ACOUSTIC MUSIC and MUSIC with ELECTRONICS (excerpts)
for full piece check out: www.myspace.com/danielwohlmusic
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(B.cl. piano. cello. percussion and electronics)
The initial concept for this piece was to compose music that would be heard through a veil of noise. The idea came from waking up in the middle of the night with the television set turned to a “non-channel”. The screen was mostly filled with black and white static, except for a faded image of what looked like an old couple dancing. The image would come in strongly and then recede into the static.
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GLITCH
(string quartet and electronics)
Commissioned by the Carlsbad Music Festival for the Calder Quartet
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Mvt2 “Postal” – Live version
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Mvt 3 “Old Timey”
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Recording by: Chris Otto, Andie Springer, John Pickford Richards and Evelyn Farny
Live version: the Calder Quartet
New York Times writes about a performance of Glitch at the MATA Festival in NY: “stutters, pops, crackles and further sonic detritus — inspired fragmentary lines and noisy abrasions … over recorded string sounds played from a laptop. Mr. Wohl’s ingenuity was evident…”
A glitch is a short lived fault in a system. All audio mediums inherently contain glitches that make them interesting in their own ways. To me they are happy accidents, flaws that take on special meaning or interest: The hiss and pops of vinyl records, the skips on a scratched CD, and mp3 compression errors are glitches that have become emblematic of each medium, and have come to represent an era in music. In the age of mechanical reproduction, a player’s mistake on an acoustic instrument such as a tiny variation in pitch, an inconsistency in bowing, or an accidental scratch in the midst of otherwise “normal’ playing style, can now read as a glitch. It’s interesting to me that these mistakes made their way into standard repertoire in the last century and have come to be called extended techniques. This tendency has also appeared in the “glitch” style of electronic music by bands such as The Boats and Oval.
Errors form the conceptual basis for this piece. Each movement deals with a different kind of glitch in the electronic track. The electronics consist entirely of manipulated string recordings while the quartet itself plays it’s share of intentional pops, hisses, fragmentary melodic motifs and other inconsistencies that comment on or reflect back to the track.
In my own process, accidents have often lead to interesting results. Crucial moments have arrived in the form of mistakes, that I’ve then tried to mold into coherent structures.
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AORTA
for piano and electronics -2010
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