ÿþ<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../ygmNEW.css" type="text/css"> <title>CMThen-NowDetails</title> </head> <body> <div class="TopBack"> </div> <div class="TopFront"> <h2>About <em>Color Music, Then and Now</em></h2> </div> <div class="Links"> <p><a href="../../index.html">Home</a> </p> <p><a href="../../aboutus.html">About YGM</a> </p> <p><a href="../../products.html">Products-Ordering</a> </p> <p><a href="../../contact.html">Contact YGM</a> </p> <p><a href="../../links.html">Related Sites</a> </p> </div> <div class="Center"> <h3><em>Color Music, Then and Now</em> by Wayne Slawson</h3> <p> CD YGM-04<br> Published by Yank Gulch Music<br> Copyright &copy; 2007. All rights reserved. <br> </p> <h3>Notes by Wayne Slawson.</h3> This recording combines two of my pieces from the 1980s with recent compositions. <em>Colors</em> and <em>Greetings</em> were composed and realized at the University of Pittsburgh with computer-controlled, analog synthesizers (an ARP and a Buchla). The recent music was composed and synthesized using a software synthesis system called <a href="../GENERAL/SYNTALnotes.html" target="_blank">SYNTAL</a>, which incorporates a version of the Klatt speech synthesizer (see J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 87, 1990, 820-857), and is available as freeware for computers with UNIX-type operating systems, such as Mac OSX, Linex, etc. Please <a href="mailto:ygm@yankgulchmusic.com? subject=SYNTAL%20Inquiry">email us</a> for information about installing SYNTAL. <h4><em>Colors</em> (1985) [17m 38s].</h4> <p> While doing research for the book <em>Sound Color</em> during a sabbatical year at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (1978--1979), I began planning a composition that would represent a musical application of the concepts I was developing. The first version of <em>Colors</em> was completed in late 1980 and was presented at a number of concerts in 1981. Nine colors (from color classes EE, AE, AA, AW, OO, UU, OE, II) and a neutral color are included in <em>Colors</em>. For an overview of sound color in general, click <a href="../GENERAL/SCinGeneral.html"> here.</a>) The stereo version presented here was slightly revised in 1985 and digitized in 2007. </p> <p> An extensive discussion of the piece appears in <em>Sound Color</em>, Chapter Seven. Here are quotations from program notes for a presentation in Lund, Sweden: </p> <p> <blockquote> <em>Colors</em> is in the form of eleven variations, the main unifying feature of which is a structure of sound colors. The structure is presented straightforwardly in the first three variations---"The Landscape"---as a combination of seven contrapuntal lines of vowel-like sounds. The pattern of pitched and noise excitation is varied from one variation to the next while the sound-color structure remains the same. </p> <p> In variations four through seven---"Motions"---the same color structure is expressed, but now with continuously changing, glissando-like sound colors. Once more the variability throughout these variations is in the excitation, which becomes gradually harsher and louder from variations four through six. The tempo also quickens dramatically over these variations from a very slow variation four to a highly compressed variation six. The seventh variation, very fast like variation six, has distinct pitches that refer back to the first three variations. </p> <p> The sound-color structure in variations eight through ten---"Events and Continuities"---is excited by percussive, pulsing sounds along with a pattern of noise and pitched sounds that become increasingly prominent. The pitches that emerge are transformations of those of the first three variations. The colors are fixed in some contrapuntal lines, continuously varying in others. </p> <p> The final variation---"A Return"---presents the sound-color structure of the first group of variations, now excited by pitches anticipated in part by variations eight through ten. </p> </blockquote> </p> Here's an excerpt from Variation 1: <br> <embed src="./ColorsVar1Excerpt.mp3" autoplay="false" border="2px" width="200px" height="30px" margin="10px"> <br> Here's an excerpt from Variations 6, 7, and the beginning of 8: <br> <embed src="./ColorsVar678Excerpt.mp3" autoplay="false" border="2px" width="200px" height="30px" margin="10px"> <h4><em>Greetings</em> (1985) [11m 2s].