Hello everyone – hope you’re all keeping well.
I’ve been silent on the blog for awhile now, but not because I haven’t been working on a few things. I have two videos (!) to share with you, and I’d really love to have your feedback.
The first is a video of one of my own multiphonic miniatures (MMs). As some of you may know, Scott McLaughlin and I started a call for MMs at the beginning of the UK lockdown, and what we’ve got back has been interesting in itself, and wonderful to see what you’ve come up with. However, it’s also been clear to Scott and I that the resources to think outside the box with multiphonics simply don’t exist.
And so one of the big questions for us is: is it at all possible to help composers to have an intuitive and wide understanding of multiphonic sound production without an embodied experience of the instrument?
One of my thoughts has been to take a break from making charts, and to do more sharing of examples, to put multiphonics in context so that you can hear and see (and have me explain) what’s going on.
So there are two videos here, and I’d love to have your feedback on them. Is any of this useful? Are some aspects more useful than others? What would you like to see more of?
They both approach this from two different angles:
- I’ve been writing my own multiphonic miniatures, in which I try to use a limited range of multiphonics, and to play around with different limitations. In this video (eventually: these videos) you’ll hear me play through my miniature (with the score on one side), and then I’ll explain the multiphonics I chose, what limitation I was using, and what the results were.
- In this video I take one multiphonic and do a little improvisation with it, playing with the different pitches that come out. These videos are short, and the explanations appear as text in the video (along with the fingering and pitch chart). (I picked this multiphonic at random, but what I think I’d like to do is go through my “easy multiphonics” post and do a video on each of them!)
And if you like this stuff, please subscribe to my channel!
