Workflow

A sketch of the possible areas in Chinatown that will serve as “beacons” for Family Association.

I just wrapped up about two weeks of processing the oral history recordings, and this week I’m finally starting to figure out how the music will work. In particular, I want to investigate how the combination of music and speech can not only heighten and deepen our experience of the words but also remind the listener that there is inherent musicality in all speech. By combining music and words together, where the musical material is drawn from the speech audio, I would like to guide the audience towards hearing speech as a musical (and ultimately, deeply expressive) experience.

From listening through the interviews, I organized and edited them into five themes. As a result, I also created five rough areas in Chinatown that will serve as a “beacon” for each theme.

After exploring different options, my idea at the moment is to assign a solo instrument to each area, whose music is derived from the recorded speech from that area. In the in-between spaces (i.e., Elizabeth Street), the audience will hear a combination of the music from both areas as a duet. This way, the music connects each of the areas together in a flow, and the listener is free to wander to these in-between spaces in Chinatown to hear the interaction between the different themes through music.

Working in Dorico

This is also the first time that I’m using the notation software Dorico to do the bulk of the composition and notational work. It’s definitely a learning curve at the beginning to learn software (mostly because you have to unlearn what you knew before), but I’m definitely enjoying the new workflow.

I will be working on this duets idea this week and next! Let’s see how it goes!