A Performer's Take on Electronic Music (The Click Track is 100% Pure Evil)

A Performer's Take on Electronic Music (The Click Track is 100% Pure Evil)

contributed by Brad Baumgardner ( www.bradbaumgardner.com )



Those who know me know that I don’t write much electro-acoustic music, which is to say that aside from required class projects, I haven’t written any electronic or electro-acoustic music. In fact, I consider myself woefully inadequate regarding the use of technology in general. We never had a computer in the house when I was growing up and I didn’t even have an email account until I was a wide-eyed college freshman in the Fall of 1999. Given my largely analog existence, it is a wonder that I greatly enjoy performing electro-acoustic works. I take pleasure in nearly every aspect of the process, from collaborating with the composer, to overcoming the obstacles and hurdles involved in integrating my instrument (bass clarinet) with electronic sounds, to the seemingly endless wood-shedding I must put into some of the ridiculously difficult parts that come my way. As an enthusiastic new music bass clarinetist and experienced acoustic composer, I have very little to offer in the way of technical advice for composers of electronic music. But, I can offer the experience and observations of a committed musician who has worked on a number of electro-acoustic pieces and has discovered things that electronic composers can do to either greatly aid or substantially piss off a musician who has agreed to tackle a difficult work.

As I’m sure anyone who happens to read this already knows, synchronization is often the most difficult part of performing with any kind of fixed media. Both tape and video are completely unforgiving and relentlessly repetitive musical partners because fixed media is exactly that – fixed. It will never change for, or react to a live performer. For composers, pieces featuring a performer coupled with fixed media can present a specific appeal – the accompaniment is for all intents and purposes relatively foolproof. It never changes, so even an incompetent performer cannot completely derail a work. If the performer gets lost or screws up in any noticeable fashion, the electronic components still sound polished and well crafted. We’re all friends here, so let’s be honest – composers (me included) are often very weary of being made to look incompetent by less than stellar performances. Fixed media offers a solution to this dilemma since it is a wonderful way to faithfully reproduce a composer’s intent time after time with little to no risk involved. But, from a performer’s perspective, artistically realizing a piece of music that involves fixed media is one of the most difficult things we can be asked to do.
I have played for a number of composers who have employed different methods for simplifying this task. Some of them are useful and others I completely detest. I can say with absolute vigor and no regret that as a soloist I absolutely abhor click tracks. As a composer, I can understand the appeal of a click track. It functions much in the same way my metronome does. It guarantees that I am keeping accurate time. But unlike my metronome, which is used solely for practice, many composers expect their players to perform with this unrelenting pulsation. It robs performers of the opportunity to actually produce musical phrases by instead requiring them to realize notation against a time grid rather than interacting with auditory cues and ultimately making more expressive music. I can’t speak for other performers, but I have a very difficult time reacting to other musicians or even static tape or video with a persistent click in my ear. That constant click also alters my own concept of my tone production and results in a less confident and less expressive sound from my horn. I take no issue with click tracks for conductors of large ensembles or click tracks that are included as optional rehearsal tools, but requiring a player to perform with a click track is essentially unmusical.

Composers often resort to the use of a click track because tape parts are not always overtly metrical. I don’t know much about the popular aesthetics of electronic music, but in my experience composers shy away from musically metrical tape parts. It probably has something to do with the whole “if you can’t figure out the way I constructed my sounds, then I must be a great composer” attitude that tends to permeate the genre. While I don’t necessarily agree with this culture of electronic mystique, some of the tape parts I’ve heard are very unique, but often difficult to analyze from either a technical or a musical perspective. This doesn’t mean that these electronically produced elements are not inherently musical in their own right, it just means that it is difficult for performers to take cues from music that isn’t predictable to some degree. Composers often build in auditory landmarks that function as musical signposts for performers. This is often very useful, but if they are few and far between it can be difficult to regulate the space between cues. Luckily I’ve never crashed and burned on a tape and electronics piece in performance, but there have been plenty of rehearsal situations in which I either had to wait for the tape to catch up to me or feverishly accelerate through material to overtake the tape part. A click track may remedy this situation, but I feel that it takes away from my ability to play musically and makes me a very accurate robotic pitch generator.

In my experience, one of the simplest and most successful techniques for synchronizing non-metrical tape parts with a live performer is the construction of interactive cues. If tape parts can be chopped into smaller fragments that can be operated by the performer via foot pedal, or triggered by the composer during live performance, flexibility is created without sacrificing the reliability of the tape part. This allows flexibility in the absolute time of the tape part and also creates the possibility of free time sections within a fixed media piece.

