Beneath the Old Power Plant
Beneath the Old Power Plant
Written for the Quasar Saxophone Quartet
Composer: Chelsea Komschlies
Performers: Quasar Saxophone Quartet: Marie-Chantal Leclair, Soprano Saxophone; Mathieu Leclair, Alto Saxophone; André Leroux, Tenor Saxophone; Jean-Marc Bouchard, Baritone Saxophone.
Project Overview
Beneath the Old Power Plant is a work for the Quasar Saxophone Quartet that explores new and interesting ways to use multiphonics, as part of a larger multi-composer research creation project led by Robert Hasegawa and supported by the ACTOR Project. Multiphonics on a wind instrument happen when the air column inside the instrument begins to vibrate at multiple (not purely harmonic) frequencies at once, producing at least two audibly distinct pitches, usually from an altered or non-standard fingering.
When I found out our project was going to be based on saxophone multiphonics, my mind went immediately to the sounds of machinery and their rich beating overtones. In fact, many sax multiphonics already bear some resemblance to the timbre of machinery and industrial fans. I decided to build my own film to eventually accompany the piece, which I am in the process of creating with the help of new AI filmmaking tools. I came up with a storyline for the film that included enormous, fantasized machines. In my story, a mechanical bird begins his existence in the bowels of a mysterious, deserted power plant. Lonely and afraid, he wanders the silent, eerie twists and turns of the old factory, searching for a reason for his existence, and desiring above all else to belong to someone who will care for him.
Part 1: Art
Although this is an essay about musical composition, I must begin with visuals. Visual inspiration is as crucial as the music itself for me, because visuals and sounds are intertwined in my mind. Once I establish a visual “world” for a piece, the sounds naturally follow. This project excites me because it reveals aspects of my artistry usually hidden from listeners. While I have synesthesia, many crossmodal connections are universally shared. My Ph.D. research in crossmodal correspondences shows that people often agree on which sounds match certain colors, brightnesses, textures, and temperatures.
Visual Inspiration
I imagined an underground world filled with masses of twisting pipes, valves, and machines. I saw lots of dominant red and orange tones as if the inner workings of the power plant were warm and alive like the inside of a body. One of the sources of visual inspiration for the piece was point-and-click style puzzle adventure games, which were a huge part of my childhood and are a newly rekindled hobby for me as an adult. Games that inspired the visuals include Mechinarium and Samorost (both by Czech artist Jakob Dvorsky and Amanita Designs), whose soundtracks by Dvorsky also helped inspire my music, plus one from my childhood titled The Day the World Broke.
The last is an obscure 1997 point-and-click game in which mechanical creatures are secretly living inside the Earth’s core.
The steampunk and salvagepunk art genres also inspired both the visuals and the music. Steampunk features whimsical fantasy and intricate machines, often set in a fantastical Victorian era. Salvagepunk, related to assemblage and "found object" art, uses rusty, discarded pieces joined into something new. Both styles have a whimsical, folksy element, blending intricacy with a rough, unrefined charm.
Creating the visual style in Midjourney
I couldn’t truly find the musical style I was seeking without having this grounding in the visual. Once I could see the world, the musical style began to fall into place. My next step was to block out the scenes, sometimes to the level of detail of camera movements, allowing me to score the unseen film in my head.
Part 2: Music
There are several aesthetic themes present in Beneath the Old Power Plant that are important in my composition work as a whole:
Fantasy, sometimes whimsical and nostalgic, sometimes dark, often both
The uncanny, presenting the familiar in a strange new light
Combining traditional and experimental elements into a cohesive whole
Translating ineffable thoughts and emotions into music, conjuring them in the listener
The spiritual sublime, often linked with things that may seem too simple for such treatment, like Kiwi the mechanical bird's emotions and experiences
Humor and camp, often right alongside this deep spiritual reverence
Crossmodal correspondences, allowing the music to evoke texture, color, temperature, size, and space
Finding the Musical Style
In this work, I challenged myself to incorporate multiphonics in new and interesting ways as well as to combine unexpected elements to create a unique musical style for the piece. My goal was to serve the essence, mood, and tone of the visual art and story. I absorbed sounds and music that fit the
narrative, starting with factory and machine noises and the Mechinarium and Samorost soundtracks by Jakob Dvorsky.
Dvorsky’s work was a central inspiration for this project, and reading about him and the artists who influenced him established an Eastern European connection in my mind. I explored various sounds and music from the region, eventually discovering the rich folk choral traditions of Bulgaria. The blend of dark, simple melodies, modern harmonic progressions, and intricate microtonal ornamentation captivated me. I was also drawn to the unique timbre and harmonic spectrum of the Romanian tulnic and shepherd’s trumpet. These elements felt perfect for the project, giving my imaginary power plant its voice.
Spiridon Ion Cepleanu, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tulnice.jpg
Exploring Baltic and Eastern European musical traditions was also personally uplifting, as they form the oldest known parts of my late father's heritage, which I knew little about. Although my finished music doesn't directly represent these folk traditions, nor was that the goal, you might say that their musical DNA is deeply woven into its fabric, in the way that my ancestors’ DNA is deeply woven into me.
Other influences in my listening inspiration included Medieval Eastern Orthodox chant, film scores, contemporary experimental jazz, and the genre-defying music of the Moscow Art Trio.
