Ragnhild Berstad: Respicio. (2003/2007) BLOGG
We are currently working on the piece towards a premiere of the new version with electronics at the Ultima Festival in October 2007 in Oslo.
18 of september.
I have been working hard with this piece: Hoers and hoers learning the score. But the motivation is hard. I have not yet a feeling where this will go. I feel like having a mental block. I am afraid off the score and the material is not played with. I feel stiff an un uninspired. I do not dare play with the score.! After several sessions with Ragnhild and really working with details, I have lost my own artistic feeling an ambition with the piece. I struggle to do what she wants, the level of perfection, all the good thoughts of quality in the process and in the performance is ripping me apart. I am fragile an insecure. I am afraid the composer will be disappointed, and a am afraid of failure. It is not going to be at the high standard I want.
Time to change attitude and make it my own, do your best, let go of the high ambition, the quality will come if not in the first performance then later! Get yourself together.
01September.
A long period of hard work! I really struggle learning the score. A lot of info, and many tones. But is is light in the tunnel... I got through the piece in one day fore the first time, and got am impression of the form and the amount of work remaining. I have been focusing to learn the rest of the music witch need to be sampled. It is getting there, and I have an impression of how it must be to fit in the end. We are sampling on thursday friday.
We had a session on thursday the 30 of August in the hall with the new 5.1 set upp. Great experience, and learned a lot. Sent the marimba clean sound from to speacers lying in front of the marimba. Center speacer behind the marimba, and 4 speakers in the room. I used my mixer as preamp and the ingenears got 16 lines from me directly. 8 microphones and 6 electronic + stereo effect form my computer. It worked great. I am not totally happy with the marimba sound, but I will spend some time testing it next time. I also need to figure out the electronic prosessing, how to controll, Ragnhild wants really many changes. Maybe the press sensor is going to work, but i never used it with 4 mallets before. Ableton is sendig a great signal , all 6 tracks is in sync and the ide is develloping. The listening environment for me is strange. I can not hear the enectronic tracks ballanced and i do not hear the prossesed marimba. When got Ragnhild to play whild i listened in the room I understood more. The clean marimba need to be more amplified. If sounds distant. The electronic track have to be at a sertan level to be heard and dynamic, but the instrument has to folluw upp. The idea of beeing close to the sound is really important to get to work. Keep up the work! I am not totally shure i will be ready in a month , but I just need to fokus on learning the score and mek it sound great...It is really a learning experience.
August, second week. It is easier now. The music is getting out in parts of the sections, and i can mamorice the fast sections more than 3 tones at a time. It is getting into my brain and body. Keep on working. We have arranged to test 5.1 sound the 30 of August in the Levin salen. Ragnhild has made most of the electronic parts at Notam and we only miss sampling the clean marimba sound when i have a feeling how the piece is going to be. It is a totally new piece, I can not recognice anything from 2003...
Hard work. Be avare of your back... Standing over the big marimba for hours are
hard. I focus on the long sections of tones still, but I need soon to go thru the tremolos as well. Some of them seem difficult fysically.
August. 4. I got a new revised version. She also explained the hole piece section by section. It felt good. I got more of what she wants. I also got the sound files. They sound wery nice, but the tempo is brutal. I am not shure i will be able to get the tempo highenough... Raghild is really curious and a bit worried how this is going in October, she also misses the time together with me in my stidio testing the material. I have not had time to do this, she has been working alone, not getting enough support from me..
August first week 6 sessions, and I got thru the hole piece several times. Working on micro level focusing on the long sections of fast notes. Figuring out sticking and trying how to make music out of it.Hard to memorice. building sections by 3 and 4 tones in a row.I do not se the hole piece. Difficult.
May and June. Ranghild dropped by with some music. A hectic period for me traveling. I need to keep focus on august and september. A bit of bad counciones about not following up Ragnhild's hard work. She is probobly really neurvous about how this is going to be in October...We have worked a lot on the Galss piece and learned eatch other to know better, and I start to feel that I can talk and respnd to ragnhild in a good way.
March 30.
