Category: Evening

After another late Summer hiatus, I’m back with a non-evening recorded Evening Improvisation. Actually, I’ve had a hiatus due to a number of personal life things including our car getting hit while being out of town. I have also been preparing a series of audio songs from all my travels this summer. A draft of one of them can be found here on Soundcloud. (I had a flight canceled and it wasn’t pleasant or fun.) I’ve punched that one up since that post and it’ll be a pretty fun release when I get there.

It took a moment, but now that the new semester has begun I had a moment to sneak into the awesome practice room next to my office and had a recording session with that instrument. I have posted a few other improvisations including this banger, where the instrument got horribly out of tune. Boy do I wish this sort of thing would happen more often! Micro tonality is not usually a musical element of the organ and I relish it when I have the chance to play with it.

As I pondered these things, it occurred to me in this session to set up two recording devices instead of one. In those other recording done in this practice room, I’ve added reverb to make it feel like it exists in some kind of real space, instead of a totally dry room. My logic in using two recording devices would be to pit them against each other in my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) or at least have my phone recording be a background to the better recording device (it’s TASCAM portable recorder that I love).

And that’s what I did! In this series of recordings where I am testing things out with how I will potentially move forward with a more concise recording project involving and organ, synths, and audio manipulation, this was one of those tests. And I think it’s pretty understated – deliberately so; I will always err on the side of making things understated than over the top. “LOOK AT MY WEIRD STUFF!!!!1!” Generally, I’d rather these performances be up front and anything manipulated be in the background to the performance and that’s the case here.

Finally, this will all eventually end in some kind of album similar to the Aria with Nine Variations. I have a few other ideas to play around before I go forward with a 60 minute album. It’ll be coming soon though! Organ + synths + audio manipulation is something I want to get out there and this is one of those trials. Enjoy!

Not too long ago, I posted an improvisation on an organ that was REALLY out of tune and boy did I have a lot of fun with it. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go check it out here. I think it’s an absolute blast as the organ so rarely is able to do anything microtonal. On a small note, the organ was tuned shortly after I made that improvisation and the folks that tune the organ said that they would be willing to make adjustments for me so long as we plan it ahead of time. This is not a spoiler, but I am working on and planning out another album with organ and synth and to have also a detuned rank of pipes as a possibility is quite appealing.

Over the past couple of weeks, it has been pretty cold here in Pittsburgh. Hovering between the 10s and 30s, this can cause quite a bit of havoc on the tuning of an instrument. And some ranks are more susceptible to going out of tune than other ranks. As I have been getting more acquainted with the organ at St. Andrew’s, I have discovered which of those stops go out of tune more regularly. WELL, there was one stop on a few particular notes that went REALLY out of tune this past week and after monkeying around with it, I arrived to the following improvisation.

I was being hyperbolic when I said the organ is not microtonal, it is in two general ways: the celeste stop and mutations. The problem with the celeste is that it is usually pretty quiet and the mutations are usually quite high and hard to fit into a more central tessitura and that’s if they are tuned to their fundamental. There are improvisations where I have tried to manipulate that in interesting ways and it is something always on my mind in the right circumstances. Combine that knowledge with a rank that has a few notes that are really out of tune and we have another cool improvisation!

This improvisation centers around a couple of pitches: E, F, G, and B, all in the tenor range of a 4′ stop – which is above middle C if you are keeping track. If you watch the video, my left hand is in that tenor range and the right hand in the octave above so the two stops are playing the same notes. Where I had fun is in using the mutations – those stops generally emphasize harmonics of a fundamental and at St. Andrew’s there is a Cornet stop on the Great manual that provided a nice contrast to the out of tune stops. Throw in some tremolos for effect and I think the improvisation is a lot of fun. Enjoy!

It’s funny: last week I improvised on the practice room next to my office and I thought the outcome was pretty cool and interesting! I enjoyed the process so much that I decided to try to replicate the process where I record an improvisation in the room and then add the synth to it after the fact. Maybe a small amount of filtering and a reverb to give the organ a fake “space” in which it can exist like the prior improvisation.

Well, in preparing for this particular improvisation, I noticed that the 2′ Principle stop on the Great was REALLY out of tune. Not a little, A LOT; to the point that playing a chromatic scale does not result in something resembling an equal tempered chromatic scale. What particularly intrigued me were the notes that were slightly out of tune with one another, some of them being nearly unisons and even then, they weren’t aligning with A=440 tuning! The acoustical beating between two notes that are not in tune is something I LOVE to play with – that in part is the premise of this Organ + Synth improvisation series.

In the moment, an improvisation usually feels like applying metrics, tropes, techniques, things that I have done hundreds or thousands of times before. Every once in a while though, an improvisation feels fresh and new and this, for me, was one of those times. Unlike the previous one, this improvisation has no edits: it is presented as I recorded it in the moment. I tried adding a second improvised synth track to it but it never really added anything that wasn’t there already or simply detracted from the improv. Here it is, an improvisation with a bunch of out of tune notes, no edits, and an added acoustic!

