Harry-Ed Roland:  COMPOSING, an approach

My approach to composing is, simply, emotional, passionate and musical.

My approach to electroacoustic music is illusory, transcendental, orchestrated and defiant.

These two facets are integrally evolving and tediously paired by notions of musical structural integrity, cause-and-effect and psychoacoustic manipulation.

Plainly put, for me, electroacoustic music is ultimately no different from any other kind of music, except that it is not yet bound by exclusive traditional, ritual or cultural conventions.  Let's just say, it is not real or only as real as I choose to make it.

Unlike ‘real music’, which essentially exists, historically, to dignify, animate, coordinate and accompany ritual, I think of electroacoustic music as the orphan among musics (with an orphan brother called: techno), culturally and commercially estranged.

This very fact makes it the perfect vehicle, for those, like myself, whose musical need is private, passionate, inexhaustable and basted in the essence, elation and power of a modern transmigrated black-american reality. 

This very same, my, insatiable passion is theoretically anchored in the multi-faceted technicalities of magical illusion, psychoacoustic phenomena, classical music and musically induced ectasy.  While, additionally, I'm an avid electro dance-floor junky.

This ultimately means, my trans-genre approach is rooted in the foundations of ritual-dance music and large-scale concert performance, music theory, music history and diverse and explicit musical "identity" in the world's musics.

My generational signifiers, having survived and in many ways thrived in racially segregated and harshly discriminating realities, were short-circuited by the need for "escape" from the hierarchical reality of a world which was (perhaps, is) enslaved to time, innately inhumane, immoral and unjust.

In my youth, producing the musics of my culture was a thrill, a given and also a social responsibility; in other words, I had no choice; no voice, just ‘the voice’.

As a juvenile, my decision to study and indulge in classical music was an initial effort to dislodge the aforementioned cultural shackles, only to have them replaced by my permanent though subtle exclusion from having innate rights to classical music (someone's else's culture), requiring constant permission and, equally, ceaseless submission to musical aesthetic constraints and conventions; again, no voice, just ‘their voice’.

These new classical shackles were, perhaps, analogous to a futile attempt to adopt a new religion.  Religions, like aesthetics, do not reside in the intellect.  They are the cutlery of culture and are akin to oxygen, immune systems or blood cells.

Let us not forget, at this juncture, that those ‘classical’ music constraints (many of which are mere conventions while others are physiological or acoustic) are neither ‘real’ nor rational vocabularies.

Violins don't have to be bowed or plucked nor clarinets blown;  those are mere conventions.

So, essentially, in electroacoustic parlance, the ‘liberated’ sound of falling objects need not necessarily, in musical contexts, be employed to traverse space in the same (top-to-bottom) direction. – ‘liberated’ sounds are sounds recorded and henceforth not actually produced by some (often) identifiable physical process, object or event.  There is a second ‘class’ of liberated sounds, those presumedly identifiable but, in fact, contrived, ‘staged’ or synthesized.)  The notion of ‘contrived’ sounds simply references the practice of taking an object and making it produce a sound unlike its naturally occuring or characterizing one; while ‘staged’ sounds are choreographed, composite stage-managed events.

Electroacoustic music arrived on the scene in my life (in Berlin in the mid-80's) at just that perfect moment when I had emerged, no longer willing to cater to and bend with the accusations, by classical music's gate-keepers, of ‘intrinsic’ musical ineptness (accolades and commendations notwithstanding).

Electroacoustic music's orphan-heritage made it ideal, a cultural void or at least a cultural infancy, with lots of room for the disenchanted or displaced.  In fact, from the outset, I realized that it was my voice and that it was something VASTLY different for me than it seemed to be to those through whom I, literally, had stumbled on to it.

But yes, I immediately found elements of musically induced ecstasy, elation, transcendence and passion in this artform;  although, these, precisely these ‘qualities’, more often than not, were being shunned upon, stripped away and subdued by my initial numerically indulged mediators.

While listening to ANCHORS and ARROWS (Karlsson and Hedman - 1984, Sweden), my first encounter with electroacoustic music, I heard the singers and saw the dancers who were not only not invited to the party but whose very existence had probably gone undetected or perhaps denied, if only on principle.  Yes! ANCHORS and ARROWS thrilled and mesmorized me.  Truly, it was purest elation, like that stirred by a Brahms concerto or Rachmaninoff rapsody.  And yes! It was as if they (jens h.and eric k.) had found and rescued me. 

Upon reflection, years later, I realized precisely how likely it was that the singers and dancers had not only not been invited but were sheerly unknown.  They had never been a part of the equation.

No doubt, from that moment, my first transcendence with electroacoustic music, my mission was clear;  I set out immediately and inexhaustably (on an ATARI CDP system – the only one available to me without ‘cultural’ censorship) to unleash them (the singers and dancers) and to reinstate them to the place of prominence and honor which they had occupied in my traditional musics.  Only this time, they would dance and sing to my beckonings and they would be there by choice, alas, ‘my voice’.  

The ‘there’ of my mission was also a place to escape to, a place to mold and bend, and a place which I could control, inhabit, influence, nurture and populate.

No matter how long one contemplates the notion and techniques of composition, the very act of composing at some point either severs itself completely from technical manipulation or it reduces the artform to the emotional status of menial.

This is but another way of saying, the techniques of historically spawned composition are eventually rendered irrelevant except in instances where the energy which needs to be quickened to detach the audience from their daily routine is, in fact, ‘historical’, as in merely remembered.

At this point, it also must be said, however, that composing electroacoustic music converges with ‘writing notes’ in as far as the ultimate challenge with MUSIC is to be guided (not shackled) by the worldly conventions of music (rhythm, groove, harmony, beat, melody, pulse, counterpoint, voicing, theme, repetition, motive, orchestration, structure, familiarity, tessitura, temporal illusion, etc.), as opposed to a mere fascination with the instrument, sound, effects or technologies.

This means, there's a part – no matter how intangible – of music, the space and the entire experience (irrespective of how contemporary or advant-garde) which can't be invented, neglected or contrived.

Suprisingly perhaps, for me, music is still only remotely intellectual;  the intellect merely being a means to an ‘emotionally moving’ end:  ethereal ecstatic elation.

This is so true that, although my music has a modest but loyal ‘fan-following’, composing is still like having dinner at grandma's house.  Grandma cooks to ‘rock my world’.  My music rocks my world so profoundly, in fact, that it's virtually incidental to me whether anyone else listen in.  I listen to it constantly.

My approach to composing is, alas, somewhat like designing airplanes;  whereby, a physically pleasing visual aesthetic is nice but irrelevant, juxtaposed with the existential question: "will it fly?" or "can it?"