Today we spent 3 hours sampling Marimba, vibraphone and Tam.-Tam. I used one hour to set up the sound equipment. I used my setup of microphones, mixer, sound chard and recorded in Soundforge an easy stereo program, I tried in Cubase Sl, but i could not find the option to change input to my Asio driver. Finally after 4 sessions we have learned to set gain high enough for Ragnhild to get a good signal to process at home. She has been patient, and has learned a lot herself on the option of sampling done not in the studio. The know how is essential to be able to work with music today, the old way with studio time is to expensive and not efficient for experimenting. We need to learn this to a proper level, and the clean sounds of the instruments to be played live must be done in the studio due to the location, noise for the PC, things resonating in the room, but hopefully it is good enough for processing electronic.
The time we spent together is a great way to learn the piece, i got a lot of her thoughts on how she wants it. This will hopefully lay in my back head when I start to learn the piece. The first impressions are developing and we both get a better understanding of how the instrument and the persons work!
She responded well on the parts i have rehearsed. It comes to life. This is the level of understanding we need. She has corrected me in the way she wants it to be played and I do my best to realize her ambitions and fell free to color it with Kjell Tore.
March 23
I have been rehearsing 4 sessions of an hour, and the material is exiting, the merge between pitch and noise/sound is especially intriguing at this point. I have decided not to break my back mentally on this, so i rehears slow with no pressure on myself to get the material in. I would like to go thru everything with the approach to let it slowly get into my mind. (not setting deadlines when it must be finished). I would like to see if it is possible, and when i set 100% focus it will be interesting to see if the first step will pay off. Recognition of the material , not get the feeling of new unknown material. Difficult to explain, but it needs time to develop in my body, and the first experience with the material is always heavy!
March, 10
Today we recorded several sections of the marimba part. Ragnhild needed it to make electronic material. we used long time to get it to sound right tuning the microphones distance, input gain, witch of the 5 microphones to use on different sections, deep high, and the input in the computer. Very useful and learning. Mallets are also an issue. Hard or soft or just the correct sound on different sections, useful experiences.She had also made a number of changes, so i got a new copy of the score.
Yesterday i decided to premier this piece in october at the ultima festival.
March
Today we vent thru possibilities of abelton live, signal processing live and starting and stopping sound files using triggers like the malletkat and the Behringer foot switch.
We vent thru the sections of the piece ready (8 pages) focusing on if something needed to be changed if it was not possible to play. Very few "impossible" parts. Some places the long rows of tones need to be played 3 in one hand, but n the tempo it is ok, however we are to look at it in a few weeks when i am more into the material. Ragnhild has really gotten into writing for the quartertonemarimba and the open approach is great to work with.
January and February.
We have met 3 times, and i have rehearsed several hoers. Together we tried sections of material and talking of possibilities. Ragnhild was not happy with the quality of the samples and the idea to use studio time on the samples with clean sound is very nessesery.We had some mail contact discussion the possibilities of making an art video, Ragnhild knows some visual artists and i am really eager to link this to the music.
December 2006.
We sampled 70 minutes of short samples of the piece using my microphones sound card and pc.Thru this i learned to sample and edit samples in cubase sl. The quality was not ok. The sound in the room was ok, but there were some noise. In the studio as well due to that Ragnhild and the computer was located in the same room. It vas also difficult to play just parts of the piece without knowing how the atmosphere of the piece was intended to be. I think it is necessary to do this anyway, it gave us a good start of getting into the material and hopefully gave Ragnhild some ideas vat is difficult and what is ok to write, and how i respond to it. It also worked as a good start of getting to know each other.
I showed Raghild about trigging possibilities and we will go further into this later.
October 06
We met and talked what we wanted. We looked thru the original material and talked about what she
taught about the way the performance vent the first time, and i did the same. The piece was intended to be 10 minutes but ended up in 15 due to the time to move from the vibraphone and the marimba and the fact that it was a lot of material and the 8 weeks i used to rehears it was not enough. We bout wanted to revise it and to make the material and the anticipations on what was possible to be equal for the performer and the composer. We talked already the first time to use electronics, but i was not ready.
The academy of music, 15 of December 03, the soloist diploma exam.
Thoughts from December 2003:
Incredibly difficult! I was not able to get to the musical lines, and the piece became very long and slow...
I have worked fore 8 weeks on this very hard and got to the point were i nearly could play it using the first solution in mind to survive...
This has really great potentialities! Ragnhild is really into the quartertone world
� Kjell Tore Innervik, 2007.