Cetacean Echoes

On the 21st August at 7pm, Cetacean Echoes, my latest original composition, was premiered at the Korksirken Church in Bergen, conducted by Bjørn Sagstad. The church was a large, reverberant space that suited this piece well, and during the week leading up to this premiere, I worked alongside Bjørn and the musicians to rehearse the piece.

A cetacean is a marine mammal, and this piece aims to give the audience an insight into the incredible, sophisticated communication systems of whales. They sounds and vocalisations which i have chosen to focus on include echolocation clicks (clicking patterns a whale uses to map it’s surroundings), and whale song. Human noise pollution in the ocean is a real threat to these systems, and through sound, this piece explores a world where humans (represented by musical sounds), and marine environmental sounds can co-exist.

The premiere was recorded, and will soon be released on YouTube.

Euphonium - Nils Rainer Vågen and Glyn Porter

Tuba - Isak Stenerson and Isak Brun-Iverson

Piano - Agnes Barbara Önnerstad

Percussion - Andreas Fotland

Conductor - Bjørn Sagstad

More about Cetacean Echoes

When introduced to Schnittke’s Piano Quintet (1976) by Michael McCartney, I was captivated by mov.5 and it’s hypnotic ostinato. Much of the material and harmony in Cetacean Echoes is derived from my own ostinato and chord series that I wrote at the piano as influenced by this piece. The chord series uses all the white notes on the piano, with the addition of an F#, and this note selection remains the same throughout the piece, with emphasis on the notes in the ostinato – in particular G’s and D’s. Until the euphonium solo enters at b.18, this perfect 5th keeps the harmony open and intentionally vague, reflecting it’s more environmental nature.

 When I refer to environmental material, this means material based more on timbre and effect, rather than musical material which contains more regular rhythm, pitch and contour.

 The rhythmic qualities of this ostinato only develop into a repetitive ostinato in the final figures of 15 and 16. Before this point I move inside the ‘grey zone’ between environmental qualities and musical qualities, an exploration that was important to this piece due to its intentions - the sounds made by whales don’t fit into a regular time signature/rhythm or specified pitch but rather are built and organised through shape and timbre, just as is done musically in Gagaku (UNESCO),  a Japanese traditional performing art. This is why my notation uses aleatoric techniques, such as stemless noteheads, boxed material, and a combination of approaches to time.

Dániel Peter Biro (my composition teacher at the Grieg Academy), was particularly influential toward my experimentation into time, suggesting it as a solution to address the divide/tension between environmental and musical material. Therefore, this work is measured by either seconds over brackets (‘environmental’ approach), or time signature and tempo marking (‘musical’ approach), with more emphasis on seconds in the first half of the piece, and more prevalence of time signature in the second half. The time brackets reflect Brown’s String Quartet, and also influenced my use of stemless noteheads. 

Throughout the work, I have made us of these stemless noteheads, both during measures with time signatures and measures based on duration in seconds. Particularly in the measures with time signature, this bridges the musical and environmental approaches and deters from a sense of pulse. Additionally, to move away from consistent pulse and create a sense of floating, I have intermittently used an approach that can be seen in Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, this being a lack of emphasis on the downbeat.

After researching whales and their communication systems, I chose three key sounds to emulate, blowhole air bursts, echolocation clicks, and whale song. The air bursts were the easiest to emulate as could be simply done by blowing fast air through the brass instruments with a specific speed and cadence provided in the reference recordings that I sent out to the players alongside the score and parts (the reference recordings included original whale sounds, as well as recordings of instrumental effects).

For the echolocation clicks, the percussion was the easiest to obtain using castanets, however rhythmic irregularity of these was difficult to notate so I made use of aleoteric boxes and reference tracks e.g. b.15 in the percussion, alongside specific instructions that these needed to be played as varied rhythmic guestures. I also wanted to include this sound in both the piano and the brass. For the brass, this meant creating beating (pulsing effect that occurs between two sounds of slightly different frequencies) through the medium of multiphonics by singing and playing at the same time, as is done in Baadsvik’s Fnugg for solo tuba, which I have notated similarly. For the piano, this meant experimenting with the use of string dampening which I first head in Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, which also happens to be about whales. This piece also uses other hands-on string techniques, and through my own experimentation, I use hands to create a ‘rumbling’ effect on the lowest strings, more suggestive of an underwater landscape than any of the specific whale sounds, these other sounds can be placed into this landscape and feel supported. For the whale song, the most effective approach was workshopping and experimentation, until arriving at the sounds I was searching for with the most idiomatic technique. For the percussion, the use of superball can be observed to make the instrument ‘sing’ and my preference for bass drum is most appropriate for the deeper sounds that whales make. This is combined with a series of both full valve and half valve glissandos and multiphonics with unspecified pitches in the euphonium and tubas. Unspecified pitches can also be observed it Kurtág’s Tenyeres (1) and in Nono’s Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau, however I did this using arrow shaped note heads.

To determine the shapes of these sounds, I transcribed the recordings of whale songs which you can see above, I then assigned sounds to players. Timbre, shape, variety and conversational playing was most important here compositionally, and the notation had to reflect this, and so this evolved into aleoteric boxes. The legend also aids the players by providing context and intention behind the written extended techniques and effects. 

Worthy of note if my instruction of ‘stuff jumper down bell’. The balance was posing an issue, with three brass instruments competing against the solo euphonium, and so I wanted a method of reducing the volume of these effects, without interfering with the techniques. The tuba 2 does not have a jumper because this would affect the air burst, and so the only other sound assigned to them is low pitch bends which can be done quietly. 

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