I’m back again with another Organ + Synth improvisation but this one is a bit different than the first. I’ll explain the details in a moment, but the short explanation is that I needed my practice time at St. Andrew’s for more pressing things and I instead recorded this at Duquesne. I also wanted control over more parameters than the first improvisation, which led me to cheat on this one.

Yes. That’s right, I cheated. First, the quite excellent practice organ that is next to my office at Duquesne has, well, terrible acoustics. It’s a practice room after all! I also, as mentioned above, wanted more control over more parameters, meaning more than two knobs that I can twist with one hand in the moment. I like to think of this as me continuing to figure how to use Pigments along side a live instrument. For this particular improvisation, I recorded the organ separate from the synth, spliced the recording, and then improvised the synth over that recording. It was a lot of fun to imagine the synth part while I was recording the organ part!

With this improvisation, I was trying to blend the synth with the organ in a way where you could not hear where one starts and the other ends. When I was playing the organ part, I discovered a really cool “periodic beat” in the pedals that set the stage for the rest of the improv. From there, I built up a series of composite sounds that I knew would work well with a synth later. To be clear, where I cheated with the organ part is that I cut up the recording to create an arc and then added the synth to those composite chord. It helps that they are both put through a reverb filter together, giving the impression that they exist in the same space. This project was a lot of fun and has definitely given me some ideas for the next one!

A prelude, for us organists, is typically the thing we do before a liturgical service. In other words, incidental to another thing that is about to happen. That is exactly what this improvisation is: it is an experiment as I am outlining and sketching a new work. And by new work, I mean a future album of music; at least, that’s the plan. In the mean time, I am playing around and trying to navigate waters that I have thought about and am now doing some practical realizations.

So what is this thing that I’m doing? Let me explain! Outside of the organ world, I also love playing with synthesizers, which is certainly something you can hear in my Aria with Nine Variations. I have played with vintage synths, I own a Yamaha CS1-x that I have used for many years, and more recently, I have been playing with software synths. In the Aria, I used the shareware synth HELM, which I will still promote as one of the best places to start if you are new to synths. For this project I was looking for something a bit more powerful: Arturia’s Pigments!

What makes this synth so special is that it is Arturia’s only true software synth and it has four different engines to create sounds: traditional waves, wave table, granular, and the one I was really curious about, an additive synth generator. Additive synthesis, simply put, is the process of adding partials or harmonics to a fundamental pitch. In part, that is what an organ does – you play a pitch on the manuals or pedals and add and subtract stops to that fundamental. Put the two together and I think there is a lot of potential!

This improvisation is the result of that experimentation. I set up Pigments to work with my travel control synth (Native Instrument’s M25) and here it is! The fun part, for me at least, was trying to imitate and manipulate the sum total of the sound. Since organs cannot play pitches outside of their temperament and tuning, it is really nice to be able to have something that allows me to do that. It was also fun to be able to “dim” the synth and close the box of the organ to create a similar sonic effect. I will be doing a whole series of these as I prepare my next big project!

Well, well, well, second improvisation in a row where something went wrong! The first thing to point out in this improvisation is the title: 12-Tone Cipher. There are of course, two things to unpack here and I’ll start with the first part: 12-Tone. Something I have been practicing lately (meaning the past 4-5 years) is using all 12 chromatic notes in a row before I repeat any of them. To be clear: I am not keeping a strict measurement of intervals or other relationships to determine a tone row so I can transpose is, just simply keeping track of what notes I have and have not played at a given time. It is not a lack of interest in tone rows, more that it would require an enormous amount attention, skill, and practice to do so, something I currently don’t have the time for. (Someday maybe!)

My interest in doing a tone row is to keep things fresh in my improvs. Simply another way to explore timbre but in a way that contrasts the last improvisation which was through an attempt at literally representing a sound. Speaking of the last improvisation, where I accidentally hit a piston, let me address the second half of the title, “Cipher.” A cipher is when you hit a key and the air continues to blow through the pipe even when the key is not depressed. Well, that is what happened! What I was going to do in that moment was to spell out the 12-tone pattern I had come to on a loud reed stop but the Ab and Bb just never stopped.

In the moment, you can probably hear the mashing of all the keys around those pitches as that sometimes will stop a cipher. Since that didn’t work, the next solution was to turn the instrument off. As the organ shut down, I kept holding on the cluster and the effect was exactly what I wanted: this crazy percussive crash followed the power turning on a return to the opening texture. All that is to say, it was an interesting time as the improvisation developed and changed and resulted in something interesting. Enjoy!

Over the past several semesters at Duquesne, I have taken the task of writing all of the sight reading exercises for the students. It’s been a lot of fun to create pieces that each have a little quirk in them to offer a small challenge as they are sight read. It has been in the back of my head to edit the best of them into something a little longer, approximately 2 minuntes or so, and throw them up on IMSLP. And I’ve finally done it! I like the four of them quite a bit, but my favorite has to be the Fugetta on D-S-C-H.

