Meeting with the composer
This was the meeting with the first members of the residents' collective gathered around the “carillon project.”
We listened to audio testimonials and the first sounds of the carillon composed by Pavel Tchikov.
We exchanged our impressions with the help of Stéphanie Franck (Philocité's philosopher), who will accompany us throughout the project.
Discover all the sounds and details of this morning below.
Do you live in the neighborhood? Join the adventure!
Pavel Tchikov is a composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist based in Belgium.
His main band is « Ogives », an octet that combines classical language (couterpoint, tintinabuli, polyphonies, etc) with rock and electronic music. He composes, plays bass, guitar, modular synth, sings and writes some of the lyrics in the band.
In parallel he leads his solo project « Anamnesis », where he mainly plays modular synth, sometimes associated with guitar or theremin, or some acoustic intruments (gongs, tubular bells, objects), and produces a great variety of genres, from techno / idm to musique concrète.
He is also involved in various collaborations with musicians such as Farida Amadou, Phil Maggi, G.W. Sok, Tom Malmendier, Olivier Praet, thisquitarmy, ... He's a member of free improv' collective « l'Œil Kollectif ».
In his spare time he runs a studio and label called « la rouille » or builds some sound installations, audio gear and makes album covers in metal.
LISTEN to the bells
Understanding composition choices
One of the main ideas behind the project, beyond its participatory nature, is to rethink the carillon, the bell, and the language of bells. The goal is to move away from any Christian connotations by working on a range that would allow us to distance ourselves from them. The first idea was to mix different scales, particularly by playing with major or minor intervals (to caricature, certain combinations of intervals offer more European colors, others more African, and still others reminiscent of Asia, etc.) * or by adjusting the temperament : a process of tuning (or accordage) of fixed-pitch instruments in response to the impossibility of tuning them solely with pure intervals, which is illustrated in Indian microtonalities, for example. But with Pavel, we realized that we were merely postponing the problem. Indeed, why favor one culture over another?
Reflecting on these stories of scales, temperaments, their links to cultures, historicity, and the desire not to emphasize aspects that are too specific to particular cultures, histories, or communities, the idea emerged to come up with something that had no history, no real roots, no tradition. Something new. So Pavel suggested working with the Bohlen-Pierce scale. Developed by mathematicians in the 1970s and 1980s, this scale is not based on the octave, but on a larger interval: the tritone (octave + a fifth). This tritone is divided into 13 intervals, and most modes have 9 notes. The scale is difficult to access because it breaks all our sound habits. Pavel had been studying this scale for some time, but until then he had never been satisfied with his results. He synthesized the sound of bells and applied the new scale to a computer model. And the magic happened—it sounded right! No doubt because a bell, by its very nature, is always a little dissonant. What's more, the question of major and minor was no longer an issue... And, incidentally, the carillon will be the first Bohlen-Pierce carillon in the world.
@ Massimo Stampone
The next step was to work on the range in order to find a balance between the budget, the notes, and the musical color. First, he determined a range of eight notes with the following frequencies: A3 +4, C4 +2, C#4 +9, C5 -3, G5 +2, G#5 +10, C#6 just, B6 +4. These intervals and the number of notes will be readjusted as the composition progresses. Pavel will compose according to the moments of ringing chosen by the participants.
Rhythmically, the direction taken is to work with Euclidean rhythms: a mathematical algorithm devised by Euclid in 300 BC. It is used to distribute notes or beats as evenly as possible within a measure, and generates almost all of the most important rhythms in world music.** This allows the rhythmic structure of the compositions to be approached “without favoritism” while echoing the cultural diversity present on the COBRALO stage.
* The idea of playing on the major or minor third is not new, to say the least. I will let you discover this through this story about chimes and the major or minor third: "The oldest metal bells that have been preserved date back to the Shang dynasty, which ruled China from around 1600 to 1604 BC. (...) During the Zhou dynasty (from around 1046 to 256 BC), sets of tuned bells called bianzhong were among the precious possessions of high-ranking individuals. When Marquis Yi of Zeng died in 433 BC, he took with him to the afterlife the bodies of 21 young women, an arsenal of bronze weapons, tableware, and refined harness fittings, as well as a set of 65 bianzhong bells. A few years after archaeologists unearthed his tomb in 1977, it was discovered that the bells could be played like a carillon. Each of them, called a zhong, is oval rather than circular in cross-section and produces two distinct notes, usually a major third or a minor third separately, depending on where it is struck.
Source: “A Natural History of Sounds: Notes on the Audible,” Capar Henderson: pp. 271-272
** "Euclid's algorithm calculates the greatest common divisor of two given integers. It is demonstrated here that the structure of Euclid's algorithm can be used to generate, in a very efficient manner, a large family of rhythms used as timelines (ostinatos), particularly in sub-Saharan African music and world music in general. These rhythms, referred to here as Euclidean rhythms, have the property that their attack patterns are distributed as evenly as possible. For example, the “Euclidean rhythm E(3, 8) illustrated in the figure below (where, using the E major scale, the measure is divided into 8 equal parts with 3 ”interventions") is one of the most famous rhythms on the planet. In Cuba, it is known as tresillo, and in the United States, it is often called the Habanera rhythm, used in hundreds of rockabilly songs in the 1950s. It is often heard in early rock-and-roll hits in the left-hand patterns on the piano, or played on the double bass or saxophone. A good example is the bass rhythm in Elvis Presley's Hound Dog. The tresillo pattern is also widespread in traditional West African music. For example, it is played on the atoke bell in the Sohu, an Ewe dance from Ghana.
Source: “The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms,” Godfried Toussaint_School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal.
