J. Simon van der Walt

Sequencer-aided composition; a justification

Although I have never heard it expressed outright anywhere, I have a suspicion that there is a strong, hidden bias in the contemporary composition community against using MIDI sequencers as a compositional tool. One always hears composers say, with a hint of snobbish pride, 'Of course, I compose everything with pencil & paper & only then enter it into Finale'. This is usually followed by the archetypal tale of the illiterate Cubase composer, who in ignorance writes violin parts that go down to F. One hears the sound of muscles being flexed.

Just because I work with a MIDI sequencer doesn't make me a musical illiterate. I happen to be a child of the sixties; I still believe in progress through science and the white heat of technological revolution. I want the future to be better than the past. I don't want the composed music of the twenty-first century to be forced to carry the weight of the nineteenth on it's back. What is wrong with embracing the technology which is there & working with it? Why can't we develop a new aesthetic instead of judging the new in terms of the old?

A comparison with the word processor springs to mind. I remember my years at University trying to complete my ill-fated psychology degree, writing & re-writing thousands upon thousands of words in green ink, with arrows pointing from one section to another & even paragraphs cut up & stuck together in a different order. This document, needless to say, I produced using ClarisWorks. If it's alright to drag, cut, paste and spellcheck one's written ideas, why not music?

When I work with a sequencer I don't automatically stop imagining the sound & feel of the instruments in my head. (For one thing, I work with one of the cheapest sound modules on the market, so everything sounds like a band of mouth-organs anyway!) As a composer, the mere sight of, say, a top Bb written for a tenor trombone, brings not merely the sound to mind, but the weight of the instrument, the slide position, the pressure of the players embouchure, and the memory of all the excellent trombonists I have worked with to my mind. Why should I mysteriously lose this skill just because I'm looking at a piece of phosphor-coated glass instead of a dead tree?

The particular software I use most of the time is Logic (See note 1), and I am sure that many of my positive convictions about sequencer-aided composition are as a result of the way that program works. For a start, what I term the 'canonic operations' are all very easy to perform with Logic. I can perform transposition, augmentation & diminution of a phrase instantly & without a second thought. Almost as accessible are inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion. With a little more work and creativity, I can multiply or divide the intervals by a constant, or select every C and turn it into a C#, or indeed perform almost any mathematical transformation of the material that I can dream up.

At any time I can see what a passage looks like in any clef & hear what it sounds like on any sound in my module. At any time I can try out any vertical or horizontal combination of ideas just by dragging them around on the screen, until I find something that sounds right. If I suddenly hear the continuation of a passage, I can turn to my keyboard and play it in, either one note at a time or in real time, and the tidy up the results afterwards. By simply turning on the 'Loop' parameter I can instantly turn any phrase into an ostinato, which repeats until I stop it or vary it; a temptation often to be resisted for someone for whom 'Six Pianos' was a life-changing experience.

Whenever I need to I can make a quick draft printout of my ideas so far, and work on them away from the computer. I can give troublesome extracts to players to try out for practicality. I can make a recording of the piece so far & listen to it in the car to get a feel for how it flows. When the piece seems to be complete I can in most cases produce a score & parts directly from Logic, although the workarounds involved are admittedly sometimes horrendous.

There is another prejudice against MIDI which sometimes gets wheeled out in academic circles; that MIDI is entirely predicated upon the twelve semitones of equal temperament, and can only handle microtones in a very clumsy way. This objection, which is fair enough, is held to be fatal to any 'serious' work using MIDI. Now for one thing, this seems to me a bit rich coming from a community which was totally in thrall to the pitch-class-set until fairly recently. As long as one is aware the MIDI specification implies a particular model of what constitutes music, one can use it a source of compositional strength and discipline. The vertical and horizontal arrangements of the notes may become more important than the sound, which is just a program change away; now it's a flute, now it's a violin. Such an indifference to sound is of course deeply unfashionable, but I don't care; to me it's pleasantly reminiscent of the days when composers would happily craft pieces suitable for viols, voices, recorders, or anything else that happened to be lying around.

Department of well-you-would-say-that-wouldn't-you, but I honestly think that the work I am producing and the way in which I am going about it are a unique and valuable contribution to the artistic life of our time, and, yes, I do become a little bitter & twisted at the thought that, if I had the time & the deviousness, my work would probably gain wider acceptance if I wrote it all out by hand so as to disguise it's origins. But that would be dishonest! I stand by my decision to embrace the MIDI sequencer, as a responsible artist trying in all humility to express my vision of the truth.

Notes

1. Many people have never heard of Logic. Dance musicians are convinced the sun shines out of Cubase's ASIO, and will hear of nothing else. Algorithmic composers have heard of MAX, little suspecting that many of the same MIDI tricks can be done in the Logic Environment. Real composers use Finale, of course, or Sibelius if they're hip and up-to-date.
   
   I have my own personal take on the minority status of such a fantastic program. One aspect is copy protection; in the days of the Atari, everyone had a crack copy of Cubase, whereas Notator (Logic's predecessor) you had to buy. This, along with the admitted fact that Cubase had a better graphical user model of the data (subsequently copied & improved upon by Logic) ensured it's industry standard status. And of course PC users have their street-corner crack CD-Rs of Cakewalk. Another factor must be marketing. As a committed mac user I feel a distinct sense of deja-vu; a superior product being stomped on by an inferior but stronger rival, sound familiar? Cubase have also made a strong push into the educational market; I actually have to phone the Logic distributors up & beg them to send junk mail to the college where I work just to keep up with Steinberg.<rant mode off> Back

j.simon@jsvdw.freeserve.co.uk

Created 21/2/99
Last modified 21/2/99