Jeff Stadelman

Interval Signals: An Interview with Jeff Stadelman

Jeff Stadelman grew up in the rural northeastern part of Wisconsin. He earned music degrees from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and Harvard University; and taught music composition and contemporary music for 23 years at the University at Buffalo.

Amidst a career of composing mainly for traditional orchestral instruments, Jeff recently began re-exploring analog and digital synthesis, favoring the compositional limitations of small hardware devices like the Elektron Digitakt over the modern practices of laptop-based production. In June, Infrasonic Press will release Signaling, Jeff’s first album of entirely electronic, beat-oriented music.

We sat down with Jeff to discuss the new record and his compositional strategies for the project.  The interview covers radio beacons, “horizontal collage”, outsmarting Elektron groove-boxes, Don Voegeli, and the expressivity of J Dilla’s snares.

IFSP: What does the title “Signaling” refer to?  It seems like radio communication is an important theme on the record.

JS: I don’t want to limit the listener’s experience of this music, so I won’t list all the examples and resonances that come to mind. But an important connection with “signaling” is the idea of the beacon. I have thought a fair bit about shortwave radio beacons, that are called “interval signals”: these encapsulate my appreciation of the function and expressive possibilities of not just different beacons’ distinct signaling, but also the sheer fact of their existence and how they signify.

What is it about how radio beacons exist or signify that intrigues you?

If we first expand it out to of all kinds of beacons: physical ones like buoys and lighthouses and certain highway signage, to radio beacons of various types, to broadcast radio and television prompts and audio/visual symbols used to separate segments of production… These beacons are mechanical, they are repetitive, they are lonely minimalists, they look for attention, their message is short, they are often Cassandras warning of dangers, they ignore others, they break down, their aesthetic is basically practical, they probably don’t reflect much on their situation with their one-track minds, but then who knows?

Is this modeling on beacons a more recent idea in your work?  You’ve spent most of your career writing for traditional orchestral instruments: what led you to suddenly switch from that world to focusing almost exclusively on electronic music?

If I think back, it could be the progression went something like this: I’d been interested in serial music structuring since maybe 1980 or so. That whole process led me around 2005 to digging into pure canons, and developing software tools to “mine” for them in various settings. The canons were, by their nature, often potentially repetitive loops, and I realized they had similarities to all sorts of musical things in my experience: puzzle canons, hip hop beats, Schoenberg ostinatos, Morse code, music boxes, broken records, Steve Reich, game arcades, birdsong and animal behavior generally, Donatoni, telephone answering system loops, shortwave interval signals, and much more. Since everything I do musically sits embedded within a sort of fog of aesthetic considerations and calculations thrown up by my brain, I couldn’t help realize that loops themselves might be important.

I think the key to the questions regarding my shifting styles, and tools, and compositional intent is again the idea of the beacon. In some sense this music is quite different in every possible way from, say, my string quartets.*  But it’s also possible to look at what might be in common. The process of composing feels quite similar in the sense that I try to listen down into the material in front of me and determine what opportunities exist for building out beauty. What often happens in whatever music I’m writing is the feeling that I’ve observed and perhaps projected a compositional space that has landmarks and some orienting features, but also a lot of open space and perhaps unresolved obstacles.

*Note: check out Jeff’s Three String Quartets (2016) on Navona Records (NV6048)

What sorts of landmarks or orienting features populate your “space”?

One with Signaling would be the geometric purity of material, such as triangle wave audio oscillators and pure sine-wave low frequency oscillation vs. dirty low-fi sampled or processed material.

Another would be the intonation wobbles that arise from things like oscillator drift and vibrato vs. systematic, rigorous intonation adjustments such as division of the octave into 19 parts instead of the usual 12.

Then there’s the splitting of timbre—say something that sounds similar to a bass clarinet—from a cohesive, integrated whole sound (a pitch with a complex sound color) into a multi-pronged chord (often a chord of several pitches, each with a simpler sound color).

Another orienting feature, of a more general nature, is concern with communication, and the question of whether some musical material seems to be talking to an audience, or more is just being itself—a sonic object. I’m fascinated by the idea that many loops of cynical pop music generate a false illusion of communication (and a rather sad one, if you think about it); while much “indecipherable” complex contemporary classical music generates for many a false illusion of communication failure. Obviously this view has innumerable facets, shades, and subjectivities, and could easily shade into obnoxious elitism and worse. That’s not what I mean. I mean there are sonic forces out there in the world that have the same freedom-enhancing and freedom-killing tendencies that everything else in our capitalist framework has. I definitely try to be cognizant of that.

Do you specifically try to make your music “freedom-enhancing” or is it more about exploring the continua between communication and its failure or freedom and its suppression?

