Michael Early Victorian Webs

Michael Early
Victorian Webs

Date:March 15, 2015
Author:
Category:Chronicle

Victorian Webs is a Fantasy on Morse Code and the Telegraph, executed with 21st-century computer networking. The title is inspired by Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet, which makes parallels between our own Internet and the Victorian era’s use of the telegraph to communicate over long distances. When I came across the book while researching for this piece, I knew right away what this piece of music had to be called – it just seemed too serendipitously similar.

I was really fortunate to be able to work again with both the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and Sideband on this piece, a piece that wouldn’t have been possible without these shared communities. And, thanks to the fact that Dan Trueman was working on a laptop piece (Four Squared) at the same time with the fabulous new music pianist Kathy Supové, I got the chance to work with her too!

Victorian Webs calls for six performers with laptops along with the solo pianist – on the video, you can see and hear six of us, with Kathy on piano. Two of the laptop performers play keyboards that direct the pitches of the whole electronic ensemble. The other four most often play flashlights, blinking Morse Code messages (displayed on their laptop screens) at their webcams to trigger sounds. The pianist and both keyboard players read notated music from the score.The flashlights trigger sounds in a simple binary on-off relationship. This felt right, given the poetic inspiration from a telegraph circuit – it’s either clicking out a dot/dash, or it’s off. Although all four flashlight players tap out the same Morse Code messages at the same time, there are two different groups of “webcam instruments”. Each group of two performers re-broadcasts data from one of the two keyboard players, or (toward the end of the piece) one of two cycles of sampled/electronic sounds. When the flashlight players aren’t flashing Morse Code, they use their laptops to make subtle changes to the texture of the pitches and rhythms being sent to them from the keyboards.

Theater and Sound

VWebs-Flashlights

There are a few (understated) theatrical elements to the performance. The music begins with first one, then two, flashlights signaling Morse Code, before all four join in as the piano enters. For me there is something poignant about these isolated points of light flashing messages out into a dim performance space. Computer scientist and musician Rebecca Fiebrink’s piece Blinky was the first time I had seen flashlights used with webcams to trigger sound, and it was a beautiful effect in a darkened hall. That image came back to me as I began work on Victorian Webs.

There’s theater in the position of the keyboard players, too, facing each other on either side of the pianist – the contrast between the face-to-face interaction between keyboards, and the more isolated flashes of the Morse Code players. This setup originally came about for purely practical reasons: Dan Trueman was using the same setup for Four Squared, which was performed next; and, it turned out to be the best way for piano and keyboards to hear and interact as an ensemble. (I also remember this setup, along with my choice to use two keyboards, as being inspired by Dan’s earlier Clapping Machine Music Variations. I liked the setup visually on stage, and also the way that the piece used a pair of keyboards to direct the two-part counterpoint of the pitches and rhythms.)

VWebs-Live

I also simply like the way Morse Code rhythms sound on a purely physical level, as sonic objects. The rapid dots and dashes of a skilled Morse operator is a texture I find mesmerizing, with its (alphabetically) logical but (musically) not easily predictable patterns.  This crisp, mesmerizing quality can be heard in the automated patterns found in the middle of the piece. At the opening of the piece, these patterns are much slower. The keyboard players and pianist all layer these patterns freely over one another as short, loose, overlapping musical cells. The harmonies are warm and familiar, but they are also incomplete – always ending on a question. The synthesized sounds are slightly modulated sine tones, barely more colorful than the dots and dashes of the telegraph.

The fuzzy, delicate opening gives way to a darker section over a deep, breathy pipe drone with edgy, off-kilter overtones. The resulting harmonies are sharp and tense; the flashlights are set aside while the Morse Code performers stand and tilt their laptops to color the drone, in some kind of weird quasi-ritual. (Another theatrical element – although the rapid change of technology may have already rendered it obsolete – laptops with the newer SSD file storage no longer have the motion sensor that allows the tilting to have any effect! I’ve come up with another way of controlling it for future performances.) For me this music is a little broken; a counterweight to the picturesque warmth of the previous music, and the bright positivity of the following music.

The faster middle section features busier, upbeat, computer-generated textures. For me they recall the optimistic “Space Age” view of technology from the 1960’s and 70’s. (One Sideband member joked that the middle section sounds like the introduction to a NOVA episode on PBS. It wasn’t a conscious influence, but now I hear it too.) The piano gets a little out of control toward the end of this upbeat section, until it overpowers the electronics (the Luddite in me rejoices in this moment). The music comes crashing down to a long, low sustained chord; progress slows to a standstill.

In the final sections, the flashlights return, along with the slow, warm music of the opening. This time around, the flashlight players’ messages broadcast more complex, ambiguous noises, replacing the sine tones with clouds of clicks and out-of-tune buzzes. It colors the original opening’s idealism with the brokenness of its counterweight. That these two things can coexist warms my heart. It’s my favorite part.

Poetry and Narrative

VWebs-Telegraph

It’s important for me that each thing I create has some kind of story, some kind of poetry. This can mean a lot of different things in different pieces. In Victorian Webs, I think the main poetic kernel of the music is a kaleidoscope of nostalgia: a positive memory colored by loss; the past’s image of an idealized future, viewed through the idealizing lens of our own present; complexity mourning its loss of simplicity.

The bits of Morse code that I use in Victorian Webs are pulled from the inaugural message transmitted on the first U.S. commercial telegraph, in Pennsylvania: “Why don’t you write, you rascals?” For me there is a combination of an isolated melancholy and a jaunty futurist bravado in this unanswered message.

Victorian Webs is my own response to this message – and much like my own relationship with the online world, the response is a resigned and mostly peaceful ambivalence. The electronic textures in the middle section’s bright, synchronized rhythms weigh against the fuzzy, cloud-like textures of the outside sections; the pianist moves in a slightly different orbit than the circling electronics. It’s a dance, of sorts, between freedom and order, the human and the mechanical, the pull of the past and the pull of the future, communication and the unanswered question. One side never quite resolves the other.

Playing Victorian Webs

Maybe you’d like to try and play the piece yourself!
The score and software, with step-by-step setup instructions, are both available for download here.
And if you have any questions you can contact me here (use the ‘contact me’ link at the bottom of the page).