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Primarily, ImDM is my doctoral composition project. On a grant application I wrote:
ImDM is an electro-acoustic music composition designed for performance using a laptop computer. It explores the relationship between academic computer music and computer based music from other realms, including electronic dance music—techno, drum-n-bass, breakbeat, glitch, etc—and other experimental forms. The similarities between these musics include experimentation with sound processing, an embrace of textural layering, and similar hardware and software. The major difference is the presence of a steady beat—meaning the use of a sampled or synthesized drum pattern, not simply the use of a regular musical pulse—in most electronic dance music and its absence in traditional computer music. Other differences include performance practices and aesthetic goals, including preferred concert environment, the creation of music for dancing, and, often, the intended audience.
To fully explore these differences, this project is being built around a single sampled drum loop. The sample, taken from The Winstons’ 1969 recording of Amen, Brother! and known commonly as the amen break, has a rich history of sampling and appears in many diverse genres, including hip-hop, gansta rap, rave, IDM (intelligent dance music), and drum-n-bass. At times this loop will be developed within the electronic dance music aesthetic as a morphing groove that provides a steady beat around which other samples (including recordings of a thunderstorm and human speech) can be manipulated. At other times the loop will be deconstructed and treated with the techniques explored by Pierre Schaeffer in his work with musique concrète. By developing the amen break through a gradual morphing of its pattern over time I will be recalling the aesthetics of minimalist music. Pioneered by Steve Reich, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, minimalism had a widespread effect on music, including most electronic dance music. Careful attention to these varied styles and aesthetics will result in a project that is a true musical hybrid, rather than a mere borrowing from the surface elements of one to paste onto another. Other objectives for this project include the creation of a software interface to encourage an alternative approach to composition and the use of performance as a creative, compositional act.
Part of a composer’s development is the exploration of different, sometimes competing methods. This is continually challenging as it can often seem that all reasonable practices have been thoroughly explored. Through this project, I plan to explore a compositional process common in electronic music, but often ignored when composing with music notation. Chris Cutler, in File Under Popular, explains this concept best by generalizing the history of music making as three broad modes: ritual, passed on by human memory; notation, passed on as memory fixed on a page; and recording, passed on as captured memory of a performance. One important implication of this idea is the changing roles of hearing and vision in each mode. In ritual (or folk) music, the ear was the primary sensory domain in the creation of music. As notation of music become common, the eye became the primary sensory domain—music was conceived and created on paper first before realization in performance. Advancements in recording began to move the creation of music back into the domain of the ear. Now it is possible to work with sound directly and to utilize any possible sound in the creation of music, things that notation cannot do.
Creation within the recorded mode is not a new solution in and of itself. My approach will differ through the deliberate lack of any compositional conceptions from the notation mode—including the emphasis on large scale form, thematic materials based on groups of pitches, and the subordination of rhythm to harmonic and melodic development. My formal academic training worked almost exclusively in notation. Printed music was the source of study material and the end result of creative effort. Classroom listening was done in the context of a simultaneous viewing of the score. By endeavoring to remove this sort of conceptualization from the creative process, I hope to realize a music whose form is guided solely by the implications present in the audible characteristics of my recorded sounds, and whose developmental strategies favor moment to moment intuition over large scale formal logic. My efforts should demonstrate this as a viable approach to the creation of music, and will hopefully encourage a similar exploration for others.
(I did not get the grant.) More than that, ImDM is an effort to break out of the creative rut I find myself occupying after many years of composing music according to the traditions, styles and forms preferred in academic music. It is a way to explore the union of composition and performance for myself. And it is an attempt to make a statement about what I think is important in music.