Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 2

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 123: Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 2

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

In this week’s episode, we talk to Ursula Kwong-Brown about balancing acoustic and electronic elements in her music, her compositional process, and where she finds inspiration. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Ursula Kwong-Brown, check her out here: https://www.ursulakwongbrown.com/. This episode was originally recorded in February 2024.

This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano),  as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/15652943

Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Hannah Chen, Addy Geenen, Yoyo Hung-Yu Lin

Curious to hear music by Luna Composition Lab alums? Check out E4TT's annual concert of music by women and non-binary composers, "Midnight Serenades," on January 25.

Chapters

• 0:34 In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in February 2024.
• 0:42 How do you balance acoustics and electronics in your music? Before you begin a project, do you decide whether you want your piece to be more oriented along the lines of a traditional concert piece, or with electronics, or online only, or does that...
• 5:40 So when you're looking at the blank page of paper, and you're writing either for your own desire, or a commissioner has said, do what you prefer, do you just start imagining the sound you want, and then the sound comes to you, and then you realize, oh...
• 7:52 Do you have synesthesia?
• 8:22 For our listeners who might not know, some of the terms you use, could you tell people what the spectralist movement is?
• 10:11 For those who aren't as electronically trained, you want to just briefly, Logic and Ableton, right?

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble For These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in February 2024. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

Nanette McGuinness  00:30
How do you balance acoustics and electronics in your music? Before you begin a project, do you decide whether you want your piece to be more oriented along the lines of a traditional concert piece, or with electronics, or online only, or does that evolve as you're working?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  00:48
You know, this is something I've been struggling to deal with ever since I started working with electronics in college. I was at Columbia University where I studied with Tristan Murail, who was one of the founders of the spectralist movement. And so, I was sort of lucky, I got to spend a lot of time at the Columbia Computer Music Center working with a lot of people doing sort of cutting edge stuff with electronics. And I had composed like I'd said, on paper since I was about six years old. So I'm like, you know, at this point, I'm like, whatever, 20 years old, I spent, I spent like more than half my life writing music, for instruments. And incorporating electronics, just like hurt my brain for the longest time, I could not figure out how to conceptualize it, how to write it down, how to notate it. And it's been an ongoing process, like these days, I would say I compose sometimes out of order, like I'll play things into Logic, like a digital audio workstation. And then I'll take it back into Sibelius. And I'll do that. And then sometimes I'll take it back into Logic and play again. And it's, it's all sort of a mishmash of however I, however each project wants to go. One thing that's great working with my husband is that he's like very good with electronics. And so he's always encouraging me to like, start with what you want to hear and figure out how you want to do it later. Because often there are many ways to do something. And so did not worry about that in the beginning is very liberating to start with like, okay, I want this viola to have this like, amazing decay. And like, this reverb and like this, you know, and there's different ways to do it. Like this piece, Reflections on Rothko, for viola and electronics that's been done a lot using something called mainstage in Logic. Like last week, we just built a patch to do it in Ableton for a violinist in Chicago who performs with that, and it never even occurred to me, you could do it that way. But you know, people come asking for things and you realize that, yeah, it's perfectly possible to do it that way. And someone else actually did it with hardware, like on a mixer, like no software at all. And that was something that was totally new to me is, is doing it all on hardware. So I guess with each project, it's different, you know, you just sort of try to think of the sound world that you're going for, and then notate it as clearly as you can. And one thing about electronics is that as the programs develop, there's always going to be new solutions to how to do things. And so you basically just have to be clear as you can with the intentions, and then be open to different ways for people to, to problem solve that, you know.

Nanette McGuinness  03:41
Sure. Yeah, it sounds like your compositional process, if I understood correctly, that it's mostly, you're working with electro acoustic at this point and that you're imagining the sound world you want. That you're not doing a lot of straight acoustic stuff.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  03:58
I am doing a lot of straight acoustic stuff too. So I just wrote this like 25 minute Requiem, that's for you know, choir and piano. And it's, I wrote actually a version, it started out as a version for like synth and solo voice with me like just recording myself like ten times over and layers. And as I did this, I was like, this is actually a choral piece, you know, having sung in choirs like my whole life, I guess I have an affinity for choir music. But no, I guess so that's, so that I mean, there are some things that you can do on like a synth, a great grand synth sound that you can't do on a piano, right? Like it doesn't sustain forever, for instance.

Nanette McGuinness  04:46
Right, right.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  04:49
But, but I mean I also love things that are purely acoustic because as I, you know, I grew up playing chamber music, going to chamber music camp, going to Interlochen, and I love being able to just like sit down with some musicians and make music and not have to worry about like, whether the you know, the speakers are going to work or whether you know, or starting and stopping the iPhone with the measure number, you know, like, it's such a headache, like, there are times, then having things purely acoustic is just the best. And I as a musician, definitely appreciate that.

