[EN]

Official launch at the Borderline Festival in Malmö (Sweden) on April 29, 2005.

“Entropic Twilights”: Explicating the Plague

At the beginning of the 21st century, listeners are inundated with music that wafts through every commercial space. Shopping malls have become tasting centers, wherein a book shop will pipe in a muzak-ed The Beatles tune while the clothes boutique next door is barking bass-heavy electronica. A little further down the stroll, light classical is shouldered alongside hip hop, creating a garbled omnipresence. There is no silence any more, only a miasma of unrelated ideas.

Paul Dolden coheres such babble in a single, densely packed meta-narrative. This is his voice, his style, condensing the shopper’s day, explicating the aural plague, giving it shape and substance. Since the 1980s, Dolden’s vision of the present has made the musical community prickly. His output does not tidily emerge from the austere modernist tradition, which has long lost its currency, except among composition instructors and their students. By today’s techno-standards, the musical descendants of Webern and Stravinsky sound nourishing up close, quaintly non-electric at a distance, and not quite real any more.

With his history of layering hundreds of recorded tracks, aggressively recalibrating the limits of orchestration, Dolden attacks classical music’s tail-eating inwardness and the weak fibres by which it clings to artistic relevance. 1989’s “Below the Walls of Jericho”, with its bristling fabric, was bent on enlivening the audience’s blood flow. It was a nasty shock in the concert hall, where shocks have been in short supply. Now Dolden offers a new sound in “Entropic Twilights”, a barrage of now, in the form of myriad musical genres, packed smart and tight like Bach’s counterpoint or Ligeti’s mircropolyphony. “Entropic Twilights” is tonal, less dissonant and longer than any previous works (49 minutes) and welcomes comedy back to serious music. Listen for when the dark, pulsing orchestral tensions melt into speedy jazz guitar at the end of the first movement and try not to smile. Let’s return to the humour aspect later.

“Entropic Twilights” begs a reappraisal of the vocabulary around Dolden’s music. Particularly, his often-touted ‘aesthetics of excess’ no longer seems to apply; the millions of notes heard on this recording, uncharacteristically, do not overload the listener. There are exactly enough of them.

‘Composer’ is another problematic term, because its classical inferences do not encapsulate what Dolden does. Other composers compose for the open air, only rarely with electronic assistance. Dolden composes for cyberspace, and this is best illustrated through “Entropic Twilights”. Gone are the raging blocks of scintillating klangfarben heard in the Jericho triptych. “Entropic Twilights” works instead with four brief melodies, stretched and compressed, beginning and ending at different positions around the body; you can actually feel one tune coming down into the top of your head as another strain spirals upward toward your jaw. This creates a unique sensation of panoramic space: the listener’s body feels like a magnet, drawing together musical Diaspora. At other times, there is a perception of physical movement, as if the listener was moving through audio chambers featuring walls of only recently imaginable timbres, among other individual melodic currents cruising at their own distinct tempos. Dolden does this by composing in stereo and realizing his ideas through recording engineering of the highest order.

Composers compose for the open air, while Dolden composes for recording technology, and this is a pertinent distinction: mediation becomes muse. During his suburban upbringing, young Dolden heard almost all music through radio and recordings, as did we all. His youthful compositional approach came under fire for its ‘unnatural’ fixation on microphones and loudspeakers over pure, unblemished instrumental sound. Ironically, live instruments are today a rarer treat than their electrically mediated facsimiles. ‘Nature,’ it would seem, is being overrun by reality. That irony is critical to Dolden’s approach. Responding to media mediation is, again, his style, an enterprise distinct from traditional composing. It is media art.

Dolden the media artist has also been called a maximalist, though that term means little more than containing more. There certainly is a lot of music in “Entropic Twilights”, but that is also true of every Mahler symphony. The term is misleading: ‘maximalist’ implies a school of composition that does not exist in any meaningful way. As for the use of different musical genres concurrently, Dolden is using genres the way Bach, Haydn, Schönberg, and Bartók used folk tunes. Dolden uses unorthodox instrumentation to capture those genres accurately: heavy metal through electric guitar, and gamelan through those gorgeous gongs.

