Malhaus is an audio book based on a short story by Greg Fox. The music was developed alongside the words. This is actually the purely instrumental version with no story - it works as a piece of electro-acoustic music. The audio-book version will be added in roughly one month's time. The work is largely for small guitar-based jazz group, solo flute and voice, with additional sections for synths and church organ. See item details for compositional methodology and aesthetic goals. Structural documents will be added over the next few days.
"Malhaus" is a story-telling audio-book. This is the purely instrumental version which was finished before the story parts had been turned into sound recordings. It works equally well without the words.
The piece is structured as follows:
- An outer stretch for synths and voice and sampled toilet - Four chapters and three interludes - An outer stretch for cello, sampled lead guitar and voice - A short scary piece for church organ
The interludes are for flute - the first is for purely solo flute, the second for flute duetting with a second part which is all two-note intervals, the third is for flute with dreamy chordal backing : in other words the flute part seen as individual becomes combined (or contrasted) with a steadily more coherent backing which moves from silence to majority to society. The political implications of this for the solo flute are ambiguous.
The chapters are for guitar, bass guitar and percussion - the first chapter presents the material exactly as it was initially developed using chance mechanisms - the relations are very free and independent except for times where they seem coincidentally dependent. The second chapter adds a third voice: percussion. Again this is uncoordinated with the other two, but obviously with three random elements the chances of coincidental 'harmony' or rhythmic cohesion are much greater. The third chapter sees the percussion gravitating to the two guitar parts such that many of the attacks are simultaneous and others are poetically aligned to increase the sense of rhythm: there are in other words once again two opposing (or co-existing) parts, each with its own portion of the alligned percussion. The final chapter sees the two opposing parts gravitating also, such that there is a feeling of ensemble playing, as though the material were never generated by chance at all.
The other mechanism at play across the four chapters is that of shifting and transposing: in chapter two the guitar is shifted - in other words sections are moved forward or backward in the 'track' so that the order of material is altered. At the same time the bass part undergoes transpositions so that the resultant tonal relationships are changed.
In chapter three the same happens the other way round: the bass is rearranged horizontally and the guitar transposed vertically. This means that compared to the first chapter, this material is different but related, in the same way as you might expect to see in tonal composed music.
In the final chapter there is shifting of material but no further transposition, and the important feature is how co-ordinated it feels. The overall trend is for societal cohesion to develop out of unrelation (with the help of the percussion, which the reader may interpret positively or negatively).
The factor which will resist this societal cohesion will of course be the spoken word part, but in this version the societal aspect is what we see.
The outer sections are rather like the intro and outro sections of a film score, or an overture and finale from a theatre piece. The human voice is already present in this version as it's only used instrumentally.
The instruments in this recording are all sampled (ie. sound-fonts) - this makes the composition process much quicker, enables 'impossible' ideas and specific manipulation of timing, and hopefully is drastically different to what 'normally' happens with sampled sound (ie. rhythmic stability, sequenced music, etc.)
The guiding principles of the piece are somewhere between Xenakis' macro-control of probabilities and Henze's "order out of chaos". This version stands up pretty well as a purely instrumental piece with the added advantage that individual chunks can be taken out and combined with other things for CDs etc.
The audio-book version will be published within the next month of so, by the end of April 2006 at the latest. In the meantime, structural diagrams and the text of the story will gradually be added in preparation.
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