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Maggi Payne | |||
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Education | Courses Taught | Compositions | Credits-Commissions | Discography | Awards | Interviews | Performances | Program Notes | Recording | Reviews Education
2008 Cloud Fields, multi-channel audio with multi-channel video 2007 Electric Ice was commissioned by the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios in commemoration of its 50th anniversary celebration (2008-09), for CD publication
2008 2006-07 60X60 double CD Compilation (60X3), Vox Novus label 2007-2008 Montalvo Arts Center Residency (five weeks), Saratoga, CA 2007 Selected, 34th International Contests of Music and Sound Art Electroacoustics of Bourges (2007) in Trivium, Category 1: work of formal aesthetics, ReCycle 2006-07 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College 2005-06 Mary Metz Chair, Mills College, 2006-07 2003-04 Sarlo Award for Excellence in Teaching, Mills College 2003 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College 2003 Faculty Travel Grant, Mills College 2002 Honorary Mention, works for dance or theatre category, 29th Concours International de Musique et d'Art Sonare Electroacoustique de Bourges 2002 for System Test (fire and ice) 2002 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College 2001 Faculty Travel Grant, Mills College 2000 Honorary Mention, program music category, 27th annual Les Concours Internationaux de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges for Sweet Dreams 1999 Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica for Apparent Horizon 1999-01 NARAS grant to archive Mills Music Dept. holdings 1998-1999 Faculty Research Grant, Mills College 1998 Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica 1997-1998 Faculty Development Grant, Mills College 1994-1995 Faculty Research Grant with Professor David Bernstein, Mills College 1993 Barlow Competition, third place winner for Desertscapes 1989-1990 NEA Composer's Grant 1987 NEA Interdisciplinary Arts Grant 1987 Mention, 15th Int'l Electroacoustic Music Competition, Bourges, France 1983-1985 Artist-in-Residence, EXPLORATORIUM 1983 Mellon Grant (video) 1983-1984 Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship Grant (video) 1982 Second prize winner, 3rd Concorso International. "Luigi Russolo" per giovani compositor di Musica Elettroacoustica 1979-1980 NEA Composer's Grant 1972 Mills Crothers Award for outstanding composer, Mills College 1970-1972 Full fellowship and teaching assistantship, Mills College 1969-1970 Full fellowship, University of Illinois, renewed for '70-'71 1967 Pi Kappa Lambda honorary fraternity Interviews Interviews: excerpted from various interviews with Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Joel Chadabe, Gavin Borchert, Birgitta Driesel, Paul Robinson and others My father bought me a reel to reel tape machine when I was eleven or so. I recorded all the keyboard parts of the Bach B minor flute sonata on flute so that I could play along with it. A subsequent machine had several speeds and "sound-on-sound" so that I could overdub several lines at different speeds (without vibrato) and end up in the correct octaves. Accompanists were hard to come by, and I liked being self-sufficient. I began recording professionally in 1968 in Chicago. At that time I was primarilly a flutist and played on many sessions while obtaining my B. Mus. degree at Northwestern University. I felt it important as a performer to learn as much as I could about engineering in order to tailor my playing style for session work, which is different from my performance playing style. When I went to Mills College there was a recording studio and I was hooked. I currently record digitally, and edit using my Sonic Solutions digital audio workstation. In college I found I was running out of extended techniques on the flute and wanted to expand my sound capabilities. I was also performing pieces such as Davidovsky's Synchronisms II (electronic tape and flute) and Haubenstock-Ramati's Interpolation, Mobile per flute (1, 2, et 3) which required some technology. Fortunately I was studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana at the time Gordon Mumma was in residence. Gordon Mumma showed me how to build circuits and I built my first ring modulator there from one of his circuit designs. Jim Beauchamp, Ben Johnston and Sal Martirano were there also. There was a classical studio there with a few Moog modules, and I loved working in it. My first electronic compositions were made using the Moog Synthesizer. Orion was one of the first, and I used the Moog to generate both the audio and the visuals for the piece. The visuals were oscilloscope images which I filmed in 16mm. The sound was generated separately from the images, and was subsequently electroprinted onto the edited 16mm film. Allusionswas a film/video/dance work with quadraphonic sound which used two dancers (Carla Blank and myself), video feedback, colorizing, and a great deal of optical printing to build up density and to overlay images. The music for Allusions was generated using the Moog, and dealt with localization and spatialization. The other early pieces which followed, Transparencies, Spheres, Lunar Earthrise and Lunar Dusk all dealt with localization and spatialization and were quadraphonic. Transparencies, Lunar Earthrise, and Lunar Dusk all used abstract slides as well. I continue to use video in my works, including Circular Motions, Io, Crystal, Solar Wind, Airwaves (realities), Liquid Metal and Apparent Horizon. For the last several years I have recorded natural sounds as my sound sources, and have transformed them using convolution, phase vocoding, extensive layering - whatever is available. I'm totally hooked on technology and have been for many years. I love sound, I love timbre, I love working spatially. I do, however, try to keep things in perspective. The technology is only a tool to accomplish a musical idea. The flute is a tool, the phase vocoder is a tool. The music is the important factor. I was being interviewed the other day, and the "why do you do tape music" question came up again. It occurred to me that aside from the control one has in the studio setting and the ability to do many things that just aren't possible in live performance (or financially feasible due to the number of samplers, etc. it would take to perform live), that there are a couple of other factors involved. When I do a tape composition I have absolutely no excuses. I take complete responsibility for any imperfections in the mix, the sounds themselves, the structure, etc.. It is what it is. I could always wish for more or better, but it is the final product. When my tape compositions are played back in a concert setting I prefer to be present - and to run the console myself. That way I can hopefully equalize and make subtle level changes to more closely match what the piece sounded like in the original mixing environment, or I can choose to take advantage of special characteristics of a specific venue to enhance or adjust the sound of the piece. I also often listen to both live and taped music with my eyes closed. In my own music I like to think of taking people out of themselves and into the musical spaces that I create, so that they no longer feel "in the place where they're sitting" but in this kind of virtual world that I've developed. I like to take them on a journey with me if they are willing to come. If people are conscious of their current surroundings it makes it a bit harder to accomplish. Since so much of our perception is visual - I believe it's around 85%, when one closes one's eyes or otherwise has less visual content to contend with, one can focus much more directly on sound. Of course most of the music we hear is recorded music (electronic music) - from CD's, cassettes, radio and television broadcasts, films, etc. On the other hand, many of my pieces have a video component. Hopefully the music also stands on its own, but when played with the video people may choose to ignore the video or focus on it. I have also had the pleasure of collaborating with video artist Ed Tannenbaum, who uses dancers and his digital video processors to create stunning live performance works. I've also had many of my works choreographed by wonderful choreographers/dancers, including Carolyn Brown, Molissa Finley, Marcia Sakamoto, Betsy Kagan, Nancy Bryan, Carla Blank and Jody Roberts and have composed music for film, video, radio and theatre. When asked about being a recording engineer and composer who happens to be a woman, the only answer I have is that it never even occurred to me that I couldn't be. Naivity or perserverance.
