Paul Dolden Interview

BEHIND THE VEILS OF TEXT: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL DOLDEN.
BY JEREMY TURNER

Paul Dolden is both famous and infamous (sometimes simultaneously) for heavily multi-tracked compositions of an epic length that seem to go perceptually well beyond the conventions of what currently passes for the all-too “human” standards of technical performance and classical aesthetic taste.

Although Dolden has been working full time for the last 25 years on these rather intense and intricate compositions, there remains confusion about how to pigeon-hole his work.

This is partly due to his unique approach to working with digital media. Unlike generic Electronica music where most of the performances are automated and/or the orchestration has been sampled from found sound(s), Dolden composes everything from the bottom up in his own studio and notates every single performance detail.

Playing all types of string instruments himself (including electric guitar), he also hires singers and other instrumentalists in the same manner as those commercial recording studios that collaborate on an album or TV show together.

In spite of this confusion around his work, Dolden has won over 20 international awards and so has managed to convince many people that his extroverted compositions have historical legitimacy within the New Music canon.

Although he has written works for live performers and tape (from every type of soloist, duo, trio to full orchestra and tape) there remains more than a passing reference to popular culture throughout his compositional output.

However, to say that his music is merely a pastiche of "new music" and pop music is inaccurate as his constantly mutating musical portfolio includes hyper-accelerated rhythms, the creation of otherworldly world-music chimeras, Jazz fission/fusion accidents and challenging clusters of a rather post-human microtonal density using “excessive” layers of 500 + simultaneous tracks.

His earlier album (“The Threshold of Deafening Silence”, 1986-1990) almost has an Industrial tolerance for perceptual (and perpetual) “loudness”. The more squeamish members of the recital hall usually found his earlier artistic expression to be overwhelmingly abrasive, confrontational and alien.

I conversed with Paul, via e-mail, about the role of technology, philosophy, aesthetics and culture in his music.

PAUL: Ninety-Eight percent of the music people hear is heard through loudspeakers without the aid of live performers, yet music continues to identify itself as a performing art. Classical music remains almost hostile towards technology. Its practitioners think it will put them out of work and/or ruin their “authentic” acoustic concert hall sound. Yet DJs, rock, and jazz musicians have proven that the medium can be used to create interest in your live performances and to expand the technical possibilities of musical instruments. They understand and manipulate the recorded medium in order to get their point across. Note that these are the most popular music(s).

The most important musical revolution of the twentieth-century was not serialism, minimalism, or new complexity, but the introduction(s) of technology into every form of music making and consumption. Technology has completely changed the social and economic situation of the musician.

My own work springs from a desire to make recordings that are more than postcards from the concert hall. I am interested in using technology to create music we cannot perform live and that we can barely imagine when performance is the criterion for diffusion.

I want to create recordings that are inexhaustible for the listener. The density, the number of musical and audio parameters that are being constantly adjusted, allow for hearing the recording repeatedly, and with each listening new musical relationships emerge.

The published audio work—the recording—becomes the final artistic statement. The recording becomes the art object rather than being simply a memory of a performance or an advertisement for a band. In this sense, it is the recording as an art object that now contains the “authentic” experience.

One significant advantage to creatively transforming the recording process from performance-document to a stand-alone artwork is that it allows instrumental events to co-exist in a way that could not be possible in the “real” world. If we also appreciate the recording itself as a discrete art form worth our aesthetic attention, we could learn to reawaken our hearing and musical sensibility and be able to transcend our stereotypes as to what constitutes a “live” experience.

For example, one soft flute part played romantically could become (through mixing in a recording studio) louder in the mix than 40 microtonal screaming trumpets played in a free jazz style. This is very simple to do and it is only the beginning. The reason to produce recordings which have the widest possible orchestration is because such a possibility exists for the first time and we are no longer confined to using the recording medium to represent one configuration of sound sources in one imaginary space.

Recordings replicating concerts typically set up an imaginary proscenium arch in which the focal point is static. The listener is presented with a number of sound sources that more or less evoke a real world performance.

