Imagine a Nano-orchestra.....

Welcome to the Knik Philharmonic Orchestra! It is located in my mind and in my small studio in the basement of our house on Neklason Lake, between Palmer and Wasilla, Alaska. The name was created back in late 1990 or early 1991, soon after I returned to writing electronic music after leaving the medium back in late 1972. In those eighteen
years, the technology of electronic music had changed quite markedly. In the early 1970s, electronic music was created mostly through creating tape recordings of oscillating sound waves and other electronic distortions, or by editing tape recordings of sounds occurring in the natural world, or by combining these basic elements. Editing was done by re-recording from one tape to another, or by manually cutting pieces of reel-to-reel tape into snips and pasting them back together.

During the early 1970s - 1970 through 1972, for me - electronic music was becoming an increasingly important fixture as background music in such art as film scores. The most notable electronic film score from that period was Wendy Carlos' score to Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. The electronic music I composed during that period was much more modest, mostly two to five-minute experiments I could try out on the radio audience listening to my weekday morning program on KRAB-FM in Seattle.


When I returned to electronic music in 1990, the return was less an intentional move back to that medium than it was an auxiliary benefit from my creation of a computer-based studio for composition and notation of music to be performed by conventional acoustic musical instruments. I was one of the very early users of Finale, the first truly viable music notation program. I turned to Finale because while orchestrating a ten-minute composition by hand during the summer of 1989, I discovered my writing hand going numb after half an hour or so of scoring. This was the side effect of a crushing injury ten years earlier to my left hand during a marine salvage operation on Prince William Sound, which went awry.

When I bought Finale, along with the computer, MIDI controller and Proteus II sound module to go along with it, my whole approach to writing music changed, as it inevitably does for any composer using a similar setup. The Proteus II was the first digital sound module available to the mass music market that was primarily made up of digital samples of orchestral instruments. I tied those "voices" to the Finale program so that as I composed a string quartet, for instance, I could play back my work-in-progress to sound more than a little like what a human string quartet might.

But along with the orchestral sound samples, the Proteus II came with dozens of synthetic amalgamations. Sci-Fi movie kinds of sounds and special effects. Early on, I started using some of these sounds in improvised or notated electronic mixes. Some of my sculptor friends, most notably bronze sculptor Peter Bevis, requested electronic backgrounds from me to accompany gallery shows or multi-media presentations. Peter might be the one who came up with the term Knik Philharmonic around that time. Or me - I can't quite remember. In 1990-91, we lived about 20 miles from our present house, in an area known as Knik-Fairview Loop. Knik is an old settlement near where Alaska Natives had a village that took advantage of a mild micro-climate and nearby streams with large Sockeye, Coho and Chinook runs.

From 1991 through 1994, Peter Bevis and I co-operated in a series of presentations. We called three of the winter activity sets the Knik Philharmonic Winter Tours. They involved us in activist artistic projects having to do with environmental catastrophes or ecological degradation. More about what we did then in a future post.

But in 1995, Peter became sidetracked in a major project - saving the art deco ferry boat Kalakala from the boat's location at Gibson Cove on Kodiak Island. His work as a sculptor virtually ceased until after 1998, when he brought the vessel down from Kodiak to Elliot Bay, and then over to Lake Union. More about that, too, in a future post.

Peter Bevis and I both feel strongly that artists can make powerful statements about human events, including day-to-day political events which shape the lives of our families, communities, states, nations and this planet. I have felt uncomfortable with the notion that classically-oriented composers should write music that avoids disturbing the listeners for one reason or another. A fair percentage of my classically-oriented musical output has been what I term Protest Music. The combination of my political activism, protest music and communication with other artists and activists, is what the Knik Philharmonic is all about.