excerpt from Innova 877 - Neil Rolnick: Gardening At Gropius House

Neil Rolnick Gardening At Gropius House (excerpt 2)

Neil Rolnick, Gardening At Gropius House with Todd Reynolds, violin and members of Alarm Will Sound with Alan Pierson conducting.  From Innova Recordings 877.  

Neil Rolnick - Gardening at Gropius House

Recorded Live at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY 2/17/2014
Vicky Chow, piano; Neil Rolnick, computer

Neil Rolnick: Dynamic RAM & Concert Grand @ Roulette 2014

Score for film by Barbara Hammer

from Neil Rolnick: Macedonian AirDrumming, Bridge Records (BCD 9030), released 1992

Sanctus

Collaboration with choreographer Julia Bengtsson, a "proof of concept" study for a larger multimedia and instrumental piece.  Both electronic and instrumental versions of One For The Ages are based on interviews with very young and very old people, telling stories of their relationship with someone in the opposite age group.  In each interview the story teller was asked to describe the music they thought the person they were describing listened to.

Neil Rolnick: One For The Ages (electronic version)  Mvt 2 - Kerstin

Collaboration with choreographer Julia Bengtsson, a "proof of concept" study for a larger multimedia and instrumental piece.  Both electronic and instrumental versions of One For The Ages are based on interviews with very young and very old people, telling stories of their relationship with someone in the opposite age group.  In each interview the story teller was asked to describe the music they thought the person they were describing listened to, and the musical setting was derived from the music they mention.

Neil Rolnick: One For The Ages (electronic version) Mvt 1a - Jake

For solo cello and computer
Performed by Ashley Bathgate at National Sawdust, Brooklyn, NY
Nov 7, 2015

Neil Rolnick: Cello Ex Machina @ National Sawdust

For solo alto saxophone & computer
Performed by Ted Nash at Roulette, Brooklyn
Nov 7, 2015

Neil Rolnick: Silicon Breath @ Roulette

performed by Relache, with Neil Rolnick, Synclavier 
from Neil Rolnick:  A La Mode & Real Time (CRI SD 540) released 1984

Neil Rolnick: A La Mode

performed by The New Music Ensemble of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Maya Kherani, soprano, Carrie Zhang, alto, Daniel Cilli, baritone, Nicole Paiement, conductor, Neil Rolnick, laptop computer

from Neil Rolnick:  Gardening at Gropius House (innova CD 877)
released 2013

Neil Rolnick: Anosmia

from Neil Rolnick:  Macedonian AirDrumming (Bridge Records, BCD 9030) released 1992

Neil Rolnick: Balkanization

performed by Gordon Gottlieb, percussion with computer tape
from Neil B. Rolnick: Solos", 1750 Arch Records (S-1793), released 1984
re-released on Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, OO Discs #8, 1994

Neil Rolnick: Ever - Livin' Rhythm

performed by Music from China and the Todd Reynolds String Quartet
from Neil Rolnick:  The Economic Engine, innova CD 724, released 2009

Neil Rolnick: Economic Engine, 1 Traffic

Neil Rolnick: Economic Engine, 2 Farm 2 Factory

Neil Rolnick: Economic Engine, 4 Hutong 2 Highrise

performed by the New York New Music Ensemble
from O.O. Discs #8, released 1992

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 14 Consolidated Edison

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 13 Potomac Electric Power

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 12 Southern California Edison

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 11 Central Hudson Gas & Electric

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 03 Central Vermont Public Service

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 02 Connecticut Power & Light

Neil Rolnick: ElectriCity, 01 Texas Utilities Electric

performed by Peter Eldridge, baritone with Neil Rolnick, laptop computer

from Neil Rolnick: Digits (innova CD 656  2006

Neil Rolnick: Making Light of It, 2 Making Light Of It

performed by Peter Eldridge, voice
text by Philip Levine

from Neil Rolnick: Digits, innova CD656, released 2006

Neil Rolnick: Making Light Of It, 1 Wednesday

Neil Rolnick: Making Light Of It, 3 Words

Neil Rolnick: Making Light Of It, 4 The Return

Neil Rolnick: Making Light Of It, 5 Llanto

Neil Rolnick: Making Light Of It, 6 The Last Step

performed by Neil Rolnick
from "Virtuosos in the Computer Age, vol. II, " Centaur Records, CDCM Computer Music Series, vol. 11 (CRC 2133,)released 1992

Neil Rolnick: Persistence Of The Clave

performed by Hartt Contemporary Player, Douglas Jackson, conductor, with Neil Rolnick, Synclavier II

from "Neil B. Rolnick: A La Mode & Real Time", Composers' Recordings, Inc. (CRI SD 540), released 1987
re-released on "Neil Rolnick: The Economic Engine,” (innova CD 724) 2009


Neil Rolnick:  Real Time

by Neil Rolnick
performed by Ashley Bathgate (cello & laptop computer)
from "Neil Rolnick: Ex Machina" (Innova CD 950) released 2016
© Copyright 2015 by Neilnick Music (BMI)

Writing this piece for Ashley Bathgate, cellist for the Bang On A Can All-Stars, was a unique and rewarding experience, not just because she’s a spectacularly talented and accomplished cellist (which she is), but also because she is utterly unafraid of technology, eager to explore the possibilities it presents, and engaged enough to toil through crashes and malfunctions, in order to get to the musical heart of the piece.  

