Christopher Coleman

Intervention

duration ca. 1:31

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Electronic Essay #2

duration 11:48

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Electronic Essay #1

duration ca. 3:00

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Instrumentation

tape

 

Program Note

The three works listed here were my early attempts at electronic music.  The Electronic Essay #1 was a music concrete work, created from analog recordings of my own trombone playing, with additional trombone sounds--pouring water in the mouthpiece was particularly effective.  These recordings were manipulated through multitracking, manual speed shifts, tape splicing and reversing and the like.  It was created at the University of Georgia's first Electronic Music Lab, at the time basically a double closet with two tape machines and a Buchla and ARP synthesizer.  The Electronic Essay #2 was created on a larger Buchla synthesizer at the University of Chicago's Electronic Music Lab and features large sheets of sounds with bold dynamic changes.  One of the sounds created was remarkably like a baby's cry, and came about serendipitously as I lightly touched a contact to the outside of its socket.  The Electronic Essays were stored on magnetic tape that has, in the case of the first Essay, since decayed and no longer exists.  Intervention was a result of my first experimentation in digital electronic music and was created through writing code for the first commercially available Yamaha sound module rather than by performing on a keyboard.  The piece was something of a distorted three-voice fugue on a theme by Howard Sandroff.  After leaving Chicago for Hong Kong, I abandoned electronic music for several years until composing Rite in 1992, a far more substantial and sophisticated work than any of its predecessors.