A Summoning of Fireflies

A new short film.



A Summoning of Fireflies. 2013.

Video, sound & music by Arthur Durkee.

Music: "Summoning" by Arthur Durkee
AD: Animoog, softsynths, bass guitar, live recordings, effects.
All Rights Reserved.

In June, when I was out shooting footage of the wind in the grass, as dusk fell the fireflies began rising from the verge. They pulsed alongside the road ditches, in the trees, and over the fields.

I have spent several evenings this summer filming fireflies at dusk, gathering a lot of good material. This short film is the first in a series.

Darshan: video

Darshan, 2012

Music, Images & Words by Arthur Durkee.

AD: shakuhachi, synthesizers, meditation bells

This is basically a music video for my recent CD, Darshan, which was written to be used for yoga, meditation, Reiki, and other similar purposes. The setting is the same meditation hall in the Japanese garden that I go to when I can to get back to center, meditate, etc.

I am now thinking about doing more music videos for Darshan, as I think this turned out rather well. Stay tuned.

Video: Ocean Arch

Video: Light & Silence

I've opened up my own channel on YouTube, apdurkee, and uploaded two short videos by way of experiment. Eventually I plan to make better-quality uploads. There will more experimental short videos like this on my channel soon.

I have been making short video films since 2005, incorporating my still photography and original music, along with the occasional use of my poems as texts either presented as type in the video itself or read aloud as part of the audio track. I want to explore these possibilities in more depth; it's just taken me some time to figure out the technologies involved. (Including YouTube itself.)

Honestly, making the videos is the most time-consuming part; the upload is relatively easy. Creating, editing and mastering video programs brings out my latent perfectionism: you want to get everything just right, and look and sound its best. This means going over the finished product as a viewer two or three times, to find the last tweaks to make. It's the same process, really, as recording and mixing a song in a recording studio: you do the creative work, you finish the mix, then you take a short break, then sit down and listen through the track with fresh ears (and eyes) for final tweaks.

The video for "Light & Silence" was shot a couple of years ago, on an autumn visit to Grand Teton National Park. The dramatic skies made the day I spent making photos and video some of the best images I've made while at these mountains. The Tetons are one of my favorite places on the planet, in any season. The original video footage was in color, but I've been wanting to experiment with B&W video for some time, to bring the B&W photography aesthetic into the video realm. Two of the shots in this video are time-lapsed, to bring out the movement of the clouds over the mountains.

The music for this short film was made using software synths on my iPad. After recording the basic track, I did some sweetening with reverb while mastering the combined audio and video tracks. The music was recorded very plainly, to keep it simple and clean. It's essentially an improvisation within planned parameters—a way I like to compose a lot of my ambient music. You set an arbitrary limit, perhaps on scale, perhaps on instrumentation or tempo, then you improvise freely within those constraints. This is a way of working as a composer learned from Brian Eno, John Cage, and others. It is partly determined, partly free. Limits give you room to work within. My composition professor back in college once said that limits help us focus, using the constraints they place on us to give us freedom to work within; a lesson i've never forgotten.

New Music for Meditation: Flute Recordings

Beginning work on a new recording project. Having had several flutes restored to me recently, I have been planning to do some new recordings towards a new album project. This past winter, recording Darshan, a new album of music for meditation, yoga, healing, and Reiki, has also renewed interest in recording more new music in that mode. I am also continuing to write new lyrics for new songs. I'm not writing many poems right now, but that's normal when I'm working on music.

Tonight I was finally able to set up the microphones and do some recording. (I'm writing this while taking a short rest break.) I've had some computer issues lately, but now things in the studio are working again. I've got the stereo mic pair set up in the living room, and when I'm done tonight I'll leave everything set up so that all I have to do to record some more is throw a few switches and start playing.

I recorded a first piece with the Zen flute, and another with one of the shakuhachi I hadn't played in awhile. Mostly I'm exploring. I'm recording everything, expecting to trim most of it away later, leaving just the best music. I will probably make one piece from this session with a lot of space in it, to make an ambient piece with flute events widely spaced apart.