Multiphonics
The multiphonics played different roles:
Imitating the sounds of machinery
Many of the multiphonics from the Quasar database[1] already sound like things like industrial fans and machines.
I also used lots of what the quartet called sons fendus, or split tones, also known as spectral multiphonics. A low fundamental on the bari sax, for example, can be overblown and voiced to produce a multiphonic, as in this example by Jean-Marc Bouchard on baritone sax during one of the workshops. These also have a machinelike quality of a different nature.
Altered "Salvagepunk" Versions of Harmonic Progressions
Many of the sax multiphonics come from slightly altered harmonic series and thus have a tonal character with two, three, or more pitches from triads being audible. Since this was the case, I could use multiphonics to clothe ordinary tonal chord progressions in steampunk machinery costumes. The underlying chord progressions are still audible, but they are detuned, beating, and “rusty” so to speak. I think there’s something really powerful in taking a familiar object for which people have a clear mental category and making it strange and unfamiliar, uncanny.
Crossmodal Aspect
The artwork for the film is very red and orange, and for me, red and orange music has a rich spectrum. Blues to me are hyper smooth, plain, “cooler” in sound as well as in color and minor in tonality, whereas reds are richer, rougher, and “warmer” in sound, more harmonically in tune, with a general major tonality. The choice of multiphonics in a certain scene was guided by the colors I am imagining for the scene.
Eastern European Spiritual Connections
Prior work on bell-like timbres in Stravinsky’s Utrenja gave me insight into the Eastern Orthodox reverence for complex spectra, seen as spiritually sublime and closer to God. Saxophone multiphonics inhabit a timbral world more aligned with these complex inharmonic spectra than with the plain harmonic tendencies of Western tonal music. Thus, multiphonics play a role in stepping outside the simple, in-tune, uniphonic tones of Western Europe and into a richer, older sound world. The timbre of Eastern European folk instruments and the reverence for complex spectra further inspired me. Multiphonics enrich the timbre in a way that threads Baltic and Eastern European DNA into the piece, staying true to these influences.
Will it /blend?
As I used Midjourney to generate the concept art for this project, I was inspired by how it could blend unexpected elements, creating novel combinations, sometimes unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I sought to combine unexpected musical elements in a similar way, so that the result was not just juxtaposition, but a new and uncanny synthesis. Below, I show an example of the Midjourney AI image generator’s /blend function (from its original Discord days) to show you what I mean. Here, I generated two sets of images in Midjourney that have nothing to do with one another (and nothing to do with this piece, either): imaginary scenes from the original Gumby series and imaginary paintings by French Symbolist Gustave Moreau.
Prompt: a still of a backdrop from the original gumby series, 1960s claymation style, unsettling atmosphere, vibrant colors, vintage film
Prompt: a painting of Orpheus by Gustave Moreau, intricate detail, oil painting, French symbolist movement, dark atmosphere, cliffs, forest, jewels, lyre, jewel tones and dark colours .
And here is what happens when I ask Midjourney to blend pairs of these images together. These results are no longer Gumby nor Gustave Moreau, but a weird new emergent synthesis of the two.
I asked myself, what would this sort of synthesis sound like if it were musical styles instead of art styles? What would it sound like if I combined these disparate musical elements: the Bulgarian and
Romanian folk traditions, Eastern Orthodox chant, experimental jazz, cute Pixar-esque film score, indie video game music—and then on top of that, made them sound steampunk, salvagepunk, and rusty, as if made of old metal pipes, gauges, valves, and broken machinery?
Musical Style Alchemy /blend Examples
The following examples showcase the musical and visual ingredients that inspired a specific moment in my piece, along with the resulting musical syntheses. Here, visual and musical elements are equally important, combining to guide my sonic choices.
1. Ingredients:
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Coraline: “Exploration”
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Mechanarium “The Furnace”
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A.I generated Image
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Synthesis: Kiwi’s Theme
2. Ingredients:
John Zorn, Cobra + +
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Anthony Braxton, Composition No. 265, Part 9
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A.I generated Image
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Synthesis: “Walking”
3. Ingredients:
Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, “Pilentse Pee”
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A.I generated Image
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A.I generated Image
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Synthesis “Powerplant”
4. Ingredients:
Ivan Spasov, The Bulgarian Voices Angelite, “Holy God”
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Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, “Sableyalo mi Agontze (The Bleating Lamb)”
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The Bulgarian Voices Angelite with Moscow Art Trio & Huun-Huur-Tu, “Mehmetio”
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Synthesis: “Mother Build”
5. Ingredients:
Emilie Girard Charest’s piece Bestiare for the Quasar Quartet, “Bestiare”
Note that rather than this being a mere style inspiration, I’ve actually used techniques from Ms. Girard Charest’s piece in this section, such as buzzing into the instrument and whistle tones. In her work, they create a vivid picture of animals, but I was hoping to use them to evoke strange machinery and contraptions.
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Romanian folk shepherd’s trumpet
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Romanian Tulnic
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Synthesis: “Workshop”
Score and Recording
Conclusions
I hope that this has offered an enjoyable glimpse into my process for this piece. Many thanks to the Quasar Saxophone Quartet, Bob Hasegawa, and the ACTOR Project for making this collaboration possible.
To follow my process of making the film, please visit https://www.komschlies.com/BTOPP