galapagos

"In C" performance at Darmstadt, 11/29/07, originally uploaded by dubitable.

What a blast. We got written up in the NY Times too, who said: "It was the most vital, audacious and energizing performance of the score I’ve ever heard."

The musicians were all fantastic, and I got to hang out with a lot of cool, interesting people including, but not limited to, Josh Goldberg, Luke DuBois, and Zach Layton, the organizer of the event.

I ended up not using my original SuperCollider code and wrote a quick version that let me manually play notes. It was not as clean as my programmed-fragments version, but probably let me be more integrated into the performance and was a nice little bit of last minute code-fu (considering my relatively crap sclang skills). I've posted it as well.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone!

I'm one of a number of people performing Terry Riley's "In C" tonight at Galapagos in Williamsburg. The performance is tonight's DARMSTADT "Classics of the Avant Garde," a regular event hosted by Zach Layton and Nick Hallett.

I'm performing the piece using SuperCollider 3, the fantastic code-based sound manipulation software tool. Here is my sclang source code. It's fairly simple as SC3 coding goes: I've coded all of the fragments into individual instances of Pbind (basically a sequence of note durations, pitch values, and what sound to play the notes with), and I'll be triggering each Pbind manually as we move through the piece. It's sort of a half-assed version of live-coding. Also, I will be tweaking amplitude multipliers (per a few different Sine wave UGens) simply via mouse movement, to add a bit more control and variation in the sound. I've tried to find a good balance between sequencing the entire thing completely automatically and having a good amount of control over the execution, so I can actually perform rather than just "push play".

I'm excited to be a part of the event! I've always been a big fan of "In C." Here is a link so you can find out more about Terry Riley, and I found a copy of the score here if you want to take a look.