Quick story there: back in November 2021, in teaching the third semester of written theory, I took a single class to give an overview of fugue as a form and genre. I offered the class the chance to give me a subject of their choosing and I would improvise a fugue on that subject. One of the students then handed my Dmitri Shostakovitch’s musical signature and I have to say, it was an absolute delight! My improvised fugue went well that morning and it inspired me to write that as the “harder” sight-reading exercise last month. Unlike the first three, the Fugetta appears unedited from its original form. Get the score from IMSLP here!

Look at me get things out consistently! Three weeks in a row no less! Seriously, there is nothing like a little routine and pitting recording back into it feels good. In fact, as of writing this, I also uploaded another silly video with my kids and our stuffed animal, Monster (click here for the fun). Coming out of this pandemic (or limping out? ugh), I am endeavoring be more consistent with my output. A big piece of it is: I have a new church position and I spend time in that space regularly. Also, the organ is an fine enough condition, unlike my last years at the Monastery. That M.P. Möller imploded in those last years and you can hear it in my final liturgical improv there – there is so much noise and it is all coming from the organ and even with the filters on it, it is quite apparent that a lot of noise was pulled out and it affects the sound of the organ in the recording quite a bit.

That all being prefaced, I had been wanting to get back into the experimental side of output by exploring this new (to me) instrument. My first attraction in these situations is to go straight to manipulating the harmonic series. Or some kind of timbrel manipulation. An excellent example of this is Evening Improvisation I, number 11. One of the great things about playing the organ is that spectral (harmonic) manipulation is really easy with mutations. Broadly speaking, mutation stops are a kind of harmonic manipulation and monkeying with them is easy.

Two things I want to add to my thoughts here: the first is that it has been about two and a half years since my last Evening Improvisation post. My interests have evolved as happens to all of us and I think that can be heard here particularly in light of the second thought. I have been listening to A LOT of Kaija Saariaho and it is certainly influencing my more experimental musical self. There are things that are here that are pretty typical: gestures, repetition, ABA improvisational form, etc. But I feel like this shows some change from the last set of Evening Improvisations. Or maybe I am reading into it too much and overthinking it all. Let me leave it at: it is good to be getting things out there.

What a semester! It literally has been three months since I have posted but I have an excellent excuse. I am nearly done with my doctorate but something came up in the process of completing it. My advisers discovered that I had not taken any courses in electronic music composition! Now, as much as I wanted to be done with course work, this is something I have not done (except once and rather amateurishly). It is something I really needed in my education. It added just a little more to do than I normally like. That made the past three months way too busy.

Holy cow though, I am loving learning new things. While this next video does not have any electronic composition elements, it does include something I have learned about: de-noising software. Most of my videos have not included that kind of software and boy some of it could use it. At some point, I will post the new piece that I am creating, which has been a unique experience as a composer. And it is thoroughly an organ composition realized electronically.

This improvisation comes from my time practicing at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in Missoula, Montana where I played my Sonata No. 1. Dr. Nancy Cooper was my first organ teacher and since my family return there every summer, I have made it a habit of playing there yearly. Of course, with this wonderful Richard Bond neo-Baroque tracker rebuild, it was hard not to play around with it after practicing for a few hours. The key word there is tracker; much the previous post from the tracker at St. Paul Cathedral here in Pittsburgh, it is really fun to play with slowly lifting and depressing the action.

The 8′ Principle is such a lush stop on this instrument. It was hard to ignore!

Happy New Year!  It has been an exciting time as things are gearing up for an exciting summer.  The Kansas City AGO 2018 Convention sent out a very kind promotion to a piece of mine that will be premiered, Sonata No. 1.  It has been a long time coming and it is very, very exciting.

On a note about the blog, I have wanted to post something for some time but due to a mix of Christmas, family, and some issues with the organ, I have not been unhappy with the handful of recordings I have made.  Well, after the KC Newsletter, I wanted to post something and I took a look at the recordings I had and I found this gem.

Back in November, I went to St. Paul Cathedral to make a recording of more experimental improvisations, but it was not a very satisfying session.  Or at least that is what I thought at the time.  While reviewing the recording I came upon this terrifying improv.  St. Paul Cathedral has a magnificent von Beckerath organ, one that reminds me of the organ I played my undergrad days.  Really, both are German neo-Baroque trackers which allow for certain kinds of exploitation.  When I re-listened to the improv, I recalled the difficulty in moving my fingers slowly off the keys to create the desired effect.  The cromorne had particularly interesting sonorities when using this technique was applied.

As with any avant-garde composition or improvisation, I tried to ground it with some simple elements.  It is essentially a binary form, with a heavy emphasis on the lowest C pitch.  It is a balance; when there are highly strange elements present, simplicity is certainly needed.  And lastly, that middle section makes me think of this sound, whether or not it was intentional at the time.