Echoes

In the photo, we’re giving an idea of how large and heavy our equipment was in 1972. This time we’re going to RPI, in Troy, New York, to perform Echoes and other compositions.

In performing Echoes, Jan Williams, percussionist, interacts with his own sounds, delayed, transformed, and coming from any of four loudspeakers placed in the corners of the performance space. The technology includes a tape delay, ring modulator, Daisy (a multichannel pseudo-random control-voltage generator built by John Roy), and various Moog modules, among them an oscillator, filter, and several voltage-controlled amplifiers.

Echoes, following Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing, is another form of interaction. In this performance, Jan Williams plays drums, cymbals, vibraphone, and other percussion instruments. His sounds are picked up by a microphone, delayed a few seconds, then transformed, then sent randomly to any of four loudspeakers around the concert hall. If we think of the first percussion sound as something that is “said” by the percussionist to begin the conversation, the sound as it emerges from the loudspeakers is a “reply” to which the percussionist, in turn, replies, and so it goes throughout a conversational performance.

Noticing that there’s no structure, and imagining that the sounds could be different in every performance, especially if they are played by different instruments, one might ask me what I composed. As a question: What did you compose? The answer: I composed the process of performance, which includes the concept as well as the technical method of the way that the sounds are transformed.

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Technology, in general, allows us to extend ourselves, to do more than we could otherwise do. Specifically, in music, technology can be used to extend the sounds of acoustic instruments. And since everything we do comes back to us in one form or another, technologically-extended sounds can come back to performers in magical and unexpected ways, providing them with more interesting feedback, putting them in a more interesting performance environment, and giving them more interesting cues as to what to do next.

Thoughts of interesting feedback, performance environments, and cues for further action could, in fact, lead to a variety of different specific improvisational compositions.

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For other compositions, click on a title

Blues Mix 1966
Albany Music 3 1966
Jack in January 1967
Street Scene 1967

Drift 1970
Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing 1971
Echoes 1972

From The 14th On 1973

Flowers 1975
Settings for Spirituals 1977

Solo 1978
Scenes from Stevens 1979
Follow Me Softly 1984

After Some Songs 1995
Spring Drum with Pierre’s Words 1997

Many Times … 2001
One World 1 2006
Micro Fictions 2009
Different Cities 2013