transmission

Richard BARRETT
Born 1959, Swansea, Wales

transmission (1996-99)

From DARK MATTER (1998-2001) 10400
electric guitar with live electronics solo

transmission for electric guitar and live electronics was commissioned by ELISION Ensemble and is dedicated to Daryl BUCKLEY: it was written between 1996 and the summer of 1999. The point of departure for the work is a system of composed movements across the guitar which generate changing harmonic fields: this `fabric´ is used to produce the notated materials, by diverse means of compositorial derivation, and also to produce the sound-materials played out of the computer (in the second, fourth and last of the six sections), which are derived from a recording of the `fabric´. The processes of derivation (of transmission of an original `message´) continue during the live performance: the compositional means of improvisational playing which emerges from `lacunae´ in the score of the fourth and fifth sections, and the technological process by means of live electronic processing if the guitar throughout.

The original `fabric´ underlies the entire performance as if it were a deep archaeological stratum, whose transmission to the surface of the music proceeds through distortions, elucidations, losses and reconstructions, and so forth. Thus, transmission belongs among those of my compositions (also including ruin for 6×3 instruments, completed in 1995) which are concerned with musical composition (and, by extension, listening) as an attempt to bring order to a (fictionally) broken-down remnant of . . . what? the distant past? the depths of the subconscious? Composition, performance, and once more, listening should always involve a sense of discovering, even if, like Columbus, we may be mistaken about what we have discovered.

Another point of departure was an attempt to reconceive the electric guitar itself, neither as an expanded (or impoverished, depending on one's point of view) version of its `classical´ forebear, nor as a medium for effecting a fashion-conscious fusion with its familiar contemporary vocabulary. transmission uses a `hybrid´ instrument equipped with both `electric´ and `acoustic´ outputs, and uses playing techniques related to both of the above traditions as well as (probably most importantly) what the guitarist Derek BAILEY calls `non-idiomatic´ (to which I prefer the term `radically idiomatic´, that is, relating to the instrument/player interface itself rather than to a stylistic idiom). Thus it draws, more than any of my other compositions to date, on my own modest experience and abilities as an improvising guitarist, from the times before I found a deeper (through no doubt equally modest) `instrumental vocation´ in the domain of electronic music. Each of the six sections accordingly embodies a different angle of view on the instrument itself (as well as on the aforementioned compositional material, which in the end comes to the same thing), almost as if six different instruments are sequentially presented; each also uses a different relationship between the instrument and its electronic `environment´, which in each case involves notated parts for one or more footpedals, affecting such dimensions as pitch-shifting and timbral modulation as well as volume.

The guitar timbres were devised in collaboration with Daryl BUCKLEY; the electronic sounds are performed using the LiSa sampling software developed by Frank BALDÉ at STEIM in Amsterdam. A preliminary version of transmission, in the form of an improvisatory `sketch´ of possible processes and materials, was performed by Daryl and myself at the Schömer-Haus, Klosterneuburg (Austria) on March 7 1999, on the initiative of Karlheinz ESSL.

Programme note © 1999 Richard BARRETT