The type of recordings I have been trying to produce upset the listener’s passive concert-hall relationship by constantly changing sound focus, depth, density, sound sources, music style, while maintaining a cohesive musical experience.

Open your ears and minds to the potential—it is endless because it has hardly been explored.

JEREMY: Given your advocacy of the mediating role of technology in music why do you still write works for live instruments and tape?

PAUL: I love working with musicians, and audiences want to see something when they go to a concert. Concert hall writing is a continuation of my studio practice. If I am writing for a dark sounding instrument such as bass flute, viola, or bassoon, I will produce the tape part so the live element cuts through. Therefore, one can finally hear a driving bass flute part accompanied by three heavy metal rhythm sections on tape produced for the needs of the soloist sound.

This is not an original idea and is no different than a singer whispering, "I love your post-production techniques" over thrashing guitars, bass and drums. What becomes more surreal in my mixed works is the different types of sonic/musical "worlds" and how quickly I can transform these worlds. I should also add that my live parts are generally written for the live musicians to "show off". Perhaps it is my years spent as a jazz musician but I still feel audiences like to be "wowed” by live musicians.


My mixed pieces are often disorientating for the chamber music lover because I destroy the transparency and intimacy of chamber music by using dense, large sounds. For the musicians, the works can be disturbing because they involve redefining many musical relationships.

Most groups have spent a great deal of time developing an "ensemble sound". In my mixed works, I am asking the musicians if I can join their band in the form of a tape part. They must now develop a playing strategy and relationship with this new member. On the bright side, this new member will always be in tune, on time, and will not talk back.

JEREMY: Besides density, you have a pre-occupation with polyrhythms and new tuning systems.

PAUL: My pre-occupation with these musical concerns evolved out of a search for a musical language that would accommodate several hundred simultaneous musical parts. In dense romantic music, such as Mahler's Symphony of 1,000 or Brian's Gothic Symphony, there are hundreds of performers but the music is largely four part writing with extensive doublings.

Between 1955 and 1965, there emerged 2 writing techniques in which the standard 60 piece orchestra started playing 60 different musical parts (Ligeti’s Micropolyphony and Xenakis’ stochastic music)…. However, I would argue that a sixty piece orchestra is not large enough to demonstrate stochastic behaviour, and that 400 or more parts are needed to reach musical entropy.

The possibility of highly articulated transparent micro-polyphonic music is reduced when forty of the sixty instruments are the same string timbre. By contrast almost all of my scores use simultaneously fifty to one hundred different musical instruments each of which contributes four to eight tracks. Micro-polyphonic clarity is increased when you have 50 to 100 different instrument-types each of which have a unique attack, timbre, resonant structure etc. My virtual orchestra maybe the world's largest orchestra but the arco strings are usually 16 of the 400 tracks or 4% of the total sound, rather than 60% of the sound.

After establishing my approach to orchestration, I realized that in order to have 400 unique musical lines, I needed more than 12 notes per octave. To further increase clarity, I needed blocks of sound to be moving at very distinct velocities, or the use of large primary number-based polyrhythms. At this point I realized I was producing a music that could only be created in the recording studio, one part at a time.

To answer your question about tuning systems: between 1980 and 1993, I only used unique (microtonal) tuning systems which I developed myself for each piece. From 1993-2003, I wrote in equal temperament and have now returned to writing microtonal music.

From the beginning, I rejected the idea that every note has an exact frequency. What about all the frequencies between each of our existing notes and new combinations of vibrations? In addition, I have been creating works in which a new tuning system is used every minute and sometimes I use multiple tuning systems at the same time - once again using the recording studio to create a music that could never be realized in real-time.

To this day, I am struck by dissonant contemporary music that limits itself to equal temperament. Equal temperament was developed over hundreds of years in order to modulate triadic harmonies through different keys. The dissonance this system gives is a by-product of this system, and represents less than one per cent of all possible dissonances.

