Category 3

Outdoors, Live Soundscape, Live Instrument

Humans have likely played music outdoors and in various social functions since the beginning of music. Only in the last few centuries has music increasingly moved indoors. Researchers in the field of soundscape studies, such as Schafer and his colleagues, deduced that a likely cause for music relocating was the increasing human-caused sound in the outdoors, from transportation: carriages, to trains, to cars, to planes; from technology: of clamoring factories in the Industrial Revolution; and from urbanization; etc. Slowly and in parallel, musical instruments were developed to create increasingly louder sound: from the steel frame and strings of the piano to the Wagnerian orchestra and singers to loudspeakers for rock concerts. Outdoor music does still exist in parades, open-air concerts, street musicians and 'muzak' from stores, and through some artists experimenting once again outdoors, in urban and natural acoustic spaces.

One individual that has made many site-specific works, including autonomous surround installations in natural soundscapes is David Dunn (b.1953). He has composed and improvised pieces, CD works, installations, radio programs and most recently focused research into bioacoustics and climate change, recording communication sounds of insects, for instance. Dunn is called by some a composer of “environmental music” or an “acoustic ecologist” by others, and has certainly created some ear-opening work.1 When considering insights from the experimental music tradition combined with the broader meaning for Acoustic Ecology, Dunn writes, “...I am willing to contend that this capacity to hear the soundscape as music is simultaneously one of the most archaic ways of listening and the most modern.”2

Nexus I for three trumpets was recorded in the interior of the Grand Canyon over a three-day period from the June 17 – 20, 1973. I listened to the track on “Music, Language And Environment” Environmental sound works by David Dunn, 1973–1985, a CD released in 1996 by Innova Recordings. This CD can hardly compare to the experience of trumpeters playing live inside of this American landmark; nevertheless the natural reverberance of the canyon and the wildlife form a stunning combination with the three trumpets. All sound sources coexisted for this recording project, so place is clear. In listening my imagination transports me to my imagined setting of the canyon with trumpeters Ralph Dudgeon, Jack Logan, and Ed Harkins, and of course David Dunn leading and recording the project. The end result of this piece (and most-heard) would be this CD-version, but I suppose that a live performance could be recreated “in spirit” of the original. A PDF of the guided improvisation score existed and was available on Dunn's website at one point.

In the beginning of the piece, the trumpeters explore the canyon with shorter impulses to achieve more echoes. Staggered entrances and at times chords twist along the canyon walls. The fourteen-minute track leaves air for birds and environment regularly, as other creatures such as crows bounce their voices off of the rocks as well. The rich reverberance of the canyon and the concept of distance, the placement of the musicians and microphones, the depth and breadth of the water-carved formations, are all orchestrators of the piece. Like in Western movies where the majestic Grand Canyon becomes a character, in Nexus I it is a prominent musical character, and an ideal setting for a trumpet, let alone three! Triple-tongued trumpet calls change color as the canyon warps the sounds. Trills and super-high over-blown notes are transformed in this iconic landscape. When planes become audible and add low frequencies otherwise not heard in that nature setting, the trumpets intensify their dissonance and volume in response. The musicians eventually blend with frequencies in the plane, then create a counterpoint with canyon echoes as the listener has accepted the plane rumble into the established “ground” of the environment.3 They also play pitch bends inspired by the planes' slow doppler effects. Nexus I has a musical form of intensifying activity and accumulation of material, a clear climax and a recapitulation/resolution. Although Dunn could have ended the tape earlier because there is a good ending moment, he chose to continue and include the sound of another plane in the distance, and indistinct trumpet improvisation to give the feeling of a fade-out: the tape stops but the music goes on.

urban background, cars. Immediately, a forceful synthesizer enters, creating an amazing dialogue. Musical elements the bird senses include range (switching to very high frequencies as needed), pitch bends, speed of oscillations, rhythm, and timbre. Sometimes the mimesis goes both ways, and Dunn had to have been listening carefully to the responses of the mockingbird (especially its grace notes, small mixes of grace note notes with sustained, and short rhythmical motives); he sticks to his main sound materials and varies the combinations during the dialogue. The mockingbird does its own loops of the new sounds in a very electronic way, which simultaneously is in line with natural repetition in birdsong. At times the two duet partners did a nice counterpoint. The track ends with a special moment (c.4:43), where we hear the mockingbird trying three–to–four different ways to mimic the timbre and oscillation of the synthesizer. Dunn was doing sustained tones as his duet partner blended with shorter figures inside. When the synthesizer stops, we hear that the bird continues to sing various fragments it learned from the encounter. From all of the known birdsong transcriptions and adaptations this is undoubtedly the most interactive and responsive approach. I personally enjoyed his choice of electronic sounds, rather than a classical instrument. 

Questions may arise whether these two Dunn pieces should be in this category. I realize that these two examples of Outdoors/Live/Live are mainly existing as fixed media now, but I still think that they still fit better in this category rather than Category 5 (Indoors, Pre-recorded, Pre-recorded) because the two elements of Dunn's pieces were a performance recorded simultaneously, live, in the same location.

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1 Dunn, David. Website. http://www.davidddunn.com/~david/Bio.htm, accessed March 22, 2016.

Another live-interactive work was recorded outdoors in Balboa Park, San Diego, in July 1976: Mimus Polyglottos, (Northern mockingbird), where Dunn and Ric Cupples brought synthesizers to have a musical conversation with this highly-adept mimetic bird. Like in Nexus I, the mockingbird piece provides a sense of of outdoor place, although the acoustics are not nearly as rich as in a canyon. The piece opens with high and shrill mockingbird calls within a noisy