The first step in any musical treatment of speech is transcription, the translation from recorded source material into musical terms and notation. Just like conventional music, the sounds of speech are defined by pitch, rhythm, and loudness, but unlike conventional music, those qualities are constantly in flux. This makes it difficult to accomplish an exact translation, but through some ingenuity and a willingness to simplify, an acceptable approximation is possible.
Throughout Hack, the transcribed source material is subjected to a range of transformations. These include the extraction of accompanimental figures based on the pitches and rhythms of the speech, the fragmentation and distribution of the speech melody among several instrumental parts, and the creation of new musical lines extrapolated from musical artifacts found in the source material.
In the Transcribing Speech section above, I demonstrated how, at the end of “3 - Dave Chappelle,” I maintained the speech rhythms of the original material but expanded the single vocal line into a full harmonic texture. While, in itself, speech already has a melodic contour and a pattern of rhythmic emphasis, it does not suggest harmonies of any kind. Therefore, in order to write contrapuntal or harmonic textures for the string quartet (a medium that excels at both), I found it necessary to abstract harmonies from the speech melodies.
One of the most immediate yet hard-to-define characteristics of a standup comic’s delivery is her character(s). The character that is created onstage is the result of several musical elements and their leveraging of our learned associations: a monotone delivery evokes a boring or mild-mannered person; a fast and prickly delivery means that the character is nervous or excitable; a loud and harsh delivery conveys anger. These examples are unsubtle and clichéd - the best comics are able to create nuanced and unexpected characters using their voices alone.
"Mobile Miniatures illustrates one of Spektral Quartet's most appealing and significant qualities. Though violinists Austin Wulliman and Clara Lyon, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen are all adventurous, unimpeachable musicians, that's basically standard equipment in contemporary classical ensembles today—what sets them apart is their willingness to meet their audience halfway. They don't water down their repertoire, but they're happy to share what it is they love about the work they play—and they consistently find new ways to make their concerts fun, engaging, and serious all at once."
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But for all the easy delight these works afford the listener, they are from a compositional and performance standpoint works of great difficulty. Many Many Cadences is a brain-frying overload of musical information, the level of sheer musical skill required to execute The Ancestral Mousetrap effectively is monumental, Hack would be a nuanced, well-structured piece even if it weren't also an illuminating essay on the music of American speech, and the composer of "The Joke" has some serious chops, too.
This is repertoire that makes serious demands on the performer, and offers serious rewards for the listener. It just happens to be a lot of fun to listen to, as well.
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That said, there is no finer string quartet in Chicago than Spektral Quartet. With the superb violinist Lyon joining Spektral a year ago (replacing Aurelien Pederzoli), the group seems to be playing with even greater intensity, cohesion and flexibility. And, as Saturday’s concert demonstrated, while many celebrated new-music ensembles necessarily perform a great deal of not-so-good music, Spektral’s batting average is consistently high, displaying an adroit selection of young and contemporary composers.
That Clara Lyon is a strong addition to an already imposing lineup was evident in the opening performance of Schubert’s Quartetsatz. In the first violin part, she led her colleagues in this taut single movement with a bold yet sweet tone that conveyed Schubert’s gracious lyricism as much as the biting drama, backed by pinpoint articulation and alert ensemble.
Ryan Ingebritsen’s “3 Birds” section from his 4×4 proved especially rewarding. With the composer working the laptop, all four players were amplified, each spread out to the corners of the audience. The viola begins a solo line of bowed long notes, which eventually passes to each violin in turn, then the cello. Spacious yet concentrated, the music grows in amplified, slightly distorted volume as the individual string lines slowly rise, fall and coalesce. There is a haunting quality to this unsettling music with a ghostly wail-like expression, followed by hard pizzicatos and a highly rhythmic section. Ingebritsen’s stark yet compelling music was given first-class advocacy and played with the utmost concentration by the Spektral Quartet members.
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Live performance video of Mathias Spahlinger's "Apo Do," a piece we workshopped with the composer at the University of Chicago's festival, there is no repetition: Mathias Spahlinger at 70. This footage was captured at our March 22nd, 2015 concert at Constellation. This piece is sonically INSANE.
