Abstract
Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf are three great musical ladies, born in 1915. Could we make them singing together? This was the goal of a performance made for a music festival in L’Aquila (Italy) in 2015. This raises musical questions: what kind of sound could link Billie Holiday to Schwarzkopf, Schwarzkopf to Piaf? What kind of musical structure? With the help of the software ImproteK, the three ladies eventually sang together Autumn Leaves and The Man I love. ImproteK allowsmony of the used material (called “memories”) to the harmonic progression of the reference song (called “scenario”). The machine can also include into its “memory” what is currently played during the performance. This process raises fascinating questions about musical notation and style: the chosen common notation will define how the improvisation will follow the reference scenario, where the chosen memories inds and character interacting with this structure. The result can be arresting, surrealistic, kitsch; it is often fun.
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Notes
- 1.
A full biography of Hervé Sellin can be found on inter-jazz.com.
- 2.
The Real Book is a popular compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards.
- 3.
It is a virtual example since, as far as we know, neither Monk nor Taylor did record the piece, and Duke Ellington did not play it in solo.
- 4.
The precise chord vocabulary is described in section “Functional Notation”.
- 5.
Actually, we should speak about the second boom of the recording industry: audio recordings were already quite popular in the middle class at the turn of the twentieth century. In his Ph.D. dissertation, Chamoux (2015) found that more than 100 millions records were sold in France between 1900 and 1914. However, the first World War and the spread of the radio, made the recording industry collapse; these huge record sales were not equaled before the end of WWII. Other factors played a role in this re-birth, like the use of LPs and, more importantly, the modern microphone technology developed toward the end of the 1930s.
- 6.
This Lied is written for a male voice and Schwarzkopf never recorded it. However, the composer is obviously associated with her repertory, and several recording of Schwarzkopf singing Mahler were subsequently used with ImproteK.
- 7.
For the people puzzled by this strange title: Soft garlic = Aïl doux in French; Raymond alludes to the writer Raymond Queneau; 1815 = Waterloo; Screws = vis; finally, Aïl doux Queneau Waterloo vis sounds approximately like I do know what love is, enunciated with a terrible French accent.
- 8.
All quoted explanations by Sellin come from the interviews of Jérôme Nika for his Ph.D. dissertation (Nika et al. 2017a), in which they are quoted at length.
- 9.
We should keep in mind that this is not necessarily a harmonic notation, since it could use, for instance, categories of spectral descriptors.
- 10.
The videos listed in Appendix just show excerpts of performances.
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Acknowledgements
This work was made with the support of the French National Research Agency, in the framework of the project “DYCI2: Creative Dynamics of Improvised Interaction”(ANR-14-CE24-0002-01). The authors would like to thank Markus Noisternig for his valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the article.
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Appendix: Videos listed in the article
Appendix: Videos listed in the article
Video 1: Hervé Sellin Playing “The Man I Love” with Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf & Elizabeth Schwarzkopf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyW4A3L7kBo
The Man I Love #1 improvisation by Hervé Sellin (piano) and Georges Bloch (using ImproteK). The scenario provided to the system is the chord progression of the song, and its musical memory is:
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Hervé Sellin playing The Man I Love,
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Billie Holiday singing The Man I Love,
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Edith Piaf singing Mon Dieu and Milord,
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Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Mozart, Don Giovanni: “Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata,” and Puccini, Turandot: “Tu che del gel sei cinta.”
Video 2: “Autumn Leaves” by Sellin, Bloch, Mahler, Mozart, Puccini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNcK3bRnbv8
Autumn Leaves #2: improvisation by Hervé Sellin (piano) and Georges Bloch (using ImproteK). The scenario provided to the system is the chord progression of the song, and its musical memory is constituted by recordings of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Mahler, Puccini, and Mozart.
Video 3: Example of Video Improvisation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUXDkdt76J8
Example of video improvisation. ImproteK is chained to a video player (Bloch et al. 2008) and improvises by re-injecting videos, transformed and reorganized to match a given scenario. In this example, the scenario provided to the system is the harmonic progression of The Man I Love, and its memory is constituted by several videos:
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Lisa della Casa singing Mozart, Don Giovanni: “Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata,”
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Edith Piaf singing Mon Dieu,
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Billie Holiday singing The Man I Love,
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Hervé Sellin playing The Man I Love.
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Bloch, G., Nika, J. (2018). Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf Making Music Together. In: Kapoula, Z., Volle, E., Renoult, J., Andreatta, M. (eds) Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76054-4_15
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