• In every instance, Sander sought inclusion in his images. SS soldiers were represented equally alongside farmers, bankers, and the homeless. He eschewed visual politicking for a more ethnographic approach, and his preferred medium of photography proved to be ideally suited for this objective documentation. This approach is simply impossible in music, and as such, Jamboree is an extremely subjective piece of work. I don’t think this in any way detracts from the overall strength of the project, but it does place the work as a whole in a slightly different category – it’s a subjective documentation – true crime as music.
• While I was walking through the gallery, I found it hard to avoid a type of temporal rubbernecking. Nearly every subject in every photograph would now be dead. To photograph something is almost to buck fate – to wholly define a moment by removing it from the endless flow of time. Sander recognized this – one of the most powerful images in the series, which unfortunately was not included in this exhibition, is the death mask of his son, Erich Sander (to whom Jamboree is dedicated).
• It’s interesting that a person’s taxonomic value is summed up by Sander as “Banker” or “Communist Party Leader”. Gives some perspective on his views on employment.
• In his own time, Sander was viewed as being pretty conservative, which is something I didn’t realize. He didn’t bother with the technical or compositional innovations of the time, instead preferring conventional compositions produced using unwieldy, antiquated technology. In a time of advances in perspective theory and handheld cameras, Sander’s technique meant that his work wasn’t included in exhibits focusing on ‘modern’ photography. It’s understandable really – with no knowledge of the larger context, his individual images are merely good. They are only truly great when taken as small parts of a much greater whole.

One book closes, another opens.

I mentioned in the notes about the sessions that we decided to record the fundamental components of each track live, which impacted the mixing stage in a few ways. When you record a loud band live, there is inevitably a certain amount of bleed between the microphones on each instrument. So when we turned up the guitar microphone, you could faintly hear the drum track in the background. It’s actually exactly what I wanted for the session – that bleed is actually one of the things that gives recordings from the 60′s a certain flavor – but it does add a level of economy to the mixing process. You can’t really go back and make small fixes in the controlled studio environment. If you were to edit in a part recorded without the rest of the band, that track’s tone would change where the piece was inserted because the resulting bleed from the other instruments would disappear. So Pro Tools for us became less of an editing environment and more of a dumb recorder, which, for this project, was completely appropriate.

We began the mixing process by arranging the individual Pro Tools tracks into several stereo submixes (or stems). We had separate submixes for the drums, guitars, bass, vocals, organ, keyboards, and any other random things that would pop up in songs. These submixes were sent through the beautiful vintage API console in Studio C to give them a little analog warmth. At the console we used several processing effects:

• One of the engineers at Omega had a rack of GML boxes which we were very privileged to use on vocals (GML is the namesake of George Massenburg, the inventor of parametric EQ). We used a Model 8900 GML dynamic range controller (basically, a compressor) and Mod8200 EQ.
• For much of the reverb on the album we used an EMT 140-ST Plate Reverb, a 4′ x 8′ sheet of sheet metal that echos when a transducer vibrates it. It was so large it was held on another floor of the studio, so we had to dial in the settings in a different room.

Within Pro Tools, there were some subtle compression added to some of the drum tracks (mostly the kick), Several of the vocal tracks had a lot of abrupt dynamic shifts which we were able to smooth out with some automation (automation allows you to change the level of a track automatically, so you don’t have to always man a fader) – the rest of the level issues were smoothed out with the vocal compression (compression variably compresses the level of an input track, making the loud material quieter and the quieter material louder). We also added a bit of light vocal harmonizing on The Trucker, and a subtle slapback echo on The Performer. But – and this is very important – at no point in the mixing or processing was any AutoTune used.

With the automation done and the processing in place, we then rode the faders slightly and dumped the master stereo mixes onto 1/2″ analog tape. The tape tended to soften the edges out a bit, and gives the whole album a round, late 60′s sound. Between the API and the tape machine we used a Drawmer 1968 Mercenary Edition stereo bus compressor – this was set pretty lightly and was more used to get the appropriate level to tape. After we took everything from Pro Tools, went through the console and the outboard processing gear, and bounced the resulting mix onto analog tape, we took the resulting tape mix, bounced it back to a master Pro Tools session, and pronounced it done.

