Tristan Coelho on his piece “Rhythm City”
Read my interview with Sydney-based composer Tristian Coelho on his piece “Rhythm City”. It is a multimedia piece for piano, live electronics, and video projection. The text version of this interview was created by Estere Bundzēna.
Can you briefly summarise your piece?
Rhythm City was a piece I composed in 2018 and it was written for a friend of mine, a wonderful pianist Zubin Kanga, an Australian pianist and composer. He works at Royal Holloway in the University of London as a lecturer. We have collaborated over the years in various ways, on different pieces, but this one was quite a new thing for me. He approached me asking for a piece for a piano solo with a multimedia element — a live set, live electronic sounds and visual imagery.
The idea of the piece was to assemble lots of video clips of fairly mundane day-to-day activities, short clips of things like chopping vegetables, shutting a door or the traffic. There was no real planning for those video clips. I wanted to assemble a bunch of different types of activities or scenes that I could loop and then extract musical inspiration from. What I have done in the piece, was attempt to elevate relatively mundane things and explore the musicality in them. A lot of the video clips are short loops and then rhythms start emerging and then that is referenced in the piano part. It is a bit like a silent film in the early 1900s. You would have someone playing the organ and improvising sounds in sync with the visuals or even providing some sound effects. I took that on as a bit of an inspiration, it is like a silent film that you are playing along with, in addition to reverb and granulation effects. Therefore, I see it as the silent film exploration or at least a link to that. The piano player has the piano and also a midi keyboard resting on top of the piano. The pianist can manipulate the video clips in real-time — splice them up, change the loop points, reverse them and trigger a random flurry of videos. There are many interactive components and it resembles a video game-style experience for the pianist. There are various moments in the piece where the performer stops playing the piano altogether and just manipulates the video clips. In a nutshell, it was an exploration of the mundane, day-to-day things that we find ourselves doing, and finding musicality in those things.
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What is the central message of the piece?
The message is to stop and smell the roses, enjoy the sounds around you and take stock of things. Ultimately, listen to the world around you. I find I do that a lot. I carry my phone around with me like everyone else does, and I am always sampling and recording sounds, looping them and playing with them. To be in tune with your surroundings and enjoy the sonic experience — that is the message.
How did you come up with the title Rhythm City?
I thought it was a pretty snappy title, quite playful. It summarizes the idea of the piece in a way. You are in a certain setting, in this case, a city and everything can be playable like in a video game. It is kind of a gamification of these sounds, so I see it as a playful piece ultimately. Looking back, I was inspired by Stefan Prins and his piece Piano Hero. Zubin has played that piece and I remember being quite taken aback by it. It was playful and fun. I wanted to achieve the video game experience for the performer and the audience. It is like a nod to that piece and it was all very new for me, that type of approach and having that kind of degree of control over the visual component in real-time. It was a bit of a risky thing for me because I had not done it before, but I learned a lot during the process. It was a great learning curve and wonderful to work with Zubin on it.
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Where were these clips recorded?
Mostly in Sydney, Australia. A lot of them were little clips from things in my apartment. Later on, the piece goes beyond that and explores the city in various ways. There are internal, indoor clips and then there are outdoor clips and we go between those. The clips are characterized by clear driving rhythmic elements.
How does the pianist play both the piano and the keyboard?
The piano is set up in such a way that the music stand is taken off, so there is room for the midi keyboard on top. The midi keyboard is key-mapped to certain things in Max/MSP. There is a certain range of the keyboard which triggers discrete video clips that are an octave, an octave and a half. Some keys play around with the speed of the video and the loop itself. It makes the loop shorter or longer and reverses the video. Another random feature is by a press of a button and it creates a flurry of randomization in the clip selection. It is rather interactive and you can have a lot of fun playing around with the keyboard. The pianist has to control the piano and the video sampler elements. He has some sliders to change the mix of the various elements and a microphone that is used with a threshold to trigger certain things. For instance, if you play a really loud chord it might trigger a certain clip or certain sequence of clips.
What is the arc of the piece?
