Today I played an interesting piece. Basically, it was a short piece composed for solo trombone, called wash. For some reason, the piece didn't work out for the person it was written for. So he took some 3 and a half bars of the piece, recorded them, and then set it on an endless loop, which, over the course of 9 minutes, is distorted and deconstructed until nothing is left but a wall of sound, which eventually, after the 9 minutes are up, goes back to a vastly altered version of the original bars of music.
That was basically the core of the piece. On top of that we had the trombonist himself, who decided it would be cool to play into a microphone hooked into a distortion box, which added a sizable delay effect, and had another effect which added a lot of reverb. He would then play bits of the piece, and improvise the rest, overtop this recorded loop. For some reason, he and his teacher thought it would be cool to add drum set and cello to this mix, so that's where I came in. They also thought it would be nice if I had some distortion, so I finally got to use my amp and distortion box in a performance setting. I must say, it worked beautifully. I love the effects I can put on myself with that box, and I think I came up with a really good one for the piece.
But anyways, it was a really cool project. Basically, we broke the recording into what we thought were appropriate sections, and used stopwatches so we knew exactly where we were in the music, so when the spot came where we were supposed to cut out, we'd know it ahead of time. In the end, it was quite rewarding, since I kind of felt I helped to compose a piece that, at least to me, was original and exciting. Plus I got to improvise live. It wasn't hard, since I had the score in front of me, so I could use bits and pieces of that whenever I wanted. We're doing the piece again on friday. I'm definitely looking forward to taking another stab at it.
Kind of ironic. I never did much modern music at Eastman at all, and here I am at UW Madison, and have done two new music performances in the space of a week.
That was basically the core of the piece. On top of that we had the trombonist himself, who decided it would be cool to play into a microphone hooked into a distortion box, which added a sizable delay effect, and had another effect which added a lot of reverb. He would then play bits of the piece, and improvise the rest, overtop this recorded loop. For some reason, he and his teacher thought it would be cool to add drum set and cello to this mix, so that's where I came in. They also thought it would be nice if I had some distortion, so I finally got to use my amp and distortion box in a performance setting. I must say, it worked beautifully. I love the effects I can put on myself with that box, and I think I came up with a really good one for the piece.
But anyways, it was a really cool project. Basically, we broke the recording into what we thought were appropriate sections, and used stopwatches so we knew exactly where we were in the music, so when the spot came where we were supposed to cut out, we'd know it ahead of time. In the end, it was quite rewarding, since I kind of felt I helped to compose a piece that, at least to me, was original and exciting. Plus I got to improvise live. It wasn't hard, since I had the score in front of me, so I could use bits and pieces of that whenever I wanted. We're doing the piece again on friday. I'm definitely looking forward to taking another stab at it.
Kind of ironic. I never did much modern music at Eastman at all, and here I am at UW Madison, and have done two new music performances in the space of a week.
posted by Nabir at 2:25 AM
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