Dolden is a staunch post-modernist, eager to play with signifiers and, luckily, he is witty enough to make genre splices splat or glisten. The jazzy guitar part that concludes “Entropic Twilights”’s opening movement, “Twilight’s Nomadic Desire”, almost goofily caps the more brooding, percussive choral stuff beforehand. It is a sudden shift, deliberately snuffing out a darker kind of tension in favour of something more exuberant. It is a pratfall, and also a serious demonstration of how to refresh the listener’s experience. The icy trance beforehand had been well prepared; the dreadful atmospheric integrity explodes while the music’s integrity holds fast. (Remember, we are dealing with very finite musical materials constantly reappearing in new garb: a four-melody Idée fixe.) The anticipation of the listener is mangled but the music’s logic remains intact, which seemingly goads the audience to listen less as academics and hear more as adventurers and joy riders.

Serious music has been skimpy on visceral thrills for a long time now, perhaps because popular music often is so good at evoking them. But 18th and 19th century listeners attended piano concertos in part for the wild ride of a virtuosic performance, a lively accompaniment, a yee-hah! This recent absence has cost the classical tradition dearly. Dolden’s “Entropic Twilights” livens up the situation, for all music. “Entropic Twilights” is a rejection of music’s pervasive tameness, via velocity and scale. Just as the healthiest artistic genres of today — film and the novel — appeal to the guts of the audience as much as they provide cerebral edification, “Entropic Twilights” evocates the breadth of our actual living experience, supercharged and relentlessly entertaining.

“Entropic Twilights” is a challenge to the classical scene and to those polite, piped in tunes, those vague prompters of commercial well being. It is ill to reduce music to a mere sickness imposed upon our sensibilities, to allow music’s value to be whittled away by flabby ubiquity and frippery. Dolden’s rebuttal is an action-packed tonic of fortifying, electric irony and multifarious, heads-up reality. Enjoy.

Production Methods for “Entropic Twilights”

First the work was composed on 140 pages. I remember it took me 137 days to compose the work. While composing I created the click tracks since many of the sections involve complex rhythmic phasing and I needed to see how the bars lined up to control the harmonic rhythm.

Next the individual parts were written out and musicians and singers were hired to perform the individual parts one at a time. I performed all the bowed and plectrum string parts. All the parts with sustained note values (i.e. melodic work) were performed four times each. All the parts were recorded in stereo using two AKG 414 UBL-S microphones. The microphone pre-amp was a tube amp made by Peavey (VMP 2). The signal was then placed through a Klark-Teknic Parametric Equalizer with different EQ curves for each instrument (These curves I have developed over many years of recording). The signal was then placed through a phase angle correction unit, the Barcus Berry BBE. Finally the signal was digitized using a Digidesign 882 I/O. All the performances were edited for greater accuracy. Next all parts involving the inharmonic samples (i.e. pitch shifted saucepans, bowls, wheel rims, various poles, bass drums, various gongs and tams and many types of bells) were created. In the case where samples doubled a performed part, the samples were edited following the rhythm of the live part.

The piece was originally premiered in September 2000. However I was still unhappy with the sound of the piece. For the next two years I re-mastered my three previous solos CDs: “L’ivresse de la vitesse” #1 and #2 and “Seuil de silences” (originally called “The Threshold of Deafening Silence”). During this remastering period I learned a lot about the new digital tools available to me. Secondly I began to realize that for “Entropic Twilights” I needed new types of production styles. I spend a great deal of time listening and studying other people’s productions and mixing techniques. However I may be alone in the inherent problems of dense multitracking. Moreover I may be really alone in my orchestration ideas. For example, in this work, I have 6 cymbal parts, 3 guiros, 3 shakers, castanets, maracas, 2 snares and I still want the flute part played softly in its first octave to cut through. Obviously a few sonic comprises have to be made. Here are a few engineering “tricks” I developed for this work.

