"Stung" - Jerryana Williams-Bibiloni (Extended Techniques)

What are Extended Techniques?:

Extended Techniques are unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional methods of singing or of playing musical instruments employed to obtain unusual sounds or timbres. This technique isn't specific to just contemporary music and isn't tethered to a specific compositional schools and styles. It has found footing in classical pieces, current popular music, jazz, and avant-garde jazz.

Examples of extended techniques in instruments include:

- Bowing a string instrument with two different bows

- Bowing under the bridge of a string instrument

- Detuning a string while playing

- Parallel rather than perpendicular bowing

- Snap pizzicato, also called Bartók pizzicato, where a string is pulled away from the fingerboard until it snaps back and strikes the fingerboard.

- String scrapes

- Using key clicks on a wind instrument

- Blowing and overblowing into a wind instrument without a mouth piece.

- Pitch bending or lipping on a wind instrument.

- Combination of a mouthpiece of one instrument with the main body of another, for example, using a French horn mouthpiece on a standard bassoon

- Unconventional mutes or other foreign objects in the bell of a brass instrument such as plumbing parts.

- Silently depressing one or more keys, allowing the corresponding strings to vibrate freely, allowing sympathetic harmonics to sound

- Percussive use of of the piano's lid or keyboard cover by slamming them.

- "String piano", striking, bowing, plucking or other direct manipulation of the strings.

- Palms, fists or other external devices to create tone clusters.

- Resonance effects such as whistling, singing or talking into the piano.

- Inserting objects on top of the strings of a piano to create a prepared piano as made popular by John Cage.

Examples of extended techniques in voice include:

- Overtone singing also known as vocal multiphonics where multiple notes are sung by one voice.

- Growling

- Vocal Percussion such as beatboxing

- Whispering

- Whistling

- Screaming and Shouting

- Animal Sounds such as, hissing, clucking, barking, panting.

As you can see the possibilities are almost truly endless and "extended techniques" serves more as a catch all term for techniques and instrumentation utilized rather than a specific theoretical basis for music composition.

Stung:

Composer Jerryana Williams-Bibiloni uses a number of extended techniques in her piece "Stung" which is inspired by "Tora! Tora! Tora! (Cadenza Apocalittica)" from Makrokosmos Volume 2 Part 2. Narration, panting/breathing and intense dynamic contrast are all evident.

Text used:

- "The Fairy" from "Queen Mab" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

- "Ringing" on Hello Poetry by Hinata

Who is George Crumb?

George Crumb is an American composer of the avant-garde and modern classical genres. Born on October 24th 1929, in Charleston, West Virginia most of his early life is a blip in a biography as readers focus more on his academic accolades and compositions.

Crumb studied at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan in 1947 and majored in Music at the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts, later the University of Charleston (West Virginia) where he graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1950. Not yet satisfied he graduated with a Masters in Music from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1952 and then studied, albeit briefly, as a Fulbright fellow at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and then returned back to the United States to receive a D.M.A from the University of Michigan in 1959. Given his academic success it came as no surprise that Crumb earned his living primarily from teaching. First as a teacher at a college in Virginia, then as a professor of piano and composition at the University of Colorado and then in 1965 he began a long relationship with the University of Pennsylvania. Although he retired from teaching in 1997 he has still continued to compose with his latest full composition being published in 2012 and revisions to earlier works being published into 2013. [George Crumb]

He has been a recipient of a number of prestigious awards such as the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Music and a 2000 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition. The Edward MacDowell Medal, an award which is given annually since 1960 to one person who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture and the arts, was awarded to him in 1995.

Diving into his compositional style George Crumb was initially influenced by Anton Webern and explored usual timbres (also known as tone color or quality.) Much of what makes his work unique is that he calls for instruments to be played in usual ways, utilizing extended techniques. Crumb himself describes music as "a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulse." [Wikipedia] He filled a niche for more sophisticated, though still conservative, concertgoers as listeners and musicologists alike described his body work in the 1960's and 1970's as toeing the line between neoclassicalism which was perceived as outmoded and avant-garde which was more radical. Also during this period of composition Crumb like many other young composers shared the desire to reach out to alienated audiences. " In works like Ancient Voices of Children (1970), Crumb employed theatrical ritual, using evocative masks, costumes, and sonorities. In other pieces he asks players to leave and enter the stage during the piece, and has also used unusual layouts of musical notation in a number of his scores. In several pieces, the music is symbolically laid out in a circular or spiral fashion." [Wikipedia] This is seen, for example, in his work Makrokosmos.

Makrokosmos:

"Crumb's most ambitious work, and among his more famous, is the 24-piece collection Makrokosmos, published in four books. The first two books (1972, 1973), for solo piano, make extensive use of string piano techniques and require amplification, as dynamics range from pppp to ffff; the third, known as Music for a Summer Evening (1974), is for two pianos and percussion; the fourth, Celestial Mechanics (1979), is for piano four-hands. The title Makrokosmos alludes to Mikrokosmos, the six books of piano pieces by Béla Bartók; like Bartók's work, Makrokosmos is a series of short character pieces. Apart from Bartók, Claude Debussy is another composer Crumb acknowledged as an influence here; Debussy's Preludes consist of 2 books of 12 character pieces, whose titles appear at the end. Crumb's first two books of Makrokosmos for solo piano contain 12 pieces, each bearing a dedication (a friend's initials, however he also wittily dedicates a piece to himself) at the end. On several occasions the pianist is required to sing, shout, whistle, whisper, and moan, as well as play the instrument conventionally and unconventionally. Makrokosmos was premiered by David Burge, who later recorded the work." [Wikipedia] Below I have included a short presentation regarding the two works in Makrokosmos that Crumb dedicated to Scorpios.