Perpetual Motions
From a recent walk with my partner. I wonder what people of the distant pass thought of rainbows?
A bit over a year ago I embarked on a project for two piccolos + electronics inspired by the history of tortillas (you can read more about the start on the blog post “Rage Against the Tortilla Machine” linked here). This month, I have finally wrapped up work on the piece and handed it off to the players! Today I’m sharing a bit more about the piece itself, including a few excerpts from the score!
Several words about the electronics
Admittedly, a lot of the electronic music I wrote was trash
To be perfectly transparent, I don’t work with fixed tape & interactive electronics nearly as much as I did in graduate school. While then I had access to all kinds of resources, equipment, and enthusiasm to craft multi-channel, interactive pieces with original sound recordings, after leaving school I just wasn’t in that world as much anymore. While I’ve still had fun putting a few different projects together the last few years (notably STUMPED for Mitchell Beck’s students in Idaho and a piece for a film project by George Warner), there’s no question it was a big challenge getting back into it.
That being said, when flutists Natasha Loomis and Tara Rozanski met with me to discuss a new project (commissioned by pianist Chris Opperman on their behalf), they were SO excited about the idea of doing a piece for two piccolos with electronics, I just couldn’t say no. As we talked through different ideas, we fell in love with the recordings I had made of horrifying screeches from the tortilla machine I use to work at in Texas, and knew the piece would need them.
The next several months were filled with a lot of doubt and agony on my end and an endless supply of patience and support on their part. However, now on the other side of things, I’m glad that I took the time I did to work through it—it gave me a lot of time and space to consider exactly what this piece was about and why I was writing it.
How do you even start something like this?
Diorama of a market at Tlatelolco from the Chicago Natural History Museum
The general idea of the piece is that the process of making tortillas has not fundamentally changed very much in the several hundreds of years they have existed. As the world modernized around them, even as machines took over some of the labor and the corn itself has transformed, the actual steps have remained largely the same - soaking the kernels, grinding the soaked kernels into a dough, forming a tortilla, heating it up, and eating it.
Knowing the general progression was going to be more natural sounds transforming into mechanical, I first wanted to identify a few key transition points for the electronics. What did a market place sound like then and now? What about a night out on the town?
Early 20th Century Photograph of a market in Mexico City
While musically material returns exactly the same as before, I wanted to find ways to tie the natural sounds to the mechanical sounds they were getting replaced by. Birds and crickets becoming machine chirps. The sound of a stone grindings becoming more like gnashing gears.
However, in keeping with the idea that some things really are “perpetual,” I also wanted to keep some of the natural sounds that remained consistent—the churning of water, the sounds of birds, some scraps of music and conversation. I also knew I wanted to have a moment where the sounds from the tortilla machine were heavily featured in conversation with the piccolos.
With that in mind, I set to work compiling the sounds I thought I’d need.
What sounds did you use and where do they come from?
The sounds come from a mix of recordings I’ve made myself as well as free-to-use recordings from freesound.org. From FreeSound, I managed to get some really excellent recordings from markets in Mexico, the sound of deep water churning, a mortar and pestle grinding, and some ambient city noise recorded in Mexico City.
A complete list of what was used from FreeSound is linked below, along with their contributors:
The beautiful tortilla machine I got to work with and listen to for many hours a day <3
A lot of these sounds were used as-is, outside of trimming and re-ordering samples, and doing a bit of EQ work to make the overall mix a bit more consistent. The ocean wave, however, I filtered out more of the high sounds, in order to really focus in on the deep, churning sounds; also, for the bird samples used here, I like to clip up these recordings and have them play at slightly different speeds and pitches to create more variety.
The trash you saw earlier was originally used in this dance piece at IU, (Paper or Plastic?), and I’ve used those samples A LOT since this project.
From my own library of recordings came the sound of the tortilla machines, crickets and birds (taken from my days making the sounds & music for Macbeth at IU), crinkles and rips of paper (to emulate corn husks), and various percussion samples (recorded all the way back in 2010 at Luther). I spent an evening once with my flute friend, Robin Meiksins, recording a huge variety of different trash sounds at Indiana University—glass bottles, paper, plastic bags, metal cans, bottle caps, cardboard boxes—and those four hours of recordings and six hours of editing into individual samples has come in handy for almost every project since.