I have come to believe in heavy compression of most instruments and voices because otherwise when all the tracks are together, you only hear the strong or penetrating parts of each instrument. (i.e. high notes on brass and flutes/piccolo, the low notes in saxophones, clarinets, vocal vowels which have high pitched formants, etc.). The problem with extensive compression of all tracks is that you start getting that static wall of sound. Secondly, percussive sounds with exponential envelopes cannot be clearly perceived through this wall of sound. (One tends to only hear the tick of their attacks). Therefore I developed dynamic settings for compression with optical-style compressors. One example: Attack: 100 (milliseconds) Release: 12 Ratio: 20:1 Threshold: -30 dB. These types of settings produce an articulation similar to a musical articulation of sfp (Fast loud attack and quick decay to soft). This is emphasized by the fact that optical compressors emphasize lower numbered harmonics as they go into deep compression. (In this case the soft or last part of the sound). Partially to offset this “darkness”, a dynamic treble enhancer was used after compression that kicked in as the signal became too dark. The quick reduction in level after the attack of each note or phrase allowed the short envelopes of the percussion instruments to be perceived in the final mix. In short I made the orchestral instruments more percussive.

Likewise I realized the pitched percussion instruments (metal, bowls, poles, gamelan instruments, plucked strings, gongs, tams, vibes, marimbas etc.) needed to become more sustained and less percussive. I designed extreme low level compressors for each instrument type. These compressors left the peak of each sound where it was and severely brought up the decay portion of the sound. To this decay portion I often added dynamic noise reduction and/or treble enhancers. I also added many short delays, in the 5 to 50 milliseconds range to these instruments in order to imitate the “timbral density” of the orchestral and voice parts. This timbral density for the orchestra instruments was created by recording each part four times. In addition for these pitched percussion instruments I often used multiband compressors and expanders designed to pull down the upper register during the bright attack portion. Lows and mids were brought up or down in conjunction with the previous low-level compressor.

Another sound quality problem I had in previous mixes was the build up of resonant peaks resulting in a muddy sound when many tracks were playing fast. In particular the resonant peaks of particular instruments become an almost steady hum or drone killing the rhythmic drive. For example both the piano and cello have strong resonant peaks between 85 and 110 Hz. When you have many tracks of the same sound source you get this sonic sludge in these resonant regions. In previous works I had worked with finding numerous resonant peaks and using notch filters to remove them. However acoustic instruments often have many closely spaced resonant peaks and by the time you are up to 10 or 20 notches you are starting to get a very thin sounding cello, piano, toms, etc. I realized I needed more of a gap or space between each note than was possible with human performance. In other words an extreme short staccato. This was done through fancy applications of gates in order not to cut off the initial attack transients of each note. First an extremely fast optical compressor was used to darken the sound after the initial attack. The next unit, the gate, was triggered by seeing only the bright attack transients. Next, another fast attack VCA high ratio compressor was used to even out the levels. Often a dynamic treble enhancer was added and/or a “de-clicker” to remove the clicks that did occur by gating. Often somewhere in the chain of plug-ins a multi-band compressor/expander was needed. For each part I also produced a very fat or full sounding compressed version which did not use gating. In the final mix I would have the staccato or gated version and the legato compressed version at the same time. I would achieve a balance between the two and sometimes vary their mixture levels. In some passages only the gated versions appears in the final mix. When only using the gated version identification of the instrument is often impossible. However following the pitch pattern is possible because the gated short notes ended up being around 20-40 milliseconds long.

A similar approach was used on cymbals, shakers, guiros, hi-hats, toms, timpani, bass drum, low gamelan tams, electric bass, acoustic bass, contra bassoon, tuba. A short gated version and a fat compressed version were produced for each performance. In the final mix the gated version produced the rhythmic articulation and compressed version produced a resonant big sound. In the final mix there was a tendency to use more of the gated version when the two rhythmic sections had “pulled apart” either through the use of phasing or two different tempos. The most time consuming part of all this work was when I had sounds for which I could not gate electronically. For example, all the electric bass parts I went through and edited in a silence between each note. Therefore the gate had a chance to identify each note separately and then shorten each that note accordingly.

