements and contrasts the organ part, however both parts are
equal. Unfortunately, the recording below does not really capture
the computer's part except at certain points. In addition, one of
the speakers began creating a large amount of static for unknown
reasons, however this merely becomes part of the performance.
Knee Play 5
Here we return to Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach and my
favorite piece from the opera, Knee Play 5. Again I used Festival
to generate the spoken and choral voices while I doubled and
played the organ part. It is very unfortunate that once again the
final spoken part cannot be clearly heard as it is beautiful
poetry and an important part of the piece. This piece allows the
computer to take the lead with spoken and vocal parts, central to
the pice, while the organist takes a supporting role. It is the
reversal of the common trend of having a computer create the
backing while the performer takes the lead.