2008 Sonic Residues Festival, Stony Brook University, NY 4/29-5/12 (Raw Data)
2001 Ruth Crawford Seegel Festival, Brooklyn College, CUNY, NYC (Holing Pattern-pianist Sarah Cahill)
1999 Bang on a Can Marathon, NYC.
1997 Oberlin College, Ohio 38 continuous elements (including silence) was composed for an installation project titled Rock's Role (After Royanji), curated by Ron Kuivila and sponsored by Art in General. The installation at Art in General ran from April 24-June 26, 2004. This work consists of 38 elements of sound, including silence. These tracks are intended to be played in continuous random mode throughout the exhibition. It consists of a series of sounds which are all acoustic in origin. Many have been so highly processed that they are no longer recognizable, others are still recognizable if one has heard these sounds in the way I have heard them. Since the original recordings range from familiar objects recorded in unusual ways to unfamiliar objects recorded in more orthodox ways, these sounds provide an aural path into an uncommon, or otherworldy world. I build imaginary acoustical environments (soundspaces or soundscapes), at times compressing a vast world into an intimate minute one, at times examining sounds microscopically with the intent of expanding them into a universe. Perspectives shift from microscopic to telescopic to wide angle, sometimes within the same sound element. Sometimes different perspectives are layered, creating multiple views simultaneously. This is all in an effort to encourage the listener to be so immersed in the sound that they experience the sound from the inside out. Aeolian Confluence (1993): At ten year intervals I compose a flute piece. Aeolian Confluence is the third work in this series. The first section is sampled flute, which slowly builds and rises. The second and third sections use the SoundHack convolution algorithm, with flute samples as the exclusive sources. The final section is recorded live, with several overdubs, and uses additional samples only at the very end. The piece deals with spatial concerns. The first section slowly rises, spreads, comes forward, then cascades down while rapidly receding; the second and third are very distant; the fourth section is very present, receding only at the very end. Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1), composed in 1987, is the music portion of a performance work, called Queue the Lizards, done in collaboration with video artist Ed Tannenbaum, and was the result of a National Endowment for the Arts Interdisciplinary Arts Grant. Very early in the collaboration, when we were first tossing around ideas, he mentioned that he would like to work with sounds of water, snakes, and whips (for gestural and spatial possibilities). He later denied saying anything of the kind. Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1) has as it's source material many forms of white noise, including (commercially ubiquitous) breathy vocal and unpitched but resonant flute sounds, snare drum, and pure white noise. Spatial location and modulation are of primary concern in this piece. The video for Queue the Lizards was directed by Ed Tannenbaum and is a tape of a live performance in which Ed utilized his digital video pprocessor and the Fairlight digital video processor. All video processing of the live dancer was done in real time. In live performance additional music parts are played along with the digitally pre-recorded tracks. Airwaves (realities) (1987) attempts to convey a sense of the vast differences in perspective which individuals have regarding what is collectively termed "reality." One of the most striking close-at-hand illustrations is the contrast in the lives of the desert dwellers of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area urbanites. The diverging viewpoints are partially due to differences in population density and ethnic make-up, with the extreme physical contrast of the barrenness of the desert versus the lushness of the Bay Area being a significant contributing factor. Airwaves can be presented with a video which I shot of rather static desert landscapes of Nevada. The starkness of these scenes in contrast to the sometimes active, at other times lush texture of the music, is intended to further highlight the differences between the cultures. There are only two unprocessed "natural" sounds in this piece: the very beginning of the cars passing by and the two airplanes which fly over. All of the other sounds are derived from television and radio broadcasts, both major sources of "unrealities". These materials, most of which are dialog, are highly processed, resulting in a complete disassociation from their origin. I started gathering the video images for Apparent Horizon (1996) six years prior to its completion. My original intent was to slowly reveal information in various landscapes by holding still on an image for several seconds, then zooming in or out or panning to reveal more detail, an unusual vista, rock formation, etc.. It occurred to me that it also might be interesting to see what might be "revealed" from an overhead view. Since it was impractical to rent airplanes for this purpose, I decided to incorporate NASA footage taken by the Space Shuttle and Apollo series astronauts. It is at times difficult to distinguish earth views from space from those taken on the earth's surface. Many of the earthbound shots are of rather "alien" landscapes--those where I, as a human being, don't really fit in--I'm the alien here. In these often desolate places the only sounds one hears are wind, insects, a scant number of birds and animals and a rare rainstorm. I decided to take our constant human chatter and transpose it into sounds somewhat reminiscent of nature's sounds in the landscapes to which they are attached or to transform them into somewhat "otherworldly" sounds. This was an attempt to convey an aural impresion of the sensations I have experienced while in these earthbound landscapes and those sensations I imagine the astronauts might experience while viewing the earth from space. Sound sources consisted of transmissions from/through space and were from Space Shuttle and Apollo missions, satellite transmissions, and shortwave radio broadcasts. Often I chose sections that were full of static and distortion--signals which were reaching unintelligibility. There are Morse Code "crickets" at Bryce Canyon and static "rain" at the Canyonlands. Processing includes heavy equalization, convolving, extreme sample rate conversions and time compression/expansion. This is the third piece in a series of pieces which are based on transformations of human-made or generated sounds, the previous two being Airwaves (realities) and Liquid Metal. Arctic Winds (2007) transports me to the Arctic (where I've never been, but dream of). The