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Transmission (1996-99) |
electric guitar and live electronics, comissioned by Elision
Transmission for electric guitar and live electronics was commissioned by ELISION and is dedicated to Daryl Buckley. Its main point of departure is a system of composed movements across the guitar which generate changing harmonic fields: this “fabric” is used to produce the notated materials, by diverse means of compositorial derivation, and also the sound-materials played out of the computer (in the second, fourth and last of the six sections), which are derived from a recording of the “fabric”. The processes of derivation (of transmission of the original “message”) continue during live performance: the compositional process by means of improvisational playing which emerges from “lacunae” in the score of the fourth section, and the technological process by means of live electronic processing of the guitar throughout. The original “fabric” underlies the entire performance as if it were a deep archaeological stratum, whose transmission to the surface of the music proceeds through distortions, elucidations, losses and reconstructions, and so forth.
Another point of departure was an attempt to reconceive the electric guitar itself, neither as an expanded (or impoverished, depending on one’s point of view) version of its “classical” forebear, nor as a medium for effecting a fashion-conscious fusion with its familiar contemporary vocabulary. transmission uses a “hybrid” instrument equipped with both “electric” and “acoustic” outputs, and uses playing techniques related to both of the above traditions as well as (probably most importantly) what Derek Bailey calls “non-idiomatic improvisation” (to which I would prefer the term “radically idiomatic”). Each of the six sections embodies a different angle of view on the instrument itself (as well as on the aforementioned compositional material, which in the end comes to the same thing); each also uses a different relationship between the instrument and its electronic “environment”, which in each case involves notated parts for one or more footpedals, affecting such dimensions as pitch-shifting and timbral modulation as well as volume.
The original guitar timbres were devised in collaboration with Daryl Buckley; the electronic sounds are performed using the LiSa sampling software developed by Frank Baldé at STEIM in Amsterdam. The first complete performance was given by Daryl Buckley and the composer in Oldenburg in August 2000.