Cello Ex Machina is the most recent of the pieces on this CD.  It was composed with the explicit goal of eventually making the piece something that Ashley can perform on her own, without me playing the computer.  And this is, in fact, how she now performs the piece, playing the very demanding cello part while controlling the computer with pedals and with her articulations and dynamics on the cello.

This piece aspires to an orchestral sound world, with the depth and variety of sound you might expect from a large ensemble, not from a solo cello.  There are layers of voices, contrasting timbres, and opportunities for the performer to play freely within the musical structures.

The title means:  the cello emerging from the machine.  But I don’t think of it as describing a futuristic sci-fi world of machine-like automated cellos.  Instead, I imagine a symbiotic world in which the cello motivates the machine to sing, the computer motivates the cello to expand its voice, and together they can construct sweet, expressive and complex musical worlds, different from what either can produce alone.  

Neil Rolnick: Cello Ex Machina

by Neil Rolnick
performed by Ted Nash, alto sax & Neil Rolnick, laptop computer
from "Neil Rolnick: Ex Machina" (Innova CD 950) released 2016
© Copyright 2015 by Neilnick Music (BMI)

Breath is what animates us.  Without breath, a saxophone is just a bent metal tube and valves.  Add breath, and it comes to life.  In writing this piece, I had the image of the player’s breath animating the computer as an extension of the horn.  One way of thinking about Silicon Breath is as a catalog of ways the instrument and the computer can interact with each other:  from building layers of loops, to complex canons, to using processing on accented notes to make a kind of counterpoint, to building chords which take their dynamic shape from the player’s breath.

My New York neighbor Ted Nash is normally heard with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.  He’s got an international reputation as an incredible sax player, but had never worked with interactive electronics until he jumped into this project.  He jumped with both feet, unintimidated by the technology, figuring out how to create and coordinate loops of his playing, and how to trigger various aspects of the computer processing with his articulations and dynamics.  The virtuosity and musicality of his sax playing seemed to elevate and accelerate his integration of the technology.  

While Silicon Breath is a piece for solo saxophone, the sound world it creates is multilayered and multi-textured in a way that is impossible for a solo horn.  Yet all of the sound of the piece comes from the player’s breath, on stage, in real time.  There’s nothing pre-recorded, and Ted is controlling much of how his playing is transformed by the computer.

Another way of thinking about Silicon Breath is as a story about us and computers.  It’s not much of a relationship if we think of the computer as an inanimate object which we use to do mundane tasks.  But if we breathe life into it, and take it on as a partner to expand the scope of what we can create and the breadth of our ability to express ourselves, then perhaps we get a whiff of silicon breath.  

This piece was made possible by an Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council On the Arts.

Neil Rolnick: Silicon Breath

Mirages (2017) by Neil Rolnick.  For piano and live computer processing.  Both piano and computer parts performed by the composer.  ©2017 by Neilnick Music (BMI)
      1.  In The Desert
      2. On The Water
      3. On The Highway

When you travel, you see lots of things.  Sometimes you see things which aren’t there.  Shimmering images of boats or cars or distant mountains may hover above the sea or the desert or the empty road stretching out ahead of you.

When I write music for instruments and computers, I often feel like I’m striving to create those ghostly scenarios which are somehow superimposed on the very real landscape of performers and instruments, enabled by the heat and energy of the musical moment.

Mostly I do this by writing music for other people to play, and I devise the digital environment which creates the sonic mirages.  Recently I found myself thinking that this is really unfair.  That I ought to put myself in the same position I put other instrumentalists in.  So that’s what I’ve done.  Like all mirages, the floating images may vary from performance to performance … but they’re part of the journey.

Neil Rolnick: Mirages

My wife Wendy passed away in August 2018.  Two days later, in a panic that I couldn't remember the sound of her voice, I found that I could un-delete voice messages on my phone.  I found about a dozen messages from her there, dating from the beginning of her long illness until her final days.  This piece uses those messages, mixed with some of the music she talks about dancing to ...

