Featured Composer
Harry-Ed Roland

Introducing Harry-Ed Roland

We now move on from our Canadian Featured Composer, Gustav Ciamaga. I hope you have enjoyed finding out more about this marvelous man. In Memoriam.

Our next Featured Composer is Harry-Ed Roland, who has been very active as a composer using the CDP software all the way back to Atari ST days. An enthusiast for the advanced project-handling facilities of Sound Loom, he has had compositions accepted for the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) for several years running. There is not much about the CDP software that this man doesn't know, so it is with great respect that I present him as our next Featured Composer.

About the Composer

Harry-Ed Roland, generally known in Europe as 'd.d.', is a composer who has been a part of the music scene in Berlin for several decades. The Portfolio link on his website lists many activities besides composing. Don't fail to check out his poetry.

Harry-Ed Roland, 2012

Harry has written a fascinating essay on what electroacoustic music means to him and how he approaches composing in this idiom. His view is thoughtful and personal – signs of a creative mind – and not a little intriguing. Here is a quote from this essay: "Electroacoustic music's orphan-heritage made it ideal, a cultural void or at least a cultural infancy, with lots of room for the disenchanted or displaced. In fact, from the outset, I realized that it was 'my voice' and that it was something VASTLY different for me than it seemed to be to those through whom I, literally, had stumbled onto it."

Another paper by d.d. details why he finds Sound Loom to be such a useful tool for his large-scale composition projects. Among the topics included in this paper are:

• the importance of listening
• handling hundreds of breakpoint files (design, storage, recall)
• creating Sound Loom 'instruments', which save parameter values etc.
• remembering last used process
• experimenting with 'out of range' parameter values (which Sound Loom allows)

Some of d.d.'s many compositions are listed on our links page. From these, I would like especially to mention The Warrior Weeps I-IV, a major work which was also used for an Installation at the Bricklane Gallery London alongside an HD-video by British film maker, Zahid Dar (Tuesday 14 February 2012 through Sunday the 26th).

Much more information about d.d. and his multi-faceted creativity is to be found on his website: http://www.her-krypticvisions.com.

Featured Music: An excerpt from Eine Vernachlässigbare Mänge: nr.1 - pangea

Audio Example:
Vernachlässigbare_1min.wav (11.3Mb Stereo .wav file, 1'")

The detailed notes for this composition reveal a deeply musical approach to sound. The focus is not on the actual sound sources, but on the musicalisation of these sources. "It is a distant place", d.d. writes, "where the sound goes, and the path which it takes, on its way to evolving into silence." In doing this it draws upon an understanding of many different musical formal ideas. One of these is the "intricately formalized integrity" of 'fugue events'. Among electroacoustic facilities, envelope transfers, pitch trace extraction, harmonic tuning, focusing on tiny movements internal to a sound, stretching, transposition, filtering, spatialisation, variations and layering were important. "They are often overshadowed, in part or wholely, sometimes piloting and sometimes devoured by the ensuing drama of an electroacoustic discourse." The result is a music that has a strong sense of overall form, is rich in detail and highly evocative for the listener in an open-ended, dream-like way – at least that's how I hear it (AE).

To find out more about Harry-Ed Roland and to hear selections from his many and varied compositions, and to purchase his music, please go to http://www.her-krypticvisions.com.

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If you are a composer who has made use of the CDP sound transformation software in your compositions and would like to be featured in a future edition, please contact Archer at:
archerhgm(a)gmail.com

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5 February 2019