Java Fuels Doctor Nerve

Oct 19, 2006 3:41 PM

Composer/guitarist/programmer Nick Didkovsky is best known as the leader of Doctor Nerve, a rock-based septet that plays energetic and tightly arranged music that is created with the help of algorithmic computer programs. Using JMSL (Java Music Specification Language) as his compositional toolkit, and its predecessor HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) before that, his pieces have a strength and emotional impact that explodes the myth that computer-generated works are, by their nature, bland and sterile.

But Doctor Nerve is only one aspect of Didkovsky's busy musical life. His pieces have been performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars, the Sirius String Quartet, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, and the Arte Sax Quartet. One of his most recent compositions, "Slim in Beaten Dreamers," is a suite for brass quintet and drum set, commissioned by the Meridian Arts Ensemble and appearing on its latest release, Brink (Channel Classics, 2006).

Didkovsky brings computers into nearly every aspect of the compositional process. For example, the title of the Meridian Arts Ensemble commission, as well as the names of its 15 movements, are anagrams of the ensemble's name, which he generated using Anagram Genius Server.

Didkovsky's work with Doctor Nerve has always intrigued me on both an intellectual and a musical level. So I was excited to get the chance to ask him a few questions about his latest endeavors with JMSL and see what's on the horizon with his band, which has been together for well over two decades. We spoke on the phone in October of 2006.

How did the commission by the Meridian Arts Ensemble come about?
Meridian and I have a relationship that dates back to collaborations we did with Doctor Nerve. I think the first time we collaborated was to record an arrangement that I made of Captain Beefheart's "When It Blows Its Stacks," which we recorded for a Doctor Nerve CD, Every Screaming Ear. This version featured eight horns-the three Nerve horns plus the Meridians. That was really exciting.

We had been bumping into each other and seeing each other's concerts for years before that. We've also shared the stage a couple of times, doing some conducted improvisations, and we've shared a bill at the Knitting Factory. That was the groundwork for this project.

We relate very well to each other's musical sensibilities, ways of working, and musical taste. So I thought it would be cool to focus some energy into writing a piece specifically for Meridian, and they thought that was a good idea. So we applied for a commissioning grant through the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. The grant was approved, and that's how the project came to be.

Did the group give you any compositional guidelines or suggest things to do or not to do?
No, they did not. We got together for a strategy session where I was really more interested in technical details about what each player can do with their horn, what's hard, what's easy. I was already familiar with them as personal players, so I knew their improvising styles and could sculpt my composition to the people themselves, not just their instruments. We sort of knew mutually where we were at with this piece, so I just went for it.

Could you be a little tougher on them as instrumentalists because they are used to playing more difficult music?
[Laughs.] That's a good way to put it. Yeah, you can get very tough on the Meridian Arts Ensemble. They rise to the occasion. I heard stories from them where they would spend half an hour on three measures of one of my movements, just nailing it. And they do! It's uncanny to hear and see them perform this piece. It's burned into them. It's really a stunning experience.

Did you take a different approach to their composition than you would with, say, a Doctor Nerve piece?
Well, I really wanted to cover the elements I'm interested in when I compose for Doctor Nerve. And most of the sections of the suite that I wrote for Meridian are very rhythmically driven, using tuba and trombone as stand-ins for electric bass. John Ferrari is a killer drum-set player, so I had my rhythm section: I had my bass and drums.

I had already logged a lot of years composing melodically for horns, and creating the sort of hocketing, interactive, fractured rhythmic stuff that I do with Doctor Nerve. And that translated pretty well to Meridian. I really approached the piece with them in mind as personalities. And with their virtuosity I could push an ensemble sensibility farther than I had with Doctor Nerve. Although I think Doctor Nerve has killer players in it, we're not all conservatory-trained musicians. So there were aspects of details and complexity that I could push with this piece that I maybe wouldn't have done so much with Doctor Nerve.

Did the composition influence you to go in any new directions, with Doctor Nerve in particular?
Every time I write a piece, I add to this catalog of new experiments, and their successes and their failures. So every piece I write will inform the next piece that I compose for Doctor Nerve or anybody else. I think by burning in new versions of music-generating software that I designed for this piece, that laid some very concrete groundwork for pieces that I would later compose for Doctor Nerve and other ensembles.

Do the notational features you added to JMSL influence how you work, or are they following what you would normally do?
They very much influence the way I work, because there are a number of different ways of getting at JMSL through this notation. One way of working is where I'll write a program that will generate music from scratch: I'll run the program and I'll listen to it, and if I don't like it I'll run it again. And if I still don't like it, I'll run it again. Then I might hear a germ or a seed of an idea. Or I might hear a finished piece emerge from that program, and that'll end up in notation, which I can then edit and change and develop into a piece (or leave as is if I'm satisfied with it the way it is).

And that was something I could very much do in HMSL, the older software music package that I was using on the Amiga, which JMSL became the evolutionary successor to. What else JMSL made possible, with respect to notation, is that it has a plug-in API. So I can write music-mutating plug-ins that I can access directly from within the notation editor. I can grab a range of music from a staff, I can put it through some sort of musical-transformational filter, and see the changes appear on the staff, right before my eyes. That gets really cool because you can start with some raw material -- you can punch in a melody that you've composed the old-fashioned way -- and then you can start applying musical processes to it and really push the compositional direction into areas that would otherwise be pretty hard to access.

Can you play it back as well as see it?
Oh yeah. You can play it back. You can loop a couple of measures and train your fingers to play it. The notes flash so you can sort of follow the bouncing ball [laughs], which may sound goofy, but when things get gnarly, it's so helpful to stare at the screen with my guitar in my lap and just loop three or four measures of really hard stuff and be guided visually and musically as I'm trying to learn some pretty freaky lines.