Benjamin Louis Mawson - - - Composer and Virtual Performance Developer

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Virtual Music Performance
. . . a way of making things seem to be happening that are not.

When I work on a new piece of music, whether in manuscript or in a digital studio, like almost every other composer in the world, I wonder if and how it will be performed and consider ways to do this.
A significant problem for composers working now is the general decline of concert-going which has added to the already manifold difficulties of staging a new performance.
For many reasons, practical as well as aesthetic, composers whose training and instincts are rooted in the dialectics of the Western concert music tradition are creating music in digital format and, increasingly too, for sole release via download.
Most of us own an iPod or a phone that plays music. Since the advent in the 1980s of the Sony Walkman private listening, on the move, has been a growing norm for millions of music listeners.
If we want to sample Azeri mughams or Venezuelan mash-up, download familiar tracks by the Louis Armstrong Hot Five or compare Horowitz with Richter playing Chopin, there are Youtube, iTunes, Spotify, Yandex, Bleep and countless other channels and repositories: a vast store of recorded music is instantly available free of charge, to flick through, glance at and stockpile.
The older practice of an audience gathering to listen to a performance by players of instruments persists but seems to be viewed, like the embattled Thane of Cawdor, “under heavy judgment…to bear…that life/Which [it] deserves to lose”. Undeserved as this unfolding tragedy of course is, it is demonstrably true that ubiquitous listening to recorded sound is on a continued increase whilst listening to live 'art' music is a diminishing activity, engaged in by a minority, which cannot survive without increasingly scarce subsidy.
For a variety of reasons whose origins are diverse, live performance has continued throughout my life to dwindle. Over twenty years ago, whilst still at school, I earned money playing the piano in pubs and continued for some years to subsist wholly and then in part on such income as could be had as a pianist in nightclubs, bars and restaurants, as a violinist in street bands, staging shows in pedestrian precincts, railway station concourses and shopping centres or playing solo in accompaniment to jugglers and magicians. It was a living carved out a penny at a time, a directly rewarding experience, shot through with danger and uncertainty, frustrations and conflict but nonetheless a vivid and beautiful time.
I was also a member of orchestras, choirs and chamber groups. In July of 1989, the regional youth orchestra of which I was member toured Germany and the Czech Republic. On arriving at a hotel just outside Carlovy Vary in the Black Forest we found that the ballroom in which we were supposed to perform was precisely the size required to accommodate an orchestra. No concert could take place.
Rapid negotiations undertaken by our interpreter led to a visit from the town's casino manager, a somewhat erratic larger gentleman called Zdenek, who joined us for breakfast, calling for beer then slightly more loudly for vodka. He said after breakfast that we could use his large concert hall.
There were eight hours before the concert and, to sell tickets we copied our interpreter's Czech writing onto placards, walking the town to promote the gig. We chatted in English and sign language with conscripted soldiers, invalid pensioners taking the spa waters, local waiters and old residents.
The rehearsal was perfunctory and tense: we barely knew that anyone would come. As we tuned instruments backstage, wondering if there would be an audience at all or if we might play to five off-duty casino workers, we heard the hall start to fill. Filing onto the stage, the sight made us tearful with joy and, I suppose, relief. The hall, which could take around three hundred seated, was now so full that rows of soldiers stood at the aisles and back, their fifty rifles neatly upright under the watchful eye of their biggest colleague.
The very old sat in groups of friends; there were young families and groups of young men and of young women, who I noted did not appear to know each other or even to flirt casually. There was a very unfamiliar sense that we were in front of an earnest audience, come together not for the social ritual of being at a concert, but purely because they were interested in hearing a programme of orchestra music. We played well and they gave their respectful, restrained applause after each piece. As our encore, we delivered an excited rendition of Fucik's Gladiators, to which the soldiers, moved from reverent attentiveness, now clapped and stamped, roaring approval and demanding a second playing at its end, which we happily gave, at considerably greater speed and volume. The music ended to euphoric and lengthy applause from the entirely standing audience: it was the most satisfying performance I can remember taking part in and have experienced nothing like it in the UK or elsewhere, despite what still amounts almost to an allergy to our programme of the evening, including Malcolm Arnold, Elgar and such.
Throughout the nineties, I staged formal concerts and raised the cost of publicity, venue hire and musicians' fees by selling advertising in the programme to small businesses. The programmes were all of new works. Ticket revenues were an extra on which it was unsafe to rely, although with exhaustive, aggressive ticket sales we could generally fill a venue with capacity of up to around eighty. The shared expectation by musicians and composers alike at the concerts I organised was that we would all have a record of our work for demonstration purposes; nothing more. Each gig required a few months' work to stage.
