Meditate

1..24....2017

racheal cogan

Labirinto - Tahrir

Tanpura (Racheal Cogan 2014)

Paetzold Contrabass (by Herbert Paetzold), Kung Bass Recorder (designed and built by Geri Bollinger), Ganassi in G and C ( by Michael Grinter), Futujara ( by Vladiswar Nadishana),

Bells, Gongs, Skiddaw Stones, Tubular Bells (from soniccouture).

Performed, composed and recorded by Racheal Cogan.

I have always loved the resonance of the tanpura and jealously adored the overlapping resonance of this plucked string, drone type instrument.

I was aiming for the same feeling of resonance and notes overlapping on recorders - like a large organ, but with the sounds coming from different places and each with their own unique tone, length, and shape from the minds of each individual player.

With that in mind,  I began shaping this meditative piece with each note played into a different track, overlapping the one before to create long phrases made up of different players working together to make a cohesive, integrated whole. Even though it's just myself playing each track, as I created this piece I envisioned many players coming together to make up a moment of resonant space and sound. As I worked, this music felt to me like a form of falling deeper and deeper into an ocean.

Listen with a good set of headphones in a quiet space.

The image is a painting from a very dear friend who is an incredible and dedicated artist - Mitch Lang. I have adored both her and her art for at least 25 years now. The world is a richer and more generous place for her being in it.

 Mitch's image is both a reflection on living by the sea and the current Australian Government's long term and increasingly callous and inhumane treatment of refugees seeking asylum by boat in Australia.

Thank you to Violaine Corradi for always encouraging me to go yet further and to Andrew for always listening.

Tanpura

This is the recording of Latitude49's premiere performance of "a five-note chord, seen from the porch of a curious mind", which their pianist, Jani Parsons, commissioned from me.

As the title suggests, the piece is based on a single, five-note collection, which is transposed, twisted, and toyed-with. 

a five-note chord, seen from the porch of a curious mind

Big Jet Plan - "Down The Way" album by Angus & Julia Stone
Download on iTunes - http://smarturl.it/bigjetplane

Angus & Julia Stone - Big Jet Plane

The River Sings
(Racheal Cogan 2015)

All instruments designed and built by Geri Bollinger

G Alto played by Geri Bollinger

Tenor, Bass, and Great Bass played by Racheal Cogan

Mixing by Racheal Cogan

The River Sings took me a long time to write. I knew what I wanted, I could hear it in my head, but it began slowly: first with the harmonic ideas and voice-ings after which the melodies started to seep their way in through the music. After that it became like a big jigsaw puzzle that you only have a very blurry photo of (with some bits missing): but when it all comes together you know that this is exactly what it was always supposed to be. When I first conceived this music the main feeling was of a serenity with movement. When my partner heard a first 'sketch' for the quartet his response was: "but nothing is happening". I was, much to his consternation, delighted by this comment, because that was the exact idea - movement within the quiet, somewhat like a river that looks still and makes very little sound but is flowing: ever moving, ever changing.

The River Sings is written for a quartet of modern recorders with unique headpieces designed and built by my dear friend in Switzerland, Geri Bollinger.

Thank you Geri for making these great instruments that are pushing the boundaries of my recorder playing and writing: opening up so many musical timbres, textures, dynamics and ... possibilities.

(The music can also be performed using a more standard recorder quartet of Alto, Tenor, Bass, and Great Bass.)

The River Sings

When I Am Laid in Earth (Dido's Lament from the opera Dido and Aeneas)

by Henry Purcell (ca. 1659 - 1695)

Voice, recorders, arrangement, and recording by Racheal Cogan

Recorders: Bass, c-Bass and 2 Contrabasses made by Geri Bollinger

When I began thinking about an arrangement for this beautiful song over a ground bass, I knew that I wanted to use four of the very low recorders in a very simple way to underpin the clarity and purity of the high voice. Simplicity and solemnity in the beginning was key to match the idea of being laid in the earth, and as the concept of suicide bleeds deeper into the song, so the recorders speak louder and become more complex with the eloquent lyrics and melody that have come to us through almost four hundred years in time.

Each project I embark upon is another opportunity for a learning curve. This time it wasn't so much a curve as a cliff face; each different component of the whole presented new problems and asked for a lot of re-thinking and re-learning and re-peating... and all I was looking for was simplicity!  In a first recording of all the parts the silent click track sternly dictated all movement and didn't suit the beautiful breathing sentiment that the music asked for.  So I spent a couple of days working on a tempo map,  to pause, to slow down, to speed up as if each part was hand in hand with the other, breathing as one. Then I patiently re-recorded and re-mixed it all fresh again. 

