Output details

Mitaki (for string quintet and electronics)

This is an example of an original composition sharing new insights into musical composition and performance in the digital age. It was commissioned from MacDonald by Cove Park as a collaborative project that would allow the Scottish Ensemble to work with live electronics for the first time and permit the researcher to work intensively with the players in the development process, in a residency at Cove Park.

Mitaki explores and extends the timbres of the string quintet using multichannel live electronic processing controlled via a MaxMSP patch developed by MacDonald that draws on objects by Dan Trueman and Peter Castine. The live processing creates multiple layers of sound with varying degrees of separation from the original material, carefully spatialised to create a ‘shoal’ of transformed instruments that fill the concert hall and shadow the ensemble. Each instrument is processed separately, and transformations include: delayed repetitions with dynamic shaping of volume, speed of repetition and spatialisation; resonant filtered delays with variable spatialisation and moving resonant frequencies; fragmentation with spatial scattering; ring modulation; up to 27 simultaneous live-recorded loops with dynamic routeing to further processing as above (loop lengths change to create constantly varying synchronisation). This patch draws on work the researcher undertook for Jonathan Harvey on the MaxMSP version of his Other Presences, and extends ideas developed in his collaborations with Catriona MacKay (see MacDonald 2 & 3).

The score includes detailed instructions for performance of the live electronic part.The researcher explains: ‘The title is the Greek name for the sharpsnout seabream (Diplodus puttazzo) – the piece plays with ideas inspired by the watching the movement of shoals of small fish and the reflected sunlight on their bodies in the clear, warm waters of the Mediterranean.’