Noopiming

This piece is included on the Six Projects CD/LP released on the Innova Recordings label in 2015.

This is a single movement a cappella choral piece. The title of the work is also the text. Noopiming is an Ojibwe word, which translates as "in the North, inland, in the woods". All of the vocalizations in the piece are created using various elements of this single word.

The piece has as it's primary aesthetic underpinning, some of my own personal impressions of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I have been doing canoe trips in the BWCA my entire life and have often felt a sense of connection with the natural world there. It's a feeling of being connected to something ancient and primordial – something darkly beautiful that seems to draw me in, while at the same time, if I'm not mindful, could swallow me whole, leaving no trace.

Noopiming was created using my fragment-based compositional process. I started by recording a group of eight singers performing various musical gestures and textures. The recording was done at the St. Paul Seminary Chapel. This material was then edited down into a palette of hundreds of short audio recordings, which I then layered, combined and endlessly manipulated to create the finished work. There was no actual score for the piece. Instead, I created two lists of verbal instructions for the singers. One was for inspecifically pitched material and the other for specifically pitched material, using only three chords, which could interlock in ways that I liked.

Adding the visual component came after the music was completed. I searched for a photographer who had a significant body of work focusing on the BWCA, and who's work had the right aesthetic to match the music. I came upon the work of Dale Robert Klous and felt it had the right kind of primordial nature vibe about it. I approached Dale about allowing me to use some of his images, and not only did he agree, but he even went out and shot some additional material for the project. I think his work is a great fit for my piece and I can't thank him enough for his collaboration on the project. Once I had the images, I synchronized them with the music in a way that reinforces the overall emotional/aesthetic impact of the work.

This project is supported in part through Subito, the quick advancement grant program of the American Composers Forum, and by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Click here if you're interested in the Noopiming DVD.

This is an excerpt of the video that was created for this piece.

Singers:

Kim Sueoka
Kathy Lee
Kris Kautzman
Linda Kachelmeier
Bryan Fisher
Justin Karch
Tim O'Brien
Mike Meyer

Soprano
Soprano
Alto
Alto
Tenor
Tenor
Bass
Bass

This is one of the verbal instructions used in the recording session for Noopiming:

Sing a series of random notes of your choosing on the vowel sound "u" (long). Fade in and out on each one and keep them relatively short. Randomize both the duration of the notes that you sing and the amount of silence you leave between notes – do not imply a rhythm. Avoid rhythmic entrainment with other singers around you. As a group, you should all be singing different notes of different durations with different amounts of silence between notes. Make each note beautiful. Keep the group sound going until you are directed to stop.

Click to see score

This picture was taken during a break in the recording session at St. Mary's Chapel.

Press Release

There are those who expand boundaries and those who create new ones. Minneapolis composer Mike Olson’s new a cappella choral composition, Noopiming, places him among the innovators. Cognizant of many traditions while beholden to none, Olson has employed sophisticated technology in the service of his intuition to compose a twenty-minute work of protean power, dark-tinged beauty, and above all, of astonishing originality.

“Noopiming” is an Ojibwe word, meaning “in the north, inland, in the woods.” The title was chosen as a direct reference to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the evocative landscapes of which are the inspiration and aesthetic focus of the piece. This new work embodies the primordial power and beauty of the natural world. Olson captures nature’s minute moment-to-moment changes in sound and environment with an eloquent grace born of acute attention to detail. Where much of his previous work has explored vastly differing soundscapes, Noopiming is a study in what can be done with a single timbre, that of the human voice. “I've written choral music in the past, but it's been about twenty years. My latest work, Incidental, took years to complete and was constructed using a wide variety of source material. In the case of Noopiming, I wanted to do the opposite. I intentionally limited myself to using unaccompanied singers exclusively as my instrumentation. I also limited the scope to a single movement with a tightly focused aesthetic vision.”

The path toward Noopiming has indeed been a long and circuitous one, though Olson’s interest in choral music is lifelong. Even while he played keyboards in jazz-rock bands, he was always involved in choirs. “I sang in choirs all through high school and in college as well.” Simultaneously, he studied all manner of composition at the University of Minnesota, his most influential teacher being Eric Stokes, who ultimately taught him freedom. “As a composition student in the late 20th century,” he explains, “it was the normal course of affairs for me to learn many compositional systems, and I’ve always enjoyed a wide variety of music, but eventually, my compositional methods came back around full circle to writing by ear. Of course now, my ear has been conditioned by my Classical training, but I'm still basically just trying to create music that feels right to me.” After a long period of more conceptual and performance-art pieces, he brought to fruition his working method of the past eight years. “It’s not really what you would think of as a system,” elucidates Olson. “I gradually adopted the approach of working with relatively short musical fragments – combining and reordering them in ways that sound good to me.” His earlier fragment-based pieces used carefully selected excerpts from preexisting music as source material, which he then manipulated. He then moved on to creating his own custom source material, sometimes through the use of traditional music notation, but more often by means of graphic notation or verbal instructions for performers to follow. This material is then recorded and subjected to countless edits, reordering and other manipulations, creating entirely new structures and forms.

This is the approach used on Noopiming. Olson gathered eight singers (four female and four male) for a single recording session, during which all of the fragments were recorded. The singers were given two lists of instructions: one for specifically pitched material and the other for unspecifically pitched material. Olson then guided the singers through the session, adjusting their interpretations as needed in order to get the results he was looking for. “Sometimes, my instructions do not achieve the desired outcomes,” muses Olson, “but at other times, they produce results far beyond what I had anticipated, changing my conception of the piece in the process.”

Olson’s decision to employ only the human voice was a significant and intentional limitation, and a departure from some of his more recent works. What emerges is powerful indeed. Vowels and consonants taken from the word “Noopiming” converge, elide and create friction. The whole work brims with sublimated energy as Olson manipulates the eight voices so that the actual ensemble size becomes irrelevant. Solo voices emerge, swell and fade amidst glacial passages of powerfully soaring chords and multiregistral ensemble polyphony whose scope and texture morph in a series of slow swells and fades. If influences are to be heard, Ligeti, Penderecki and even Schoenberg are the closest points of comparison. Yet, Olson’s music bears only slight resemblance to theirs and leans toward the "darkly beautiful".

Despite the complexities of Noopiming’s construction and execution, it is on the emotional level that Olson hopes his work will have the greatest impact. “My highest goal as a creator of new music, is for my music to transcend the actual musical materials and methods employed in it's creation. It has to feel good to me – it has to feel right. In other words, 'it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing'. I hope that those who listen to this piece will be as immersed in it as I was during it's creation.” Noopiming’s success is due precisely to these transcendental qualities and it confirms Olson’s position as a unique voice in contemporary music.