iDIG Music Festival- Absolutely essential for any media composer (Part 1)

I'm sitting at my desk, cup of coffee in one hand, idly looking at a page of an orchestral score hanging on my wall.
It's the first page of the score for Baba Yetu- the title theme for the video game Civilization IV.

My favourite score, signed by my favourite composers? Unbelievable motivation right there!

This is the biggest souvenir I brought home with me from the iDIG Music Festival, the go-to event for anybody looking to write music for games and interactive media, for developers looking to see a little bit more to understand the creative types that set the audio experience for their games, and for fans looking to experience a piece of the art behind the magic that we grew up with and live with.

With such big names from the industry including Tommy Tallarico, Eimear Noone, Craig Stuart Garfinkle, Christopher Tin, Neal Acree and Russel Brower, you could be forgiven for thinking that such an event couldn't live up to the hype.
This thought crossed my mind more than once as I was saving up €155 to purchase my Tier 1 ticket (granting priority access to all events, a page of my favourite orchestral score, a meet-and-greet with the legends themselves, as well as priority seating in the performance of Video Games Live), but I'm glad that I scrimped and saved to get my ticket.

Not only is €155 (the most expensive ticket) cheap compared with, say, the Sherlock convention in London (which has a Gold pass of £595 or a VIP ticket of £2995!) but the value for money that I got out of it is incalculable- I can honestly say that iDIG was the single greatest experience of my musical life to date.

Not only was there a wealth of knowledge waiting to be taken in from the outset, but there was a real sense that the games industry and games music industry is a community.
The composers and professionals aren't shady figures on pedestals, shielded from us by a curtain of notes, cinematics and code.
They're affable, approachable, and clearly trying very hard to bring more people in to appreciate not only the artistry behind the music, but games in general.
In fact, speaking with the VIPs at the festival they were remarkable with their patience and helpfulness.
It made this outsider feel like there was a way in, that someday soon my music could make its way into a game and provide the underscore to someone else's life, the way that Nobuo Uematsu, Tommy Tallarico and Christopher Tin have done so for me.

The Thursday morning kicked off with a talk from Craig Stuart Garfinkle, video game composer and long time educator at UCLA Extension.
Here he talked us through his process of writing, arranging and a bit about pre-mixing stems.
To me the most valuable piece of advice he gave was to write your pieces using piano sounds, not to your synthesizer.
The reason being that when you write for samples you aren't writing for performance, you're writing to the particular nuances of the samples.
If you are recording live musicians you'll never get quite the performance you need.
Tying the presentation together, he demonstrated using a piece written for World of Warcraft- from the piano sketch (with all of the parts orchestrated for orchestra, but played using piano sounds) to the Sibelius score, to the final recording.
The contrast was drastic to say the least, but you could really see the logical progression from each step to the next.

In tandem with all of the events, there was an exhibition of local game developers and tabletop gamers in an adjacent room, as well as artists selling their pieces, hitting home that iDIG is not just about the musical side of the artistry in games, it showcases the art behind the coding and the visuals as well.

Next up in the talks was a conducting workshop given by Ireland's own Eimear Noone, and she gave some helpful tips to conducting- the standout piece of advice to me was that you start conducting as soon as you pull into the driveway of the studio.
If you're getting out of the car flustered with sheet music spilling everywhere you don't inspire confidence in the orchestra or in your abilities.

Not all of the iDIG Music festival was lectures and talks- there were some brilliant performances by some very talented musicians dotted throughout the programme.

A brilliant young prodigy named JJ Macnamara took to the piano, playing through some of his own orchestrations of Lizst mixed with video games music (Tetris featured heavily), and it was a breathtaking display of dexterity, virtuosity and tasteful arrangement.
This teenager is a musician to watch out for- he is a remarkable performer.

The Triforce Quartet also performed, playing beautiful renditions of games music, from Final Fantasy to Civilization IV and beyond- bringing our favourite pieces alive with a total change of timbre to the usual scores we are so familiar with.
All of the pieces were arranged by cellist Chad Schwartz, and they were certainly a tour de force.

Tying up the talks on the Thursday was an interview with Christopher Tin, composer of Baba Yetu- the only piece of video games music to ever win a grammy.
Conducting the interview was the ever-charismatic Tommy Tallarico, though noticeably tired still radiated the usual charm and sense of humour that he is renowned for.