The latter I think. In this project I definitely was focused first on making estimable little loops—trying to do that, I mean. And then on finding ways to collage them—string them together using a slightly expanded sense of the playlist. In a modest way the strange juxtapositions and atypical repurposing of sonic material picked at the Goodwill store, so to speak, seem to me somewhat “freeing”, although this is far from being radical music. I wouldn’t mind if the album freed some young musician by showing that powerful groove-boxes and drum machines can easily be used to make music other than EDM and hip hop, etc. Having taught music a good portion of my life, I feel like teaching isn’t just about facilitating craft and artistic development, but also helping sort through one’s powerful options—since options tend to be equated with freedom under capitalism, but falsely so.

Speaking of expanding options, most of your acoustic music isn’t based around regular metric grids, at least not in the way the music on Signaling is. What attracted you to beat-based electronic music specifically, and what about its limitations do you find exciting or difficult?

The tools I’m using—the groove-boxes and drum machine/samplers—prefer to keep things on a strict rhythmic grid; they prefer 4/4 time; they don’t like gradually increasing or decreasing tempos; they have a hard time with systematized microtonality; they prefer—but don’t completely insist upon—64-step sequences; they require every attack to be programmed in; they are limited as to how their timbres can evolve over time.

A certain amount of compositional energy comes from my trying to outsmart these limitations in a concrete way—that is, for instance, finding hacks for allowing microtonality using a computer to massage data coming out of a MIDI keyboard—and also in a more passive way, namely, by turning limitations like the 64-step limit, or the inability to do a ritardando, into a virtue.

Probably the top four things that attract me to this world are:

1. really loving the sheer sounds of classical synthesis (Moog, Yamaha FM, etc.)
2. the fact that these machines are of right now—this hardware is being made today in a sort of renaissance of synthesis/sampling devices—by young people and at a mass scale
3. the loops they favor are ripe for development and critical mangling; and
4. there is much space to do no. 3 because everyone is too busy making pop-oriented fire beats. 😆

The idea of trying to outsmart or adapt these devices seems like a lot of extra effort on your part—but you always seem to write so quickly! Can you tell me about that process, and how you divide your time between the composition and production aspects?

My process is actually quite similar to what I do when writing my dots-on-paper music for acoustic instruments. I sketch for weeks and months without really making anything and, in the process, fill my studio and head, so to speak, with tools specially made—mostly that I won’t use! These sketches for Signaling etc. generally aren’t using standard musical notation. The tools might be harmonic ideas, or software I’ve written to mine for beautiful counterpoints, or instrumental combinations and timbral notions. Or, with respect to this project, the tool-building process entails trying to refine what people nowadays call a “workflow.” I can’t just write quickly: I have to construct the possibility for doing that. If I have, say, six synthesizers and groove-boxes, various interfaces and converters, a computer with 10 different possible digital audio programs, and a drawer full of audio and USB cables, that’s a lot of thinking, routing, mapping, rewiring, MIDI-massaging, Max-patching, etc. It’s like I sketch with wires instead of pencil. A few months ago it was getting positively silly, the way each day I would wake up with a new idea for how I was going to circumvent the tuning limitations of some groove-boxes, while hanging onto their desired features: namely, their very detailed and powerful per-step sequencing and modulating capabilities. I created a few little chorales and waltzes [or corals, I’m calling them now] but the whole thing was exhausting. But it is true that if I create the right tools, and the stars line up, I can write a lot of music very quickly.

It sounds like your compositional process is one of exploration and discovery.

Very much so. I’d say that the Signaling album veers quite far to the conceptual side of my interests. I feel like I frame the music in my mind the same for all my work, and I have a lot of respect for really great conceptual art. Some of John Cage’s music for example. Or Alvin Lucier’s. Good old Charles Ives is a pretty conceptual composer, often. And in the visual arts it’s practically limitless: Magritte and Sol LeWitt, to name two very different artists. I say this to contrast with my acoustic instrumental works, which deal with themes, development, harmony, and especially form in a more usually “classical” way (as in classical music of the past). These acoustic instrumental works are “not very” conceptual, in my opinion.

What strikes me though is that some of the best conceptual music, for example Cage’s Freeman Etudes, flips over into being some of the best non-conceptual music, in my mind. And at the same time some of the best non-conceptual music, say J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue flips over into being some the world’s best conceptual music, again in my mind.

That’s kind of how I see the relation between these two practices: my composing is always in motion and I am hopeful that the simplicity and limitations of Signaling will not only be beautiful now, but will invert into a kind “horizontal” musical power in future work. And likewise that some of my more extended classical work will snap shut, into a kind of “vertical,” strongly conceptual musical statement.

Can you explain what you mean by “horizontal” and “vertical”?

I use those very visual and physical categories as a sort of shorthand for artistic experiences that have to develop over stretches of time (horizontal), as opposed to happening in just a moment or two (vertical). Sound color, chords, short melodic riffs, room ambience, registering that something is a polka-hip hop hybrid, the concept of a piece that is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, for example—these are all vertical. Thematic development over time, canons, how a playlist proceeds, harmonic progression, sound-color morphing—these are horizontal, for example.

I was probably thinking about this even back in 1992, when I wrote Rus in Urbe (Country in the City), which jams dozens of “horizontal” solos, duos, trios into a “vertical” city-grid of 10-second-long units. A phrase that comes to mind for both this piece, and Signaling, is “horizontal collage.”