Musical Material
Flutes hail from a long lineage, descended from some of the earliest instruments. Pictured here are modern-made Gourd Flutes (“Tlapitzalli”)
For the music itself, I wanted to shy away from attempting to directly emulate or quote songs from the Americas—though I did listen and read up on quite a bit on pre-hispanic instruments and songs. As someone who is still really at the beginning stages of interacting with this tradition of music, I wanted to find a respectful way honor this history without just thoughtlessly throwing a bunch of random quotes or rhythms into a piece. A few of the resources I came across included:
This great video demonstrating a few traditional instruments
Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (English translation by John Bierhorst)
The Nahuatl Channel (specifically this video, but a lot of great info on this channel)
In addition to pre-hispanic music, I also dug through videos I had of street musicians and other live performers from Mexico City (I visited in 2019 with my partner and his mother). After spending a few weeks digging through a lot of material and gathering sounds, I made a few sketches about how best to incorporate what I had learned. I decided to incorporate some extended techniques in the piccolo that might evoke the color/texture of traditional instruments (breathy tone, parallel motion, expressive pitch bends) without necessarily imitating any specific songs, scales, or rhythms. I also left some space in the score for the piccolos to freely mimic environmental sounds and textures (wind sounds, water-inspired murmurations, bird-call-like gestures).
Inside Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City - before a performance by the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra in 2019.
Excerpts
Below are a few highlights from the piece!
OPENING
Did I just notice a typo in the first measure while writing this blog? Yes I did. Am I going to change it? Not for this post!
In the opening moments of the piece, environmental sounds of crickets, wind, and more create a sparse texture for the piccolos to play around with air-inspired gestures. In the second measure, sounds of a market start to ebb in as the wind sounds continue.
WATER
After the wind sounds die away, the piccolos change to a simple melody before plunging into fluid runs. This section of the piece was inspired by the soaking process of the corn, which takes place over many hours to break the kernals down with the water & lime to make the mixture for the tortilla dough. Rhythms from the opening melody return throughout this section (as seen at the end of m 13), and will permeate the rest of the piece.
TORTILLA MACHINE
In this section, there is a distinct shift in the backing track from environmental and organic sounds to more mechanical ones. Throughout mm. 53 and 54, the piccolos recall the fluid lines and opening air textures before consolidating in the bottom of their registers - preparing to build back upwards. At m 57, the infamous tortilla machine sounds enter—it’s horrific whines and screams echoed in the piccolos with their flutter tongues, aggressive tremolos, and falling trill gestures. Rather than long, flowing gestures, the music is now in small bursts of dynamic swells, dramatic rises and falls, and filled with textural variety.
ENDING
When I worked making tortillas in Texas, one of the hardest parts was getting the hot tortillas from the belt of the machine and into the bags. They wanted us to pack them while still hot, because people would wait in line at the bakery case for freshly-cooked ones rather than taking the ones that had already been set out. However…they were very hot!!
This section is largely inspired by the quick, light touches of trying to grab a steaming-hot tortilla—and the occasional yelp! Throughout, a quiet backing drum outlines the big beats of the 7/8 measures while textures from earlier sections of the piece whiz by in the tape part—the piccolos recalling different musical moments throughout this ending in short, more fragmented versions. The pervasive feature of a short-long—short gesture before a downbeat is amplified here, with moments of parallel motion from the opening returning—different, but still clearly tied to the past.
Wrap-Up
One secret for those who read this far: I’m currently training for a big adventure coming up in 2025…more on this later.
It’s been a stretch piece for me, for sure, but I’ve got another work with electronics coming up this winter (for percussion, trumpet, and electronics), and I really believe I’ve come out of this process more confident and excited about working with electronics. I’m use to having an idea, barreling through the writing process in a few short weeks, and then passing it off. Fear and anxiety really slowed down the process for this one for sure, but I’m grateful I had the time to let this work blossom and develop—I’ve been considering trying to give myself a lot more time with some of my acoustic work as well to see what happens (sometimes the idea is so clear I just need it out of me like NOW).
Coming up next, I’m working on a few projects I’m really excited about: a bass clarinet solo inspired by heavy metal and shipwrecks, that percussion + trumpet + electronics piece I mentioned, and also working on a new flute and piano duo inspired by Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. More on those projects to come in the months ahead, but in the meantime, happy wandering!
