Shekhinah: The Presence (Notes on Music)

[zitt!joe <zitt!joe...>]

In late November, the Human Systems Performance Group here in Austin, TX,
will be performing my dance/music/performance piece "Shekhinah: The
Presence." (Send email for more info.)

Some aspects of the score may interest readers of this group:

The structure and materials of the show are derived from the morning Shakharit
service. The entire score is made up of voices, and derived in various ways
from the texts and melodies of the service.

One piece that is used in several parts of the show is "River Music". In
this, the dancers follow a set of simple rules to improvise and sings
lines based on rearrangements of the phonemes of the phrase "Barukh atah
Hashem, Elokeynu melech haolam."

For the Verses of Song (Psukey D'Zimrah) section, I sampled four voices
saying each of the four syllables "ha-le-lu-yah", then played percussive
minimalist patterns on the sampler and sang a traditional version of
Halleluyah above it.

For the soundtrack of the Reading (Kriyat HaTorah) section, I first recorded
my Haftarah portion and the prayers before and after (as affected by the
degree to which I remembered them after 21 years). One of the performers,
Manu Jobst, then recorded three tracks of vocal improvisations as
accompaniments to my recording. She quoted some melody and text fragments
from my recording in her tracks, with her choices being affected by her
not knowing Hebrew (other than the phrase mentioned above). In the final
result, I played it back without my base recording, giving a tapestry of
her voices with aspects of the Haftarah embedded in it.

For the Alenu section, I took recordings that I had made by the Western
Wall in Jerusalem several years ago and passed them through a sampling
and delay circuit designed by John Jansen.

For the Kaddish section, I recorded the Mourner's Kaddish and passed
the recordings through pitch shifts and delays. In performance, I speak
an English translation of the text in sync with the recordings.

For the opening and closing music, Chris Kelly recorded about thirty
repetitions of a brief melody that I had constructed from fragments
of melodies from the Kedushah. I then overlayed up to eight unsynchronised
tracks of her voice and mixed them so that, for the opening, the melody
emerges from a cloud of voices, and, for the ending, returns to the cloud.

In none of these cases, by the way, does the music serve as the basis for
the dancers. The movement was developed in tandem with an English text
that is spoken during the piece; the music serves as more of a background,
much like a movie soundtrack.

So (*gasp*)... is anyone else out there doing experimental composition or
improvisation using traditional materials? I'd be interested in hearing
from those who are... or from anyone else out there who may have feedback
on this.

I hope, by the way, to release at least a cassette of the music for the
show eventually. This won't happen until next year, however, at the
earliest.

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