Speaking of the country, you grew up out in rural Wisconsin: was being near WHA (Wisconsin Public Radio) important to you?

My parents were big WPR consumers during the ’70s, so I certainly grew up hearing composer Don Voegeli’s synth bits on public radio, daily. I’d completely forgotten about Voegeli [pronounced vaguely] until I started drilling into the micro-genres of radio broadcasting like intros, outros, bumpers, dividers, “buttons,” etc. He’s most well known for writing NPR’s All Things Considered theme. He’d been at WHA at the University of Wisconsin Madison for years when I started studying there in 1979. I don’t think I ever met Voegeli but he was spoken of in my first electronic music class with Don Harris, and I believe the big Moog modular rig I learned on was originally over in his studio.

Long story short, Voegeli’s collections of musical-functional radio materials—which one can still find a little bit on YouTube and for sale on Discogs at high prices—might have been an unconscious source for some of my tendencies and tastes.

It’s interesting to think of public radio bumpers being important landmarks, I can definitely hear some of that.  And then there are other moments—like the second section of “First Norn“—which sound almost like the opening to a ’90s VHS training video.

Voegeli’s loops scream institutional training Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”) to me, ha ha.

The use of musical “junk” is part of what I think of as being “conceptual”.

There are moments on the record, like the opening of “Hello is Jerry There?” or the middle of “White Potato“, which would not sound out of place on a Madlib or J Dilla record. Some might say that instrumental hip hop is about as far away as one can get from, say, 20th century chamber music, but there’s a strangely intuitive connection from, for instance, the quirkily groovy pointillism of your trumpet/piano piece Mr. Natural* to the odd synthy syncopations in “White Potato”.  Likewise, there are sequences on Signaling in which the listener is taken seamlessly from something akin to “Trans-Europe Express” to something more like “Planet Rock”, as if you’re tracing connections (tuning signals?) through different geographies, time periods, and practices in the history of electronic music.

*Note:  Mr. Natural can be heard on Pity Paid (Centaur Records, CRC 2934)

I’m glad you hear it that way. Now that you mention it, my instrumental music certainly is full of odd rhythm displacements. Long ago I’d refer to all the sub-metric accenting and de-accenting I was doing as “micro-syncopations.” And on these various groove-boxes there is generally a dedicated function to allow nudging things forward and backward. The instrumental loops of J Dilla are the ones I’ve spent significant time with, and I love their vibe and impressive perfection, out of utterly “flawed” materials. James Yancey, JD, was a master of those micro-rhythmic placements. And the way the drums are violently filtered, chopped, distorted is very expressive and seemingly of a piece with their milieu. I find this very moving and, again, impressive, in the sense that a burst of white noise 1/3 of a second long—a sampled and processed snare—can contain so much expressivity and cultural information!

Your observation about my perhaps using the familiar framework of shortwave radio tuning to drop in on and, in a way, collage various musics from different times and places is probably right, and a kind of unconscious move on my part. What feels more consciously chosen is, in the midst of improvising on the instruments, with their many many changeable parameters, little compositions would crystallize layer by layer, determined to a large extent by what sound-design choices and constructions I’d set up that day.

Something that emerges for me too, speaking of “tracing connections,” is that it seemed I was building up a kind of songbook of short tunes, or what I think of as “essences.” And regarding them as possibly useful for future work, in a way that some favorite composers like Ives, Mahler, and Allen Pettersson did.

Could these “essences” be performed separately?

Yes. That’s another thing: each was made to be mostly performable on one box—for example the Elektron Digitakt. I was thinking I might be able to play a set at a coffee shop or bar. Most of the loops are made up of either 4 or 8 tracks, and for this album I did not pull out stems and mix it on computer, but rather they’re all mixed “in box,” using the hardware only. Very little processing was added after the fact. I did create the album’s continuity on the computer using Pro Tools, “pasting up” the 100 or so stereo files that make up all the loops and samples, using lots of careful, but ultimately pretty simple, crossfades.

So yes there is a lot of “tuning signals,” of various kinds. Another “tuning” is all the attention paid to the ways one piece can follow another on the radio: fade out/fade in; fade out/full-volume entrance overlap; full ending/full start; identical-tempo crossfades; and more. There’s a lot you can do, and this is part of what I was calling “horizontal collage,” but it’s also a kind of stripped down amalgam of the many ways songs can follow one another in radio broadcasting. I don’t know why, but I paid attention to this even when a little kid in the ’60s; and a bit later I recall registering how expressive the long silences between statements of Radio Havana’s interval signal were. That all definitely works its way into Signaling.

In addition to that kind of expressivity, is there anything else you hope listeners find in the record?

I hope the listener finds stretches of this music actually funny—perhaps in ways that are strange, droll, dorky, or mysteriously interbred.

Signaling is now available for pre-order. The album will be available exclusively on Bandcamp June 15, and streaming everywhere on June 29.