piece is sparse, with occasional frantic "windstorms" stirring up the vast frozen expanse. Everything is suspended, in near silence, with occasional forays dropping low into blasts of "wind." Each sound is crystallized, exaggerated, as in our dreams. The primary sound sources are dry ice and several sizes of ball bearings rolling across a variety of drumheads, attached and unattached. I started working on this piece when I had a 102 degree temperature coupled with chills for three days. I suspect that experiencing those internal extremes conjured up those beautiful arctic dreams and this somewhat over-the-top, playful piece. Brass Mirrors: in the fall of 2003 I offered to temporarily store Lou Harrison's percussion instrument collection which he bequeathed to Willie Winant. When I made the offer I did it without the intent of recording these instruments, but as I kept going into the space where they were stored, they seemed to call out to be played; I could not resist recording them. The timbres and the beats within and between the various metal instruments, including brake drums, were quite alluring. In Brass Mirrors the only alterations that I made to these recordings was to reverse the soundfiles (mirrors). The swells in the second section remind me of a lake's surface, replete with layers of waves, with occasional flashes of reflected sunlight here and there from time to time. These flashes are the crossfades at the edit point (the strike) and intentionally bring out those initial transients which last only briefly after the surface has been struck. breaks/motors (2001): One of my many jobs involves restoring/remastering recordings from the 1920s to the 1960s. One of the many fascinations I find in these recordings is in the breaks between movements, where I usually go to start working out equalization for hum, hiss, squeal, rumble, etc. removal. I took several of these "breaks," looped them in differing lengths, and emphasized the "unwanted" components for this piece. The other sound source came about when Brian Reinbolt asked me to look at a project he was working on which used a very tiny stepper motor. I loved the sound of this tiny motor and made extensive recordings of it. These two ideas sprang up around the same time, so I blended the two types of sound sources (with equalization, convolving, phase vocoding, and granular synthesis) into this composition. As with all my work, spatialization is a major interest. There is no active panning in this work as I recorded the motor at a very close distance and in enhanced stereo. Close-ups (1999): As a child I had to investigate everything at an extremely close range - fully engaging all the senses. It's as if I needed to fuse with and become the object of my attention in order to fully comprehend it. This is the adult version, which also warps perspective by recording everything very close up. The nine natural sound sources, altered temporally and layered, but otherwise unprocessed, aren't always what they might at first appear to be. Crystal was composed in 1982 using a Moog III synthesizer with extensive multi-tracking. Spatial location and modulation are important aspects of this work. Delicate timbral manipulation is also a major concern, with the harmonic spectrum of each voice in constant flux. Crystal is also a video work. The video portion was shot after the music was completed, and was edited to the music. The images consist of crystals forming in real time as viewed through a microscope. Desertscapes, for two spatially separated a capella choirs (1991) The four images I described, of Pyramid Lake, Death Valley, Bryce Canyon and the Devil's Playground/Kelso Dunes, represent four beautiful desert areas, each with very precious and unique characteristics. It seemed right to have exclusively female voices in this piece: Sirens calling me back to these desert haunts. It is important that the interplay between the two choirs be audible. The sound should wash across the space, fully involving/surrounding the listener in the vast frailty of desert space. Distant Thunder (2003): For me this work conjures up images of being in the desert while watching distant thunder storms roll across the sky, accompanied by the unforgettable sweet smell of desert rain. These storms are particularly beautiful as the rain clouds build, break apart, and reform, sending tendrils of rain down, most of which evaporate long before they touch the desert floor. My original intention was to use the sounds of a resonant floor furnace and various adhesive tapes slowly unrolling as the primary sound sources, but after recording the furnace, I boiled water for tea, and could not resist recording the sonic patterns that emerged. I did use the sound of the furnace, but the tape unrolling was used only to impart natural spatialization through convolution with the other, more stationary sources. Electric Ice (2007) was commissioned by the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios in commemoration of its 50th anniversary celebration. I first learned electronic music from James Beauchamp, who taught an incredible acoustics course. Gordon Mumma also taught me so much, including circuit building. EMS had a classical studio with a few Moog modules, so I thought it fitting to use a Moog IIIP (processed using digital filters, granular synthesis, and convolution) to generate the material for this piece. The only other sound is an unprocessed rattling steam radiator. Many thanks to professors James Beauchamp, Gordon Mumma, Ben Johnston, Ed London, Sal Martirano, choreographer Al Huang, and fellow students William Brooks, Ed Kobrin, and Steve Beck (and many others) for providing such an incredibly enriching experimental environment. fff, for solo flute (2006): I developed this, at times rambunctious, at times extremely delicate, work through improvisation. My primary intent was to explore the capabilities of the flute using extended flute techniques while leaving open the possibility for yet further development of these techniques. The timeline is somewhat flexible, and only the types of extended techniques are specified in the timeline, not specifically each specific action. This is a live solo piece, without electronic modification of any kind. Fluid Dynamics (2002): My original intent for this piece was to use two very rhythmical sounds which I had recorded--a raucous faulty faucet in the men's washroom near a Concert Hall and a gently squeaking gas service regulator outside of Lisser Hall, both on the Mills College campus. As the piece developed, though, the rhythmic elements were set aside as the more subtle sound of gas traveling through the pipes and the softer purring sound that the faucet made on its way to the clacking rhythm took over. To these sources I added the sound of a large steel ball and a small