If now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, one asks to play the piano in a public place it is usually viewed as a problematic request requiring at least two decision makers, who seem best trained in persuading the makers of such requests to leave quietly. At best one is looked at with surprise by bar staff and told apologetically that the instrument is only there for show. Several pianos I have found in restaurants and bars, in quite a few countries, turn out to be just the cabinet: strings, action, pedals long ago removed. It is more than an affront to the sensibilities of one who, once at the height of happiness playing impromptu live music, now lifts the lid of a piano to find split, cracked keys rigidly glued in place. It may be like seeing a familiar-looking figure in an armchair under half light furthest from the fireside and, approaching to greet them, realising they were dead, stuffed rigid and with marbles for eyes.
The general demise of live music and the accompanying insouciance with which all but the musicians themselves have accepted the quiet brutality of licensing laws and the cacophonous torture of ubiquitous recorded music are a pity, a tragic loss which, if it ever happens, will take generations to repair. So the older culture, the one that has always been there has, in around two decades or a little more, lost so much ground to the exponential growth of digital media that it is becoming a rare specimen, a strange and unexpected pleasure to hear anything of live music at all when out eating, drinking, meeting in public places.
That is one, important influence upon the mode of thought, the technical and aesthetic solution I hope to expound clearly and persuasively here.
Another, equally pressing concern for me is that the way we currently listen to digital music lacks at least two of the elements crucial to live music as a communicative, communal act: the meditative transport of immersion in a complete, uninterrupted hearing of a musical work and the experience of being in an audience, listening to a new work collectively with others.
A significant part of my work as a composer is concerned with how the digital studio may extend the capacity both of our auditory credulity and the technical range of the imaginary performer. Perhaps more important than these questions - how we can both humanise technology and use it to exceed the physical limitations of real performers - is how, especially as digital music continues to eclipse live performance, to narrow the gap between these two listening experiences, to further humanise and add unpredictability, organicity, to the experience of listening to music relayed in fixed format by a digital processor.
Music is now made that sounds like a real performance even though the music is impossible for real musicians to play.
A composer may continue building upon, adapting, responding to the work of musical forebears and generate work that emerges from and extends historical practice, synthesising new personal languages, whilst disengaged from the previously crucial process of interpretation by conductors and performers.
This is a strange and at times bewildering liberation. Composers have always needed to be mindful of what could and could not be played: it has become possible to conceive and create the ostensibly perfect performance of a piece of music.
On first composing in the digital studio I brought experience of primitive overdubbing experiments and combining tape or generated noise with live instrumental playing. It was with what the computer could do in terms of timbral character that could not be done elsewhere that I was most pre-occupied.
Early preoccupations of electronic then digital composers centred on the creation of new timbral possibility either through edited, mixed combination or by synthesis.
The development of sampling and huge increases in computer processing power suddenly make new combinations of sampled and synthetic instruments viable. Until the last few years, synthesis was the only means to represent real instruments and this had severe shortcomings as will be remembered from any 1980s or 90s pop tracks with synthesised strings or horns.
This has meant that simulation of traditional acoustic instruments is now possible within the digital studio where, until the development of suitable levels of processing power and with the concomitant hindrances of synthetic instruments, timbral characteristics of digital music were bound to strive for novelty and separation from their acoustic counterparts as an important way of setting the new digital music apart.
This is no longer necessary or of central interest to those working in the commercial field. Live players have been replaced by their simulacra primarily for reasons of cost and of control. With a very simple part for strings to play in unison it is far easier and cheaper to programme the string parts than employ, rehearse and record live players. Compare too the highly polished, edited and compressed string parts on Stevie Wonder's 1980 Rocket Love (Hotter than July) with Nelson Riddle's arrangement for Sinatra's 1958 Spring is Here (Only the Lonely) - the evolution of string writing that has been so rapidly facilitated by advances in simulation and sound processing.
We can though and must revitalise the links between art music and its potential audiences, to exploit this alien world of automata and digital information in refreshing our approaches to the fundamental characters of our musical languages.
The technology has by no means accomplished all that it might, even for something so relatively straightforward as simulating the piano. The attack and sustain of a sampled instrument can be varied in more minute degrees than a human pianist could accurately control. The speed, complexity, density of a score can utilise the benefits of these new software-based representations of instruments to generate an increasingly close approximation of a real performance.
In terms of piano simulation there remain two serious obstacles to realism in MIDI-based composition; sustain remains (in the majority of cases) a switch controller rather than a continuous one. This means that half-pedalling or slow sustain increase or decreases are impossible. It is either on or it is off. At the real piano it is possible to use tiny variations in pressure upon the sustain pedal to enrich and blur or sharpen and pointillise one's performance.
Another profound hindrance to realism is the general absence of sympathetic resonance that one would hear in the sound board of a piano; the signature of an individual piano is its unique, complex overtone structures, the quiet combined resonance of other strings when a single one is struck. So amongst things that cannot yet be done with the simulated piano are holding keys down silently in order that their strings be undamped to resonate most loudly.
At a piano, silently depress and hold, with the left hand, the chord C-G-C. Then play with sharp attack, two octaves higher up, E-G-C. A well-tuned instrument will produce a C major chord of ringing clarity that slowly, smoothly fades until the quieter resonance of the sound board to the vibration of all the other strings can indistinctly be heard.