For tonight's session, I'm just improvising. Getting to know my flutes again. You record everything just in case you come up with something really good. I've made several piano pieces that way, and even more Stick pieces. Tonight's session is a reintroduction to some old friends. Finding our voices together again. I'm not worried about perfection at all for this session.

When I play back a solo flute piece, sometimes I hear Stick or keyboard parts to go with it: they emerge from within the gestures and spaces of the music. What I'm doing for this session is also listening to play back with reverb added, to hear how things sound in a large acoustic space. (I have some of the best software reverb emulators ever now: the software algorithms just keep getting better.)

I feel like working on into the night. If I run out of air, I will keep going with other instruments.

I am making raw tracks here. They will assembled later. This is all raw material. Some of it might turn into finished pieces, some of it may be mixed in elsewhere. It's like a painter taking sketches to later repurpose them into finished paintings. That's a good analogy, actually. Tonight I'm recording sketchbook pieces. Something good may emerge from them later. Meanwhile, it just feels incredibly good to playing my old flutes again. A year ago, I'm not sure I would have even had the breath and stamina for this; so I guess it's true that I'm getting stronger, now, even if still very gradually.

•

I've put in about two hours now tonight. Time to stop and let the ears rest. I find that I can't really go much more than four hours at a stretch without my ears getting tired. Two hours of continuous recording is pretty good, overall.

I recorded some ambient soundscapes, when I was tired of playing flute. Some of these larger bamboo flutes require a lot of air to play, so they're actually tiring to play for a long time. I recorded another take on the Zen flute, and some more shakuhachi.

Then I fooled around for awhile trying out ambient synth patches. One or two ideas that won't escape the sketchbook, probably, but one or two that might be good music beds, once I massage them a little. One in particular might end up being good to blend with one of the flutes, later on. I'll see how that goes.

Zen: Stop when you're tired. Eat when you're hungry. Chop wood, carry water. Sleep wherever you fall. Live in the moment. Play.

Begin Again, Keep Going

Having completed a large commission of songs for male chorus and piano, which occupied all of my attention for several months, and which produced a concert's worth of music, I have this past week been newly commissioned to do another, very different musical project. A CD I had made on commission almost a decade ago, a CD of trance music to be used as background for yoga classes, meditation, and similar situations, has led to a commission to make a sequel CD. Not a repetition, but the next level. I'm a better composer and musician now, or at least I hope I am, since time is meant to improve your art-making, not stagnate it.

This new CD I am recording now will be used for meditation, yoga, healing, massage, Reiki sessions, and so forth. Thus I'm writing it to sustain those purposes, not interrupt them. That calls for a particular kind of music. A particular tone and tempo very different from the dramatic, narrative songs I've been writing for most of this year. It will be completely non-verbal, instrumental music. It will use original recordings of Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist meditation bells, bells recorded from my own collection. It will use a fair bit of shakuhachi. No doubt there will be some synthesizers and keyboards in the mix, and Chapman Stick. It will have a variety of shapes and tones, but overall will hopefully take the listener deeper into meditative states of consciousness, the opposite of overstimulated, stressed-out, Type A caffeinated states of mind.

There's a lot of bland, boring New Age music out there. The best of that genre has always been music first, New Age music second. I think of musicians such as Paul Winter, Will Ackerman, and a few others, who pretty much invented the genre, but also transcended it. Contrast their vibrant, emotional music with the soulless boring pap of Stephen Halpern's random noodlings on electric piano. Contrast the powerful presence of the music in Stephan Micus recording against the flatlined neutral of most New Age music. Even ambient music, created in modern times by Brian Eno, inspired by Eric Satie's semi-joking idea for "furniture music" a century earlier, has more soul than most music you hear played in New Age bookstores, or most healing centers, massage offices, or new Age spiritual healing seminars. People often make the mistake of equating music meant to be unobtrusive and supportive with toneless, dull, bland, and spineless.