brass ball bearing being propelled across a wooden floor, a spare MCI tape machine part rolling in a circular pattern on a linotype sheet, and a roll of very thin brass sheeting gently swaying. The other main sound is that of a large steel ball rolling down two strings of a miniature koto-like instrument I bought at Cost Plus many years ago. Paul Dresher's use of a ball bearing rolling on his string instrument (quadrachord) in his work Sound Stage reminded me of this fascinating sound, and I could not resist using a highly processed version of it in the final section of the piece. The sources are processed using phase vocoding, convolution, granular synthesis, equalization, and extensive layering, and although a residual attachment to the original sounds remain, their origins are at times rather obscured. The spatialization is natural. Static sources are convolved against naturally moving sources so that they take on the spatialization characteristics of the moving sources. These sounds held such fascination for me in the intricacies of their timbres, the smallest perturbations being so audible in the loudest and in the softest sounds. The dynamic potential is almost visceral for me. It is as if the listener is inside of these entities, exploring every detail from the inside out rather than being an outsider looking/listening in. There were two sounds that primarily sparked FIZZ. The first was a barely audible disequilibrium in a toilet tank. This almost inaudible sound was cyclic, but constantly changing, with a faint rising squeak that occurred at the valve where the rod attaches, coupled with trickling water going down the refill pipe, so there was a squeak, trickle, squeak, trickle sequence. I stretched this out using granular synthesis and layered the results. There is an ebb and flow that naturally flows across the channels. It's the long section that occurs after the rhythmic high pass filtered faulty faucet valve that begins the piece. Disk drives on/off spiral us out of that section into a gratis section in which a malfunction in my system caused the loud cyclic low frequency feedback. This is accompanied by fizz, a sound which I've always loved but never got a good recording of until a student, Alison Johnson, brought in a wonderful recording of fizzing. She divulged her method to me, sparking this piece. The fizz and the feedback are totally unprocessed other than slight equalization. Although some sounds may be somewhat identifiable, hopefully the listener will explore the piece purely for its sonic content. Holding Pattern, for piano and three EBows(2001): When Sarah Cahill approached me with the prospect of composing a work for piano in tribute to Ruth Crawford Seeger, particularly in reference to the 9 Preludes which Sarah had just recorded, I was intrigued. Ruth Crawford Seeger's interest in timbre, particularly as represented in Preludes 6 and 9, spurred this brief work. This delicate timbral exploration's last sustained notes are those that begin Prelude 6. The Mystico marking of Prelude 6 and the Tranquillo of Prelude 9 are reflected in the character of Holding Pattern. HUM was loosely scored and worked out in greater detail as I was playing/recording it in 1973. The 8-track tape machine I was using was full of hum, and that, coupled with the amount of humming that the flutist is required to do, suggested the title for the piece. The piece is written for seven flutes. It may be performed live, with condenser microphones and amplification, or as a single flutist (with condenser microphone and amplification) playing along with the tape. This new recording is missing the electronically generated hum, but there is still a considerable amount of humming coming from the flutist. The piece explores the instrument's wide timbral capabilities and enhances its dynamic range by the player's carefully "working" the microphone. HUM 2 (2000) for Abbie Conant: When writing this multi-track work for trombone I could not help but to see the tie-ins to my work of 27 years prior, HUM. That work is scored for one live flutist and six taped flute parts (although it could be performed live with seven performers) which should be diffused around the performance space. HUM 2 is scored for eight live trombones, although it can be performed by one trombone plus seven taped parts, and the players (or speakers) should also be diffused around the performance space. The piece deals with expansion/contraction and involves spatial deployment of the eight performers or eight or four speakers. Ideally one should not be able to distinguish the live performer from the taped parts when performed using the tape version. The piece takes advantage of surround capability with sounds traveling around, through, and across the space (all built into scoring of the piece), with many instances of extended techniques and delicate pitch alterations (of 2-7 Hz). If the listener is in a good listening position, the space should contract--to appear to come very close (as all eight trombones get very loud) and expand outward (as all eight trombones get very soft). The expansion/contraction also takes place in the frequency domain as pitches converge and diverge and in the amplitude domain with an extreme dynamic range. This work is virtuosic. I composed the work for the trombonist, Abbie Conant, whose superb capabilities are explored in the work. Inflections (1968) is a solo flute work which explores space/spaciousness. The spaces in between events are equal in importance to the sounds produced by the flutist. Each sound is a "precious" entity - as if each is an irregular pearl in a string of pearls. The intervening silence acts as the thread that binds them together. Inside Story (2008): One of the studios at the Montalvo Arts Center has a Steck piano that was donated to them . It is a beautiful piano with a wonderful, very colorful sound, but it was rather out of tune, with the inclement weather not helping, so I decided to use only the "inside" of the piano. "Story" comes from its own story and the stories that this piano has witnessed in its long history. The resonating voices throughout reflect the many voices that have been part of its life, and the whispering (gently rubbed strings) melodic line at the end is a ghostly reminder of past melodies played on this remarkable instrument. It's Elemental was composed in response to a call from Phonography for works of under seven minutes duration in which recorded sounds were to be used with no layering, processing, crossfades, or editing permitted. Since these are all techniques that I use extensively, I thought I would take on this difficult challenge. The sounds consist of my floor furnace turning on while the mics were placed within the furnace housing, the sound of a Jacob's ladder which I built, tape unrolling, water