As we were going through the process, I found it helped to think of the mixes as existing in a three dimensional space. In addition to the left/right panning position of each track, there’s a kind of depth to each track as well. This depth can be controlled by volume, compression, reverb, and other effects, and changes with the relative levels of each track during the song – it’s quite a dance, and I was lucky to work with someone as talented as Scotty. Everything ended up sounding wonderful.

So – a fascinating process, and way less stressful than the tracking. Next step – mastering.

[Here's a link to a high resolution image]

I printed the score out on a large (~20 feet) sheet of butcher paper and taped it to the dining room wall.  Over the next few weeks I made additions and notations, and in the end arrived at something I felt accurately represented what I was hearing in my head.  As a document of my compositional process, the score was a fantastic success.  But that was also the score’s main problem – it had become an object that represented my process.  Which was great for me, but I quickly found that my object ended up being a crappy tool for other performers.  When I rolled out my opus for a group of musicians expecting something akin to a traditional score, they looked at me like I had a horn on my head.  They got into it eventually, but it wasn’t the wild success I was hoping for.

So aside from it being more of an object and less of a tool, what went wrong?

Two main things:

1 – It was completely non-representational.  Without some type of traditional score component, people had nothing to grab onto.
2 – It wasn’t developed with the performers.  It had been in my head so long it made perfect sense to me, but without a frame of reference, anybody else looking at it saw just a swarm of lines.

So how can we do better?  I’m working on an example and hoped to have it ready by tomorrow, but I’m going to give it a little more time and try to get things working better.

Stay tuned.

What we’re concerned with is the addition of graphical elements to scores as suggestions for improvisation.   This technique emerged in the early 1950′s from a group of composers who rejected the traditional score for requiring performers to submit to the will of the composer.  In contrast, graphical notation fostered an active collaboration between the performer and the composer.  Examples:

John Stead – Play II (for harpsichord and synthesizer)

Ryan Rapsys – Fantasy (for piano and electronic sounds)

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Helicopter String Quartet (for for string quartet, 4 helicopters with pilots and 4 sound technicians, 4 television transmitters, 4 x 3 sound transmitters, auditorium with 4 columns of televisions and 4 columns of loudspeakers, sound projectionist with mixing console/ moderator (ad lib.))

By my reckoning, after the initial experiments the field splintered and lost its focus.  One side moved into an exploration of the boundary between a score and visual art (a typical example of this is George Crumb’s A Magic Circle of Infinity).  Another went towards fluxus and event scores (a typical example of this is Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano).

Graphical notation shines when it is used as a tool for amplifying communication between the composer and the performer.  It loses all of its power when it functions as an object or a performance art piece.  So how can we do this?  Tomorrow I’m going to talk about my flirtations with graphical notation in the past, and then I’ll show how it can be improved in the future.

More Resources

• BibliOdyssey has a fantastic piece on graphical scores
• The Block Museum on the campus of Northwestern had a good exhibit on graphical scores that is archived here
• More information on the Stockhausen Helicopter piece can be found on Stockhausen’s site

Scoring exists to standardize music in a format other people can use.  Non-ancient systems of scoring arose around the 9th century, when monks noticed their fellow brethren having difficulty remembering the melodies of Gregorian chants.  At that point, scoring consisted of notations above the lyrics that sketched out melodic motion or phrasing.  The system allowed for a good deal of complexity, but because it couldn’t express pitch or time, in the end it acted merely as a reminder for people who already knew the tune.  A quantum leap was made in the 10th century when Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian Benedictine monk, introduced the concept of a four line staff,  the precursor to the modern five line stave we use today.

But the staff notation commonly used today isn’t without its drawbacks.  The system is rigid and leaves little room for creative interpretation.  Also, while there are standardized mechanisms for representing pitch and rhythm, there is nothing for tonality.  For a system of music notation to be truly useful (at least to me), it has to both accurately represent the things that can be accurately represented (like note duration and tempo), while at the same time leaving space for the things that are a little harder to define (like tone and structured improvisation).

That’s what we’re going to talk about this week.  First we’re going to look at how other people have used systems of graphic notation, and then I’m going to share some of my past experiments.  Finally, I’ll suggest a theory with an example for the Jamboree project.

Tune in tomorrow.