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“We have also Sound-Houses, where we practise and demonstrate
all Sounds and their generation: We have Harmony which you have not, of
quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers Instruments of Music
likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and
rings that are dainty and sweet... This is part of Francis Bacon’s vision of a Utopian New Atlantis published in 1627, and three and a half centuries later, it’s all true. In fact you can do it (and much more besides) from the comfort of your own perfectly ordinary computer. Over the last twenty years or so, digital sound has come of age and (thanks to the demands of the commercial sector) become very affordable. In particular, samplers offer the composer an amazing sonic blank canvas (to quote Trevor Wishart in his excellent book Audible Design “Any sound whatsoever may be the starting material for a musical composition, and the ways in which this sound may be transformed are limited only by the imagination of the composer”), and are now cheap and easy to use - if you can word-process a letter, you’re more than qualified, and if you can’t, I promise that given a bit of persistence you’ll work out how to make some ‘dainty and sweet’ noises of your own within a week. There’s no question that samplers have become hugely popular very quickly, and have rapidly spawned whole new genres of music, but I worry that at the moment these marvellous new instruments are mostly used in studios, in music primarily designed to exist as recordings, which may only later develop a live form. We should be integrating electronics into our music making (just as the wider world of percussion instruments was in the first half of this century) not letting it head off on its own tangent. For me nothing beats the excitement and expressive potential of music in live performance and the vastly expanded sound palette offered by the new technology can, with a bit of planning, be an organic part of that, as works like Jonathan Harvey’s From Silence and Steve Reich’s City Life demonstrate. Yet given how many of them are out there, I’m not seeing samplers and computers on the concert stage anywhere near often enough, using keyboard (or other types of controller) players as part of an ensemble. So that’s the challenge - get writing. I won’t deny that setting it up is a bit more effort than taking a violin out of its case, but the possibilities... Michael Oliva teaches composition with electronics at the Royal College of Music. The monthly listings magazine new
notes is essential reading for composers, performers, and everyone
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