Song Stories: The Flow Project
The Flow Project has been really fun and I’m excited to share with you my *two* compositions “Left and Right of Passage” and “Out of the Woods” that are part of the project, and also some project updates. Flow is a global sci-art collaboration in which composers incorporate recordings from different sections along the Lech River forming one larger compositional work.
The first composition I wrote for the project, “Left and Right of Passage” explores a section of the river with fish passage. It exhibits an imperfect balance as humans attempt natural processes, and while total success is not possible the effort is worthwhile. Water is clearly audible in the recording, and echoes reflect the human-created boundaries. Adding to these soundscapes of place, I introduce my own sounds, in the form of cello and vocals. All of the sounds in “Left and Right of Passage” originate with either the field recording, or my playing cello or singing. Also I structured it as a double choir, with one choir (on the left) providing a consistent wall of sound, and the other (on the right) constrained but with movement, inspired by satellite data of the site.
Channeling is a recurring concept in the river segment and this composition. The river used to be multithread with multiple channels, but has been strengthened and confined to a single channel. Fish are channeled to enable their movement past human energy production. In “Left and Right of Passage,” constrained movement is evoked in the vocals, particularly in the left choir but also in the right choir. The brevity of spurts of pizzicato and truncated melodies illustrate channeling in the cello. Segments of the original soundscape emerge unaltered (aside from volume shaping) at the beginning, middle, and end of the piece, emphasized by frequency constrained channels of the original soundscape. These are offset so that the original field recording can be distinctly heard, most notably at 18-50s, 1:12-1:55 and at 3:15 until the conclusion.
“Out of the Woods” is… totally different. While still string-centric, the primary inputs are field recordings from a violin workshop near the river. All of the percussion sounds come from the wood instrument construction sounds from the workshop. The rhythms were already so compelling, I took long clips of them and did very little processing. The voices are also all from the workshop visit, in the field recording. Voices in the workshop blended four languages, discussing craft and location. “Acero” means maple in Italian. Wood was harvested nearby, connecting nature and human process. Soft sandpaper rubbing underlies the vocals.
The only sound I added was viola da gamba. This instrument had a musical culture of being played in the home and in small groups, emphasizing soft richness of tone and polyphonic shaping in the renaissance and early baroque before more modern priorities of loudness and soloists. I added reverb and effects to this early music sound, linking past and future.
In “Out of the Woods,” wood is nurtured by water. Wood is flooded by water. Wood resonates. Wood transforms. Wood speaks. Wood connects. Wood remembers. Wood forms new memories.
FLOW is being presented in various places, mainly in Europe. Here’s a recent article written about the project in the SciArt Curator. There is a podcast with interviews with each composer, and mine should be released shortly. You can hear all the compositions using an interactive map on the project’s webpage. Stay tuned for more updates!
