My Compositional Approach to This

I spent some time thinking about you, the patrons, before I began the actual composing. In one of my other lives, I am myself both a patron of several orchestras (including the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and also on the Board of Directors of a professional orchestra. As such, I am familiar with both the programming and musical predispositions of musical directors, board members and patrons. I decided that the parking garage was not a suitable venue in which to try to challenge or expand those musical sensibilities or introduce you to unfamiliar musical styles or genres. The simple existence of music and art in the garage is by itself probably enough of a challenge. You can focus your cultural experiences in the Kauffman Halls themselves, where it is both appropriate and of your own volition.

A sonic amuse-bouche, or musical appetizer, for the patrons

So I composed very simple, tonal little fragments of musical atmosphere, very much like cinematic musical cues. My intent was to infuse your walk from car to hall with a little flavor, some color and possibly a tinge of dramatic intensity to the experience. I use the presence of space as a primary ingredient for musical interest, trying to make you aware of the space and your own motion through it.

Because of the size of the garage and the (comparatively slow) propagation time of sound through air, rhythms and echoes will shift in time and character as you move through space, as will the timbres of the music, due to the changing temporal relationships in space between you and the various speaker arrays. In this sense, the musical experience will be a little kaleidoscopic and endlessly variable.

Mostly I tried to let the spaciousness and natural sounds of the garage merge with the music, by creating slow, sustained phrases with ample time between them to accept and illuminate the garage sounds themselves as they occur with the music. Most of my sounds are orchestral in origin, drawn from the Vienna Symphonic Sample Library.

Classical Quodlibets

As I was composing, it also occurred to me that this was a wonderful opportunity to create some quodlibets (little pieces comprised of assembled fragments of an already known work) based on major works from the Classical literature, taking advantage of the spatial character and the unique sound formats to illuminate some of the qualities of these works. So, in the “mashup” style of so much contemporary popular dance music, I have paid homage to Beethoven (Symphony #5), Bach (Unaccompanied ‘Cello Suite #2), Mahler (Symphony #3), Tchaikovsky (Symphony #5), Holst (Venus, from The Planets) and Varese (Ionisation), creating brief sonic glimpses of their works for you to enjoy as you walk through the garage.

Honoring Kansas City’s Great Jazz History

Finally, I used this same mashup technique to honor Kansas City’s own Count Basie and some of his sidemen, especially blues singers Jimmie Rushing and Joe Williams. Basie has been a huge influence in my musical life and this was a God-given opportunity to be able to assemble something like this in his honor and memory for the Kauffman Center. I hope you enjoy them!

Spatializing the Music of Roberta Vacca and Bobby Watson

Part of the intention of this installation, from the beginning, was to make it available to other composers and visual media artists to create works for the garage. From the beginning, Italian composer Roberta Vacca was involved to create electronic music for the garage. More recently, Kansas City’s own Bobby Watson was invited to contribute several works.

Part of my work has been to take their recordings and rework them to fit in this installation, including spatializations for the unique speaker arrays and in some cases also doing mashups (with the artists’ full permission and cooperation) for additional musical interest and variety. For me, these efforts were some of the most rewarding parts of the project.

Some Final Thoughts

The Kansas City Arts District Garage that services the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts has given us, the artists involved, a great opportunity to create an utterly unique and original set of art works and possibly even a new genre of sound art. This originality stems from the combination of the very large utilitarian garage space combined with a sense of the interests and desires of this particular garage’s users – you, the patrons of the arts. The genre actually turns out to be quite natural and idiomatic. Some early observers have even suggested that the garage itself might also become a very exciting electro-acoustic concert venue, which is to me a very interesting idea! I hope this sort of installation gets adopted elsewhere. My thanks to the City of Kansas City for this wonderful opportunity.

David Moulton
halfZen
Groton, MA
September, 2011