Arcana

Arcana Composition Notes The pieces on this CD represent the evolution of compositional ideas and techniques, which were generated and refined over years of collaboration in our personal studios. Though we share a common musical language from our studies at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, our compositional concerns were quite different. The process of working together has brought our musical ideas closer together in many ways, but there remains a healthy creative tension and a bit of technical specialization in our respective collaborative roles. Five sets of ideas and techniques are common to all of the music on this CD, though used in differing proportions in various pieces. • Musique Concrète: Environmental sounds play a large role in our music, both in the use of samples in place of instrumental sound sources, but also as architectural elements that determine the shape of large sections of the music. • Generative Grammars: We have tended to generate most of the sonic material and much of the phrasing and orchestration from a small number of sources, which give the pieces an internal consistency, a larger architectural rightness of proportion and shape. • Harmonic Series and Just Intonation: We have made extensive use of ratio-metric and harmonic series tunings, which give the tonality a more unique cast as well as making the both consonances and dissonances more powerful. • Long timbral evolutions: Much of the structure and propulsion of these pieces comes from the evolution of timbre in field recordings and tracks generated from studio feedback networks. • Improvisation: Although we tend to set up somewhat regimented formal parameters for our pieces, most of our work together leaves a space in the process for improvisation. Sometimes this is heard within the final piece (as in Lake of Time), and sometimes it's relegated to a more traditional pre-compositional role as a means for generating the melodic and harmonic content of a work (as in section 3 of The Death of Socrates). ____________________________________________________________ Piece Descriptions Dissolution uses recordings from our individual archives to form structural elements, which were assembled with much attention paid to the interlocking shapes of their individual sources. We then added algorithmic and hand percussion, electric bass and didgeridoo. This was then used as a foundation for improvisation of the organ and electric guitar parts. We would like to thank Wayne Eagles for his outstanding guitar work which helped unify the elements and solidify the trajectory of the piece. Carnac uses environmental sounds and field recordings as the foundation, which forms the basic structure of the piece. Much care was devoted to the selection and layout of sample-based quot;drumquot; sounds. These were then used to generate algorithmic drum phrases and gestures, from which the bits which were ultimately used were selected. The drum parts form the temporal structure for the piece in an iteration of Fibonacci ratios that shape the work as a whole. To this rhythmic bed we added just-intoned synthesizer, electric bass and the Slovakian fujara, which is the overtone flute that introduces the piece. The bass plays simple notes derived from the harmonic series and functions, along with the synthesizer, in an architectonic fashion (as does the bass in James Tenney's Electric Guitar Septet, a touchstone for Carnac). The piece uses Fibonacci series members 2, 3, 5, and 8 to de