Sharp, Elliott / Orchestra Carbon

Larynx

Label: NEOS Music Country: USA

Larynx is an analogy; the orchestra as a throat. It follows as corollary to the throat as orchestra: throat singing as practised by the Inuit of the Canadian arctic and the hoomii singing of Mongolia, as well as by related jawharp techniques found throughout the world. The natural overtone series is the melodic core of much of these musics and of much of Larynx. Ratios derived from the Fibonacci Series are used to generate tunings and melodic/harmonic material for the strings, brass, slabs, pantars, and doubleneck guitarbass, as well as rhythmic material for the ensemble.

Concepts from fractal geometry provided further inspiration and core material. This is a continuation of systems used in such pieces as Marco Polo's Argali, Self-Squared Dragon and Tessalation Row. Within a given section, some musicians will be strictly utilizing these systems while others will play using their own idiosyncratic processes. Using guided improvisations layered and intertwined with the predetermined materials, the musicians may expand upon and comment tangentially on the given material.

In 1985, I became aware of the fractal geometry of Benoît Mandelbrot through an article in Scientific American and became increasingly excited by it. I felt a resonance with Mandelbrot's mapping of mathematical functions to forms and phenomena from nature including turbulence, chaos, and seeming randomness and felt that "an ideal music" could also be a mapping of these forms and phenomena. Exploring the many regions of an iterated Julia set on my Atari ST computer, I felt that I was looking at a picture of time - not linear at all but jagged, reticulated and looping.

With the album Fractal (1986), I set out to construct pieces loosely based on various aspects of fractal geometry. Each piece had shifting elements of structure and guided improvisation, layers of interlocked order and chaos. I looked to the math for catalysis, inspiration, and allusion - I was not interested in generating tables of fractals to construct musical material - too mechanistic, too academic. At this time, I also began using a MIDI converter on the guitar-half of my doubleneck to drive a sampler. By sampling sounds, processes, and phrases produced through the extended techniques that were to form the sonic cores of compositions and from the various homemades, an additional reflexive and recursive element could be layered into the mix as well as greatly extending my timbral range.

An important organ within Orchestra Carbon in the realization of Larynx is the Soldier String Quartet, whose rhythmic astuteness and enthusiasm for the extended techniques called for in the compostition made them a pleasure to work with. Their instruments were tuned entirely to the Just Intoned ratios of 1/1, 3/2, 8/5 and 5/3 (translating as C, G, Ab, A), generated from adjacent Fibonacci numbers. These tunings were also applied to the slabs, pantars and guitarbass. To maintain the intonation system in the bulk of the piece, all of these instruments were played using only open strings and their overtones.

In a like manner, the brass instruments played open pedal tones of those same notes and their overtones. There are, however, a number of places in Larynx where players are free to use a variety of sound-production techniques well outside any system. Slabs are horizontal basses with a movable bridge in the center of the string span and pickups on either side. They are played with lightweight metal mallets with rubber tips combined with hand-muting to bring out specific overtones. In this way, one slab may be played by two people. They may also be bowed or played with slides. The pantars are the metal tops to sweeping-compound cans fitted with four tunable strings, a contact pickup and a bridge/resonator made of a domed cymbal. They may be plucked, hammered, struck or excited by an E-bow.

Larynx is constructed in six major sections with five interludes. The opening and closing use all four drummers; the remaining sections each feature one, with the others playing slabs or samples. Starting with the second section, the order of the featured drummers is: Noyes, Previte, Bennett and Linton. Each has developed a unique vocabulary; I enjoy the contrast between them as well as their understanding of my compositional syntax. This applies to all of the musicians in Carbon, who are given instructions of varying degrees of specificity in the different sections (ranging from exact rhythms or playing techniques to general notions of density or textures).

The same processing algorithms are mapped onto each section, cross-referencing them while yielding radically different sonic textures. One is transported (via interlude) into each new section - the terrain is different, yet one recognizes that the functional identity of the new place is the same (an analogy from topology applies: a torus is a torus is a torus). The interludes form a cycle of their own while connecting the main sections; the same processes are applied to groups of instruments - explicity different but self-similar in both internal and structural workings. The order of interludes is brass, pantars, string quartet, slabs, guitarbass.

Larynx was commisioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the 1987 "Next Wave" Festival and composition was completed by June of that year soon after which recording was commenced. It was recorded and mixed at BC Studio, Brooklyn, NY from June to October 1987 and engineered by Martin Bisi. It was constructed in layers and sections in the studio. I was severely limited in budget, funding the recording out of pocket and finishing another section or adding layers whenever I could afford to bring in some of the players and book a few hours of time. While recording, the players rarely worked in context. They were overdubbing to previously recorded guide parts played on my doubleneck or a horn with the drummers. Their understanding of how their parts interlocked with those of the other players came upon listening to the completed recording (which served as a guide for the ensemble in rehearsing for the premiere performances.) This recording was originally released by the pioneering California indie/punkrock label SST in 1988.

When Larynx was performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music (November 13-14, 1987), it manifested its own musical life, fueled by the inspired contributions of all the musicians. The music dances upon the everchanging boundary between a geometry derived from the Fibonacci Series and a fractal geometry of turbulence, chaos and disorder. The explicitly ordered materials are embedded in a dense field of manifold processes. In any section, many micromelodies may operate simultanously; they interact and combine, pop out and reveal themselves. As elements shift, new landscapes emerge (along with new sets of processes).

I was not interested in mechanistically assigning musical functions to tables of fractals or in using mathematical functions as artifacts. The essence of my use of fractal geometry is as a conceptual flamethrower, burning away conventional ideas of structure and development and allowing Larynx to be heard as a multiplexing of other-than-musical processes. Like a sonic hologram, one may listen from many angles; both the components parts and the whole are simultaneously revealed even as they are transfigured in form and function."-Elliot Sharp