Nanette McGuinness  05:28
So when you're looking at the blank page of paper, and you're writing either for your own desire, or a commissioner has said, do what you prefer, do you just start imagining the sound you want, and then the sound comes to you, and then you realize, oh, this is going to be an acoustic piece? Or, oh, I want electronics? Or does it just evolve as the sound world evolves?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  05:52
I would say that I have different sources of inspiration. And some of them just call to me, oh, that's electronic. And some of them don't. Like yesterday, I was on a plane coming back from Portland, Oregon. And I saw Mount Shasta coming up through the clouds, it was beautiful. And I was like, oh my god, I have this idea. And so I pulled out my iPad, I did, I took a picture through the window, I pulled out my iPad, I was like writing these like descending lines. And I totally thought it had to be electronic. Like there's something about like the light and the shadow and the alternating. And I just heard it as like electronic sort of descending clouds of sound. But, for instance, I was working on an idea for for this upcoming commission for you guys. And it was a piano idea that was sort of echoing itself. And it sort of was inspired by, by sort of like a delay line and electronics, but it was acoustic. And I was just really hearing it as like an actual pianist echoing and sort of imitating sort of the sound of electronics sort of like Steve Reich does, you know, with his some of his piano music that sort of plays on the idea of electronics, but are totally acoustic. I don't know, I guess it just depends fully on each piece is different, you know.

Nanette McGuinness  07:08
Actually, that clarified it for me a lot. Something gives you an idea and you hear it, and what you're hearing tells you where you want to go. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:20
It's just sort of like some colors might feel like they have like sparkly silver in them in some colors, I guess I think a lot with color when I compose. And some of them don't, right? Some of them don't have any sparkle. And you're like, okay, that's not, you know, this is just like a burnt, like orange color that there's no silver in that one. Okay, like, it's just a different color.

Nanette McGuinness  07:39
That makes sense. Do you have synesthesia?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:42
I suppose I do. I mean, if you look at my folders, like it's funny, I because I, you have so many ideas that come to you, and you know how to organize them, right. And so I have them by color often, like like red and blue and yellow. So I'll have like blue 11 or something. But I'll know at least what the sound world is from the color.

Nanette McGuinness  08:06
That's fascinating. Thank you for going into it in more depth on that. For our listeners who might not know, some of the terms you use, could you tell people what the spectralist movement is?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  08:17
Oh yeah, so, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey were these French composers who made, sort of spectrograms, like they took recordings, audio recordings, and they looked at them with like frequency and the sort of the Y-axis and like the X-axis. And you could see if you analyze, like say, a bell, the the overtones that it made, and you could compose something based on those complex overtones. And you could, it would be different for like a piano, which has a very flattened spectrum, versus like a clarinet, which has like a lot of even partials, versus an oboe, which is like, or human voice which has a very strong format in a certain range. And so they compose music, sort of like, loosely inspired by this stuff. And for me, it was especially useful because I was analyzing these frog songs. And I was able to pull them in and be like, hey, Tristan, like, can you look at my frog song and be like, this is weird, right? Like they're singing these perfect fourths, like, have you ever seen this? And he's like, no, it's pretty strange for an animal to sing a harmonic interval, like two simultaneous pitches, not, not melodic, right, which is more normal. So that's, that's spectralism. You know, they would do things like, he had a little keyboard that he would detune to quarter tones and place little rocks on it so that he could have these various, you know, precise chords with these very precise harmonics that were flat or sharp. That was the world that he came from, yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  09:59
For those who aren't as electronically trained, you want to just briefly, Logic and Ableton, right?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  10:07
So, so Logic is a digital audio workstation. And it's, you know, the traditional like, time runs on the X-axis. And, you know, you have a bunch of different tracks, and you can record like vocals or drums or whatever you want, right in layers. Ableton is sort of a mind warp if you're used to thinking that way because it runs in loops. So you'll have like a column and each, each column will be like a different instrument, different voice, and within it is a loop. And you can, you can like run a show that way. So like each scene or part of a song will be like a row of loops. Or in the case of my viola piece, it'll be like a set of processing. So like, in this row, you'll have a ton of reverb. In the next row, like no reverb, but like three kinds of delays, because I have a pizzicato section and I want there to be like, lots and lots of echoes, but not so much reverb. And then in the next scene, it all cut out and it's back to reverb again, you know, so it's a way of organizing time and processing.

Nanette McGuinness  11:15
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Ursula Kwong-Brown, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area or to make a tax deductible donation, please visit us at www.e4tt.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble For These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]