There were other processes involved to get the sound of “Entropic Twilights” which are too numerous to mention. However I would like to mention one recording innovation I used for drums. I first used this idea during the remastering of older works phase (2000-2002) (in “Beyond the Walls of Jericho” and “Physics of Seduction. Invocation #3”). My problem with drum recordings previously is that I had been using standard industry procedures. When I got to the final mix I found I did not have enough level control over individual drum pieces, because of the bleed of sound. (i.e. sound of the hi-hat in almost every microphone etc). I realized I needed to record the drums in the same manner as I did every other sound: one piece at a time. This allowed for individual level control in the final mix and individual settings of compression and equalization for each drum piece. Moreover having the player free from playing the entire kit at the same time allowed for certain articulations that are not otherwise possible. For example the six cymbals parts play a continuous ride in the feel of the musical section. In addition I had the player (Phillipe Keyser) play two bars normal and then two bars where he choked or stopped the sound of the cymbal after each stick stroke, with his free hand. This prevented the buildup of the cymbals in the mix that you often hear in a typical rock mix in which once the drummer starts bashing on the ride cymbal everything else is masked because of the 300 Hz to 20 kHz broadband noise of the cymbal. Likewise having 6 cymbals, like the 3 guiros and 3 shakers, is to create a timbral density equal to the instrumental parts.

My intention in “Entropic Twilights” was to produce a beautiful recording that constantly varied its sound and therefore the production procedures (for example sections that are very “orchestral”, sections that seem to swing like the best big bands, sections that “rocked” you into the ground). Unlike most composers or producers who create one type of “sound world” this is still my biggest challenge which means developing an extremely flexible audio production technique. In addition I am doing sound constellations that cannot occur with acoustic ensembles.

As a final comment I realize my music, particularly since “L’ivresse de la vitesse”, has become about the same musical materials being performed by a constantly changing instrumentation. In this piece, the four melodies are only developed in a limited manner, and no other melodic materials are introduced. Contrasts are created by each section having a unique orchestration that is never repeated again in the work. By contrast, the instrumental composer normally deals with a fixed instrumentation for the duration of the composition, whether it is a string quartet, orchestra, or solo flute. In most styles of writing the compositional decisions and tensions are based on the introduction of new material and/or more extended variation/development of existing material. Clearly my working method elevates the art of orchestration coupled with audio engineering to a dominant compositional concern. At the point of this writing, the obvious question is whether I want to change this balance.

Featured Musicians in “Entropic Twilights”

Paul Dolden: electric and acoustic guitar, electric and acoustic bass, violin, viola, cello, dulcimer, sitar, banjo, tams, gongs, bowls, wheel rims, metal poles, metal plates, various bells, gamelan orchestra instruments
Phillipe Keyser: drum kits
John Korsrud: trumpet
Derrick Christian: bass voice
Hamish Gordon: oboe, english horn
Johanna Hauser: clarinet, bass clarinet
Liz Hamel: alto voice, tenor and bass recorder
Brock Campbell: tuba
Nick Apivor: marimba, vibes, congas, shakers, guiros, castenets, maracas, timpani
Elliot Polsky: bata drums, timbales
Lorraine Reinhardt: soprano voice
Bill Runge: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxes
Jason Cook: boy soprano
Ingrid Chiang: bassoon, contra bassoon.
Rod Murray: trombone
Jonathan Quick: tenor voice
Chenoa Anderson: flute, piccolo
Jeff Nelson: french horn

[FR]

Lancement officiel le 29 avril 2005 au festival Borderline à Malmö (Suède).

«Entropic Twilights»: Expliciter le fléau

En ce début de 21e siècle, les auditeurs que nous sommes sont submergés par la musique qui plane dans chaque espace commercial. Les centres commerciaux sont devenus des centres de dégustation, où une librairie susurre la version «muzak» d’un air du groupe The Beatles, alors que la boutique de vêtements voisine hurle de l’électronica aux basses tonitruantes. À quelques pas de là, de la musique classique légère et du hip-hop se retrouvent coude à coude, le tout dans une omniprésence confuse. Le silence n’a plus sa place, il n’existe qu’un miasme de propositions isolées.