Moving on to rhythmic organization, we must remember that Western musicians cannot perform polyrhythms more complicated than five against four. By contrast, I will have, say, three different parts, each playing, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen notes in the same time period, creating a perfect 17:16:15 polyrhythm.
Many score pages can include forty different tempos with each tempo driving five to twenty instruments or parts. Sometimes, bar lines between all the parts only line up every twenty seconds. This is clearly beyond the abilities of any conductor. Rhythmic accuracy is maintained in my work by using separate click tracks for each level of velocity. The result is a form of counterpoint through polyrhythms.

I should add that these “Dolden” concerns of microtonality and polyrhythms are de-emphasized on the music of my new CD Delires de Plaisirs. My musical focus on this CD is melody and modulation in equal temperament and counterpoint achieved through multiple lines at the same tempo. What a concept! Now, I understand what fun composers have been having for the last few hundreds of years.

JEREMY: Since your work revolves around the aesthetics of recording technology, to what degree do you feel it is important that you show documentation of your notational processes? Do you still feel a need to connect and communicate your ideas to a musically trained audience?

PAUL: As far as my scores go, this is merely my way of organizing my thoughts. Yes, I do write the scores before I record anything.

However, this is because it is impossible to just grab 400 tracks of sound and arrange them on 400 tracks so that they make musical sense. The scores for me are like a script—a set of directions for making the piece. Indeed, it could be argued that my sounds have so much post-production that they no longer resemble the sound descriptions found in the score.

What or who is the musically trained public you refer to in your question? People who are musically trained are working professionals. We no longer have a sub-culture of amateur musicians who form the basis of our audience. Musicians in training can study my scores. However, no one seems to know the scores exist. For what it is worth, they are at the Canadian Music Centre libraries across Canada.

JEREMY: Many of your works were and often are, still greeted with hostile reactions in the concert hall One such audience member might wonder, “are you intentionally trying to disturb people?”

PAUL: No not at all. The reactions you refer to only occur in some classical new music concert halls. It seems that some members of the new music audience lack the ability to separate out density and amplitude.
Let me explain this simple point since it seems to dog some of my performances. Performances of my works have never gone above 95 decibels which is, in fact, no louder than a large orchestra from eighty feet.

If I were to place the "Dolden orchestra" of 400 performers in one room it could get as high as 200 decibels and you would be instantly deaf. However, I produce recordings in which each person is recorded one at a time. When assembled together, I play it back at normal listening levels. Because of the density and post-production techniques, the music may seem louder than it actually is.

The ability to make a recording appear louder than the actual decibel level is the holy grail of every commercial music engineer. For example, the kick drum in popular music recordings sounds like the huge orchestral bass drum and yet somehow maintains the fast articulation of a normal kick drum. Another sonic illusion is the recordings of guitar amps that sound 20 feet tall and yet have the behaviour of a plucked mandolin. Cutting through both these sounds is the softly-whispered lead vocal line: “I love your post-production techniques.”

One has to be able to separate decibel from density before one can appreciate my creative decisions in microphone choice and placement, choice of mic pre-amp, compression style, dynamic expansion, equalization, dynamic equalization, spatialization, mixing and mastering - and, there are all the musical decisions which are actually informing these production techniques.

JEREMY: Are you involved with and/or inspired by any extra-musical media practices such as visual art?

PAUL: Visual things don't inspire me at all (I actually cannot see very well). The only thing that inspires me is music and the general great feeling of being alive and how little time we have on this planet - a feeling I have more now that I am turning 50. I think I have only started to compose and yet it will be all over for me soon.

I still want to hear so many more pieces that I cannot find in others’ work-as much as I love what they do. I want more: more melody, more rhythm, more counterpoint, more harmony, more instruments, more dynamics, more contrast, more and better sound quality, more story-telling, etc. Any “extra-musical” inspiration behind my music can be blamed on my liberal arts education.

My intellectual training at university was a wide range of history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc. I did this because I had to learn to read and write, since I already knew how to read and write music, and had been making a living as a musician since I was sixteen.

My works in the 1980s are informed by the modernists. It is about the materials themselves and there is a hierarchy where some are better or somehow superior to other materials.

