Week 1: Jamming Secton
Date: 20th March 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 3-5pm
Venue: Pats Pa11
Preparation for the Meeting
As Genie and I agreed to work on opera roles and arias that Birgit Nilsson is famous of performing in our last meeting, I researched on the singer herself to start with. From her foundation website, I gathering a lot information of her career, operatic roles that she is renowned of and keen on performing, and here I have made some brief notes some major events of hers.
1946- Opera debut: Weber’s Der Freischütz, substitute the original cast in performing at the Royal Swedish Opera in 3 days of notice
1947- Got engaged, began to have International Recognition: Verdi’s Lady Macbeth, replace Inga Sundström on he role Lady Macbeth due to her illness at the Royal Swedish Opera again with short notice, performed 10 shows in 21 days.
1948- Got Married and performed her first Wagnerian Role: Der Fliegende Holländer (4 Nov, 1948), performing the role Senta
1953- Bayreuth Debut: Beeethoven 9th and Fidelio
1954- Engagement in Bayreuth Festival: Lohengrin, performing the role of Elsa
1957- Vienna Debut: Brünnhilde Die Walküre
1958- La Scala Debut: Turandot, 1st non-Italian Soprano to sing at the seasonal opening day of La Scala (It is a tradition that La Scala opens on 7 Dec, Saint Ambrose's Day )
1959- Metropolitan Opera Debut: Tristan Und Isolde, renowned as “The best show in Broadway”, the 3 Tristan tenors were all ill unprecedentedly, therefore each of them sang one act of the opera. Birgit make fun of that claiming “No Isolde has ever consumed that many Tristan in a one night”.
1965- Adapting “voice-killing” Role: Richard Strauss’s Elektra, Birgit’s is being warned that the role might shortening her singing career, but she found the role suits her voice perfectly.
1967- Performed Brünnhilde Die Walküre for the 100th times
1970- Last performance of Tristan und Isolde: Birgit claimed that that will be her last performance of Tristan as that is Wieland Wagner’s final production
1982- Last operatic performance: Elektra. At the high point of her career, Birgit declared at the final night of the Elektra production, “ This was my final performance. an I was at peace with this decision.”
1983- moved on to teaching
More information about Birgit Nilsson’s life can be found here
After reviewing Birgit’s operatic performing career and her major achievements, I have gathered a list featuring characters that highlights her career and then arias and musical materials that can represent these roles, shown as follows:
Weber, Der Freischütz; Role: Agathe, “Wie nahte mir der Schlummer”
Verdi, Macbeth; Role: Lady Macbeth, “La Luce Langue”, “Una Macchia è quituttora”
Wagner, Der Fliegende Holländer; Role: Senta, “Senta’s Ballad”
Puccini, Turandot, Role: Turandot, “In questa Reggia”, “Mo Li Hua”
Wagner, Die Walküre, Role: Brünnhilde, “Hoyotoho”, “Der diese Liebe mir ins Herz gelegt”
Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Role: Isolde, “Mild und Leise”
Richard Strauss, Elektra, “Orest”
I acknowledged that this
Lessons form Genie
Acknowledged my curiosity in exploring electronics, Genie gave me a tutorial on the electronics effects that she normally use. Yet, Genie start with something that wouldn’t have expected form her. She suggested we should explore the natural timbre and tone that our voice can naturally produced without processing so that we can know how much my voice can naturally achieve. I agree on her thoughts although I am quite surprised but also impressed. I elaborated that this enables us to find the meaning of incorporating technology through the absence of it. I found it impressive that she will bring it out as I would have thought people specialised in technology would be highly depend on it and do everything with it. But I guess I am wrong. She the moved forward to talking about device in Ableton. She started with Vector Delay, its a tools in Ableton that split up one voice to multiple voices but multiples voice are remained a big body of sound. Techniques that are similar but more refined are called Grain Delay. Like Vector Delay, it splits the voice but Grain delay split them into particles that makes changes to each particles individually with close attention. Continuation the functions that split the sound, the Chorus effect to emerge the sound with short delays however it makes the sounds of voice richer. A further advanced device that can change the texture of the track is called the Vocoder. Genie claimed that you can send any audio signal to the Vocoder and it will trap the pitch, analysis the voice in the signal and reproduce it electronically. It found this tools scary but yet fascinating. She also added that Delay is a very common built-in with other device on Ableton as it just comes very handy as most device work well with delays. After introducing device that can change the texture of the track, Genie moved on to device that can modify the pitch, starting with Shiffer. It is just very basic device that can shift the pitch of the track. An advanced version of the Shiffer is called Dual Pitch. It can change the pitch of the notes, but it add a note with certain intervals so that 2 or more notes played together instead of one, which form a choir of notes. Genie also reminded on some basic concept in DAWs. For example, 0% is 1 delay time and the higher percentage on the feedback, the longer the note going to last. And also the difference between Reverb and Delay, Reverb is used to create a sense of atmosphere and space and simulate a natural reflection of the sound through space whilst delay is the direct replication of the original sound source but played afterwards in designated time. Although, I didn’t fully understand everything on, I am grateful that Genie willing to explain how do these Ableton device works in fine details and responds to my question on the spot. I think I am more confident on DAWs after revising my notes.
Jamming Section
Our jamming section that day has certain limitation. My available time this week does not allow me to further study on any more materials that what I already did, hence the process of narrow down the repertoire list above to motives that we will using for the project are yet to be done. However, Genie and I agreed that it is more important for us to have a go of how can we interact with operatic materials with electronics. Therefore, for this time around, we have adopted some Puccini’s opera tunes that I know of as materials and Genie would respond to me through the electronic manipulated voice. Another issue is that there is only one output plug at Genie’s current interface, so that we can only process Genie’s voice, whilst my voice does not go through her DAW and hence the recording is a phone recording. Here is the trial section that we did on the day: (staring from 1:20)
Audio link for desktop users: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V-_ujJlXLYEVAfFTGWf44eU3xG4rOO7n/view?usp=drive_link
Goals for next week
At the end of the meeting, we have planned matters that we have attend to at our meeting next week and preparation that we need to do before that. Next time we will continue on our jamming with more solid framework and the fragments from that arias. We also intended to explore more on electronic percussive sounds and sounscapes that would be relevant to the projects. Genie will also bring also another inference so that we can have a go of processing my sounds as well.
