Jeff Kaiser – ZEITNOT II
22 November 2018
Bernaola Festival XV
Conservatorio de Música Jesús Guridi
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Excerpts from a live performance that was filmed and edited by Alfonso Garcia de la Torre. (Excerpted by Jeff Kaiser.)
This is the continuation of a series inspired by my love of chess. The first, ZUGZWANG, is a duo for trumpet and electric guitar. The title of the latest series come from the German term frequently used in chess: ZEITNOT, meaning “need of time.”
The music in this work furthers my development of software for live performance, creating a hybrid sonic environment of human, flugelhorn, software, and space. The majority of sounds you hear are created live with my flugelhorn, toys, and voice and then processed by software I author in the Max programming environment. Other sounds you hear include selections from a sample library I have been creating by recording the trumpet while it is not being played in the traditional fashion: the sound of air escaping from slides, valves descending and ascending, pipes and bells being struck and plucked. These libraries are accessed by rhythm generators, pitch generators, and an improvisational algorithm: all are participants in the live improvisation. The audio is then spatialized in the concert hall using ambisonics, a surround sound variant. [This performance, while performed in ambisonics, was recorded in stereo.]