I heard behind me a
loud voice
Nagging for
tuba and computer
2007
Stefan Klaverdal
About
the piece
This is
essentially a piece on beats. It is an experiment with repeating 16ths, eventually climbing scales also become part of the
equation.
The title
is from the book of revelation, and relates to the feeling of rapture spoken of
in the text. In other genres, and also traditionally music that has a loud bass,
accelerating rhythms like in this piece is often used to produce feelings of
ecstasy. "I heard behind me..." plays with the same
mechanisms, but in a slightly different way.
It is also
a piece about nagging. In fact the first title for this piece was
"Nagging". The nagging aspect is used in a more general sense,
meaning that it might be annoying with repeats, like it is with children going
on about stuff they want, but i find it very
interesting that in music, the same rules don't apply. What would normally
become nagging, turns into something else. Stylistically something also happens
to the music when it is repeated. It starts morphing into other unexpected
forms.
First
performed in Malm, November 29th 2007 by Kjetil Myklebust.
Technical
information:
To play the
computer part, the patch for MAX/MSP is needed from
the composer.
It is not
self-sufficient, and will need a player through the performance to operate it.
One will
also need a computer capable of running the MAX/MSP
runtime environment.
The patch
is only tested on Apple computers, and will run nicely on a G4 867MHz.
A soundcard
with one in and two out is also needed. It has to be set to very low latency.
Other
equipment:
A PA-system with two smaller speakers (Genelec
1029 or equivalent) to be placed as close to the soloist as possible.
A
microphone for the singer connected to the soundcard