However, modernist music has evolved to such desperate levels of abstraction that many scores are more interesting to read than they are to listen to. We are losing our audience because of this abstraction.

In my thirties, I discovered the post modern writings of Baudrillard and Kroker. Everything is equal, and there are no hierarchies in the postmodern world. Moreover, the post-modern "author" or composer is dead (but don’t tell a publishing rights organization). This was a revelation for me because I realized that all musical styles were equal once they are reduced to a recording. Now my musical language was liberated to include styles from heavy metal to church choirs.

Is there a composer in this post-modern world of mere surfaces and appearances? Does all music-making have to sound like those ads that bands post when looking for a new member: “Beach-Boys harmonies, with Van Halen attitude, world grooves, and Björk spirituality?”

The answer, I realized, was in my working method of excessive multi-tracking, which allowed known materials to implode from within and take on new identities beyond their worn out historical meanings. In other words, I was able to create some sort of new music by starting with materials grounded in reality and project them into new realms without any need for a new abstract musical language. The first result of this was the piece L'ivresse de la vitesse. Although I still operate musically with these beliefs, I have abandoned the post-modernism's cynicism.

What I mean is that if you really look at post-modernism it is still an extension of modernism in that it perceives individuals as alienated and isolated from each other, and this is considered a bad condition. There is always a sense of nostalgia for a time when the individual is integrated into a social fabric.

As far as I can tell, such a time never existed. I see communicative technologies as creating a form of a social life – yes, an experience of the social that is consumed in private.

By contrast, most modern composition has continued with the notion of the isolated genius composer bringing down from the mountain the tablets of musical discovery and truth to the masses gathered in the concert hall. I prefer that the consumer can listen to one of my recordings for 10 seconds or two hours at any time and any place.

Indeed, I have gotten "fan" email from people who say they only listen to my music when they are having sex, others when smoking drugs, others when driving a car
fast, etc etc. These are all types of social activity that are not allowed in the concert hall.

Secondly, I prefer that my music be part of their social reality and I am not trying to adjust it with "truths or musical discoveries". At the end of the day, I am trying to reconnect on a social plane defined by my listener and mediated by technology. The extensive multi-tracking is my humble attempt to create a full and rich social world in sound that the listener can party in. In terms of compositional materials, it is partly why I use choirs and percussion a lot. Everyone directly relates to the bodily sense of singing and hitting things. Also, I just love these sounds.

JEREMY: When I first heard the “Threshold of Deafening Silence” at a recital concert at the University of Victoria in 1993, I was overwhelmed and enchanted by the composition’s sublime gestalt—it felt like experiencing a divine deity of some sort. What is your opinion on the concept of the sublime? Do you feel that at least some of your work is trying to grasp a contemporary equivalent of the sublime?

PAUL: The sublime is very important to me. I like music or art which strikes me with a sense of grandeur or power, where I experience feelings of exaltation. As much as I admire the technical accomplishments of music post World War II, it is too ascetic and dry for me. One has to ask after a while: where is the listener in such a self-conscious anti-expressive music?

JEREMY: I can even see the more romantic Schoepenhauer-like sublimity in your work. In your new work, what is your attitude towards romanticism?

PAUL: Romantic music was a reaction to the perceived dryness of baroque music with its advanced counterpoint puzzles. Therefore, one has to take the entire romantic attitude with a large grain of salt. Romanticism in music also occurs at the same time as the “great man,” “the hero,” and the “rugged individualist” emerge in the popular imagination. Romanticism is a western movement, focused on western man.

By contrast, we are all part of a living culture that is now global and transcends time and place because recordings allow us access to all types of music from different eras. Most of my musical concerns of microtonality and polyrhythms spring from non-western music that is thousands of years old.

I dream of a music that is a "musical meltdown" of my entire collection of CDs: from the counterpoint and textural concerns of the modernist composer to the melodic and groove concerns of popular and world music. I find lots of music to explore in the area between romantic self-indulgent expression and the emotional flatness of modernism, which emphasizes the materials of a work over the individual.