After the talks, there was a break of about two hours before the Cosball, a cosplay event with a soundtrack of remixes of different classic game soundtracks (the dubstep remix of the Mario themes was unbelievably good) and provided an opportunity for everybody to socialise and mix, attendees and VIPs alike.

The cosball was fantastic- I managed to spend an hour or so hanging with Christopher Tin, who if you haven't picked it up by now is one of my favourite composers of all time.
But the group of us spoke about music very little, the conversation was mostly about, well, any other typical conversation you'd have with a person in a pub on a night out.
Lots of laughter, banter, and drinks.

Over the course of the evening I was unbelievably excited- everything about the day that far had exceeded my wildest expectations, and on one of my trips to the smoking area of the bar I said so much.
I evidently said the right thing to the right person, because that little snippet of conversation would end up kicking my experience of iDIG up another gear.

I wouldn't find that out until the next morning, however.
I still had yet to hop in a taxi with my new-found attendee friends to try (unsuccessfully) and find somewhere that would serve us alcohol.

But alas, that will all have to wait for another post.

Bach, Bagels, and Bilateralism (2010)

The other day, while chewing my morning bagel and listening to some JS Bach, the Crab Canon, no less, my thoughts drifted from my toroidal breakfast morsel to the lemniscate of Bernoulli specifically and the concept of symmetries nested within symmetric isometries in general, and its ramifications within the discipline of counterpoint and specifically fugue.
This was not a novel chain of association for me, as the thought has been crowding my mind with ever growing urgency and frequency for the last two years, and served as a central principle of design and impetus in much of the music I’ve produced in that span. Nick Capocci recently remarked to me, and I quote without permission,
“It [symmetry] is a powerful intellectual and philosophical concept, and, naturally, finds a ready medium in free counterpoint”.
I quote the above because I can not find more apt words than Nick’s.
So what of it? Forays into the exploration of symmetric form within counterpoint are nothing new, and imitative counterpoint could be viewed as fundamentally grounded in that pursuit. The methods of textural inversion and imitation (transformational symmetry, mathematically speaking) have been well established and documented for four centuries.
There is nevertheless a glaring hole, both theoretical and practical, where melodic inversion and retrogradation is concerned, particularly of entire polyphonic textures. The smattering of extant works left by Bach in the mirror fugues of Kunst der Fuge and the Crab Cannon are hardly a large enough body of work from which to derive a rigorous contrapuntal methodology for mirror techniques.
Until I experienced a recent epiphany, just a year or two old now, it was apparent to me that such mirror forms in counterpoint could only be improvised haphazardly case by case through a blend of intuition and trial and error alone. Viewed in light of the realization that music, as an abstract contrapuntal construct at least, is an isometry of a frequency axis (v) against a time axis (h), it became apparent to me that it is indeed possible to derive from the conventional (or any) protocols of voice leading a consequent set of protocols for melodic invertibility and retrogradibility.
The epiphanic realization was in understanding that melodic invertibility and retrogradability are integrally related, in fact, for phrases which are mutually symmetric across (v) and (h), their results are precisely identical. Moreover, simultaneous melodic inversion and retrogradation of such a phrase is identical to the original phrase itself. And so a methodical analysis of any sample of music with respect to melodic invertibility and retrogradability must begin with parsing that phrase into the largest elements which are symmetric to either or both axes. The inherent guarantee in this approach is that the smallest of possible elements would be merely two consecutive notes, a configuration which will invariably be mutually symmetric to both (v) and (h).
Well, I’m still assembling the specific details of my methodology for writing melodically invertible and retrogradable counterpoint, a system which might be viewed as an extension and modification of the principles outlined by Fux, with focused scrutiny on considerations of symmetry, yet there’s a great deal to be learned by practice and sometimes failure. I hope the Mass Mysteria to be a proving ground for the application of my theoretical observations.
The attached links are to the audio and score of my motet setting of Pacem Relinquo Vobis, rendered completely in mirror fugal forms.
http://www.box.net/shared/j3jt4l07b5
http://www.box.net/shared/msjy0u95nl

Philip Glass Creativity Conversation at Emory

A composer friend sent me a link to this fascinating interview with Philip Glass, in which he discusses the creative process (towards the end of the video).

Enjoy!

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