On May 30th at Constellation, we premiere a commission of staggering scope, Hack, by Chris Fisher-Lochhead. Maybe you remember the proof-of-concept we posted for this piece last year, featuring comedian Richard Lewis? It's gotten a lot bigger since then, and given the intricacies of the project, we thought we should hear from Chris himself. Dig in!
"In the spring of 2011, I started making musical transcriptions of routines by some of my favorite standup comics.At the time, I was beginning to get interested in the purely musical characteristics of speech, and standup comedy, as a medium that demands a heightened, even exaggerated use of speech and encourages idiosyncrasies of style, was a perfect arena for such an exploration.For several years, the idea of using these transcriptions as the basis for an original piece of music hung around in the background until finally, with the support of my friends in the Spektral Quartet, it came to fruition in the form of a large, multi-movement work for string quartet entitled Hack.
The first question one might ask about a string quartet based on the deliveries of standup comics is "why?"To answer that, I first have to say a few things about speech and music in general.When we create and interpret meaning in speech, we are relying on how something is said at least as much as (if not more than) what is said.It is these mini-performances that people are constantly putting on that can swing the meaning of a sentence from dire earnestness to arch sarcasm.In my opinion, the ability to detect these sometimes very subtle differences in tone and cadence is the same sensibility that allows us to appreciate and understand music.At times, instrumental music can be alienating without the familiar foothold of words or images, but it is my belief that anyone who can find meaning in human speech has the tools to understand and interpret what is going on in that music. Hack is an attempt to make those connections evident.
One of the perks of writing a piece like this is that I got to watch hours and hours of standup comedy and call it composing.As someone who knows and appreciates a wide variety of standup comics, it was a difficult task to choose a set of performers and bits to use for this piece.In order to make that decision, I used three main criteria:
Is it funny?This is extremely subjective, I know, but it would seem to me pedantic and wrong-headed to work with a clip that I didn't personally find funny.Given that the premise of this project is to explore how comedians use speech to effectively communicate with their audience, an unfunny bit would seem to fall short of effectiveness.
Does it have musical potential?There is some comedy that I find extremely funny that would not prove particularly apt as a source of material for this piece.I love the comedy of Steven Wright, but his style (dry, atomistic, absurd one-liners delivered in a monotone) is not particularly fertile for musical exploration.This does not, of course, mean that there is only one type of delivery that has musical potential; I wanted at least to have some sense of how I could treat the bit as music.
Does it fit within the musical world of the piece?Part of my decision related to how well the musical material contained within the bit fit within the overall arc of the piece.Despite the fact that the piece is composed of 22 self-contained modules, I still want it to work as a coherent whole.In some respects, this came down to how I treated the fragments, but I also wanted to be sure that the material I was working with supported the piece's sense of unity.In counterbalance to the need for unity, it was also important that I explore a variety of different deliveries.The standup comic spends years honing an onstage persona, and the way they deliver their bits is an extremely personal and important part of their act.I wanted to be able to emphasize the musical differences between the breathless, accusatory delivery of George Carlin and the perforated, deadpan delivery of Tig Notaro.
In the end, I wound up with the following list of comedians whose material I had settled upon: Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, Robin Williams, Dick Gregory, Professor Irwin Corey, Rodney Dangerfield, Sam Kinison, Redd Foxx, Kumail Nanjiani, Mort Sahl, Susie Essman, Richard Pryor, Ms Pat, and Tig Notaro.
Between picking the material and treating it musically (which I will cover in an upcoming post), is the sensitive process of transcription.The musical properties of speech that I am interested in do not inherently exist on paper.We imbue what we say with a musical impetus in the moment of speech and hardly ever think about how one would quantify or notate it.As a result, transcription of speech is always a creative act.I make certain choices about how I am going to translate speech into a written medium that invariably alter the source material in some way.For example, in one situation, it might be best to track the rhythmic emphasis of a passage by using a constantly shifting meter while in another, it might be best to establish a regular tempo and notate rhythmic emphasis as syncopated accents against the prevailing beat.In my transcriptions, I do not pretend to be capturing the essence of speech in notation (a futile endeavor); I use notation to record the collision of speech (a chaotic and unruly object) with the tidy regularities of music notation.In the example below, I have included the transcribed source material for the opening four bars of the piece.This source material, taken from Lenny Bruce's 1961 performance at Carnegie Hall, in this case has been adapted as a cello solo."