boiling in a stainless steel pan, a gas service regulator with frogs contributing from a distant pond, and a faulty washer in a sink's valve. Liquid Amber (2008): Liquid Amber's images and sounds are about texture—images that compel me to physically reach out and touch them in real life and on-screen, just as I am drawn to reach up to try to touch a star in the desert's black velvet night sky. The sounds are physical, tactile, visceral as well, produced by my touching various objects (skin, fabric, wood, metal, water, etc.). There are only a few exceptions, as when I used synchronized sound in the fast water sequences. When I shot those scenes the spray of the water on my face and tumultuous sound were so very physical that the images still conjure those sensations for me. There is a faint voice on occasion—vocal cords set into vibration by air. This is not an attempt to add sound effects to the visuals although certainly many sounds relate directly to the image. But the perspective is intentionally skewed as these images have great depth with layers that change in texture, so certain sounds detail the surfaces, others reflect the image's deep interior. The images are of nature or illustrate nature's effects on man-made objects such as a sheet of copper and an old ship. The title derives from the Liquid Amber tree that provided the ending for this work. Liquid Metal (1994): I took up canoeing in an effort to "experience nature" and to build up my upper body. I became fascinated with the water patterns visible at such a close-up range. The water had an intimate kind of beauty, very different from water viewed from a greater distance. I captured images for two years before finally sequencing them. It was only in the editing that I fully realized that water actually turns out to be rather colorless (the dictionary definition) - especially at close range and especially with the almost constant cloud cover we experienced. The video has no processing whatsoever. The "nature" that I ended up experiencing in large part had to do with human nature. I would have loved to have paddled the California waterways hearing only the sounds of birds, water, etc., but instead much of the sound consisted of Harley Davidsons roaring down a canyon road adjacent to the river, helicopters, the Blue Angels, various prop planes, a train screeching harmonics as it went through turns in a canyon, remote-controlled model airplanes, cars driving over a bridge, jetskis and motorboats with and without waterskiers attached. The music is derived from those sounds, with only a few exceptions (seagulls, falls, wind and waves lapping against the shore). I wanted to transform those undesirable "natural sounds" into sounds I would probably not mind hearing - or wouldn't mind hearing in my head while canoeing. I used convolving, phase vocoding, extensive layering and exteme equalizations to accomplish the transformations. Minutia 0-13, for one to three pianos (1996) is a fully notated piece consisting of 14 separate pages that can be played in any order. The pages vary in duration from 0 - 60 seconds. The performers may repeat any page up to three times consecutively or non-consecutively. When a request was put out over the internet for a 60-second piano piece, it seemed a good opportunity to write a larger work that could be flexible in duration. The total time for this piece is specified at 0 - 12 minutes. The optimum performance involves three spatially-deployed pianos. This piece explores the piano's sonorities, coincidences during performance, performance/listening/reactive skills on the part of the performers and time/space. When two or three players are playing, it is almost as if the noise of daily life was going on in compressed form. A player produces some noise, only to be overtaken by noise from another. Some of these noises are sharp, short impulses (kids playing basketball, car doors slamming, someone hammering, doors being knocked on) and others are sustained efforts (helicopters flying over, cars slowly passing by, lawnmowers), and often the subtle, quiet sounds are drowned out by the din of human activity. The future mechanical world I chose to explore in Molecular Nanotechnology is the miniaturized world of molecular nanotechnology. These tiniest of machines working at the molecular level will eventually be capable of such tasks as monitoring health, delivering drugs to specific sites, maintaining the body, and making repairs. This piece is a voyage of possibilities, somewhat sequential, but without a literal narrative. Motor Rhythms uses six tiny DC servo motors as its primary sound source. My partner, Brian Reinbolt, developed a rhythmic sequence for the sextet for an installation he was working on and generously consented to let me record them. I deployed the six motors in two semicircles for maximum interplay across the channels and miked them very closely to further enhance the stereo field. Although most of the time they are processed beyond recognition, the motors are briefly revealed in their raw state as they travel dramatically to the forefront two-fifths through the work. The linked skeletal ticks which fly overhead punctuate the spatialization, elongating via resonant equalization, then convolution with the harmonics of the final feedback section, eventually blurring into sustained resonances. Motor Rhythms occasionally teeters on the brink of disaster, sounding as if it's about to fragment or rip apart from internal pressure. All horizontal spatializiation is entirely the result of the original placement of the microphones. Depth and vertical spatialization are also carefully articulated and a fundamental concern of the piece—expanding, shrinking, stretching, and warping the architecture of the acoustic space. Of All, for solo flute (2003): When flutist Nina Assimakopoulos approached me to write a solo flute piece for her project title "LITERARY BASED WORKS BY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN COMPOSERS" I was intrigued. I immediately ran through the names of a number of poets in my mind, and landed on Emily Dickinson. I asked my partner if he had a book of her poems, which he did, and when I first opened the book it opened to the page containing this poem. I marked this particular poem, then read through the entire book, only to return to this poem as being the perfect poem on which to base this piece. It is a poem about the wind, in which the first line reads: "Of all the sounds despatched abroad." Each line of the score is a literal representation of the poem. I would read a verse, then work with the ideas and images that Dickinson evoked, finalize the line, then move on to the next verse and interpret that verse in sound, and so on. It's the pure, natural, reflective sense of Dickinson's poem that I'm trying to portray in this