Early Music America Spring 2014 - (Page 39)

Composing Electronic Music for Baroque Instruments at the Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, Maine, I had already decided that I wanted to write a folia, but one that combined live Baroque oboe and Baroque violin with electronically processed sounds, making my laptop a separate performer in the piece. The creative process of taking a very well-known Baroque idiom and transforming it into a modern piece, while still holding true to the instruments, composers, and history behind the By Brandon Labadie dance form, forced me to do a lot of research and explore various compositional techniques. I began by listening to various live performances of colleagues in the early music scene as well as analyzing manuscripts of pieces by Marais, Corelli, Vivaldi, and a few anonymous musicians from the 15th and 16th centuries. Limited by my hardware-two microphones and one laptop-and by the two-week time-frame, I set out to compose 20 variations that used a distinct A recording of Les Folies palette of electronics. In my experience, attempting to force too many electronic D'Électronique made at sounds or effects into a composition causes a lack of development and results the 2013 Atlantic Music in a smattering of disjointed, poorly Festival can be heard here: implemented electronic sounds. That said, the computer was an equal conhttps://soundcloud.com/ tributor to my composition, Les Folies brandonlabadieoboe/ D'Électroniques. I used it to enhance harmonic texture, develop thematic les-folies-d-lectronique. material, and expand the audience's Not all "early music" is performed at early music festivals. With the help of Baroque instruments and a laptop computer, Les Folies D'Électronique electronically reprocessed the old form of the folia at the Atlantic Music Festival B EFORE MY ARRIVAL preconceived notion of the sound space. Pitch shifting, ring modulation, delay lines, ﬂanging, and a bit of source ﬁltering were to be the electronic colors for my piece. At times, I felt that an effect was not necessarily enhancing the sound quality or the affect of the variation, so I left those entities as stand-alone acoustic variations-these provided the audience with an aural break from constantly processing new sounds and also reminded them of the formal folia structure. After speaking with Juilliard faculty member, violinist, composer, and director of the Atlantic Music Festival's Future Music Lab program, Mari Kimura, I narrowed down my raw compositional choices to meter, harmony, and melody. Because the late folia has such a wellestablished chord progression (i-V-i-VIIIII-VII-i-V / i-V-i-VII-III-VII-V[4-3sus]-i), I chose to stay true to these harmonies throughout each variation. But I gave myself permission to throw away at times any sense of rhythm or melody, and this allowed some beautiful moments to occur in the piece-two improvised solos and a few variations where the sense of meter decays over the 16-bar progression. After the electronics and compositional aspects of the folia had been decided, I began to think more about the history of the folia. One of my favorite descriptions of the dance comes from the 15thcentury writer Sebastián de Covarrubias Continued on page 70 Early Music America Spring 2014 39 https://www.soundcloud.com/brandonlabadieoboe/les-folies-d-lectronique

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Early Music America Spring 2014

Editor's Note
Reader Forum
Sound Bytes
Musings: My No Early Music Dream
Profile: Choral Conductor Amelia LeClair
Recording Reviews
Donors ex machina
Three Small Nails
Early Music Is a Capital Idea
Composing Electronic Music for Baroque Instruments
2014 Guide: Workshops & Festivals
Book Reviews
Ad Index
In Conclusion: 4,568 Pages Ago

Early Music America Spring 2014