Now take all keys up and silently press the left hand back down on the same three notes, C-G-C. This time, play a B major (B-D#-F#) or Ab minor (Ab-Cb-Eb) triad and listen to the ugly beautiful throbbing that emerges, staggering into the daylight like the survivor of an explosion. The studio is not yet ready for such subtle colours.
Also, all other means of playing the piano other than with fingers on keys, like hitting the strings with percussion mallets and fuzzing them with wire and paper or strumming them with coins; these sounds still require recording and manipulation of audio. The process of recreating a piece for prepared piano to sound entirely as though actually played would be exceedingly arduous and of arguable musical merit by comparison to the real thing.
Cage's Sonatas & Interludes for prepared piano and Lachenmann's Guiro would be futile to attempt this way.
In the digital studio, the limitations of what can be achieved are before the composer just as when writing a score on paper to be delivered to musicians for rehearsal. The compositional decision-making process however is not concerned with whether the score's demands upon a performer are practical but entirely whether it will sound effective.
The studio is a single multi-faceted instrument of which scoring or other representations of the sound are merely an integral part.
I have only know one composer who used music notation software and yet approached it without any difference in consideration to his former work with manuscript. He through-composed, like a tunnel-boring drill, taking the entire vertical line of the score forwards at once, working always in absolute silence.
On considering this approach it has always seemed counterintuitive: the only advantage being the saving of time transferring the completed manuscript to a typeset, printed document.
Drawbacks with this include the absence of sketch materials. If something goes wrong but you cannot exactly identify where in the immersive experience of composing, sketches nudge the memory and assist retracing one's steps.
One instructs the computer in minute detail how to render those notes, to make the music sound humanly performed, and music that could never have been made now enters the ears of listeners, tickling their senses with half-glimpsed fancies and fantasies of an ethereal world of memory, impossibility and hopefully, intuitive truth, authenticity of expression.
On instruments other than the piano, such as strings, this is far harder to achieve. Dense, un-spread chords on a simulated violin would sound entirely bizarre, because unrealistic, to most ears.
Our accustomed sense of what can be done on a violin is ingrained in even listeners of little or no musical training and realism of digital delivery depends on the performance being plausible - if a chord is sounded across the arched strings, it must be spread in live playing.
Each note of the chord will have a slightly different attack, be held for a longer or shorter time and will ring more or less in sympathy (clearly) with the other notes according to the general intonation of the instrument, tuning of strings, other acoustical properties.
It is so complex a task to simulate solo violin performance that we have not yet achieved anything like realism, although the potential for this approaches ever closer.
On the other hand, the piano already permits extensions of reality (almost) seamlessly into virtual experience. The piano's sound is characterised by a short attack followed by variable length sustain, depending on how long the note is held or the sustain pedal depressed.
Technical feats may now be achieved at the virtual piano, that players of idiosyncratic brilliance like Errol Garner and Art Tatum would be astonished by.
The difficulty though of the digital composer's task lies in achieving the complex subtleties that characterise such pianists: apparent mastery of a fluctuating, teasing route around the implicit beat that always returns in a way perceived to be bang on the nail: the ear is deceived and seems to hear accuracy and rigidity where there is, in fact, considerable temporal fluidity.
Too much accuracy then very quickly becomes boring to hear. The wrong sorts of inaccuracy, too, sound wrong. So the minute process of ironing, ruffling, sculpting out the humanoid curves of a digital performance is generally more complex and challenging than the composing itself.
While the conception, composition, performance stages are now blurred, they are all essential to realising a digital performance that sounds as though it might really be played by a powerful sentient performer.
Every stage is crucial to the work and its character: from the composer's half-remembered dream or glimpsed fragment that begins the process to the final moment of a delivered performance, the composer now controls each decision, each factor in how the music is transmitted to the listener.
These knotted, interdependent layers of the music's route to a reality in the listener's memory make the process of composing in the digital studio fundamentally different from past working experience and practice.
Although a composer might write for their own instrument and deliver the performance themselves, in such a case they would write a score and at each recital, re-engage with the written code, teasing out its sense more or less afresh and rendering the music according perhaps to a different instrument, venue or mood. Each is unique, at least minutely and sometimes radically altered from the last.
The digital composer's challenge is achieving the complex subtleties of rhythmic surprise and timbral fluidity, making it possible for new sounds to emerge from the musical vocabulary with which we are familiar, engendering warps and fluctuations of our auditory expectations, new expressive possibilities emerging from collisions and inter-weavings of the almost familiar, nearly remembered...
But how is this music to be heard? On speakers, in a concert hall or pub venue? In the car, a field, a mountainside?
The challenge of giving a live performance of a digital work is enormous but very exciting and the experience is coming this way. Read more. . .
Zones of Intensities: Auditory Hyper-Reality and Virtual Music Performance