Category Archives: Compositional Process

Rusalka [Folkloric Transfigurations]

“Rusalka” will be composed as a cycle of songs borrowing symphonic tone poem sensibilities

scored for solo soprano voice, piano, and electronic and sampled fixed media sounds to be realized within an immersive audio high-density speaker array environment. While the songs will characterize beings from Slavic folklore manifesting sea nymphs, mermaids, and sirens such as Rusalka, Mavka, Kostromo, and Kupalo, for example, these entities will interrupt each other as extended phasing leitmotifs orchestrated for the piano and fixed media in conjunction with the soloists’ portrayals of a distraught individual influenced by a combination of a fictional metamorphosis and actualized dissociative identity disorder.

This will be a deeply personal work forging a love and appreciation for the power of familiarity in folk melodies, a desire to explore influences from the many qualities encompassed within the works by the great Alexander Scriabin, and new concepts for merging electroacoustic sounds with the aforementioned.

Dance of the Bells 2.0

Dance of the Bells was originally recorded in Junderground Studios in 2009 with an extended percussion set up comprised of:

Single and Double Gankoguis

Atoke Bells

Triangles

Cymbals

Medium Gong

Finger Cymbals

Wind Chimes

Assorted Hand Bells

The set up included two separate channel mics inputting into a pre-composed AudioMulch environment featuring separate parameters processing real-time granular synthesis. Visually, lighting was designed to especially feature layers of shadows intricately dancing as the performing arms struck the various metallic instruments. The performance followed a graphically-inspired score and was captured simultaneously by two cameras later mixed intentionally for the purpose of further displaying the dancing of shadows.

This updated version is inspired by my current work incorporating studies in well-being as related to the vagus nerve to composition and the notion that music can be specifically created for mindful and healthy participation beyond that of the traditional triumvirate of composer | performer | listener, a new Gebrauchsmusik, if you will, intended for helping people help self.

Clouds {if hedrons were dimensions calibrating}

Music and Video Composed by Jason Matthew Malli Fixed Media and Virtual Instruments Recorded by Jason Matthew Malli

“Clouds” explores vastness – vastness in human potential and vastness without regard to human beings at all. In the simplest sense, this work intends to evoke recollections of staring into vastness – the formations, textures, colors, rhythms, collisions, enveloping, commingling, charging, dissipating, and even absence. Clouds release as the sky breathes. Clouds massively reduce our very self to an appropriate scale of our worth, value, and purpose. We do matter, but no more than any other single self does. And if we allow ourselves to blend simply by stepping aside for another to pass first, we will see that our path is clear for an arrival that requires no certain time. After all, from the cosmos perspective, the moon and the sun share the clouds. “Clouds” was composed during the coronavirus epidemic and quarantine experience that permeates the lives of every Earth inhabitant. Conflict exists within controlling forces while fear and loss meander almost aimlessly inside each of us daily from dawn until dusk. Pause from this cycle, perhaps to repair or at least to take care. Get comfortable, if possible, with headphones, a large screen, and feet on the floor embracing good posture. Find the pulse and flow in this work and breathe within its accompaniment.

Peace.

wirelessness 1.5

This work was composed in 2008 using Flash to explore user participation and choice for outcomes in the realization of non-synchronous performance relationships between creator and audience. At this time, wirelessness 1.5 and other works are being re-generated to work in the post-Flash Web 3.0 era and re-imagined for immersive gallery spaces and virtual and augmented reality experiences. This video excerpt represents one possible “performance,” whereby the interaction of the cursor via mouse or trackpad movements with the automated text on the screen initiates a bank of fixed media layering sonic events in a variety of iterations.

Prophets, Farfisas, and Dvořák, Oh My!

Sometimes one just needs a fun go-to project, something beneficial personally, but not necessarily Earth-shattering. Something I have been wanting to do for awhile is to re-orchestrate some of my favorite symphonic passages into the fabulous virtual instrument sounds of classic synthesizers like Prophets, Farfisas, Mini Moogs, and even some B3 on the side. So with a little music tech fun, I have started with the gorgeous slow movement from the New World Symphony. So when I need a little sonic therapy, I enter into the swirling realm of Arturia Classic Virtual instruments and just bathe in the sound sculpturing process. There are several other selections that come to mind by Sibelius, Mahler, Adorno, Gesualdo, Bach…. the possibilities are endless and may lead to some moving image scoring examples for my showreel. 27 days until summer!

