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PROGRAM NOTE back to Program Notes Last modified 21 July 2024 Watershed V (2020) After percussionist Steve Schick joined UC San Diego's Department of Music in 1991, he and I, Peter Otto and Miller Puckette worked on an elaborate percussion project involving a circular setup that surrounded Steve. We worked a year in refining the positions of four families of instruments (skins, metals, wooden snare drums, and “oddities”). I made a plan for a 6-channel spatialization of sounds that enriched the live sound produced during performance. Three decades later, Danish percussionist Mathias Reumert approached me about preparing a version of Watershed that would require only a stereo sound system that would project sounds that he triggered during performance (There are 22 such cues.). It was a perplexing challenge, not only because the variability of the computer materials would no longer have the flexible profiles of real-time events, but also because the natural sound of a reverberating percussion instrument is an immediately identifiable and richly textured acoustic experience. Eventually, I conceived a way of simulating sounds that would have the character of appropriate reverberation but would not require an elaborate microphone setup. I called it “shimmer”. The specific timbral signature of a given instrument is prolonged and spatially distributed in such a way that the essence of a sound produced in live performance seems to float in the air as a magical extension. It does this without requiring a complex of electronic equipment. In its original version, the equipment necessary to realize the real-time spatialization required two very large shipping cases. Mathias, using easily obtainable equipment, premiered Watershed V in Copenhagen on 1 September 2020. – Roger Reynolds |
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