The piece starts with quite a focused shot. You are in the kitchen, turning on your gas stove and the click of that is a trigger. It creates a rhythmic feature for the opening and then it goes from very clear rhythmic elements to increasingly chaotic, noisy sounds like glitchy elements. That gets established through the first well half of the piece and then the second half suddenly resolves into a big meditation which is quite tonal. It is the sound of hitting various kitchen tools — bowls, plates and such. All of the recordings were in G minor, so it ended up being a big meditation towards the end. There is the noisy and glitchy stuff that forms and then settles into this big meditation at the end.
What kind of sensational experience did you aim to achieve in the audience?
The big drawing connections were between the piano and the screen. I wanted it to be an enjoyable listening experience and quite a fun drawing connections between what the pianist is doing and the sounds and actions on the screen. It resembles cartoon music, where you would have those masterful composers synchronize everything that happens on the screen. Like when a character runs off-screen and it is accompanied by xylophone glyphs and it is mapped. I was curious about how humorous or how light the experience can be, watching this pianist try to match their actions with the imagery on the screen. I think those connections can make for a joyful and funny experience. There is a part where I am just cutting vegetables in the kitchen the pianist is frantically trying to stay in time with it. It is a mundane action but it is quite a complex rhythmic element that is superimposed on top of it.
What was the process of composing?
I had to compose the piano part while I was developing the software tools for the electronics because they are so interrelated. I also had to find the right order of clips. I had over 50 clips and I had to arrange them in some sort of interesting order. Then I just went about transcribing the rhythmic elements from those clips and writing piano music around that. I knew I wanted to use the looping techniques on the video clips and use that as inspiration for the piano music. So the first task was just transcribing a bunch of these videos and creating these little piano modules or sections. For example, one of the videos could be a plane landing and I had to figure out how I would recreate that in the piano and what kind of things I would do. I used these clusters of sounds and that creates a sense of gravity as it lands. That was one little study and I might have spent a day just writing music for that particular clip. The next problem is how to link all these materials together in a cohesive way. Then troubleshooting and developing the software, and jumping between things constantly because if I were too much in one area, I would lose scope of what the sounds of the music would be.
What kind of compositional principles have you implemented?
Repetition is a core one, and then improvisation is a way to generate material. Lastly, sudden contrasts and interjections of material, which is something I am very interested in as a compositional principle. To summarize, it is to repeat things a few several times and then randomly interject with very different material and then come back to the first material. This jarring idea or ‘switching between channels’ is like zooming in on different types of material and then quickly shifting somewhere else. I thought that this type of technique and approach suited the piece very well because the video clips are always changing and there is a lot of contrast.
Improvisation is a core thing for me as a composer. In the initial moments of writing a piece, I improvise to generate material. I am hoping that that improvisational spirit continues for the performer, but in the piece itself, I leave things a bit open-ended. I put things in box notation if required, but the performer has to use these core ideas or manipulate this video clip, be playful with it and just see where it goes. Therefore, each performance might be quite different. There is a lot of detail in the score, it is all written out, but I like to contrast that with open-ended moments. Of course, you will discuss the general context with a performer, but I just like having that freedom in a piece. The performer can take some ownership of it as well which is fun.
Did working with the pianist influence the piece?
Yes, there was a lot of to-and-fros. I would sketch some things and he would give me feedback. We got together a few times just to explore the electronics because I was curious. I had a set-up at home and I was doing it myself and playing it, but I wanted his perspective on a few things. Whether something was a bit annoying or difficult to play or not very idiomatic. We had to consider the midi keyboard elements, so a few practical things. “How are we going to set up the various things required for it?’’ As far as the notation went and the actual musical material, a lot of that was notated in a fairly traditional way. I would give it to Zubin and he would send me back some notes. We refined it and took shape over time.
Did you build the script yourself?
I did about 90% of it and that was a big learning curve for me. I had very specific ideas about what I wanted, but I could not find anything available that was a commercial tool. Since I have some experience in Max/MSP, I decided to just give it a whirl. I spent quite a few months developing this patch, but when you are compiling different code and trying to make it all work, invariably, there are some clunky elements to it, and there might be some programming that is not very elegant. Thankfully, I have a very good friend in Sydney who is quite a whiz at Max/MSP, so I asked him if he would not mind looking over it and helping me clean it up, and make it a bit more efficient in terms of CPU usage. Now it runs nicely.
