Tintinnabuli
This text is a short reflection of a specific experiment of playing with one rule based compositional technique, that I found somewhat analogues to how certain instrumental and idiomatic principals work in Scandinavian folk music, and some thoughts about the general nature of experiments in my project.
The musical example attached to this text is meant to show the future potential that this technique may have and not as a part of the final artistic results of my project.
The technique in this particular experiment, was inspired by hardanger fiddle playing, which partly due to the instruments design with a rather flat bridge, and perhaps partly due to it being performed as a solo instrument (this is speculation on my part), it is common to play two strings at once. Where one of the strings plays the melody and the other string plays an accompanying drone, with occasional embellishments. As the melody moves to a higher or lower register the strings being played on and which string performs the melodic or drone function changes. And as there exists many variations of how to tune the hardanger fiddle the accompanying drones relation to the melody varies quite a bit from song to song, as well as within one tune.
When pondering this fact, I came to think of the compositional style of Arvo Pärt that he calls Tintinnabuli. According to my limited understanding of this subject, one part of this style is a technique for accompanying melody that goes something like this:
You have your melody and to accompany it you choose a triad. Then you decide on a relationship between the melody note and an accompanying note from the triad. For instance the accompanying note is always the closest note from the triad below the current melody note. From there you can do permutations of how the accompanying note relates to the melodic note. Like, in the following example, where I have written a script on a mini-computer module in my modular synthesizer, so that an accompanying voice follows my keyboard playing, and with each new melody note, switches if it plays the closest note from the triad above or below the melodic line. I find that complicating the relationship between the accompanying and the played notes in this manner makes it sound in way where you can feel that there is a rational relationship between the two, but you can’t immediately deduce what it would be.
This effect where you as a listener cannot fully grasp the underlying principles yet sense that there is some kind of structure that everything is built on in a piece of music, is something that I find aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps because our brains are pattern recognizing, there is some subconscious interest in the music as this mystery of hidden structures keeps the brain occupied? I think I could describe my experience as such.
As a player I found it fun in a similar way. Within minutes of practicing with this system, I could get a good sense of how it behaved, not in a definite way where I would predict every note, just the general shape of things. Which proved to be sufficient to be able to quickly and intuitively come up with a repertoire of material that sounded good to improvise with. I quickly disregarded playing straight folk melodies, as the constant jumping around of the accompanying notes distracted too much, however repeating shorter patterns with simple rhythms worked predictably well. In the video below I focused on melismatic improvisation with phrases inspired by the folk music melodies I’ve been practicing.
... text continues after the video
It would of course have been possible to play this with two keyboards using two hands,
however even for a skilled keyboardist it would take considerable practice to be able to follow this rigorous algorithmic approach to accompanying an improvised melodic line. So, for me as a non-keyboard player employing this script allowed me to investigate this idea a lot sooner than I could have otherwise.
Furthermore, I find it important to rather than being strict and, in some sense, more “scientific” in my methods when doing these experiments, to follow where my ears guide me. I could have been more exhaustive in exploring possibilities that I quickly regarded as not working, and sometimes it is good to stay and persevere with music that does not sound good to come to a breakthrough, as I’m trying to do with other parts of this project (chiefly in interpreting folk melodies as close as I can on the synth). But in this case, I felt that it would be to ignore my extensive tacit knowledge that I’ve acquired as a musician. Indeed, with experience from working experimentally (be it in a research context or otherwise) one also gains an understanding of when it is worth to stick with it, and when it is not.
It was also not important for me whether this experiment precisely follows Arvo Pärt’s instructions for tintinnabulation or not, I think that it does, but this is of not important for this project. As for me the final expression of the sounding music is what I mostly care about.
(next: uncanny valley)