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Creative Composition - with Dr Dylan Rynhart
Gain the skills to compose & workshop your music with musicians

Each Wednesday (6:30-8pm) the 11th of May, for 9 weeks
in the Centre for Creative practices, 15 Pembroke Street Lower, Dublin 2.

Now in its fourth year, this unique course is geared towards helping
composers achieve their potential, by providing them with the skills
to compose music for professional musicians.

Over the nine weeks, the course looks at various forms of music and
methods of composition, but is primarily participant led, meaning that
the focus is tailored to the aesthetics and talents of the participants.
The participants are given exercises through the term and their compositions
are workshopped so that they can get as much practical advice as possible.

At the end of the term, each participant will be offered the opportunity to write
music for a small group of musicians and have their compositions performed
and professionally recorded which they can use to promote their work.

This is a unique opportunity for any composer, one that shouldn't be missed.

While participants are not required to play an instrument, they do need to
be able to present their music to the class, either as a recording / mock-up
or in notation. A good understanding of musical notation is recommended.

A fee of €250 will cover all tuition and musicians fees for the term

To book please click here or email dylan@dylanrynhart.com
for more info goto: http://dylanrynhart.com/education.html

Rynhart Speakers

MICHAEL DERVAN

NCH Kevin Barry Room

Who, you might be tempted to ask, are the Rynhart Speakers, who made their debut in an Irish Composers Collective concert at the NCH Kevin Barry Room on Tuesday? That, however, would not be the right question. They’re a what, not a who. Composer Dylan Rynhart has updated the Leslie speakers, the loudspeakers that give the Hammond organ its special tremolo effects, and brought them into the digital age. The Leslie speakers distribute higher frequencies through a rotatable horn, mounted on top of the speaker cabinet. Actually, what’s mounted there is a pair of horns, but the second one is included only for physical balance during rotation.

The rotation of the horns in a Leslie speaker can be set to medium, fast, or off. Rynhart has made the speed infinitely variable within its working range, and is also able to reverse the direction of the spin.

The Hammond organ tremolo is the result of what’s known as the Doppler effect, familiar from the fall in pitch of ambulance sirens when they pass you by. But tremolo is not what interests Rynhart the most. The spinning horns also spatialise the sound by sending it off in different directions to be reflected or absorbed by whatever it encounters. It’s the spatialisation that’s been firing him up, so much so, that he’s not bothered at all with the low-frequency aspect of the Leslie speakers, and he uses a separate, unmodulated sub-woofer in his setup.

The Rynhart Speakers are presented in a four-unit layout, in which the spinning of all four speakers – placed not at the corners of a listening area, but at the sides – can actually be kept in synch (or not, if that’s what a composer wants).

Well, then. What does it all sound like? Before Tuesday’s concert at the NCH Kevin Barry Room, Rynhart made a short presentation. The impression in rapidly moving music or in speech was of fragmentation and blurring. The familiar Hammond organ effects came most obviously into play when the sound was more constant. The spatialisation was, well, hit and miss.

Rynhart opened and closed Tuesday’s programme with works of his own. Components is an edit of separate performances of a piece that calls on players to improvise, with all of the performances piled on top of each other – a good opportunity to sample the speakers’ effects on individual lines. Spin Cycle comes from the Fuzzy Logic Ensemble’s Mouthpiece album, and provided the opportunity to hear the spinning speakers transforming co-ordinated, jazzy ensemble writing and voice.

It was useful to have such clear reference points from the speakers’ developer at either end of the programme. A number of the evening’s pieces were drone compositions, Piaras Hoban’s newmorningwintervlight getting heavy and dirty and detailed, Francis Heery’s Glean[edit] clearly concerned with stasis, and offering an almost dimensional shift as the horns began to rotate slowly, and Adam McCartney’s Troposphere-AMDG bringing the sound of a “dilapidated” pipe organ into the electronic domain for slow transformations.

Three other works were performed on conventional speakers, Matthew Whiteside’s Youth tantalisingly blended not always readily decipherable recorded speech with the sounds of what might have been a fan or a gentle vacuum cleaner. Ian McDonnell’s Spear Fragment was a recorded improvisation, playing with sine tones and taped scratching sounds, and espousing a sense of narrative that most of the other works seemed to shun. And David E McCarthy’s Performance VII offered a sonic assault with punitively loud drum-kit effects synched to strobe lighting – the composer provided a health warning, and himself chose to exit the room before the performance.

As to the Rynhart Speakers? Are they an important development, or just a tool waiting for a task? Time alone will tell.

DATE: 27TH JULY 2010
TIME: 8.30pm, pre-concert talk 8pm
VENUE: Kevin Barry Room, National Concert Hall, Dublin

This JULY 27th the Irish Composers’ Collective will premiere the exciting Rynhart Speakers. These ‘spinning’ speakers will perform the new works of Matthew Whiteside, Ian Mc Donnell, Francis Heery, Piaras Hoban,Adam McCartney, Dylan Rynhart and D. E. McCarthy in the beautiful setting of the Kevin Barry Room in the National Concert Hall.

This Concert will feature my piece Spin Cycle, the music I composed for my Masters Thesis submission. This work is designed to highlight the many cool and wonderful effects that these unique speakers can achieve. I built these speakers in 2006 and they are very rarely used, so this concert should not be missed !

For more info on their construction and use you can check-out my thesis here

The Irish Composers’ Collective is a non-profit organisation that aims to provide Irish composers with a community for information, education and the pooling of resources in order to create concerts of their music with professional musicians.

Tickets €12 and €10 (student ID must be presented to obtain discount) may be purchased from the National Concert Hall Box Office online at www.nch.ie , in person or by telephone +353 (0)1 4170000.

This event is in association with The National Concert Hall and supported by the Arts Council