Yes, I do have strong opinions about New Age music.

That's because I was a participating witness to the development of this music from its start, back at its inception in the 1970s. Some roots of that style of music are ambient (Eno), folk, cool jazz, especially West Coast jazz, and the encounters of improvising musicians with the musics and spiritual values brought over from India, Japan, Tibet, and China in the 1960s. A lot of improvising musicians from the jazz and rock world contributed to growth of New Age music by introducing multicultural music into Western pop. The movement was strongly influenced both by world music, and by spiritual and moral ideas from the East.

If you want to blame someone, blame The Beatles: their introduction of Indian classical music into Britpop in the late 60s and early 70s, instigated by George Harrison's encounters with India, opened that door to a million and more people who otherwise would never have heard the music, or learned to meditate. The influence of popular culture icons, especially those as beloved, and as restless, as The Beatles, cannot be underestimated. George Harrison's post-Beatles solo albums have been part of the trend, seminal and central, even when basically pop music.

The music I tend to create, now, when asked to make healing music, or trance music, or meditation/yoga music, tends to be on the ambient side. Not static and unchanging, but not tonal or harmonic, not based on Western ideas of music theory, and essentially timeless. One of my influences is of course my years playing Indonesian gamelan music. Another strong influence is Buddhist music from Japan, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia, all of which I have listened to and studied for decades.

I am making it up as a I go along. It's an improvisation on a theme, a tone, an idea, a feeling. Most of my music is just so, whether notated or improvised. Art is improvised, life is improvised. It's all of a piece. So I keep going, making art, giving myself something to do that means something, a reason to go on, a purpose and a meaning, for my own life.

•

Music surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. —Pete Seeger

Hate, fear, all the corrosive forces of entropy, give way before music's power to make us all come together in harmony. So Mote It Be.

Songs of the Humpback Whale

Today I found the reissue CD of this classic album, Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970). This was the original whalesong album, produced by Dr. Roger Payne, that changed everything. It was instrumental in changing the minds of people about ecological awareness, and can be credited as part of the inception of the whole "Save the Whales" movement in the 1970s. The January 1979 issue of National Geographic went so far as to include a plastic LP soundsheet, to be played on your record player, produced by Dr. Payne, of whalesongs to accompany their cover story on the humpback whale.

I still have my original vinyl LP of this album. I bought it brand new. It was one of those albums of music that, like many albums of 20th C. avant-garde music that I also bought in my teens, changed my life, and affected my life as a composer and musician. Songs of the Humpback Whale was the original. It was the first. There have been many recordings made since, but this one stands as a classic. I listened to it many nights, I can't count how many, in the dark of the night; I sometimes fell asleep to it, following the sea-echoes off into meditative silence.

These whalesong recordings were also one important source of the beginning of my interest in recordings of nature, or ambient sounds, and connected directly to my simultaneous studies of John Cage's ideas that all of natural sounds are music. So I can honestly say that this was an album that affected my direction as a composer and sound designer, and added impetus to my already-existing tendencies towards both new music and recorded natural sounds. (I made at least one amateur tape piece inspired by it, which fortunately is lost; it was a teenager's homage to something he loved, and no doubt I'd be embarassed to hear it now myself.)

Songs was long out-of-print, until remastered and re-released by Paul Winter's Living Music record label. Winter was another musician whose life was changed by listening to this album. He writes for the reissued CD liner notes:

Hearing this album was a milestone experience in my musical life. I was thrilled by the haunting beauty of these humpback whale voices, much as I had been when I first heard jazz saxophonists like Charlie Parker. Studying the long, complex songs which the whales repeat again and again, I was amazed by their musical intelligence, and shocked that these magnificent beings were being hunted to extinction. The whales opened my ears to the whole symphony of nature, and expanded my world forever.

