Recital 2020: Fused Timbre??

Edgard Varese used a technique which I learnt as fused timbre where he used multiple instruments in the orchestra to play the same dynamic at the same time. Though it's not completely in alignment with the theory, I did make a link in my mind between what I am doing and what he did because like to think of the effects as instruments. If we consider them like that, my piece is full of timbral fusion. Particularly for the landmark sections in the track (Beats, Starlings, Stalactites & Stalagmites, and Lucifer's Penthouse) the movements of the music needed to be uniform so they fit together but have different sound qualities so they develop in the physical space.

Last semester during my sound diaries I came to a conscious realisation that what you hear changes slightly with every movement of your body, so I wanted to use this to base my developments off. Consequently they needed to be really subtle so when I was making the sections develop in the space, I composed with blocks in mind: each "speaker" section was colour coded and the timbre was changed from the last. I wanted it to fit together so it sounded like one environment but still develop enough to feel like different spaces in that place. They all used the same recording and I created effect racks where I could vary the parameters of each layer. This gave them quite a uniform timbral quality but was flexible enough to also create variation in the physical space which I think was very important for this project.

Above is an example of the Starlings. For each permutation of this landmark I would apply this rack and vary all parameters including the EQ. Often it would be really small changes so it was subtle. Probably one of the best examples are the beats in the rhythmic section you can see below. Elise and I thought it would be really effective if there was one part of the track that had a pulse and if I was going to do this I thought it would be more effective if it were in all the speakers. So below is an example of how two of the tracks differed, in this case there have been different effects actually added to the rack! But because the beat is the same it plays at the same time, I think this is the closest I came to real fused timbre in the style of Varese.

From the Elements to the Continuum: Timbre Composition in early Electronic Music. Elena Ungeheuer. 1994. Contemporary Music Review, 10:2, 25-33. DOI: 10.1080/07494469400640271

Rhythm, Form and Content. Edgard Varese. 1959. Schwartz and Childs, Eds., (1998), Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, New York: Da Capo. www.paulj.myzen.co.uk/blog/teaching/voices/files/2008/07/Varese-Rhythm-Form-and-Content.pdf