work. I should note that this piece fulfills my intent to write a flute work every ten years starting with HUM (1973), then Scirocco (1983), Aeolian Confluence (1993), then two solo works, Of All and Reflections. (2003). The sound source for Phase Transitions (1989) was exclusively that of the Roland D50 (550) linear synthesizer. This device seems to have been manufactured to fit the needs of "beautiful music", Hollywood film scores, and commercial advertisement music beds. Phase Transitions is an attempt to make this very interesting instrument sound as atypical as possible--loud, definitely "not beautiful", a little raucous. Since it is not possible to dynamically filter the PCM sounds on the D50, the "surf section" in the middle of the piece was sampled D50, dynamically filtered using the Ensoniq Mirage. To build up the density desired, I made a considerable number of stereo "pre-mixes" from the 16 track to the PCM recorder, and subsequently layered several of the premixes, resulting in a combining of fifty-four tracks in the densest section. Musically the piece is based on the idea of phase transitions--the area of transition where matter changes from one state to another--such as from non-magnetized to magnetized, or liquid to solid. The transitions within sections move at differing rates per section, as do the transitions from one section to the next, just as different types of matter have very different dynamics of change through various states. Ping and Pong 12/13/03 and 12/14/03 originated out of a call from Chris Cutler for his Out of the Blue Radio project, which is broadcast daily from 23:30-00:00 London time on Resonance FM, 104.4 FM from July 1, 2002 to July 1, 2003. In this call he asked for an unedited real-time location recording recorded anywhere in the world between 23:30-00:00 GMT, which was 3:30-4:00 PM when I recorded these works on 12/13/02 and 12/14/02. I had planned to record something very northern Californian such as the redwood forest, but the only time I had available to do this project was during a time when it was raining non-stop, making it impossible to record the subtle sounds of the forest. I opted instead to put a galvanized steel pail on my front porch and let it fill with rainwater. I tossed in my two hydrophones and turned on my DAT machine at precisely 3:30 and turned it off at 4:00. In this recording there are many layers of activity, including some very sharp high frequency sizzling sounds as the raindrops struck the surface, combined with the deeper tuned resonances of the pail as the larger droplets hit the edges of the pail and others drove deeper into the surface. Aside from these layers, the rhythmic interplay is of main interest. It was still raining the following day, so I inverted the pail and placed two condensor air mics inside the pail and recorded the sound of the raindrops hitting the bottom of the pail, resulting in a more consistent, but still nuanced sound with rhythmic variability . The resonant frequencies of the pail are more exaggerated in this version, and one hears some sounds of the environment processed through this Helmholtz resonator (the pail) as well. I used shortwave broadcasts as the sole source for Raw Data (1998). There is only one small section which has processing, the rest being raw, unprocessed data (sound) direct from the shortwave radio, so it is full of static, distortion, clicks, pops and all sorts of wonderful, but usually undesirable artifacts. This open window to the world, with all its noise, seems to make the world bigger and more precious/precarious than it would were every broadcast received with perfect digital clarity. The piece moves from communication that was in use in the early 20th Century (Morse code transmissions) to the present (which uses the medium of shortwave and various media‹CD's, reel to reel tapes, cassettes, minidiscs, etc. as sources). As all these types of signals from around the world are available in many languages (including Morse Code) concurrently in shortwave broadcasts, it's as if the entire 20th Century were compressed in time/space. ReCycle uses my recordings of a refrigerator, a freezer, a floor furnace, ice melting, water boiling, a Jacob's ladder I built, a faulty faucet, and noise between pieces in old 78 recordings. Some of these sounds have large cycles such as the refrigerator, freezer and floor furnace cycling on and off, but there are also cyclic patterns within their "on-times." The Jacob's ladder has an irregular cycle. The faulty water faucet, the penultimate sound in the piece, and the looped noise between pieces from an old recording at the very end have the most consistent rhythmic cycles. The "Re" in the title comes from both the use of the sounds of my re-frigerator, and the recycling of unused source materials from some of my previous works, including Distant Thunder, Fluid Dynamics, and System Test. Reflecting Chair (installation, 2007): When Laetitia Sonami gave a talk at Mills describing her ideas for those wishing to participate in her David Tudor residency, I found myself sitting near the back of the room, nearest the fountain in the pond next to the CCM/practice room wing of the Music Building at Mills College. Somehow I couldn't separate the two, and since one of her ideas was to simply place a chair in a location in which one could experience the sounds of the environment, I decided to place a chair very near the fountain in the middle of the pond where egrets, ducks, frogs, and an occasional blue heron visit. The title alludes to a Reflecting Pool. This is a purely conceptual idea unless someone decides to wade out and sit in the chair. Reflections (2003) is a work for solo flute which was commissioned by the National Flute Association for their 2004 High School Competition. The timing for this request was perfect, as every ten years I write a flute piece and since my last flute work was Aeolian Confluence from 2/8/93, it was time to write another. The title for this work stems from the many internal reflections in the workÑthere are many phrases which echo or reflect the immediately preceding phrase. Reflections also occur on a larger scale throughout the work, with varied reflections of previous phrases. The nature of the sounds is also reminiscent of reflections on the water, with slight perturbations in an otherwise glassy surface modulating the reflections. The final reference is the use of the same first four notes for this piece that I used for Inflections, a solo flute work which I wrote in 1968. There are occasional extended flute techniques woven into the fabric of this work, and they should flow naturally and easily within the work. I should note that this piece fulfills my intent to write a flute work every ten years starting with HUM (1973), then Scirocco (1983), Aeolian Confluence (1993), then two solo works, Of All and Reflections. (2003). Reflections is dedicated to Walfrid Kujala. Resonant Places (1992) was composed over a two-year period. It consists of natural sounds recorded in various resonant spaces found on location in the Bay Area. Some of the resonant frequencies are emphasized by equalization and/or digital signal processing and some sections of the piece are slightly supplemented with synthesizers. The resonant sounds/spaces consisted of a swivel chair with casters rolling across an oak floor, a tightly sealed hallway which changed frequencies as doors throughout the building opened and closed, BART in a BART tunnel, two separate stove vents inside a single house, the ocean through mailing tubes, and train and freeway sounds through sewer pipes in an industrial area of West Berkeley. As the piece progresses the sense of space collapses and expands depending on the original resonant body locations and microphone placement within these bodies. The transitions tend to lift the listener out of the aural space and to deposit them into another, completely different space. Rockin' Thunder and Lighting (installation, 2007): When Laetitia Sonami gave a talk at Mills describing her ideas for those wishing to participate in her David Tudor residency, I immediately thought of using a rocking chair on glass, but later realized that might not be such a good idea if children were present. I decided instead to use a cane chair because of its beautiful curves. I used a 30 foot white electroluminescent wire to outline the curves of the chair and placed a mercury switch in the circuit so that when someone sat in the chair and rocked back and forth, the L-wire would flicker off and on. Although this action interrupted the high pitch squeal of the L-wire, which is quite audible, I decided to playfully attach a thin 3X3 foot aluminum sheet to the back of the chair so that when a person rocks the chair there's a very loud and very changeable roar of thunder (a thunder sheet) to go with the lightning. I picture someone sitting on a rocking chair on a porch in wide-open country late at night, slowly rocking while enjoying the lighting and thunder from the thunderstorm that's fast approaching. Santa Fe (2006) is an 8 CD installation work for the Atrium Sound Space, Benildus Hall, College of Santa Fe. In selecting sounds from for Santa Fe I primarily used sounds that are evocative of the beautiful landscape, skies, weather, and wildlife in and around Santa Fe. The sound sources are quite varied and are so highly processed that they take on new meaning in this new context. There are some exceptions, such as one CD of very recognizable sounds, and two CDs derived from an installation piece (Fountain) which uses water droplets from a small fountain to trigger synthesized sounds, so the fountain in effect becomes the performer. Those sounds, although not of natural origin, are driven by nature. Scirocco, composed in 1983, is a piece for live flute and digital delay with pre-recorded tape. The tape portion is composed exclusively of flute processed through a digital delay. Multiphonics, whistle tones, and humming while playing are some of the techniques used to create complex timbres. Dense textures were built by layering up to thirty-two tracks of processed flute. SCIROCCO is reminiscent of HUM, another multi-tracked, although unprocessed, flute piece composed ten years earlier. Slide, for solo trombone (2007): Sarah Denes asked me to write a brief piece for her in the fall of 2007. The result is Slide. This work has my characteristic reflections on various fragments presented throughout the piece. It also emphasizes the extreme dynamic range and subtle colorations possible on this very flexible instrument. Solar Wind (1983) is an electronic piece based on synthesized audio representations of bow shock interactions of Saturn and Venus with the solar wind as observed by Voyager, Voyager-2 and the Pioneer-Venus Orbiter. The source tape was generously supplied by the project director of the plasma wave instrument, Fred Scarf, of TRW, for NASA. The plasma wave instrument detects phenomena associated with solar wind interactions in space. The instrument, placed aboard this spacecraft, gathers information and analyzes it using a sixteen-channel spectrum analyzer. The data is transmitted to Earth and drives a computer which controls the amplitude of a sixteen-voice music synthesizer. In some bow shock interactions the actual frequencies of the phenomena are replicated; in others, some frequency shifting was necessary. Time compression is set to a 480:1 ratio. The final sequence of the composition uses the source tape with minimal manipulation. The middle section of the piece (bow shock sequence) uses the source tape, but heavily modified. The remaining segments are loosely based on the source tape. Songs of Flight (1988) consists of two works for soprano and piano, Song of Flight (the tern) and Song of Flight (the robe), commissioned by New Songs and premiered Ann Obery and David Mahler. In keeping with the visual imagery of Gary Snyder's two poems, Straits of Malacca 24 Oct 1957 and The Feathered Robe, these settings seek to complement the pure, rather stark narrative delivery of the text with a piano accompaniment which seems to shadow the voice at times, and to gently surround the voice at other times. It is an effort to extract the listener from her/his current surroundings and to move her/him into the timelessness that the poetry evokes. Stretching the Boiling Point: contorting boiling water to a slow, smooth journey across space, bubbles crackling, then the physical stretching of the bubble's surface echoed many times over across time—the theme of this gentle, brief foray is water. Minute detail of water is revealed in the very close miking of the sound sources, and is further revealed as the recorded sounds are stretched and segmented in time via granular synthesis. Subterranean Network, commissioned by Hartt School of Music in 1986, is an electronic work which seeks to evoke a sense of the experience of the tunnel fighting in Cu Chi during the Vietnam War. These tunnels, from which the Viet Cong fought much of the war, were dark, narrow, poorly ventilated hell holes, filled with booby traps and inconceivable real and psychological terrors which plagued the American soldiers, known as tunnel rats, whose duty it was to explore them. These men, if not killed by booby traps, snakes, spiders or scorpiions, were in constant threat of ambush in the tunnels. Sweet Dreams (1999): I have always been fascinated by richness of environmental sounds. After years of using heavily processed environmental sounds (to the point where they are no longer recognizable) as the sonic basis for many of my works I decided to compose a piece using only unprocessed (although cleaned up) environmental sounds. As a thread to tie these sounds which I've collected for almost thirty years together I decided to use those sounds which wake me or keep me awake nights. Of interest to me is how some sounds seem to stay in the background and others become unnaturally present in the darkness. I've emphasized these perceptual anomalies, as well as exaggerated the spatialization in this work. The piece is intended to played over speakers, but listening in headphones will make the spatial and proximity effects even more apparent. I recorded all but one sound myself--I could not resist putting in one "baa" from the cloned sheep, Dolly. Some of the recordings I used for this piece were made as far back as 1972. Wanting to make technically better quality recordings of some of these early soures, I went back to the same source locations I had used before. I most often found them to now be intolerably noisy. The increased air traffic, freeway traffic, and human intrusion on what were once quiet locations made it impossible to capture clean sounds: the bird menagerie was filled with air traffic and the airplanes had so much air traffic and cars so constant it was difficult to isolate the sounds. Everything was difficult to record cleanly and it took an enormous amount of editing and cleaning up of the background noise to make the location recordings usable. In many instances I ended up using the original recordings. System Test (fire and ice) (2001): This work, which primarily uses my recordings of Jacob's ladders, ice melting, and papers sliding against each other as the sources, is a rather dramatic piece, which I attribute to the dynamic/dramatic character of the Jacob's ladder. There is such a powerful intensity in the discharges, accompanied by wonderful sizzling, hissing, crackling sounds, and powerful low frequencies; danger is always present. The sources are convolved, stretched, granulated, eq'd and further processed many times over, then whirled into this intense piece. There is also a visual component for this work, using four electrolumuniscent wired "imagers" in a very dark presentation space. The source material for White Night (1984) consists of digital delay processing of spoken names or portions of names of fellow artists. These fragments set up micro-rhythms which interlock, then slowly shift phase. Because the source fragments are essentially static in regard to texture, pitch and timbre, the composition is built on subtle rhythmic interactions among combinations of fragments, with amplitude and density determining the overall structure. White Night is a French expression for a sleepless night of the type characterized by the mind's relentless repetition of thoughts. White Turbulence 2000: When I first started thinking about White Turbulence 2000, I thought it might be interesting to have water as a unifying theme. I recorded many sounds involving water with microphones and hydrophones and processed them using phase vocoding, convolving, and extreme equalization. As I started putting the piece together, I thought it might be playful to incorporate some obvious quadraphonic effects (the convolved airplane at the beginning) in addition to the more subtle spatialization techniques I used such as continuously varying phase relationships. Other sounds include waves lapping against the shore, an old toilet tank slowly filling with water, a brass ball spinning very fast in a stainless steel bowl with a small amount of water, etc. There is a mix of recognizable (although processed) sounds and sounds processed beyond recognition. While working on this piece I recalled the difficulty of layering complex sounds which were spatially oriented with other complex sounds of another spatial orientation. The space tends to become confused or to simply collapse when layering the sounds. This piece is therefore reminiscent of many of my early quadraphonic pieces (1973-1985) which are more episodic rather than thickly layered. Recording-Editing
2008 Historical remastering of 8 CD set of works conducted by Monteux for CD release on Music and Arts label 2000 Digitally recorded Gordon Mumma's Trios, for two sets of trios 1998 Digitally recorded/edited Milhaud at Mills: A Celebration in Song, Music and Arts label, Sara Ganz, Donna Petersen, Elizabeth Eshleman, sopranos, Belle Bulwinkle and Julie Steinberg, pianists 1996 Digitally recorded the Lisle Ellis jazz ensemble for CD release on the Music and Arts label 1992 Edited digital recording of pianist Marilyn Crispell for CD release on the MAP label "Payne seems interested in the surreal, the inward, the micro and the accumulation of physical and psychological tension. The compositions and sounds have incredible depth, a profound logic and, though not 'pretty,' an irresistable beauty."---Tom Grove, Option (Crystal CD) "Payne is due applause for her impressive melding of music theory, technique and style."---Darren Bergstein, i/e (Crystal CD) "Ms. Fenley...performed to a magical score by Maggi Payne."---Jennifer Dunning, New York Times (Solar Wind, Ahh-Ahh, Resonant Places) "She draws on a combination of impressive musicality and advanced studio craft to produce weird aural landscapes that are as unsettling as they are beautiful."---Rich Anderson, The Herald, Provo, Utah (Crystal CD) "Her music, dating back to 1982 on this disc, is some of the most sensitive and interesting electronic music I've heard, combining a wide range of sound materials, beautiful, menacing, quiet."---Taylor, American Record Guide (Crystal CD) "Maggi Payne marshals her electronic forces never less than commandingly."---Mike Silverton, Option (Crystal CD) "She manages to tightwalk brilliantly, and in this piece most movingly, between taut, angular dissonances and intervals of sheer, emotion-laden simgularities that, together, made for the most successful, single work of the evening."---Jim Jordan, Express (Subterranean Network) "Her pieces generally begin slowly and silently with gradual crescendos into climactic whooshes and whirls of crackles, clinkety clunks, swirling wind and sound waves like night insects weaving in and out of audible range."---Sammy Prestianni, Retriever (Crystal CD) "Maggi Payne's...processing of car and airplane sounds into a scintillating harmonic continuum captures some part of that comfortless contemplative attitude the desert inspires."---Kyle Gann, Village Voice (Airwaves) "Scirocco...create(s) a rain forest where instruments call to each other like chrome birds."---Richard Kadrey, The Chronicle Whole Earth Catalog "...all share in the sheer sensual possibilities of sound."---Allan Ulrich, San Francisco Chronicle (Another Coast CD) "It is an emotional moment, rich in color and spirit."---Richard Pontzious, S.F. Examiner (Ling) |
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