Songs of the Humpback Whale is a timeless classic of the earth's music.
—Paul Winter

Winter has ever since been involved with weaving natural sounds, especially those made by animals, into his music. He has since recorded several albums in which he performs improvised music to accompany the sounds made by other living creatures. Notable examples are his albums Callings and Prayer for the WIld Things. (Another album I sometimes put on to fall asleep to. On my worst insomniac nights, music such as this, or whalesongs, or Tibetan Buddhist chant, focuses the wheel-spinning mind, allows it to be calmed and quieted, so that I might fall asleep.)

Samples from this album were used by composer Alan Hovhaness in his orchestral work, And God Created Great Whales. . . (Opus 229, 1970). The orchestra creates soundscapes, repetitive patterns in the strings, with a soaring brass melody over the watery strings, and the recorded whale enters as a soloist, as in a concerto. In high school in Ann Arbor, I was playing contrabass in the orchestra when we performed this piece. I already knew the piece well from its premiere recording, as I had become interested in the composer as part of my studies in avant-garde music, and was thrilled to be able to study the score and play it. It's a musical experience that has stayed with me all these years. (I remember performing Respighi's Pines of Rome in the same concert.) In the ensuing years, I've played several of Hovhaness' solo piano pieces.

Samples from this album, along with some other recordings, were also used for the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which the crew of the Enterprise travelled back in time to bring two humpbacks forward to save the Earth. Living Music also released a soundtrack album connected to the film, Whales Alive! This CD contained narration and readings by Leonard Nimoy of prose and poetry by D.H. Lawrence, Gary Snyder, Hermann Melville, and others.

Now that this compelling and mysterious music is available again, I urge a new generation of listeners to seek it out. May your life be forever changed by it, as so many others' lives were changed, including my own.

Pulsar

In the past few weeks I've been feeling the powerful urge to record music. I've been thinking about revisiting ambient music, techno, spacemusic, and quieter styles along these lines. I am often drawn to the subtleties of ambient music, as expressed by Brian Eno, the founder of modern ambient music, who once defined it as music which can be either "actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored, depending on the choice of the listener." Since Eno's seminal work in this genre in the 1970s, an entire musical subculture and group of styles of music have grown up. I find a great deal of creativity in this still largely underground musical subculture, as opposed to the lack of creativity in contemporary over-produced, manufactured, market-driven pop music.

I've also been listening to some older pop music which demonstrated a great deal of creativity in bygone decades, which seems largely missing now. (Perhaps because the music industry has come to care more about money than creativity.) In the 1980s, there was a lot of bad, cheesy pop, made using cheesy synthesizer patches. The 80s was the era in which both the sampler and the synthesizer first became commercially affordable to many average musicians. There was a ferment of experimentation. A lot of fairly bad music was made, following the "Gee whiz!" factor: the period of discovery early in the history of any new creative technology, in which a wave of enthusiasts get carried away by the cool new toys, but sometimes forget to make art with them. But there were also some great songs made, that used synth patches in clever, creative ways. I've been going back lately and filling in the gaps of my 80s song collection, being very picky, acquiring only what I feel was good enough to endure. Listening again to Peter Gabriel's original recorded version of "San Jacinto," followed a few years later by the Genesis minor hit song, "Tonight Tonight Tonight," you hear both songs are full of the new synthesizer sounds. But they're used brilliantly, originally, and so indelible are they to the song's style and context that you cannot imagine the songs without those sounds underpinning them.

For myself, wanting to make some new sounds, and revisiting the creativity philosophy of Because I can / Because I want to / Because I feel like it, I pulled some of my vintage analog gear out of the studio and set up to record with my laptop in the writing desk/art desk area of the house. (The studio has been feeling stale. Sometimes a change of venue is all it takes to rekindle the creative fires.) I have a fondness for old analog music gear, including my small collection of vintage analog synthesizers and processors. As pristine and powerful as softsynths (software-based synthesizer instruments) have become in recent years, there's a charm about the old clunky analog gear, and a pleasure in working completely retro. Some of those old sounds you just don't hear anymore, coming from any softsynth.

