Introduction
In the earliest days of QME, two pieces in particular had an outsize impact on the way the band was ultimately to develop: Pauline Oliveros’s The Mystery Beyond Matter and David Toop’s night leaves breathing (both are available on CD here).
Pauline’s piece employs especially created software that provides enormous reverbs and extremely long delays (up to 40 minutes). Each musician may select one of the reverbs or the delays and has a limited amount of control over their settings. The processed sound from each musician is randomly and independently diffused through a multichannel PA (at least 8 channels), the speakers of which are, if possible, situated in various rooms in a large building or other complex space. Each room therefore receives a combination of sounds that is under nobody’s control.
There are two very important things about the experience that this piece produces: for the audience, it means that every listener hears a version that is the unique result of their choices about which space(s) to occupy while listening. Someone might stay put in one room and hear only what that room receives; another might walk continuously from space to space, choosing to ‘mix’ what they hear as they do so. For every walking route that a listener might take, there’s a unique experience. A listener composes their experience of the piece every bit as much as the musicians’ do.
For the performers, the piece produces another profound effect. The reverbs and delays are so extreme that they do a great deal more than ‘colour’ the sound. One of the reverbs is a digital simulation of the reverberation of the Fort Worden Cistern, where Pauline’s seminal Deep Listening album was recorded. She described how that reverb felt like a fourth member of the ensemble, and that is very much the experience of working with the digital system created for The Mystery Beyond Matter too. In a 1995 article, Acoustic and Virtual Space as a Dynamic Element of Music, Pauline describes how the experience of playing in differing acoustics influenced her early in her musical life. She had noted the effect not only on her instrument’s sound, but also the psychological effect that different acoustics have on a performer. She noted that the nature of an acoustic will determine to a large extent the nature of the music we play in it. The effect of a reverb as massive as that of the cistern is, of course, considerable, because everything that is played remains in the air in a very immediate way for a long time. Melodies become chords; Dempster’s monophonic trombone became potentially polyphonic; timbres morph and diffuse through the space in unpredictable ways, and the sounds of each of the musicians joins the others to merge into a whole that is much more than the mere combining of timbres might suggest. The reverb is not just the sound of a space; it becomes a key component in making creative decisions. Oliveros described the Cistern as an instrument, an idea that is expanded on by Sharon Stewart in her article Listening to Deep Listening:
…the performers approach this space with more than the idea of adding natural reverberation to their music-making. They are not playing in the cistern to hear how “their music” sounds with the “extra reverb,” but they are, through listening, weaving a music, a sounding, that the cistern calls out of them. They are not only causing the cistern to resonate; the cistern, as (more than) equal participant, is also causing them to resonate, calling out the sensitivity of the players as they play with their/its capacity to shape a certain music, a music that they can only call into being at that moment, with the cooperation and resistance of this space. [Stewart, Sharon. Listening to Deep Listening, Journal of Sonic Studies Vol 2 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/261881/261882].
Typically, reverbs are employed ‘after the fact’: they add colour, character, a sense of space to music that has already been created. But in the Fort Worden Cistern or the digital system created for us, the reverb doesn’t feel ‘after the fact’ at all. In The Mystery Beyond Matter, everything other than the software is improvised, but the software shapes the kind of interaction we can have: it invites a particular kind of sound and actively works against others; it has a lot to say about the characteristics of the music we can play. At the same time, it generously rewards attentive engagement with it. It may be imagined as a space that simultaneously creates limits and invites exploration: it induces the musicians to act in particular ways. This piece exists by shaping the possibilities through its software, not by defining them in words or musical notation.
David Toop’s night leaves breathing also induces a response from the musicians rather than defining one, but in this case it does it by presenting us with an aural ‘score’ (a ‘tape’ that the audience also hears) and a description of a type of hearing. The piece evokes, amongst other things, that peculiar attention that arises if we are awake in a quiet house in the middle of the night. The tiny sounds that normally go unnoticed take on an extraordinary, and sometimes sinister, intensity. Sounds such as the creaks of the building, rustling of leaves from outside, the sound of others breathing and - in the case of David’s piece - the snoring of his dog become fascinating, surreal, potent, consuming, threatening, delightful. When performing the piece, we take on a specific state of mind and respond to the ‘tape’, each other, the sonic environment of the space in which we’re performing. We explore the space that the presented soundscape and the thoughts that underpin it induce. This is a composition that is about the questions it asks us to contemplate, not about specific tasks we’re instructed to carry out.