What kind of hardware did you use?
We had a midi keyboard, and then a laptop to run the software audio interface, to take the audio from the Max/MSP patch. A monitor or a speaker for the pianist so they can hear the sound and also a visual monitor for them to see the action in real time. Then a big projector for the audience, and a microphone to pick up some of the sound for the threshold thing, where if it goes over a certain threshold, it triggers different clips. Lastly, some mics to amplify the piano in the space for the PA. Not too much hardware, but like with any piece, there is some stress and anxiety in setup, because things always go wrong. There is always a component that does not quite work or something is not working for some reason.
Can you imagine the piece without the visual component?
I think so. I spent a lot of time transcribing these video clips, so there is a lot of material that I did not use in the piece, so I could imagine a version of the piece which is just a piano solo. I think it would work quite well actually, so that is something I might do in the next couple of years. I think it would be a very different piece and I might have to cut the number of repetitions because there are fewer things to engage the audience with. If you take the visuals away, it becomes just about the music. As soon as you put visuals in a composition, it changes how an audience perceives the music. I think visuals will always attract the most attention, it is just the way we are as humans. I might have to restructure it and change the balance of the material, and it might be a shorter piece, but it could definitely be possible.
What about the piece without any music and just the visual part?
I think it could make a good installation piece. If it was in a little gallery space and you could have multiple Max patches and midi keyboards with different videos, people could come in and manipulate the video clips, like a real-time quartet. It would be projected onto the screens and the sounds could be quite interesting. For instance, kids would love to play with it and you could have all sorts of clips. I would have to think about how to implement this so that people could take video clips there and then, upload their own video clips and manipulate them on the keyboards, which would make the experience ever-evolving and personal. It could be pretty cool, I could see that working as well. That could be a piece that does not have a start or an endpoint. If the piece was an installation, it would be a community thing and people could come and go as they please.
What is the biggest difference in composing a multimedia piece compared to a usual composition?
I think it probably goes to that point I made before, that as soon as you have visuals in a musical composition, it changes the audience’s focus. I have worked a lot with live electronic sound, quite a few pieces now involve live electronic sound, and I feel that is different because it encases the acoustic sounds or heightens it. The amplifiers work together and blend everything, whereas the visuals are a different experience. The sounds do not necessarily blend with the visuals. They match and relate, but I think an audience is subconsciously always trying to reconcile those two things: the oral domain and the visual domain. I have done a fair bit of music for film and commercial music for TV ads and I quite enjoyed that, so exploring the relationship between sound and visuals has been interesting.
What has been your biggest learning point during the composing process?
Possibly building the patch and the software tool itself. That was a really big and steep learning curve because it was a lot of troubleshooting and required a lot of patience. I do not think there were too many other challenges apart from writing the piece itself. Perhaps, learning more about how experimental music can work with visuals and the fact that those visuals do not necessarily have to be experimental in themselves. The visuals that I chose were pretty mundane clips of everyday things, so I am curious about what I might do more of that sort of stuff. Since I do not want the experience to be super overwhelming for an audience, because the music is hyper-experimental, in this piece, you can have something to latch onto with the visuals being familiar things and then the unfamiliar sounds. I learned a little bit more about how to marry the two worlds.
What are your suggestions for other composers who would want to get into multimedia?
Ultimately, you need a concept. The danger when working with multimedia is that the elements are not cohesive or they do not work together. Perhaps, you write a piece and then you find a video for it, but it might not match. You have to build all the elements together in a cohesive way from the ground up, from the very beginning. Another piece of advice would be to jump between the various elements quite often so that you are not spending too much time with just the music. You have to jump between the music and exploring the visual elements. Of course, you can collaborate with a video maker, but when you do that, you are in constant contact. Very rarely you would be writing a piece of music and then trying to find a video to fit it.
Photo from the piece:
Tristan graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2006 with the University Medal and then went on to study at the Royal College of Music from 2007–2008 on a full scholarship. He has studied composition formally with Michael Smetanin, Damien Ricketson, Mary Finsterer, Trevor Pearce, and David Sawer, and piano with Stephanie McCallum. As a music educator, Tristan has taught the full spectrum of ages and abilities, writes works for student ensembles, and runs creative music workshops.