Neil Rolnick: Messages

Recorded in concert at Roulette, Brooklyn, NY Nov 12, 2019
Jennifer Choi, violin; Kathleen Supové, piano; Neil Rolnick, computer

I began writing Deal With The Devil during a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation, near Genoa, Italy.  I was particularly interested in the music of Genoa’s most famous composer and violinist, Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840), who was the first internationally renowned violin virtuoso.  His technique was so astounding that it was rumored that he had made a Faustian deal with the devil, trading his soul for his superhuman violin chops.  

Paganini was a major inspiration for the famous piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886). When Liszt was 20, he heard the 50 year old violinist play in Paris – an event he credited with changing the course of his musical life.  Because my piece was to be for violin, piano and computer, I initially planned to use the virtuoso technique which underlies Paganini’s and Liszt’s music, and to enhance it with real time digital processing.

However, as I studied their music, the piece started to move in a different direction.  There is definitely something magical and awe-inspiring about fingers zipping across a keyboard or up and down the fingerboard, about notes which fly at superhuman speed or reach stratospheric heights. But the more I immersed myself in the works of Paganini and Liszt, the more I also felt that the extraordinary technique was being used primarily to show off, to impress the audience.  Rather than saying “listen to the music,” it’s saying “look at me!”

Viewed from this perspective, this wasn’t the kind of piece I wanted to write.  Flashy playing may be awe-inspiring, but there can be something equally magical about a beautiful melody, played with directness and simplicity.  And while digital processing may be able to produce sonic effects that even Paganini or Liszt wouldn’t have been able to create, it only really adds to the music if it supports the narrative, the shape and the emotional impact.

So while Deal With The Devil makes use of many of the virtuoso techniques I picked up from studying Paganini and Liszt, it avoids using them simply for the purpose of showing off.  And I try to use the digital processing with restraint and purpose.  I hope that the half-hour long piece brings you on a musical journey exploring and developing themes, gestures and emotions.  Rather than impressing you with dexterity and speed, the goal is to give you a musical experience which can enrich and delight.  

In the end, you can decide whether or not virtuosity is necessarily a deal with the devil.

Deal With The Devil - Roulette

MONO Prelude (2009)
by Neil Rolnick

If we listen to the same piece of music, do you hear what I hear?  When we look at a red stop sign, do we actually see the same thing?  If we each take a bite of the same apple, do we experience the same taste sensation?  Even if we agree we’re both seeing hearing a Bach fugue, looking at a red stop sign, and tasting a sweet apple, how do we compare our actual perceptions?  As far as I know, we have no way to know someone else’s actual sensation of sound or sight or taste.

On March 31, 2008 between 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. I lost all hearing in my left ear.  The loss is permanent and is accompanied by a loud white noise tinnitus where the left ear should be.  With only one ear, I now hear the world monophonically.  There is no stereo or surround sound in my world.  And much of what I do hear I identify as distorted, and unclear compared to my memory of what I heard before.

What I walked away from this experience with was an awareness that our perceptions are indeed different, because my perception of sound now is quite different from what it was.  I wanted to see if this was unique, so I started asking around – first to friends, then to a wide net of contacts on the net – to see if other people experienced similar changes to their perceptions of the world through their five senses.  What I found was a flood of people who identify one of their five senses as impaired.  They are aware that they see, or hear, or smell, or taste or feel the world differently than others.  When you listen this CD, there’s no way to know if you hear what I hear.  Probably not.  And if we’re not hearing the same sounds, how can we agree on the music?  Yet, for the most part, we do.  We may not like the same things, but we agree enough on what we hear to be able to discuss it, comment on it, refer to it.  The more I think about this, with the huge number of people in the world who identify their senses as being impaired in some way, the more amazed I am.

Several years later, I’ve collected and compiled some of these stories into an evening of music and media performance called MONO.  

MONO is a series of musical meditations on the fragility of perception:  its appreciation, its loss, and our ability to adjust to changes in our perceptual abilities.  The piece is an evening length consideration of how our perceptions shape us.  It is a series of twelve pieces which explore the loss of perceptual ability and the subsequent changes in how we relate to the world in response to that loss.

The MONO Prelude is a little foretaste of the larger work.  It describes my experience of the initial few days and weeks of discovering and adjusting to the change in my hearing.  Unlike the larger pieces, which involves instruments, singers, and various media, the Prelude is performed by me, alone, talking to the audience, controlling the laptop computer which modulates my voice.
================================

BIO:  
Neil B. Rolnick
http://www.neilrolnick.com
http://www.youtube.com/neilrolnick 


A pioneer in the use of computers in performance, beginning in the late 1970s, Neil Rolnick’s music has been performed around the world, and appears on 15 CD’s.

Though much of Rolnick’s work connects music and technology, and is therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, his music has always been highly melodic and accessible.  Whether working with electronic sounds, improvisation, or multimedia, his music has been characterized by critics as “sophisticated,” “hummable and engaging,” and as having “good senses of showmanship and humor.”  

Rolnick teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he was founding director of the iEAR Studios.


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