Paul Dolden réunit et structure ces bavardages en un seul métarécit d’une grande densité. Avec sa voix, son style, il condense la journée du magasineur, il explicite le fléau sonore, il lui donne forme et substance. Depuis les années 80, la conception que Dolden se fait du présent irrite la communauté musicale. Son œuvre n’émerge pas proprement de l’austère tradition moderniste, dont la valeur s’est effondrée depuis longtemps, sauf aux yeux des professeurs de composition et de leurs étudiants. À l’étalon techno d’aujourd’hui, les descendants musicaux de Webern et de Stravinsky semblent sustentant de près, pittoresquement non-électriques de loin, et plus tout à fait vrais.

Avec son habitude de superposer des centaines de pistes enregistrées, recalibrant ainsi violemment les limites de l’orchestration, Dolden s’attaque à la circularité autodévorante de la musique classique et aux faibles petites fibres par lesquelles elle s’accroche à la pertinence artistique. Avec son tissu sonore hérissé, «Below the Walls of Jericho» (1989) cherchait à stimuler la circulation sanguine du public. Ce fut un choc puissant dans la salle de concert, là où les chocs sont devenus si rares. Cette fois, Dolden nous offre avec «Entropic Twilights» un nouveau son, un déluge du présent, sous la forme d’une pléthore de genres musicaux agencés très serrés, comme le contrepoint de Bach ou la micropolyphonie de Ligeti. «Entropic Twilights» est tonale, moins dissonante et plus longue (49 minutes) que toutes ses œuvres précédentes, et elle refait une place à la comédie dans la musique sérieuse. Écoutez bien la fin du premier mouvement, lorsque les sombres tensions orchestrales fondent pour se métamorphoser en guitare jazz sur les amphétamines, et essayez de ne pas sourire. Nous reviendrons au côté humoristique plus loin.

«Entropic Twilights» commande une réévaluation du vocabulaire entourant la musique de Dolden, en particulier, son «esthétique de l’excès», si souvent mentionnée, semble maintenant caduque: d’une manière peu caractéristique, les millions de notes entendues sur cet enregistrement ne surchargent pas l’auditeur. Elles sont en nombre parfaitement suffisant.

Le terme «compositeur» pose également problème, parce que ses inférences classiques ne rendent pas le travail de Dolden. Les autres compositeurs composent pour l’air libre, en faisant rarement appel à l’électronique. Dolden compose pour le cyberespace, ce qu’illustre à merveille «Entropic Twilights». Les blocs rageurs de klangfarben étincelant présents dans le triptyque de Jéricho se sont évanouis. «Entropic Twilights» est plutôt constituée de quatre mélodies brèves, étirées et comprimées, naissant et mourant en différents points du corps; on peut vraiment sentir un air descendre depuis le haut du crâne, alors qu’un autre courant grimpe vers la mâchoire en suivant une spirale. Cela procure une sensation d’espace panoramique sans précédent: le corps de l’auditeur devient un aimant qui rassemble la Diaspora musicale. On perçoit à d’autres moments un déplacement physique, comme si l’auditeur se déplaçait à travers des chambres sonores présentant des murs de sonorités à peine imaginables hier encore, parmi d’autres courants mélodiques individuels se déplaçant selon leurs propres tempi. Dolden réussit cela en composant en stéréo et en donnant corps à ses idées à l’aide des meilleures techniques d’ingénierie du son.

