On Composing Music for Who You Once Were

Video image by Lillian Warren

Who You Once Were is a live, multimedia performance created in collaboration between, myself painter and video artist Lillian Warren, and choreographer Annie Arnoult. Performances will take place at Houston's Aurora Picture Show August 23 and 24, 2019. Lillian writes, “The idea for this piece came from the personal experience of my mother’s gradual and intermittent memory loss, and my emotional reactions as our relationship changes. Annie, Chris, and I are working as a team to draw on our collective experience of how memories are embedded in objects, splintered and fractured by time, triggered by sounds, lived through the body.” The 40-45 minute performance combines Lillian's images from four separate video projectors, improvised movement by Annie, and my score, cued in realtime from a laptop computer and played through Aurora's mixer and P.A.

Ableton Live session for Who You Once Were

I am a composer. I began my musical training at the piano, learning to play Bach, Mozart and Chopin, and composing for traditional classical ensembles, jazz ensembles, and solo performers. Although I started out as a pen on paper composer, my main instrument for composing is the computer, specifically, the popular software music sequencer and digital audio workstation Ableton Live. When people ask me what instrument I play, I tell them the recording studio, which I use both as an instrument and (to quote Brian Eno) a "compositional tool." To create a composition, I record musical performances, sometimes notated, but often improvised, and combine those recordings with my own field recordings. The process is not unlike recording so-called "pop" music, or music in any number of other genres outside of classical or jazz. But what I do with Ableton Live certainly has its roots in the earliest years of musique concrète ("concrete music") created in the years after World War II by Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, and John Cage. The "studio technology and compositional strategies" of Jamaican dub music have also had a profound impact on how I conceptualize and engineer music, even if the results sound nothing like King Tubby or Lee "Scratch" Perry.

Although I have scored several videos for performance artist Jil Guyon, and composed music for dance companies across the U.S., including choreographer/director Rachel Cohen's New York-based Racoco Productions, this particular project was quite different than scoring a film or a choreographed dance. From the very beginning of our collaboration, Lillian provided video-in-progress to work with, which was very helpful in mapping out a timeline for sections of the score. But initially, there was no choreography for me to watch, so it was up to me to decide how tempo, harmony and texture could work in relation to Lillian's video and her suggestions to Annie for movement.

I began creating musical sketches in Ableton Live, using sounds inspired by conversations Lillian and I had about the subject and themes of this piece. She told me her mother is a fan of classical piano music, and four chords I played on friend's grand piano became an idée fixe that recurs and is transformed throughout the score. Bird songs appeared in these early sketches, and became another crucial sonic leitmotif after Lillian told me her mother is a bird watcher. Throughout Who You Once Were, both in Lillian's projected video and in person, Annie walks through doors into rooms only to encounter more doors, as if she were navigating a mental labyrinth. This image inspired me to incorporate the sounds of opening and closing doors throughout the score. The sound of a door slamming shut is so primal, loaded with emotion and meaning. But when that sound is drenched in reverb, and combined in layers with the sounds of different doors closing, you end up something closer to Taiko drums, or a tree falling on a car, or something from outer edges of so-called "industrial" music. Still, I believe no matter how much I may transform my source material, the original reference remains, like footnotes to a poem.

Speaking of poems . . . to help with the creative process, Lillian shared with Annie and I a poem she wrote about visiting her mother. The poem became yet another "way in" to the work, and I recorded myself reading the lines, and used fragments of that recording in the score. I also recorded Lillian and Annie reading the poem, and their voices are hear at key points as well, which I feel speaks to the personal and emotional investment each of us has in this project.

There's a scene in the film Bladerunner 2049 where a woman who creates fake yet vivid and emotional memories for replicants explains, "They all think it's about more detail, but that's not how memory works. We recall with our feelings. Anything real should be a mist." I use reverb in my score is to create this "mist" and give the listener a sense they are hearing something that is present but not entirely in focus, like a dream image you can't recall when you wake up.

I tend to work quickly and intuitively when I compose. If the material I'm working with is inspiring, I find it will lead me to ideas I could not have planned out in advance. This is when composing (and recording) feels more like performing. That said, like any studio nerd, I will spend countless hours mixing, comparing one mix with another, and taking apart and rebuilding what already sounded good in the first place. I figure, as long as the process feels good, and I'm not missing a deadline, what's wrong with going down the proverbial rabbit hole? When is a recording "finished"? I'm not always sure. However, at some point you have put down the brush and walk away from the canvas.

Video image and photo of Annie Arnoult by Lillian Warren

Each composition I create is its own landscape, in the literal sense of that word, with its own indigenous elements, just like the plant and animal life and weather of our planet's remote regions. Identifying, being aware of and composing with these elements can give the score a unified sound and help bring all of the components of a complex, multimedia performance like Who You Once Were together into a complete work.