</h4> <p> <em>Greetings</em>, a tribute to Ross Lee Finney on the occasion of his 80th birthday, was composed and realized in the hybrid, computer-controlled analog studio used for <em>Colors</em> earlier. The piece's nine large sections are clearly set off by means of a kind of typology of sources. The sources in the first, third, fifth, seventh and final sections are pitched buzzes that are deformed slowly by frequency modulation. All eight colors sound in continuous sweeps during each gesture of these sections. The sections in between are themselves sectionalized, with quick passages alternating with slow. Pitched, noise, and click sources excite color structures that are steady-state or with brief initial transients that imitate those in consonants. </p> <p> From time-to-time throughout the piece, the contrapuntal voices sound a sequence of colors from classes AW, II, neutral, II--- the vowels in the name of this distinguished American composer. </p> Here's an excerpt starting in the middle of the first section: <br> <embed src="./GreetingsExcerpt.mp3" autoplay="false" border="2px" width="200px" height="30px" margin="10px"> </p> <h4><em>Water Colors</em> (2006) [4m 8s].</h4> <p> Instigated by the theme "eau", which the Bourges festival chose in 2006 for its "Open Work Project", <em>Water Colors</em> is, in effect, a new variation on the color structure from <em>Colors</em>---now with an added collection of sounds recorded from the creek that runs through our farm in southern Oregon. A prolog and epilog frame the variation itself in which the sound colors seem to emerge from and recede into the water. The water sounds themselves are familiar; the way they interact with the voice-like filter may seem just a little mysterious. </p> Here's an excerpt, starting a little after the beginning: <br> <embed src="./WaterColorsExcerpt.mp3" autoplay="false" border="2px" width="200px" height="30px" margin="10px"> <h4><em>Here in Silence</em> (2007) [5m 42s].</h4> <p> The PBS Newshour's Honor Roll of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan is as impressive a reminder of the costs of war as we are likely to get on our national media. Photographs of the men and women are shown in a kind of silent liturgy for about six seconds each. Silence is exactly the right accompaniment; nevertheless, I feel the necessity for a musical response. <em>Here in Silence</em> is my response. A six-second grid underlies the timing of events. Within restrictions of overall mood and tempo, I have tried to compose with a range of event densities that reflect, for me, something of the variety in the photographs&mdash;serious young marines in dress uniforms, smiling sergeants in casual dress, officers in fatigues&mdash;each with an undeniable individuality. </p> Here is the beginning of the piece: <br> <embed src="./HereInSilenceExcerpt.mp3" autoplay="false" border="2px" width="200px" height="30px" margin="10px"> <h4><em>Winter Rounds</em> (2007) [11m 17s].</h4> Completed early in 2007, <em>Winter Rounds</em>, is the latest installment in my series of ``crooked rounds''. The idea is simple. A tune is repeated over and over---as in, say, ``Row, row, row your boat''---by each of four voices, with the entrances offset in time. The rounds are called ``crooked'' because in each voice the tempo changes with each repetition of the tune and each voice starts at one of five different tempos. Also, the ``tune'' changes somewhat in each of the different tempos; the rhythms are the same, but the pitches, and colors are different---closely related, but different. Impossible---or at least fiendishly difficult---if they were to be scored for singers, crooked rounds can be synthesized quite straightforwardly by computer. In <em>Winter Rounds</em>, the rounds themselves are framed by busy, patter-like passages whose strands seem to argue among themselves about what is to come or what has just been heard. A variety of moods are embodied in the rounds: slow and stately, quick and soft, raucous, contemplative, changing from soft to raucus, etc. The last round unwinds excerpts from previous rounds and an extended final frame closes the piece. Here's an excerpt from near the end of Round 1 through Round 2: <br> <embed src="./WinterRoundsExcerpt.mp3" autoplay="false" border="2px" width="200px" height="30px" margin="10px"> </p> <a name="generalnotes"> <h3>Notes on Color Music in General</h3> </a> <p> For an overview of "color music" and biographical date about Wayne Slawson <a href="../GENERAL/SCinGeneral.html"> click here</a> <hr> <p> To order <em>Color Music, Then and Now</em>, please return to <a href="../../products.html#cmthen-now"> YGM Products</a>. </p> <br> <br> <br> </div> </body> </html>