Les compositeurs composent pour l’air libre, alors que Dolden compose pour les technologies de l’enregistrement. Il s’agit là d’une distinction pertinente: la médiation devient la muse. Presque toute la musique que le jeune Dolden a entendue, au cours de son enfance et de son adolescence banlieusardes, provenait de la radio et de disques, ce qui fut notre cas à tous. Son approche compositionnelle pleine de jeunesse a été canardée en raison de sa fixation «contre nature» sur les microphones et les haut-parleurs, au détriment du son instrumental pur et non altéré. Ironiquement, les instruments «en direct» sont, de nos jours, beaucoup plus rares que leurs fac-similés rendus par la voie électrique. La «nature», semble-t-il, s’est fait renversée par la réalité. Cette ironie est primordiale dans l’approche de Dolden. Son style consiste à répondre à la médiation du médium, une entreprise distincte de la composition traditionnelle. C’est de l’art médiatique.

On a parfois qualifié Dolden, l’artiste médiatique, de maximaliste, bien que ce terme ne signifie rien de plus qu’en contenir plus. «Entropic Twilights» contient beaucoup de musique, soit, mais c’est aussi le cas de toutes les symphonies de Mahler. Le terme porte à confusion: «maximaliste» implique l’idée d’une école compositionnelle qui n’existe pas de façon tangible. Pour ce qui est de l’utilisation de plusieurs genres musicaux côte à côte, Dolden le fait, comme Bach, Haydn, Schönberg et Bartók se servaient d’airs folkloriques. Dolden utilise une instrumentation peu orthodoxe afin de bien rendre ces genres: la guitare électrique pour le heavy métal et de fabuleux gongs pour le gamelan.

Dolden est un post-moderniste dévoué, toujours prêt à jouer sur les signifiants, et il est heureusement assez spirituel pour rendre ses collures stylistiques brutales ou chatoyantes. La partie de guitare jazzée qui conclut le premier mouvement de «Entropic Twilights», «Twilight’s Nomadic Desire», vient presque couronner ridiculement le chœur percussif beaucoup plus songeur qui précède. Le changement est abrupt et souffle délibérément le genre de tension sombre au profit de quelque chose de plus exubérant. C’est une finale en queue de poisson, mais aussi une démonstration sérieuse sur la manière de rafraîchir l’expérience de l’auditeur. La transe glaciale qui précédait avait été amenée avec soi; l’intégrité atmosphérique lugubre explose, alors que l’intégrité de la musique tient le coup. (Souvenez-vous, nous sommes en présence d’un matériau musical très circonscrit réapparaissant constamment dans de nouveaux atours: une idée fixe de quatre mélodies.) L’attente de l’auditeur est mise en pièces, mais la logique de la musique en sort intacte, ce qui semble pousser l’auditoire à laisser tomber l’oreille académique pour adopter celle de l’aventure et de la cavale.

La musique sérieuse est chiche en frissons viscéraux depuis longtemps, peut-être parce que la musique populaire les évoque souvent si bien. Or, les auditeurs des 18e et 19e siècles allaient entendre un concerto pour piano en partie pour les sensations fortes provoquées par une prestation virtuose, par un accompagnement entraînant, par un yahoo! Cette disparition récente a coûté cher à la tradition classique. Cette pièce de Dolden redonne de la vigueur à la situation, à toute la musique en fait. «Entropic Twilights» exprime le rejet de la fadeur pernicieuse de la musique, par le truchement de la vitesse et de l’échelle. Tout comme les genres artistiques en meilleure santé (le cinéma et le roman) parlent aux tripes de l’auditoire tout en offrant une édification intellectuelle, «Entropic Twilights» évoque toute l’ampleur de notre expérience de vie, surchargée et sans cesse divertissante.

«Entropic Twilights» lance un défi à la scène classique et à ces ritournelles polies, vagues suppôts du bien-être commercial. Il est malsain de réduire la musique à un simple malaise imposé à nos sensibilités, de laisser la valeur de la musique s’effriter dans l’ubiquité indolente et les colifichets. La réfutation de Dolden est un tonifiant bourré d’action, d’ironie électrique et de réalité colorée. Amusez-vous bien.

Techniques utilisées pour «Entropic Twilights»
Voir la section «Production Methods for “Entropic Twilights”» plus haut

Musiciens enregistrés pour «Entropic Twilights»
Voir la section «Featured Musicians in “Entropic Twilights”» plus haut