The deep, deep contrabass recorder had also been sounding murky and muddy in it's two lines weaving throughout this very short piece. I spent days patiently examining changes in EQ, and listening to other options - but they didn't help it to sparkle either. In the end it took a skype call with my friend Geri (the maker) to point out to me the importance of crook placement (the crook is the metal curvy part joining at the top of the instrument). So I re-recorded those two lines and then balanced and mixed the piece again. But wow, now I can hear those lines in all of their richness. 

Then the voice: I have now been working on singing and having regular lessons for five years (!). I feel like it is still very much a work in progress, especially compared to the recorders which I have been playing now for 40 years (though I'm always still learning on those as well!). I have an awesome singing teacher (Robert Poliquin) who helps me stay on track, and I had a recording of the vocal part that I thought was passable. But Robert gently suggested it still needed some work.  My broad Australian dipthongs generally don't help with un-muddling clarity and projection (it also doesn't help that they feel so damn wonderful and familiar to use so when I live so far away from home). The rest is about freedom - mainly involving a lengthening of the mouth and absolutely no tension in the jaw; hell, try that all of you night time teeth grinders (me too...).  And then projecting a very high 'c' through some imagined space above the jaw bones inside your head resonating towards the top of your skull with the jaw completely relaxed, fearlessly knowing that beauty will come (one day).  The thought warrior makes music once again. But that's what we musicians are and what we do - always balancing the possible with the impossible, with the smallest of micro movements in the body and spirit.

So I re-recorded the voice, and then some recorder parts so they would work hand in hand again. Now it is time to move onto a fresh challenge and bring with me all that I learned on this one.

Thank you so much Geri and Robert for your support, friendship and insightful comments that lead me further down this rabbit hole. I might not have seemed very happy to do the work, but my gratitude for the changes you help to bring about is immense. Months of work translated into 3 minutes of sound! And it's never good enough, never art enough; the only sanity is to remember that it is all about the journey.

When I Am Laid In Earth

When I am Laid In Earth, Purcell

Mountain Man - Animal Tracks

For as many wine glasses as possible (in this performance they are played by the audience), Solo Clarinet and Bass Clarinet, 2 dancers and a choir of clarinets spread around the back of the audience playing multiphonics.

The Rite Of Hare

by Racheal Cogan and Pasha Karami

Pasha Karami: udu and tombak.

Racheal Cogan: mixing and recorders (tenor, CBass, and Contrabass recorders by Geri Bollinger, ganassi recorder in G by Michael Grinter, pvc Futujara by Nadishana).

I started imagining the melody to this piece at the very end of our epic move from Calgary to Montréal. I had finally made it to Montréal and I just had a couple of instruments with me until we moved into our next 'home'. This project really began on the day I met percussionist Pasha Karami at a concert he performed at. It was great music, and afterwards I learned two things: Pasha was leaving for the Netherlands the next day after living in Montréal a few years, and he wanted to work on some projects with me.

I started making this melody and hearing tombak and udu as a part of it. As I continued working my way around the melodic ideas, we moved into our new place, and finally I could record what I had and I emailed the music file to Pasha in the Netherlands. When Pasha wrote back to me he was in Iran, but would be in Montréal for a few days - soon. So we decided to record his part at my apartment.  I had started a fairly intense full time French immersion course not long after arriving, and my time for music has been really constricted! I was lucky I was able to take some time out from the French  to spend a day with Pasha talking music, listening to music and recording the percussion parts.

Pasha played me some great recordings he had made with the Win-Bang Trio and three Lithuanian singers. I'd already been listening to his music on soundcloud and particularly liked this piece with Hang Drum, Tombak, and Udu: https://soundcloud.com/p-karami/hang-drum_tombak_udu_pashakarami

Pasha also introduced me to the music of his teacher, Navid Afghah. Take a listen to this beauty:
https://soundcloud.com/user293563/timequake-zaman-larzeh

The recorder part of Le Septième Nuage focuses on the scale and sounds of the tenor instrument when the bell (the very end of the instrument) is covered up by placing it on the leg, or a small piece of plastic/vinyl on a chair or the ground. This creates a very cool low note and a beautiful scale with awesome overtones and a covered, cloudy sound, rather than the bright sound we often expect from recorders. I also use some overblown recorder sounds (multiphonics) that sound like bells chiming when they are enhanced with a bit of reverb and  pulled back from the mix (Listen at 3:00 - 3:25). The big bass recorders are subtle in this piece and mainly come in for layering and to underline moments.

Mixing this piece was interesting. I'd be thinking I had a great balance between the recorders and percussion, and then I'd turn the general volume up and the volume of the recorders seemed to increase more than the percussion, it worked the other way when I turned the volume down. Also, the further away you move from the speakers the percussion gets softer, but the recorders carry really well. In my headphones everything surrounded me perfectly, but then I miss the lower frequencies from a sub woofer! It's always a big multidimensional puzzle, where the pieces aren't meant to fit together perfectly, and there are sections missing but you have know idea what they are, and then there are those seemingly random bits that really don't belong to the puzzle, but just add that something magical.

