Monochromes Reflective Essay

 

As an artist, composer, and even a person, I’ve never been inclined to follow any path that has already been taken (or been taken too often). For example, I love folk music and while I enjoy playing it, I also feel it has been a little exhausted. It is already fixed. We have a set idea of what folk music is and I am not yet ready to stress myself about finding new, innovating ways of creating it. As I’m still such an inexperienced composer, it is much more conductive for my practice to head in a direction that hasn’t been explored quite as much and so last year I turned to electronic music that primarily used noise as the medium in my compositions. 

 

This was inspired a lot by Eliane Radigue, a French composer who used to make long, slowly evolving pieces of electronic music. She primarily used this way of thinking about specific frequencies (as opposed to musical “notes”) for her creations, this was undoubtably a result of her studies with Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry earlier in her life. Once I was exposed to her music, her pieces became some of my favourites and so of course, it is difficult to separate your practice from what you love. However, I was already on this path as I had started creating foley-style pieces with found objects as a result of taking my acoustics class in first year. I felt less restricted working with “sound” rather than “music” and so when I used these ways of composing, my creativity and work seemed to just flow.

 

As I went through this process of composition, I started to make more and more parallels with fine art (particularly painting) and music. The most obvious connection is, of course, the fact that electronic music in the form of a recorded album is quite set - as in once it’s bounced, it won’t change on its own. Now this doesn’t apply to all fine art but a lot of it seems to have the same kind of ‘solid’ property to it, at least before it starts to decay but that is a completely different conceptual pathway. I like the stability of these mediums, the control and the predictability. I then explored this idea of building a ‘world’ last year in my recital but there were so many themes and ideas in the one piece, it was hard to talk about and I believe that the quantity of concepts I tried to cover really took away from the production of the music. And so I want to refine and explore this idea of creating aesthetic sound worlds through the use of monochrome composing. I think of this not as a career move, rather it is an artistic exploration and/or study for the purpose of understanding/developing new and diverse ways of thinking about musical composition.

 

Monochrome is a technique which is often used as a study when learning painting mediums like watercolour. It is generally to develop a control of the medium however modern artists like Yves Klein and Mino Argento have used it in published pieces as well. I guess if you wanted to, you could take it back to Leonardo Da Vinci to argue that he created the “wash” technique with oil paints. That is to paint thin layers over and over again of the same colours to create shapes and textures, he often used this only in parts of a painting though (the Mona Lisa’s hair, for example) so it wasn’t a true monochrome but the idea about the layers was there.

 

I want to take the same idea but to a real extreme - that is, either 1 sound source OR utilising the idea of fused timbre in order to create a sound palate. I will then use layers of the same sounds to build up my composition from the lightest to darkest shades. I will be using a computer to make the album electronically and at this point, I am not planning on regulating or minimising the effects or processing that I can use. This will actually create another conceptual layer because you can then think of the computer as being an instrument but that’s not the focus I want for these pieces. So that is the process I am exploring and it differs from my previous music because it is so limited - now it is not just “ambient noise” with no rules about what I can use as sounds, it is a set of refined and restricted, monochrome sound worlds. I’m planning for them to each turn out as roughly 5 minutes long, and so I will create 6 monochromes to fill the space of half an hour. 

 

Plan: As a part of my practice (and a left over creativity habit from when I studied fine art), I will keep a visual journal to jot notes, research artists and composers, create images, aesthetic aspirations for pieces, develop concepts, sketch and create (probably graphic) scores and plans for pieces - hopefully before I make them, and reflect on my processes. This is an ongoing activity to partake in as I carry out a project and it will accompany the submission of my work at the end of the semester. The first actual step I will make toward the album will be artist (and also theory/technique) research to inform my practice. 

 

The next important step for me is concept drawings and physical monochrome paintings for each piece - these will serve a few purposes: I feel it is important for me to have an understanding of the medium and technique I am drawing from in my composition, so it will first be a learning exercise. Then, I might want to have these pieces of visual art to inform my process and the aesthetic of each piece of music but I’ll see how it all develops. From there I will find sound sources: these can be instruments, field recordings, noise, or found objects - they need to be audio (no MIDI/synth sounds as they probably won’t have enough frequency bands to use). I will compose in layers using processing and effects to create variation in the sounds, mixing the audio and documenting the process as I go.

 

Questions:

 

1. How will the monochrome track differ from just a piece of music? For example a piece of piano solo music which also just uses 1 timbre.

2. Does this layering process reflect one of the common ways in which electronic composers work? I guess even all composers..

3. Does the layering process reflect all composition and even all art?

4. Is music really the same as visual art?

5. Is there a different way to create? Without layers? Or would this lack depth and meaning?

6. Is this really minimalism? Yes there is only 1 sound source but what is the role of the computer in this form of composition? 

 

 

References (so far):

 

Rodgers, T. (2010). Pink noises : Women on electronic music and sound. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

 

Lysloff, R., & Gay, L. (2003). Music and technoculture (Music/culture). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 

 

Great Art Explained. (2020). Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci: Great Art Explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9JvUDrrXmY

 

 

 

 

*Idea - use frequency bands so the whole thing is made out of not just a timbral monochrome but a literal single sound as the “palate” (Dan helped with this idea).