I’ve also played with visual cues, both within tape parts and as counters displayed in monitors. These can be very useful with highly improvisatory music, but are nearly impossible as musical markers if the part is complex and requires my constant visual attention. I’ll try just about anything, but my experience with fixed media has made me most comfortable with flexible cues activated by triggering. In my opinion this is the easiest and most effective way of accurately representing the composer’s intentions while keeping the part playable for the performer.

I enjoy playing with fixed media, but I really love playing with interactive electronics. Programs like Max/MSP that allow me as a performer to have a hand in the production of the electronic sounds are very appealing. As I’m sure anyone reading this knows, the possibilities are nearly endless with a program like this. Most of what I’ve heard in this vein tends to be either loop heavy or effects driven. Many composers will generate grooves that may be layered by the player to create dense textures for soloing. While this is really fun to play, if you don’t have a complete monster of a soloist who has the vision to think at least three steps ahead of where he or she is, the audience loses interest very quickly. I’ve also heard a lot of pieces that basically alter an acoustic instrument’s sound much in the way that guitar pedals change a guitar’s basic sound. This can be a really useful tool, but when a piece is centered around this timbral aspect, the gimmick ceases to be engaging after a couple of minutes. These loop and effects heavy pieces often make me feel inconsequential as a player. In these situations I feel that the composer really should have written a tape piece, because all of his or her objectives could be met without me having to learn a part. I understand that the technology involved in performing these kinds of works in a “live” setting makes them that much cooler to most musicians, but if I’m going to woodshed a solo part and commit to a convincing performance, I want a part that will let me shine rather than highlight the super cool programming of the composer and the abilities of his computer programs. The best (at least most fun for me) interactive pieces that I’ve played have always involved me personally as a player. They are constructed in a way that makes me sound great at what I do best while still allowing the electronics to showcase the composer’s demented auditory vision.

I can’t give any advice on how to create pieces like this because frankly, I don’t have the first clue. But, I can tell you that every electro-acoustic piece that I’ve really enjoyed was always the result of a significant collaboration between the composer and myself. As composers (both electronic and acoustic) we always look the best when we write the things that performers want to play. I’ve learned this the hard way…

*******************************************************************

Now that you’ve let me ramble on about my own particular likes and dislikes in electronic music, I’d like to mention a few examples that illustrate the points I’ve been trying to make.

Lately, I’ve been performing a bass clarinet and tape piece called Fractal Excursions by Pei Ying Yuan. This piece was written for me as a result of the KCEMA commissioning project. We worked closely on the piece, and Pei Ying was very willing to alter portions at my suggestion so that we both looked good. The tape part is divided into cues, which may be triggered by the performer or by the person running the tech at the board. Pei Ying built in some improvisation for me and was kind enough to ask which super altissimo pitches I could jump up and easily grab (for those interested concert D6 and D#6 are pretty easy to just pop out) and she wrote them into a virtuosic passage that makes me look like a complete beast. I always enjoy playing those parts because quite honestly . . . they are really impressive.

Another of my favorites to play is Adam Hardin’s Echolalia. Adam set up a framework that constantly samples the bass clarinet and uses these samples in real time against the material currently being played by the performer. He also uses some processing at points in the composition. This keeps me engaged because I know that whatever I put into the computer I will most likely be hearing out of the monitor anywhere from 2 to 20 seconds in the future. This piece is also controlled either from the computer or via foot pedal. Adam has built in a degree of freedom by letting me repeat portions or by opening certain sections up for complete improvisatory freedom. This kind of trust in a composer inspires me to make sure that I represent his vision well and I always try to play this piece a little differently each time in order to pay tribute to the nature of its construction.

Another one of my absolute favorites is Scott Blasco’s Four Songs from the Caucasian Chalk Circle for soprano and playback. I’ve heard my friend Katie Crawford perform this 3 or 4 times and every time she does it I think I love it even more. Scott has shattered the electronic cult of complexity with this piece. The electronic accompaniments are fairly simple and don’t feature any super technological manipulation. The work allows the soprano to be expressive and shine as the obvious focal point of the work. I don’t know very much about the creation of electronic music, but to me the sounds seem fairly straightforward and they are definitely overtly metrical. Again this seems to fly in the face of the generally accepted electronic aesthetic of over processed complexity. The important thing about this piece is that it is expertly crafted and supremely tasteful. It is an example that simple electronic music can be truly sublime.

If you would like to hear these pieces, the first two may be found on my website bradbaumgardner.com and the latter at scottblasco.com