With the current unlimited software synthesis and sound-editing softwares that are available, it's possible to feel creatively paralyzed because you don't know where to begin: there are too many possibilities. One of the advantages of vintage gear is that you are forced to work within its limits, which can lead to creative accidents and solutions you might otherwise never stumble across.

So I plugged a cheesy old Casio "electronic music instrument," the Casiotone 202 keyboard, into three of my favorite analog/digital effects processors, in order: my spare BOSS SE-50 (I have two or three of these units); BOSS VF-1; and my Roland DEP-5. The DEP-5 is still one of the best analog/digital reverb/delay units ever made; its versatility and range of spatial effects has only recently been matched in the purely digital computer-music realm.

I hooked this rig up to my laptop via a Griffin iMic USB sound input/output. This is one of three USB sound devices that I use in various configurations. This one is the most portable, and usually lives in my laptop's travel case, along with some other basic audio gear, so that I can record anytime, anywhere, if the spirit moves me.

In about two hours this afternoon I laid down several stereo tracks. This evening, in about an hour, I mixed the raw materials and processed sounds into a finished track. I did this in Amadeus, a marvelous Mac-based audio recording and mastering software that I've used on the laptop for some years now. I also tweaked a few elements in Amadeus, now that the sounds had made it into the purely digital realm, before making a final mix.

Pulsar    

On the Casiotone I laid down a bed of a chord progression, with later tracks floating over the top in a soloistic manner. The basic chord progression is one I've used versions of before, I realize in retrospect; I suppose it's somewhat typical of my thinking when I work in the ambient genre. (In this sense, I didn't stretch my own compositional envelope much. Whether that makes or breaks this as a piece of music is not for me to determine.) The basic progression begins with a I-V drone, then adds the vi chord: I-V drone plus vi. Eventually the vi expands outward to become a full IV-7 chord, making with the drone: I-V drone plus IV-7 chord. The solo notes are pulled from this sequence in various ways. This was an instance of a chord progression that seemed wholly self-evolving, wholly natural in execution. I didn't plan it out in advance, nor was it pre-conceived. I only use music theory here to describe it after-the-fact. Really, it was an improvisation that took on its own form, and expanded into a piece. (Making poems often works in a parallel way, for me.)

So, in about three hours this afternoon and evening, I made a new ambient track. This could be the start of a new group of purely ambient pieces. All the sounds for this track were generated by the Casiotone 202, and heavily processed. I plan in the near future to connect my Stick to the same basic rig, find some new processor settings, and make another ambient track purely using the Stick. I'll share that track, as well, when it's done.

I never know what I'm going to do next. Sometimes you just have to do what feels right, in the moment. In the past few weeks, I've also begun writing a series of new poems, after a long hiatus (except for the usual haiku). Creativity feeds on itself. Stimulation in one creative zone usually rhizomatously spreads to the other zones. Meanwhile, this track was loads of fun to make. More of the way soon, no doubt of it.

Ambient Podcast Broadcast

There's an ongoing Spacemusic podcast out of the Netherlands, hosted by TC from Rotterdam. (An eccentric radio announcer if every there was one, but with good taste in ambient music, trance, and techno, and their related genres.) I've been listening to Spacemusic for years.

On the Spacemusic webpage, scroll down a bit to the episode titled 07 Jun 10 Coffee Break: 64-bit podcast. You can download or listen via from there, or subscribe and download via iTunes.

The last track on this podcast episode, starting just after 59 minutes, and about 8 minutes long, features Tony Kapela playing mostly bass guitar (and processing), and myself playing Chapman Stick. You'll hear some recognizable Stick sounds in there, but mostly it's very floaty-ambient, which is very appropriate for this Spacemusic program. I was very pleased to be part of this. (Actually, although I've listened to Spacemusic for years, I didn't know Tony had finished and submitted this track till I heard the show. Surprise!) TC seemed to think those were guitar sounds, but htey're actually made on Stick.

Ambient Stick marches on!