Fixed and Flexible: Composing for Electronics and Live Instruments: An Interview with Composer Elise Arancio

Composer Elise Arancio discusses balancing acoustic and pre-recorded sounds in Rookery, her new piece for Flute, Piano, Percussion, and Fixed Electronics.

Nicky Swett: As a starting point for this piece, you used the three creatively structured definitions of the word “Rookery” that act as epigraphs for the different sections of Traci Brimhall’s poetry book Rookery. What brought you to these texts, which you have integrated into the fixed electronics part of this new composition?

Elise Arancio: I came across this text when I was taking a flash fiction course at the University of Pennsylvania in my undergrad. Her poems stood out to me as being very musical, and they had this great, evocative imagery that I loved. The parts I used were presented as definitions. They start out with concrete, factual content and then they go into poetic language and have all these very intense emotions.

Her more poetic definitions of the word “Rookery” are no less true than the factual definitions of the word. The dichotomy of these two different kinds of definition led me to the electronics [in the piece]. The electronics part is mostly composed of a modular synthesizer, which tries to imitate the live instruments along with presenting the text. There are all these different relationships between the artificial, synthetically produced music and the live, organic music. That was fun to play around with, and I think the text really helped facilitate that conversation.

NS: Who’s reading the text in the electronics part?

EA: In the first movement, it’s mostly Tracy Brimhall herself and my teacher, Amy Beth Kirsten, who does a great job on voiceovers. It’s also an AI voice generated by Chat-GPT. Then there’s a little bit of me in the background filling in the spaces. The second movement is just Dr. Kirsten. Then the third is a collection of composer colleagues, my singer friend, and more AI voices. I wanted to imitate a crowded room, so I used as many voices as I could for that one.

NS: At the end of the third movement, you write in the score that the music should be like “war between live instruments and synthetic,” and you mentioned that the whole piece is concerned with the relationships between the live instruments and the synthesizer part. Why stage this conflict? Does your music imply who wins out?

EA: It is something that is pretty much on everyone’s mind these days: the battle between what’s real and what isn’t. If something is artificially generated, is that as good as, or not as good as, or better than what humans generate? All of these conversations are happening, so I wanted to incorporate that contention. But in other parts of the piece, the relationship is different. In the first movement, the point is to struggle to tell who’s who, what’s artificial and what isn’t. Then the second touches on a more emotional relationship between the two and is definitely less contentious. So conflict is just one of the many relationships that the electronics and live instruments have in the piece.

I didn’t have an idea of who wins out. We all would want the human side to win in that conflict, but it’s open-ended. Also, especially at the end of this very difficult piece, players might want to achieve a sense of catharsis while they’re playing by letting some frustration out. I liked that I could create a space for that with the ending to the third movement.

NS: You have the flutist switch to alto flute for the middle movement of the piece. What was the reason for that instrumental contrast?

EA: The middle movement is very different from the outer movements. It has this much more emotional quality to it. The alto flute has a darker, mellower sound. I thought that it would complement that feeling much better, because there’s a lot of high flute action in the outer movements.

NS: Do you imagine the electronics part as separate from the players, or more like a fellow member of the ensemble?

EA: Every time I write for fixed electronics, it’s always in some sort of duet. It’s always an instrument, always part of the ensemble. Ideally, there’d be no click track or anything, and musicians would have so much time to rehearse that they would be able to think of the electronics as a contributing member, as opposed to something they have to line up with.

NS: In cases when you do have to include a click track for the practical side of things, do you have ways of building in opportunities for interaction or playfulness between the musicians?

EA: I try to. I hope in the middle movement of Rookery, they won’t really need a click track; I’m less concerned about things lining up there. I tried to at least make that movement a little bit more organic feeling. Then at the end of the third movement, the electronics are going but you don’t necessarily have to line up with anything. I think that’s really helpful. I’ve done that before, where there’s a moment when they line up and then there’s an improvisatory thing to release the musician a little bit.

NS: Have you collaborated with some of the musicians who will be giving this performance in the past?

EA: I worked with [flutist] Tara Helen O’Connor at her festival Music from Angel Fire a couple of summers ago. She commissioned arrangements from me, and she’s played other pieces of mine. I worked with [percussionist] Ian David Rosenbaum many, many years ago, when I had a piece read by Sandbox Percussion. I’m excited to work with them again. As players, Tara and Ian are just so good. With them, I worry less about click tracks because I know they have their own ways of making things musical while listening to a click track. They’re going to try their best to make anything that I write possible.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD Candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is a program annotator and editorial contributor for many concert presenters, including Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the BBC, Music@Menlo, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.