Back in March, @glocq and I presented T-Voks, the singing and speaking theremin, in the final round of the 2022 Guthman Musical Instruments Competition, and we won 2nd prize! I waited to post about this because I wanted to show a picture with the entire team. Many thanks to our advisors Christophe D’alessandro, for initiating the research on singing musical instruments (les instruments chanteurs), and Boris Doval, for the invaluable vocal coaching in preparing for the performance, and for lending his voice in T-Voks. And of course, thanks to Grégoire, for developing the Voks vocal synthesizer and for being a dream teammate. I’m so proud of how far we’ve come since our evening hacks in 2018!
Had the opportunity to collaborate with dancer/choreographer Efi Farmaki for a performance at @mapecoo ’s Hybrid Identities art show, on the theme of nomad/expat/migrant women. Having twice immigrated in my life, first from China to America as a child, and then to France 2 years ago, the theme of Hybrid Identities resonates deeply with me. We tried to express the challenges of finding one’s way (trouver la voie et la voix !) in the journey of moving, of being lost, of finding balance with grace, and of transformation.
Putting together this piece was a transformative experience. Efi and I only met 4 times over the course of a week to rehearse. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing at first, but suddenly, during the second rehearsal, I started hearing music in my head inspired by Efi’s movements. I went home, took out the looper pedal that I haven’t touched in years and started to improvise songs. For lack of confidence, I hesitated about including theremin, but after seeing Efi’s final concept at the last rehearsal, I heard the struggles of finding a tune on the theremin as an auditory metaphor for the challenges of finding one’s way in unfamiliar lands.
Immensely grateful to Efi and @mapecoo for including me in this beautiful collaboration, to Yuliia for the connection, and to @tariq for the lovely photos/videos.
PS. If you’re in Paris this week, check out @mapecoo ’s show at Le Génie de La Bastille. There are other evening events all throughout the week.
I think I’ve been trying to play pieces that are technically too challenging for me. I’m so preoccupied with the mental load of computing the correct distances that I don’t have bandwidth left to project much emotion into what I’m playing.
So here’s a piece that is well within my reach technically, and here is trying to channel some feelings. The nice thing is that music abstracts away all the actual experiences so that one can literally wear one’s 🖤 on one’s sleeve without burdening people with the tangled details of one’s actual emotional life.
#theremin
Finally getting back to theremin practice... with a new setup!
I’m still working on the Franck, but just wanted to try an experiment today. I’ve been taking some voice lessons the past couple of months, and this is a song I learned. I wanted to see to what extent I can translate my vocal expression into the #theremin.
The piece is Lydia, by Fauré.
Again, the Franck Violin Sonata, first movement exposition. My first week working on this was about getting the melody in my ears and understanding it’s harmonic structure. Now it’s time to dive into particular theremin technique.
2 main things to work on from lesson with Lydia Kavina today:
1. Longer phrases - before I was trying to follow all the slurs in the score completely literally with my left hand articulation (which was kind of stressful). Now I’m trying to follow longer lines. I feel more relaxed, and it sounds more natural.
2. Erase unintentional glissandi between notes - it’s possible with the right coordination between the hands. It seems to be a matter of timing. I don’t yet have a good mental heuristic for what to do. I get it sometimes, but the miao miao glissandos 🙀 sneak here and there. My strategy is to work on small phrases (2-4 measures) at a time, watching Lydia’s video model as a guide. At the end of practice, I record a snapshot to see how I’m doing.
#theremin #moog #classicalmusic #violin #100daysofpractice
Another new piece since 4 days ago is the first movement of César Franck’s violin sonata. This is very challenging for me, not only for getting the notes (which are trickier in the higher registers) but to go beyond just playing the notes. I’m doing a lot of preparatory work away from the #theremin to get this music firmly in my ears.
I started with some harmonic analysis, trying to identify all the important chords and their functions. There are a lot of exotic chords and interesting transitions, but what the analysis really boils down to is identifying what is the tonic in any given region and identifying the dominant and predominant chords. To do so, I first notated all the chords in “jazz style” in the score and then made a “map” where I wrote the harmonies in classical notation. The map also helps with understanding the big arc of the whole piece. Once I figured out the important harmonies. I spent quite a while playing the melody of different sections with a simplified version of the harmony as octaves in the LH, so that I can hear the melody with its harmonic support.
Another part of studying this piece is listening to existing recordings for inspiration. I collected 10 or so in a playlist on Spotify. Spending some time every day carefully listening and noticing the expressive nuances of various artists.
Finally, there’s actually playing the theremin, which thus far has been only constituted a small percentage of my work on this piece. Here, most of attention has actually gone to my left hand, in order to delineate the different slurs and phrases. Here are a couple of ways I practiced:
1. Within a phrase, take all the notes of the phrase but remove the rhythm as written and just get the transitions between the sequence of notes. Slowly at first. When that is under control, add the original rhythm back.
2. Take lots of time between phrases, so that I can be sure that I am mindful of my movements. This is something I had transferred over from singing, to practice by taking more time for each breath so that my abs can fully reset and prepare for the next start. On the theremin, taking the extra time between phrases lets my LH relax.
I used to think that I was nothing like my mother. Somehow, I ended up retracing her footsteps by moving to another country to do research. Even beyond work, she is an amazing role model for her kindness, joy, patience, faith, and love. Happy Mother’s Day! 💐
Day 3 of Sophisticated Lady by Duke Ellington on #theremin. Noticed a few things To fix from the previous video:
1. My left shoulder likes to go up for louder parts. I don’t feel like it’s stiff, but it’s kind of a strange looking movement.
2. When holding notes, my volume hand likes to go up, but the surge in volume doesn’t sound good, especially for high notes.
Neither is completely fixed here, especially #2, but there is a little progress.
2nd video is a little bit of the B section, which is tough because it’s all jumps. I hear many notes as more staccato than I can currently play, to have a dancing feel.
Also experimenting with some slides just for fun.
