Java Fuels Doctor Nerve

Oct 19, 2006 3:41 PM

           

Is JMSL available to the public with the notation aspect?
Yes, JMSL can be downloaded. The notational features are in the current version, and there are plug-ins that ship with it. That's new with the last version that I released. It can be downloaded at Algomusic.com.

Even if you're not a Java programmer, you can download it, uncompress it onto your desktop, look for whether the folder says Windows or Mac, double-click on an icon, and up pops a blank score. It all looks very unassuming and innocent. You can put in some notes and listen to them. Then you can start hunting around the menus, and you'll see there are retrograde transforms, and scrambling transforms, Markov-generating transforms — very quickly the user sees that this is sort of a Frankenstein-monster notation program on steroids.

I recently received the CD The Art of the Virtual Rhythmicon (Innova 2006), which presents the work of eight composers who created pieces using Virtual Rhythmicon, your online JSyn instrument. What kind of feedback are you getting from people who use the instrument?
I don't get a lot of direct feedback, because it feels like a grand piano you would find in a public space. People come along and play it. They submit pieces. They might interact with each other, or send an email to their pals: "Hey I just wrote this piece on this Rhythmicon I found on the Web." And they don't really contact me any more than you would contact Steinway.

It really feels like an instrument that is out there in the wild. And it's very gratifying to have it validated that way. It has become an almost tangible instrument with a life of its own and a culture of its own around it. There are hundreds of pieces that have been composed for it and uploaded to the Music Mavericks Web site.

There are thousands of performances by visitors who came along and browsed the archives, and decided to play back something that someone else composed. And the power of it is that when you play back something, you're not playing back some streaming audio piece. You're actually seeing the Rhythmicon perform the piece. So it's almost like you're mounting a roll on a player piano and actually watching the instrument play back somebody else's composition.

And to add more gravy to it, you can overdub. You can start with someone else's composition, then flip the Record button on and begin adding on top of it. It's a very fluid sort of sharing of compositional forms and ideas. And it has a nice community aspect, which I can see from the outside just by visiting it. But people tend not to contact me directly. They just go there and play it.

Do you plan to do any recordings with it that you would release on CD?
What I think I might do is use it for a texture that might find its way into a piece. My relationship to it is more as an instrument builder and a co-composer, because I think that if you design an instrument like that, which has so much musical intelligence built into it, that you are very much persuading a compositional form.

There's still plenty of room for composers to work out their own styles, which is what an instrument should do. But I haven't felt compelled to compose something and put it on a record. I've composed some pieces and put it on the Web site — that makes a lot of sense to me personally. I kind of like the fact that it's live and on the Web.

I heard from Thomas Dimuzio that you were in Switzerland recently, recording a piece.
Oh man, I'm so glad Tom's onboard. This is a piece that was commissioned by the Arte Saxophone Quartet, based in Basel, Switzerland — four really fine players and great improvisers. And they're a very self-motivated ensemble. Over a number of years, they've come up with this idea of approaching their favorite composers and raising the funds personally and commissioning a piece from them. They've created a scene around themselves, which is really remarkable.

When I was on tour with Guigou Chenevier [ex drummer of Etron Fou Leloublan], and we were close enough to Basel, Sascha Armbruster from Arte invited me over to his place. We exchanged some ideas, had a rehearsal, and did a recording of a couple of Doctor Nerve pieces. That was the fodder for their grant application. Six months later they'd raised the funds and wanted to do a piece. So I did.

I invited Thomas Dimuzio to do live signal processing. I'm on guitar and laptop. And the Arte Quartet is doing their thing. The sextet is called "Ice Cream Time," and it will be released on New World Records. It's a great piece — they perform it incredibly well. We recorded it at the Swiss Radio studio, and walked out of there with a hard drive full of sound files and Pro Tools sessions. Now the work of assembling and mixing begins.

What's new with Doctor Nerve?
We premiered four new pieces at Future Fest, a festival of new rock music that was curated by Stefan Zeniuk at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. We were honored to be on that bill. I went on a composing jag and worked up four new tunes for Nerve, which are going to go on the next CD. What we're working toward now is completing a CD's worth of new material and releasing that.

I also want to find a home for a piece that I did with Doctor Nerve and narrator. It's a setting of stories that my friend Chuck O'Meara [formerly known as C.W. Vrtacek] wrote. It's for live narrator, live electronics, and Doctor Nerve being conducted using my improv gestures. The piece is called "The Monkey Farm." We've performed it once and it was an amazing experience.

I never really worked with vocals before in Doctor Nerve, and Chuck's words are really compelling. Very poignant, very powerful reminiscences of childhood. There are these beautiful little, almost Zen koan-like stories. Valeria Vasilevski narrated. She would read the stories and I would conduct her vocalizations, telling her when to read, when not to, and telling the band when to improvise, and how to improvise. It just came together really quickly, and it's a very powerful piece. So I want to get that out on CD too.

Is your music also available online?
I just recently joined the IODA Alliance. It's a music aggregator. You submit your piece to them, and they'll get it out to something like a hundred different digital download sites. My solo CD, Binky Boy (Punos Music, 2005), is now on iTunes, which is cool. A couple of Doctor Nerve records have reverted to my possession, because they went out of print with Cuneiform, so now they're up on iTunes too.

Does it bother you that there won't be a CD-resolution version of these releases out there? Will there only be MP3 versions? Everyone talks about giving up CDs, but then there's all the money we spend on getting full CD-resolution recordings. Do you think there will be a market for CD-quality (or higher-resolution) products?
I think there will. I just bought this double CD of John Cage's 44 Harmonies and this Xenakis Music for Strings CD. And there's just something so fantastic about holding this object in my hand and knowing I've got full-resolution audio. And I'm going to put this into my stereo, I'm going to turn it up, and it's going to sound just ass-kicking. I'm not going to be listening to it on little earbuds. I want a full-bandwidth experience.

There's other music that I'm perfectly happy to listen to on headphones and MP3s or AAC. I don't know if it is just a personal vestige that I still like to hold on to objects, since I grew up with vinyl objects and CD objects, and so I still want objects. Or does the new generation of listeners also covet the value of a real object, or if that's going to disappear. I don't know.

I will say there's something very valuable about the vetting process an artist goes through when they actually have to commit money to putting something out. The sort of threshold of activity that you have to exceed to create an object makes you look at your music more critically.