Have you ever heard a laptop orchestra? However advanced your tastes, chances are this hasn’t yet formed part of your musical experience-bank.
On Friday 23rd November, you’ll get your chance with the much-anticipated debut performance of OxLORK, the university laptop ensemble for which Dan Jeffries, Nigel McBride and Nick DiBeradino have succeeded in persuading the Music Faculty to support. This is an “orchestra” without double basses, or horns, or Chinese gongs, or piccolos. In a visually restrained performance, you’ll see some of the Music Faculty’s composition students – and some others who are principally musicologists – behind glowing apple-screens, typing, dragging with the mouse, occasionally laughing at a hidden joke. From the audience perspective, electronic and rather ambient sounds will wash through the room, but it’s hard to tell who is doing what to create these sounds. As a member of this ensemble, I’ll provide a glimpse of what’s on our screens.
Laptop orchestras have become a growing phenomenon, especially within the context of university music; it’s a heavily funded project at the cutting edges of custom music technology and avant-garde academic composition. Not surprisingly, it’s technology-based, with the distinctive feature being pricey speakers specifically designed for this purpose – their six-faced design renders them capable of diffusing sound in many directions. The “orchestra” doesn’t actually play together at the moment but as three groups of six (we have only six speakers, since they are so expensive). One performer controls each speaker – hence the idea that it is played like an instrument, flexibly, and in real-time.
Throughout the performance, we’ll be sending each other messages, some of which are the cause of the laughter. Most of them will be concerned with matching our tempi or tone, but I won’t promise that our thoughts aren’t sometimes wandering. Pretty much anything could happen on the night, and the three sextets may develop distinct sounds as rehearsal practices diverge. As a medium, the laptop orchestra is so new that it could still take off in many possible directions, yet already not so new that it doesn’t already have recognised practices. In some ways, it’s really quite retro, just sitting round fiddling with grooves.
About this project I have been by turns enthusiastic and cynical, but I can honestly say that as rehearsal progresses, the sounds coming out of the speakers have become vastly more interesting each week. Do expect informality and weird sci-fi sounds, jumpy bass and sparkling high tones like an ill-advised night-time stroll in fairy-tale woods. Don’t expect a prompt start.