I really love Pasha's work on the percussion parts for this piece and I'm looking forward to continuing our collaboration together.

Thanks so much to Geri for your always insightful comments on the mixing and making me work harder; and for making recorders so amazing :)

Photo taken halfway between Calgary and Montréal.

Le Septième Nuage

Composition, Recorders, Piano, Mixing: Racheal Cogan
Recorders by Geri Bollinger - alto (F or G), tenor, bass, cbass, and contrabass.

I wrote this piece for an instrument that Geri Bollinger made for me from the gorgeous, elderly apple tree in his photo above.

This tree brought a lot of happiness. It is hard to not be drawn into the red hammock to lie there daydreaming, listening to the birds, and imagining the ants crawling over your feet or the book you might be reading. The tree stood in a vacant lot behind Geri's house until the day that the owners of the land decided to build a house on it and the apple tree was removed to make room. Now the wood from the tree has given voice to three G alto recorders (and a wooden spoon that I use for cooking).

All of my instruments come from different places, and the wood that made them has often travelled several times around the world before the instrument is in my hands; from heavy cold grenadilla and ebony, boxwood that yellows darkly over the years (and that on one recorder has warped into a beautiful crookedness), to lovely light maple, pear and apple. Often the first question a person asks me about my instruments is: "What wood is that?" Usually I know, but sometimes my head muddles into a frown and I have no idea. This beautiful G apple alto is the first time that I have heard a story of the tree that made it: photos and histories as it was still growing, how much joy it brought to the maker, how he was sad to lose it, how he later found the wood abandoned, aged it carefully, and then the story of the making.

In this composition I weave together a melody rising up from the apple alto that had been creeping slowly into my days, buoyed by a mosaic of repetitive motifs and large swathes where people aren't just playing together but overlapping different ideas and coming together often just in pairs with their own threads. The piano part is holding these otherwise disparate lines together and bringing rhythmic impetus and color; sometimes hinting at morning fog, or  rhythmically shivering as if reaching its limbs outwards. The contrabass plays a very simple role in the music - lots of held low notes because I just love how rich they are, and the use of an occasional octave pedal to bring in hints of some super low frequencies; because I am a bass-junkie. The cBass plays this role some of the time sharing with the contrabass, but it also brings its own stories - especially in the opening  where it joins the piano.

Because it also takes a village to make a piece of music, I couldn't have composed, recorded and scored The Apple Tree without all of the timely suggestions and advice from Geri, Susanna, and Andrew. Thank you so much for listening; and for your patience, time, and generosity. I couldn't have dreamed up a better support team, and the music is better because of you.

The Apple Tree is written for piano and five recorders:- alto (F or G), tenor, bass, cbass, and contrabass. For those who want to try playing it, the score is published by Edition Tre Fontane www.edition-tre-fontane.de 

All of the recorders used in this recording were made by Geri.

The Apple Tree

This is a cover of Massive Attack's Teardrop from 1998. It was released in their third album Mezzanine.

Recorders, Sounds, Vocals, Arrangement, Mixing and Production: Racheal Cogan

Recorders made and designed by Geri Bollinger: Contrabass, CBass, Bass, Tenor.

The artwork is by my dear friend Carolyn Walton in Banff. Banff is a small town within a National Park nestled in Alberta's Rocky Mountains along the Trans-Canada Highway.  Magpies and crows are some of the few birds that stay throughout the winter of its subarctic climate and, whilst the bears slumber, their presence is an important part of this magical place along with the elk, wolves, enigmatic cougars, and the rare lynx. This lovely miniature work was created thinking of these birds and the many stories associated with them told by the First Nations peoples.

The Music
I wanted to utilise the raw sounds of my instruments and objects around me. So I worked on percussion ideas with slapping sounds on my larger instruments. One day I was mulling over some extra sounds the percussion needed whilst absent mind-idly tapping on the cardboard packet of some disposable razors. As I was thinking I started listening and thought that this was exactly the sound I was after. I also use a harpsichord sound in a couple of places to link back to the soundscape of the original piece.

One day, whilst prepping for dinner, I took a small break and fell into a light dreaming whilst my partner finished up cooking. As I slowly woke I could hear Massive Attack's Teardrop bubbling on the surface of my consciousness and in those suspended moments of waking I attentively fixed my focus to the sounds. It was a magical moment for some beautiful music. I decided to make a cover version; 1998 is more contemporary than my 'cover' of a composition by Hildegard von Bingen almost 1,000 years ago.