Seven Beginnings
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Seven Beginnings (2019), for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, two violins, viola, and cello, was composed as a deliverable of my ACTOR postdoc. It was premiered in the Bathurst Chamber Music Festival, 2019 (due to a late cancellation, the bassoon was replaced by a second cello in the premiere performance). The piece builds upon the trend of speech transcription in recent music, with a focus on spectral transcription and cross-modal composition. But far from being a technical étude, it is a very personal piece with a very specific motivation behind its materials and methods.
The piece commemorates the birth of my daughter Lily, so I wanted it to be a kind of origin story. Most origin stories I know posit a single starting point—“Once upon a time,” “In the beginning”—but the experience of becoming a parent has reminded me that our early lives are in fact marked by a whole series of beginnings. I noticed that quite a few of these beginnings involve sound images, and decided to compose a piece about seven of them: (1) the first auditory experiences in utero, (2) the moment of birth, (3) the first bonding between parent and baby, (4) the baby’s early vocal explorations in babbling, (5) the first meaningful words, (6) the baby learning their own name and corresponding sense of self, and (7) the ability to use language to tell stories. This progression seemed to me highly amenable to a musical form, beginning in amorphous noise and developing into fully intelligible speech in successive stages. I decided to realize this with projected text and live music, such that the music initially has only abstract or semantic connection to the text and gradually adopts speech-like qualities over the course of the piece, eventually merging with veridical speech. The audience reads the text as the music is performed, and hopefully becomes aware at some point of the changing relationship between text and music as the piece unfolds.
Relations between speech and music are endlessly fascinating, and are well-trodden territory in both research and composition. Studies such as Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh Patel[1] and “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution” by Steven Brown[2] draw detailed comparison between speech and language in terms of their sonic properties, cognitive processing, and evolutionary origins. In addition to various types of prosody, rap, spoken word, recitative, parlando, and various other genres of singing and recitation that blur the lines between speech and music, there are many outstanding pieces of contemporary music that take speech as their source material in various ways. A few that have inspired me are Different Trains by Steve Reich (1987) which employs melodic transcription of speech samples, Speakings by Jonathan Harvey (2007/2008), which employs computer-aided orchestration of speech, and Deus Cantando by Peter Ablinger (2009), which uses a custom-built piano playing mechanism to realize spectral analysis-resynthesis of speech. I have used speech-based processes in several pieces, especially through my longstanding collaboration with guitarist Steve Cowan. We delivered a public lecture recital on our work in the McGill Research Alive Series (2017). Seven Beginnings is unique in my work in that it focuses on evolving relationships between text and music. I also do not know of any pieces by other composers that approach text-speech relations in quite the same way: if anybody reading this can refer me to pieces that do, I would love to hear about them!
In what follows, I will briefly discuss some textual, technical, and musical aspects of each Beginning.
1. The First Beginning
The first beginning was noise, and it was as a liquid, suffusing and subsuming, filling every crevice, and of silent space there was none. Given what we now know, we can say with certainty that the noise was not mere chaos: out of its rush and flow would emerge approximate regularities, periodicities, pulses. And while much of how we understand the world was lost therein, the noise was not without comfort. It was not a cold noise, nor was it hard, but it contained within itself the seeds of all things.
The sense of hearing is already well-developed before birth, and in the third trimester, the unborn baby can hear sounds from outside the womb. I imagine these pre-nascent auditory sensations as the child’s perceptual entry into the world. My goal in the First Beginning was to convey this. A sound file simulating in utero auditory experience was prepared, combining biological and instrumental sounds, low-pass filtered to remove most frequencies above 500 Hz.
Spectrograph of sound file from Beginning 1
Additionally, the performers are instructed to improvise gentle noise sounds with their instruments, blending into the muffled, indistinct sound world.
2. The Second Beginning
The second beginning was the cry, scorching and dazzling, slicing and splitting through the noise like a hewing axe, like Moses tearing apart the sea: a reverse tsunami, tide ripped back from the shore in a desperate, gasping instant. Unbearable sharp, spears of fire and ice piercing through pulverized bedrock, the unmoveable shaken from the centre of the universe, time demolishing eternity, free-falling out of the deep, shrieking and screaming into existence on wave after wave of terrifying shock.
When the baby is born and the fluid drains from their ears, the filter that has shaped their auditory experiences until that point is removed, and the full spectrum of human hearing is made available to them for the first time. This, combined with the screams and cries characteristic of childbirth, motivated a dramatic burst into the high register at the start of the Second Beginning.
First system of the Second Beginning.
3. The Third Beginning
The third beginning was the song, the song that soothed the cry. It was a song of love, a love more powerful than pain or terror. It said without words one simple thing, which was the most important thing: you are not alone.
Singing is a very important way that parents soothe and bond with their children. For me and my daughter, it was one of the very first ways that we interacted, and me singing to soothe her was one of the first things she encountered after the shock of entering the world. The Third Beginning is very simple musically, based on a single major triad. There is also an optional vocal part. If a singer is used, it is essential that they not sing in a bel canto style, but rather keep it simple and gentle, improvising on pitches from a lullaby:
Lullaby pitches for improvisation in the Third Beginning
4. The Fourth Beginning
The fourth beginning was speech that answered the song. The speech was with the song, and it was in the song, and it was the song, in a different voice and under a different sky. It was the charm of discovery, of spontaneity and chance happenings, a fish discovering water and a bird discovering air. The speech was like quicksilver atoms colliding in the void: chimerical, spontaneous, joyful, curious. It was the first voluntary, the birth of comedy, the haphazard and graceless act that said, endearingly, gutturally: I am here!