LENNY BRUCE: SOURCE MATERIAL
LENNY BRUCE: MOCKUP
"First it was brusque, then eerie and sly. Julia Holter and the Spektral Quartet shared the Ecstatic Music Festival concert on Wednesday night at Merkin Concert Hall in a program that lingered in the cloudy zone where contemporary composition meets the pop song. In its sources and allusions, the concert took for granted the broad-spectrum musical erudition of current composers: hip-hop, medieval motets, Broadway, Impressionism, dubstep.
Playing on its own, Spektral — a string quartet from Chicago — brought one piece, Liza White’s “Zin zin zin zin,” that got its title and its rhythmic thrust from a rap by Mos Def, and another, by Chris Fisher-Lochhead, that radically rearranged a moody electronic lament by James Blake, “I Never Learnt to Share,” along with Stravinsky’s “Concertino” from 1920. There was also Dave Reminick’s “Oh My God, I’ll Never Get Home,” which had the quartet singing a poem by Russell Edson about a man falling to pieces as he walks, with heaving music to match.
Each piece was introduced, with an explanation, by a quartet member; the violinist Clara Lyon smiled as she praised the “weird things happening” in “Concertino.” The pieces had a shared palette: dissonant and clenched, with fleeting moments of delicacy giving way to more tension. The quartet played attentively, poised or just harsh enough, savoring the suspense; none of the new pieces overstayed. They were confident miniatures, rich in implications."
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“First it was brusque, then eerie and sly. Julia Holter and the Spektral Quartet shared the Ecstatic Music Festival concert on Wednesday night at Merkin Concert Hall in a program that lingered in the cloudy zone where contemporary composition meets the pop song. In its sources and allusions, the concert took for granted the broad-spectrum musical erudition of current composers: hip-hop, medieval motets, Broadway, Impressionism, dubstep…
Ms. Holter and the quartet also performed Alex Temple’s song cycle “Behind the Wallpaper,” which, Ms. Temple has said, includes Ms. Holter’s music among its inspirations. The lyrics of the brief songs in “Behind the Wallpaper” sketch surreal transformations and spooky situations: a character who has been swallowing seawater and live fish, another wandering a house where the walls keep shifting. The songs were atmospheric with ambiguous tonality, drawing chuckles along with hushed curiosity. They quivered, hovered, paused and slipped in and out of ghostly waltzes before the last one, “Spires,” resolved into the sweet major chords of an old movie score’s happy ending, followed by the sound of rising waves — a flood, perhaps, drowning all the strangeness.”
“Both the title and subject matter seemed to reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Though Temple’s character is not confined to one room, her odd visions signify the same descent into psychosis brought on by a life of mendacity. Holter’s exaggerated, elongated syllables and measured, bouncy tempo were more reminiscent of Björk’s timbre than Holter’s often more ethereal overtones. But the feeling of disorientation and displacement is one that Holter has previously examined, most notably on her 2013 LP, Loud City Song. ThoughLoud City takes an approach based more deeply in reality, “Behind the Wallpaper” felt like an exploration of a different side of the same spinning coin, a dizzying collage of dreamlike impressions cleverly obscuring a straightforward narrative.
While at times it was difficult to get a firm grasp on “Wallpaper,” there was also a sense that Temple wanted it that way — somewhere between avant-garde composition, mysterious artifact, and sci-fi thriller. Even at a time when genre tends to blur and bend, it’s still rare to see performances as unique and risky as this, and the combo of Holter’s bewitching vocal delivery and Spektral Quartet’s spirited strings provided an especially stirring showcase for the work. We have Ecstatic Music Festival to thank for that, at least in part. With upcoming pairings from ETHEL with Kaki King and John King, Xiu Xiu with Mantra Percussion, an 80th birthday celebration for Terry Riley, and a handful of others, there’s no shortage of distinctive, idiosyncratic events to give music fans plenty to feel ecstatic about.”
"While at times it was difficult to get a firm grasp on "Wallpaper," there was also a sense that Temple wanted it that way — somewhere between avant-garde composition, mysterious artifact, and sci-fi thriller. Even at a time when genre tends to blur and bend, it's still rare to see performances as unique and risky as this, and the combo of Holter's bewitching vocal delivery and Spektral Quartet's spirited strings provided an especially stirring showcase for the work."
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