AudioMulch and NYCEMF 2017

Per aspera ad astra Interation III was accepted into this June’w NYCEMF at Abrams Arts Center in NYC, so I will be performing on tambin, balafon, and medium gong in an AudioMulch live processing environment. The first live performance realization for Per aspera…was during a Winter Residency “Electronic Music Showcase” five year ago.

A year or so and some processing changes later, I recorded a studio performance. In this third iteration, transducers have been added to the setup. I’ll explain this further in the next post – soon!

A December Dawn’s Stream of Musical Consciousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w743skBk09g

That moment when you simply choose a CD to pop in your van on the way to dropping off your daughters for a bus trip to voice auditions for a New England Music Festival and the sounds you hear pierce your soul with a breathtaking ultra-deja vu-like experience, yet beyond that – an entity’s remembrance of a possible past, if not identically, then at least within a parallel time/space connection to something, someone you once could have been from a long life ago displaced eternally from now and concurrently still to be.
 
That sound connects you to a periphery of beauty, the early December sunrise reflections against the grayness of the year’s passing days, each note a moment, each breath a chance, each gasp a loss of moment, each silence – newness, each cadence, beginnings overcoming death.
 
Although this now moment will fade as the day will be overcome by schedules, chores, and duty (without regrets), a longing for an exorbitant time/space composing only for voices to be performed in a gothic cathedral, natural reverberations bleeding stunning dissonances, some to be resolved – many not – beauty in darkness and hope in light.

Spatializing the Studio

Summer is here accompanying a plethora of recording projects featuring the scoring of Jochen Kunstler‘s film, Get Your Shit Together, Zeus. As inspiration hits full force, it is critical to have the studio ready for plugging in the laptop and having at it. Balancing creative endeavors such as these along with the Little League All -Star Baseball season, cantoring lessons, yard work, fife and drum corps parades, laundry, mindfulness, cooking – even thinking about thinking about planning teaching for next September . . . – one gets the idea. When there’s a moment of motivation, whether succinct or substantial, that coincides with isolation, it must be conquered as productive. Thus, the can must be ready to collect explosions of ideas, whimsically or deliberately.

A process that has worked very well for me over the years begins with the placement of several microphones around the space at various angles and distances from the performance stool. The mics are of course all different and are tracked individually and in as many as 20 to 30 combinations of stereo or mono with EQ, verb, and other FX ready to automate via nobs and sliders within an arms reach. This flexible set up was developed during preparations for surround sound fixed media compositions like “consubstantial.” Eight mics recording the same sound from eight different angles and eight different settings on the DAW maximizes potential decision making during editing for moving the audio around the performance space. Even works that are eventually rendered for stereo benefit from the timbre modulations resulting from this marriage between instrument and technology.

For these GYSTZ Sessions, I will be overdubbing myself as a virtual reed quartet of A Clarinet, Alto Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, and Bass Clarinet. I hear this one’semble as a fluctuation of sonorities from church organ to jazziness to cerebral departures from both and everything else. I will also have the percussion ready to pop in at any moment – djembes, balafon, hand drums, rattles, bells, dumbek, to name a few. No doubt, this score will utilize electronic sounds and virtual instruments created in Reason, Reaktor, Ableton, Cubase, Pro Tools, and Logic; but that bank of real instruments will form the foundation and the necessary earthliness I am hearing for this film. The psychology of Crystal, the lead character, demands a complex and developing theme interspersed with pre-recorded Gospel tracks sung by two gentlemen. There are definite dreamscape notions formulating in my mind that may call for two guest singers, young female voices as undulating echoes from these featured guttural Gospel men.

As I embark upon the work, I hear a vastness of music that just may well expand beyond the needs of this film and result in an entity of its own inspired by this cool collaboration born from the VCFA community.