The Fourth Beginning marks a shift from passive to active on the part of the young child: whereas the earlier Beginnings focus on sounds perceived by her, this one focuses on sounds she produces herself. I recorded various vocalizations from my daughter in the babbling stage and spliced them together into a mash-up which I then transcribed with the aid of AudioSculpt. Orchestration was handled freely, matching instruments to the vocal sounds based on my intuitions of what would provide a convincing imitation.
Spectrograph of infant vocalizations
Score excerpt from Beginning 4, corresponding to the above spectrograph
5. The Fifth Beginning
The fifth beginning was sense, and it drew the particles of speech together. It was meaning that emerged in communion of the meaningless, the significance of insignificant coalescences, the power of emerging symbols, the power of deciphering. Phonemes, syllables, vocables, utterances: once incidental explorations, were now signposts of the real, and of the virtually real. The present became a window to the absent, and everything was forever changed.
The Fifth Beginning is the child’s first words, which connect vocalization to literal meaning, and so it is in this Beginning that speech transcription begins to play a role. I recorded myself reading the text and transcribed the fundamental pitch as a melody in one instrument while the others create a soundscape around it. The text is annotated under the transcribed line—in this case, the bassoon—so that the performer can emulate the spoken quality as much as possible. The hope is that the speech character will be clear but will not yet dominate the entire musical texture. The range and rhythmic profile of the speech here are naturally quite different from those of the previous Beginning, but the syllabic articulation may provide some continuity between them. The instruction ‘speech rubato’ indicates that the rhythms should not be realized too mechanically, but that there should be a subtle push and pull of tempo in their delivery, as there almost always is in natural speech.
Score excerpt from Beginning 5
6 . The Sixth Beginning
The sixth beginning was the self, the consequent and antecedent of sense, the crystallization and consecration of the I. Once stated, it was as if it had been said all along, had had to have been, as though nothing could have been prior. The self as epicentre, the measure of all things, the ultimate context, the subject. The self: and with it, the world. The self: henceforth, the baseline condition of all existence, the horizon of memory and comprehension, the starting-point, the arbiter, the origin.
The emergence of the sense of self is represented in the Sixth Beginning by uniting more of the instruments into the speech character: the crystallization of a prominent voice from elements of the sound world, such that the voice comes to the forefront of the musical texture. In addition to notating the fundamental in one instrument, other partials from the voice’s spectrum are transcribed in other instruments, bringing them together into a coherent gestalt. As visible in the spectrograph below, there are often more partials and/or noise components in the sound than there are instruments in this chamber orchestra, so a complete transcription seemed like a fool’s errand (and in any case is impossible, since each instrument produces not just a partial but its own complex spectrum). I therefore notated the first and second partials as accurately as possible in parallel octaves between the bassoon and horn, but the clarinet, oboe, and flute vary in their assigned positions in the harmonic series depending on the distribution of energy of each syllable. If it is a “bright” syllable with a strong upward spread, then the partials are spaced more widely with the flute and oboe in their higher registers; if it is a “dull” syllable with most of its energy in the lower portion of the spectrum, then the partials are spaced more closely, and in some cases the flute and/or oboe drop out. The result is a changing timbral quality between syllables similar to the changing formant structures of different vowels, resulting in a fairly veridical representation of speech. It is unlikely that the vowel analogy will be strong enough for a listener to understand the words from the musical sound alone, but if the text is read along with the music, the music-to-speech illusion can be convincing.
Spectrograph of spoken text from the Sixth Beginning (mm. 80-82)
Score excerpt from Beginning 6, corresponding to the above spectrograph
7. The Seventh Beginning
The seventh beginning was the story, told by the self to the self, and also to the other, and to many others. The story was abiding sense, composite sense, stability through change, coherence. The story was the coming together of speech and song, the unifying of things, the beauty and narrative and emotive arc of things, purposive order mysteriously appearing upon reflection, the trajectory of the cry and the noise. It was not merely a succession of coincidences: it was rather the silver thread, the choric refrain, the divined wisdom, the moral, the point. It was that which, once recognized, could never be ignored again.
The Seventh Beginning represents much-advanced cognitive development, in which the child can situate themselves in a larger temporal narrative involving memories and anticipations, and to articulate this in language, through stories. The emergent process of the composition is brought to completion in this Beginning, culminating in actual speech. The cello continues to play a transcription of the spoken text, and the wind players recite the same text in rhythmic unison with it. The text which the audience has been reading all along now has a radically different function, simply confirming what they are hearing rather than providing a cross-modal element. This may be surprising, or it may be a logical conclusion, depending on how aware a given listener has become of the evolving relationship between text and music over the course of the previous Beginnings.
The strings continue to play the chorale-like texture they have sustained since the Fifth Beginning, in a textural layer inspired by Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. The pitch content of this chorale taken from the same lullaby that provided the basis for the optional vocal improvisation Third Beginning, transposed, harmonized, greatly elongated, and staggered over many minutes of music.
Score excerpt from Beginning 7
A complete recording of the premiere performance of Seven Beginnings, along with slides of its text.
A second performance of the piece, preceded by a pre-concert presentation.