Copyright ©2008 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
Wait, slow down, look closer. No, not at the symbol that means you must pause before driving onward, but the physical sign. There. Sure, you've seen it before. It's an octagon, red, white letters, white border. A sturdy metal post holds it up, 3-1/4 inches at the wide part where it attaches to the back of the sign -- that part is grey, and so is the post. The post has four bends to make it sturdy, creating a back well 1-1/4 inches across. It has vertical holes spaced an inch apart. Rusting bolts hold the sign firmly in place, one top, one bottom. Now closer. There are scratches in the red paint and perhaps a beebee dent, some rust around it as well. More closely. Maybe the sign has reflective paint made with quartz particles, or maybe the reflective portion is created from thousands of tiny octagons that focus the illumination back to oncoming headlights. It oscillates gently in the breeze. Tapping it makes more of a thud than a ring, but there's a sense that it is trying to respond. A horn sounds impatiently from behind you; time to move on, but as you drive, you can't stop thinking about the sign. Its meaning becomes subservient to the shape and size and potential. Why an octagon? How heavy is it? Can you push snow off the driveway with it? Line the bottom of the sandbox? Gather several into a huge colorful wind chime? Repaint it green with letters that say "Go"? Bend it skyward or earthward? Spin it across the surface of a pond? Shoot it with more beebees? Other stops come to mind: the stop on the back of an envelope (be sure to include your check!), the stop at the bottom of a test page (do not turn page until instructed!), the stop on a door (security area!).
It is just a moment in drive time, but represents the character of discovery called upon to create a 60-second composition. Sixty seconds is no time and all time. It is one-thousandth of the Ring cycle, one-sixtieth of Beethoven's Ninth, one-tenth of Barber's Adagio, one-third of Stardust, one television commercial, five train grade crossing whistles, twenty Intel audio logos. One must sink into the time, suspend it like that stop sign, moving along only when it has been fully explored and imagined into being.
For nonpop composers accustomed to the luxury of full chamber movements or electroacoustic sound spaces, writing a 60-second composition is uncomfortable. Yet the small shape is no longer new. Television commercials have certainly come to depend on a kind of hyperspace extension of sonic imagery by extracting the most familiar components from pop music. Just as the William Tell Overture became indelibly associated with The Lone Ranger for both a radio and a television generation, so One Way or Another becomes a cleaning mop's theme, I Believe in Miracles advertises plant food, Rescue Me plumps adult diapers, and I Want it All compels the viewer to apply for a credit card. But these excerpts aren't really short compositions in themselves because they already exist in the culture and reach back into the viewer's time and memory. On the other hand, video game compositions are short -- and even shorter are sonic icons such as Nextel's walkie-talkie sound and the "Intel Inside" logo. Yet these too have associative purposes, the former with action and imagery and the latter with commercial products. None stand alone.
Whence the 60-second composition, then? In 1996, Larry Polansky developed "The Frog Peak Collaborations Project" with poet Chris Mann, who created a one-minute sound poem to be used as the source material for composers' creations. The sound poem was placed online and ultimately 115 compositions from around the world appeared on the two-CD set, each one a complete re-thinking of how to compose in a short time-space with fixed source material.
Eight years later the 60x60 Project came into being. Unlike the Frog Peak collaborations, 60x60 left the choice of material and approach -- acoustic or electronic -- up to the composer. Yet with no guidelines except a time limit, the wealth of submissions demonstrated immediately that sixty seconds were plenty -- and, in fact, just right.
Aside from three of those original Frog Peak collaboration pieces, I created six (one each year) for the 60x60 project. Each was made differently, from electronically generated sounds through transformed natural sounds to unmodified sounds, from soundscape-like to a "notey"approach.
The first 60x60 piece was The Warbler's Garden from 2003, for which I took a soundwalk across the grass and through the covered bridge. On the recording, two main sounds were outstanding: a boot scrape and a bird cry. From these two sounds, a library was built through stretching and shrinking, granulation, filtering, pitch transposition, envelopes and other modifications. Then I lived with the sounds, playing them until they became as familiar as a violin or clarinet, eventually mapping out a micro-soundscape with a droplet-like cloud, tiny squeals, a menagerie of distant whines, and ominous low resonances that suggested speech. Sounds emanated from a wide soundscape using a psychoacoustic filter to widen the field so it encompasses the listener. It is intended to be a mystery in one minute.
The 2004 krikisque was less serious and even more minimal in its sources. It was inspired by Aram Saroyan's crickets from the old "10:2 12 American Text Sound Pieces" LP, which played a loop of cricket sounds in the LP's run-out groove. For krikisque, a cricket chirping in the kitchen was recorded and a single chirp from among them selected for its perfectly rounded sound. It was stretched and filtered into a small library of chirpiness, and those modified chirps were then harmonized and multitracked until a pulsing minute was complete. The original cricket chirp ends the minute as if to say: This is what you just heard.
The first of two "notey" pieces was nysuca hanei from 2005. That same year I had completed the software emulation of the 1973-era Ionic "Performer" analog synthesizer, and planned to use that for nysuca hanei. (The Japanese-sounding name is actually a riddle.) To create this dramatic short study, a spare, irregular fugal figure was composed and rendered with the Performer VSTi using a patch that I had made for a three-track electroacoustic experiment in the late 1970s. nysuca hanei has a deliberately retro-modernist sound whose source mystery can be solved once the title's riddle is deciphered.
The second "notey" composition was filouria for the 60x60 project in 2006. It used the simplest source of all -- sine tones. With added reverb, they were built into a liquid, contoured melody. The same melody was then extracted into several versions, shifted by pitch and length and allowing each note to drop in a kind of aural sigh. These were overlain on the original melody to create a catch-up fugal figure where all the lines come into synchronization in filouria's last four seconds on an unstable suspended chord. As with most of my 60x60 pieces (as well as the Frog Peak set), they can be looped back to the beginning.
Future Remembrance from 2007 is different, allowing just one pass; it was composed for the special 60x60 Munich Mix presentation. It also returns to the use of natural sounds. Recorded in rural Portugal and Vermont and urban Netherlands were sheep bells, birds, door creaks, church bells, breaking glass, and voices -- all both left in a natural state and transformed. These sounds, neutral by themselves, coalesce in Future Remembrance into an ominous and emotional soundscape that withdraws before its final tolling bell -- a bell that has been tolling throughout the piece, but has been masked -- as recorded on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Utrecht. The soundstage is modified to extend beyond the speakers, enveloping the listener in a disturbing experience.
In 2008, I returned to the wry and gently humorous. smuttle used natural and transformed samples in my existing personal library -- mostly vocal syllables and fireworks -- combined with simple throat stops and strangled breath intakes to create an unexpectedly sensuous minute. Choosing the throat stops and breaths was difficult, both because it was my voice and I was almost embarrassed to hear it, and because it could have easily tumbled into silliness. Using the concepts of sex and explosions is the humorous part, but the voice itself is uncomfortably serious as it was psychoacoustically altered to whisper into the listener's ears. The composition is left ambiguous.
So are these stop signs? For the listener I cannot say because they are so intimate. Each was done in a single day, and so the compositional and emotional content belong to that time past -- a deeply personal stop sign for a few waking hours each year.