My article “The Seven Common Misleading Uses of Vocal Notation” has been published by the Society of Finnish Composers.
Such a concise source of information has become all the more necessary as less composers have experience with composing for voices, and here I have been able to combine my experience as a professional singer and composer.
The points I make in the article ought to be useful in facilitating the communication that takes place in notation, between singers and composers.
In late February, I finished composing my first work for the trio of piano, violin and cello, of 10 minutes’ duration. Most of the composing took place between late January and February. This combination of instruments has a long legacy to which I am glad to contribute.
More info to come soon! New piano trio
The Musica Nova Festival of 2017 in Helsinki performed its remaining notes last Sunday. I attended 16 of the concerts, in three of which I contributed as a performer, those being singing a considerable programme with the Helsinki Chamber Choir and soloistic improvising in the Ears Open Ensemble with Jan St. Werner. Both the publicity work and the artistic level of the programming were of high quality. The practicalities with exquisite venues and timeslots allowed flexibly for interaction; some programs were reperformed to ensure more people could hear the music. The artistic director Andre de Ridder has done a great service to the Helsinki new music life, and we can look forward to more in February 2019!
Selected photos from my activities: Photo 1, Ears Open Ensemble with Jan St. Werner Photo 2, Ears Open Ensemble with Jan St. Werner Photo 3, Helsinki Chamber Choir
I’m glad to hear that my long-time colleague Johan Svensson’s team has today finally completed and published their research “Pianoharmonics – a systematic approach to the inner world of the grand piano” by recording several piano harmonics and multiphonics (or just harmonics, as they call them).
Their work is accessible on the internet in an interactive and immediate form. It serves as substantial and valuable complementary material together with the piano multiphonics charts I have previously published in my thesis (Vesikkala 2016, p. 96-98; 103) and as a transposable file on the Sibelius notation software (in my Press Kit, under Multiphonics materials).
On the CD included with my thesis, I did not delve into such a systematic recording process.
Thanks to interest from composer colleagues, there are now more multiphonics materials to be found under Press Kit → Multiphonics materials.
One of them is about a multiphonics whistling sound, which, not even all professional singers are not capable of doing. The vocal apparatus is highly individual after all. The sound has found use in my earlier works, for example in Seven takes on Eliot (2014).
The second material will hopefully facilitate the compositional application of the ideas in my thesis from Spring 2016 and a particular chart of multiphonics featured in it, to be exact. The slightly revised chart is now electric and consists of a Sibelius file (here provided for both the 6 and 7 versions) that allows for transposition whereas the original printed chart only presented the situation when a fundament pitch G is used to build the multiphonic chords.
