What El Niño Will See
Prelude #9: when the machine disappears
Many years ago, I worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle (and lunched by A Sound Garden, after which the band Soundgarden is named). I was doing low-level coding and documentation for computer models of El Niño, a crucial and variable Pacific ocean/wind pattern that has enormous effects on weather around the world. This sort of computer modeling is rich and complex, and can teach us important lessons about how the world works (and how computer models work!), and might change in the future; the recent news about a potential stalling of the Atlantic Ocean currents is a good case in point, and pretty terrifying. In another life, I might have pursued that work further, but in this one, I couldn’t put music to the side. My interest in exploring complex systems through code, however, has remained.
The relationships between musicians and instruments, and musicians and machines, are also rich and complex—bitKlavier’s reason for being is to explore those relationships through instrument/machine-design and music-making. Perhaps more than anything, bitKlavier is a generative instrument/machine, inspiring ideas that wouldn’t have emerged for me otherwise. This can, however, lead to curious cases where the ideas themselves end up leaving the original inspiration behind—what started as a “piece for bitKlavier” might end up being a piece for something else, originally inspired by bitKlavier, but no longer needing it in the end. Prelude #9, What El Niño Will See, is such a piece.
Like many of the Preludes for bitKlavier, #9 takes initial inspiration from a much older piece, in this case the Debussy Prelude #7, Book 1: Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest ("What the west wind saw"):
Apparently, the piece was inspired by a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, “The Garden of Paradise,” where the West Wind was in conversation with the Mother of the Winds1:
“Where do you come from?” inquired his old mother.
“From the forest wilderness,” said he, “where the thorny lianas form a hedge between every tree, where the water-snakes lie in the wet grass, and where man seems to be useless.”
“What did you do there?”
“I looked into the deep river, saw how it rolled from the rocks, and dashed into spray, flew up towards the clouds, and gave form to the rainbow. I saw a buffalo swimming in the stream, but the current bore him down: he drifted onwards with a flock of wild-fowls; they flew away when the water swept over the precipice, but the buffalo was forced to plunge over with it. That pleased me, and I blew such a hurricane that the primeval trees were hurled cracking to the earth, and were crashed to atoms.”
Perhaps this is the answer to what the West Wind saw? Talk about environmental apocalypse!
I love the way the hands move and overlap in this piece, and took that physical gesture as a starting point, modifying the pitch material and condensing the rising part of the gesture from eight 16th-notes to six:
... became…
As with Tallboy, another one of the preludes, the uneven meter can be marked by evenly spaced “backbeats” that stratify the rhythmic feel: slower even beats underneath a faster uneven texture. In the original version of this prelude, I programmed bitKlavier to highlight these even backbeats; these are triggered by the first note in each subsection of the bar (the low G# triggers the low D#s, and then the high D# triggers the high G#s), leading to the backbeats notated in the lower, smaller staves, for the player’s reference. These backbeats are all seven 16th-notes apart, but since the two layers (high G# and low D#) are triggered by different performed notes, they will only be as in-sync as the player is, and that synchronization will shift from measure to measure, shaped by the performer’s timing.
In some cases later in the piece, the figuration leads to more complex, very quick hiccups in this backbeat layer, where the high and low registers are slightly offset:
It’s so fast, though, making it difficult to track for the ear and the player, almost making it feel like the machine is slowing down, rather than doing a fast subdivision. Check out this mockup, exported directly from Dorico/bitKlavier:
Digital mockup of the original version of Prelude #9:
It’s pretty cool, but I wasn’t clear how this would play out with an actual human pianist playing the piece. This uncertainty became more pronounced when I first heard Cristina talking about practicing the piece, where she worked through the figuration at a regular piano, and seemed to be really enjoying it there. Then she played it for me (again, at the acoustic piano, sans bitKlavier), and sheesh, I loved it so much! So much movement and dynamism within each phrase and figure, ebbing and flowing:
Cristina Altamura performing the acoustic piano version of Prelude #9:
While I wouldn’t have composed this piece without the exploratory process inspired by bitKlavier, I am delighted to have arrived at this point, where leaving out the bitKlavier component exposes something new and interesting in its own right: addition by subtraction.
Cristina also worked on the original bitKlavier version this prelude, but I always found it less engaging than her solo version, and remain unconvinced by the machine/musician interaction that it calls for; perhaps in this case the rigidity and accuracy of the machine is, well, just suffocating rather than elevating (maybe someday I'll be proved wrong, or explore some programming bitKlavier variations). But, rather than completely abandon that machine-inspired layer of the piece, I made a four-hands version, for Cristina and Adam to play together, with the parts distributed throughout the four hands:
It’s not just a transcription of the bitKlavier part, but rather an arrangement, a new version, with much of its original structure, but modified to suit the hands and music, and removing some of the detailed complexity of the machine part that I found less compelling:
Cristina and Adam Sliwinski performing the four-hands version of Prelude #9:
We don’t have a video of this one yet, but will soon, and it is so fun to watch them play it, as well as listen. More stately than the solo version, and less manic than the original bitKlavier version, this one takes the machine/musician interaction and allows it to exhale into the more familiar but ever wonderful musician/musician interaction.
About this prelude and process, Cristina has this to say:
One of the things I've enjoyed about the bitKlavier Preludes project has been how it has expanded my imagination at the acoustic piano in ways that I might not have arrived at otherwise.
Early on when I started to learn this prelude, I kept getting stuck on certain passages and had a difficult time playing it from beginning to end. So I took a cue from Dan's title which references Debussy's prelude "What the west wind saw" and started to practice it on the acoustic piano. As I spent more time at the piano with it, a version started to evolve from messing around with tonal production techniques I tend to use with Debussy. I also started to "over-pedal" to see what clouds of sound emerged to create a halo over the notes. I loved the shimmery effect and it echoed some of the effects in the bitKlavier settings for Prelude #2 "Continuing."
When I went back to playing it on bitKlavier, all I kept thinking was how much I wished the piece was a duet rather than a solo. Dan must've read my mind. Either that, or my delay in providing a finished performance on the bitKlavier must've moved him to turn it into a piano duet for me and Adam whereby certain components produced by the bitKlavier settings could now be achieved by his part.
On recently hearing both versions (solo and duo) of El Niño back-to-back I'm tickled that this process spawned a kind of "theme and variations" listening experience. The notes in both scores are mostly all the same but produce familiar yet new and exciting pieces. I've only ever experienced this when transferring Bach to other keyboard instruments! It could seem surprising and ironic that a piece in this set of preludes for bitKlavier technology is recorded on an acoustic piano. But it is a testament of Dan's tremendous mastery, humility and flexibility. Adam and I are grateful for his spirit of generosity and trust toward us in this, his monumental project and journey.
Here are the scores for all the versions of this prelude, beginning with the original bitKlavier version, which can also be played on acoustic piano:
and the four-hands version:
So, what will El Niño see in the coming years? Of course, I have no idea, and it’s more of a poetic question than anything, but I hope it is not what the West Wind saw, and am ever grateful to the scientists (including the wonderful Suki Manabe, who I had the privilege to meet many years ago as a student) who have been working on their complex models for decades to give us fair warning, and an opportunity to have some say in the matter.
Hans Cristian Andersen, The Garden of Paradise: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Little_Ellie_and_Other_Tales/The_Garden_of_Paradise
I love this piece! It's interesting hearing it played solo and as a duet.