Krzysztof Knittel - norcet I (1978-80) - computer music

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I spent the spring and the summer of 1978 in Buffalo. I lived in a quiet and secluded part of the city occupying the attic of a large wooden house. My host was a psychiatrist and used to receive his patients at home. It was always very quiet in the house – perhaps, that is why I came to like that place and its atmosphere. When it was warm I often used to sit upstairs by the open window and listen to the sounds coming in from the street – trees whispered softly in the breeze, sometimes a car was passing or a wail of ambulance could be heard from afar. When I was writing the old collapsible table creaked. In such moments I caught myself murmuring something which was neither words nor melody but a low humming tone… In fact, these were all noises and echoes which we usually do not notice taking them for silence. And one day I decided to record that ringing silence and to feed it into a computer… The title comes from the first letters of words: natural – objects – recording – computer – electronics – tape.
Similarly as in concrete music natural sounds form the initial material of the composition. The method of transformations is also deriving from the tradition of music for tape – it is a feedback obtained with the help of a small PDP-8 computer by John Morley who at the time was in charge of the studio’s digital equipment. The mixing program which we used, had been written for the same computer a year earlier by Giuseppe Englert. The whole playing took merely three or four hours. Afterwards I worked for several weeks on putting together the tapes with sounds recorded with the help of that method, arranging them into the five layers of the composition, and changing some of them with the help of electronic devices: filters, ring modulators, reverberation and other transformations of that type. Still, I did not have a clear picture of the whole and stopped the work on the composition. I returned to these materials after a two-year interval, already in the Experimental Studio in Warsaw. At present, the composition has several versions. There exist two versions – norcet I and norcet II: one with sounds obtained from the computer, and another, on which the same sounds are combined with natural effects, but different that sound material recorded in Buffalo. The voice, which can be heard in the second version, belongs to John Morley who is describing the digital feedback sound transformation that we have used. Each of these versions can be played as an independent work, and also played simultaneously with the composition Nora for harp or keyboard solo. Duration of each version –16’10”.
The original notes deriving from the realization of the piece norcet are now in the collection of the Museum of Art in Łódź.

norcet (1980) – muzyka komputerowa zrealizowana w Studio Komputerowym State University of New York w Buffalo (1978) oraz Studio Eksperymentalnym Polskiego Radia (1980). Tytuł pochodzi od pierwszych liter słów: natural – objects – recording – computer – electronics – tape. Pierwsze wykonanie miało miejsce w Teatrze Małym w Warszawie podczas koncertu elektronicznego towarzyszącego festiwalowi „Warszawska Jesień” (24.09.1980).
Istnieją dwie wersje – norcet I i norcet II: pierwsza wyłącznie z dźwiękami otrzymanymi z komputera i druga, na której te same dźwięki są połączone z efektami naturalnymi, innymi jednak, niż materiał nagrany w Buffalo. Każda z tych wersji może być wykonana jako samodzielny utwór, a także odtwarzana jednocześnie z kompozycją NORA na harfę solo. Każda z wersji utworu trwa 16’10”.

Oryginały notatek dotyczących realizacji utworu norcet znajdują się obecnie w zbiorach Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi.

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