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PROGRAM NOTE back to Program Notes Last modified 6 August 2023 Watershed V (2020) After percussionist Steve Schick joined UC San Diego's Department of Music in 1991, he and I, Peter Otto and Miller Puckette worked on an elaborate percussion project involving a circular set-up that surrounded Steve. Steve and I worked almost a year in refining the positions of four families of instruments (skins, metals, wooden snare drums, and “oddities”). I made a plan for a 6-channel spatialization of sounds that enriched the live sound produced during performance. Two and a half decades later, Danish percussionist Mathias Reumert approached me about the possibility of preparing a version of Watershed that would require only a stereo sound system that would project sounds that he triggered during performance (There are 22 such cues.). It was a perplexing challenge, not only because the variability of the computer materials would no longer have the flexible profiles of real-time events, but also because the natural sound of a reverberating percussion instrument is an immediately identifiable and richly textured acoustic experience. Eventually, I did conceive a way of simulating sounds that would have the character of appropriate reverberation but would not require an elaborate microphone set-up. The sonic result of this algorithmic process provides a character that I call “shimmer”. The specific timbral signature of a given instrument is prolonged and spatially distributed in such a way that the essence of a sound produced in live performance seems to float in the air as a magical extension that gives one the sort of feeling that a reverberant environment provides. It does this without requiring a complex of electronic equipment that had formerly been necessary. In its original version, the equipment necessary to realize the realtime spatialization required two very large shipping cases. Mathias, using only his own and other easily obtainable equipment, premiered Watershed V in Copenhagen on 1 September 2020. |
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