Crossover

If one accepts western tonality as an external referent, and gesture as having to be largely based in conventional performance, many areas of possible exploration within the digital music aesthetic such as timbral transformation are negated. The focus remains on instrumentation, orchestration and instrumental gesture.

Digital popular music practice saw the extension of the replication aesthetic in two ways: through the introduction of sounds and grammars that were from traditions beyond western instruments; and negating traditional real-time performance through editing as composition. Each approach is a type of crossover: one in bridging musical styles, the other through combining techniques of production and performance that were previously separate. While continuing to be grounded in tonal performance practice, the two aesthetic shifts were from contextualized real-time performance to decontextualized performance, and the use of any sound as an instrument.

Moving away from known musical styles and gestures demanded greater technical skill in the generation, arrangement and production of music. The problems arising are not unique to the digital music aesthetic. The crossover of eastern and western instruments in popular music was an aspect of experimentation in analogue popular music as was the incorporation of found sounds (Page & Plant CD 1994, van der Lee 1998).

The incorporation of new sounds and ‘exotic’ instruments into replication approaches in the digital realm is found in Gabriel’s film score for Passion: Music for the Last Temptation of Christ (Gabriel CD 1988). Locating new and unusual instrumental sounds, or creating them through synthesis, is a relatively simple task. Finding a context in which they are musically usable, combining these with familiar instruments, or constructing entirely new ensembles is problematic. Pragmatic questions arise as to how a new timbre blends and balances within existing ensembles, and what sort of performance gestures can be attached to them.

Gabriel’s solution was largely to use western instrumental language and gestures for found sounds, and import instrumental gestures and scales from the traditions in which the ‘exotic’ instruments evolved. Orchestration skill was of the essence here, since each piece demanded the blending the familiar with the unusual. A further contribution was in the creation of new ensembles that did not have a real world referent.

Orchestration skill in this new idiom was enhanced by the use of advanced production techniques such as automated panning to make full use of sound with little pitch interest; sound design to create material that did not exist in the physical domain; and volume control to make use of small background sounds as foreground material. In this sense, the exploration of space, timbre and volume more typical of modernist electroacoustic art forms was hinted at in the musical texture, but largely within a tonal pitch/duration paradigm.

Gabriel’s approach is not restricted to popular music styles. Frykberg (CD 1998) illustrates the eclectic nature of the approach. It is achieved through either using familiar performance gestures but unfamiliar sounds, or using familiar instruments and sounds in unfamiliar performance gestures.