| Oehlers tests the musical limits BY SALLY ACHARYA The sounds emerging from the darkened room in the basement of the McKinley Building could come from a humpback whale in outer space, or perhaps from a Chinese temple where ghosts had taken to playing the gong. 
Photo by Jeff Watts
It’s actually the sound of one penny, spinning. And it’s coming from a recording of music by Paul Oehlers, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, Audio Technology, and Physics (CAP). The oohs and clinks and groans of Oehlers’s “sound source”—that spinning penny—have been stretched digitally, snapped apart, and shaped into new forms as if sound were a type of clay and Oehlers a sculptor with a particularly surreal vision. His complex “landscapes” of moody, all-encompassing sound have been featured in experimental films, played at art installations, and even found their way to perhaps the most surreal setting of all: the QVC home shopping network, where Oehlers’s music once was featured as a backdrop for a shot of Marie Osmond climbing the stairs. His music has also caught national attention from a rather more prestigious quarter. Oehlers recently won a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat that has drawn the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Thornton Wilder, and Alice Walker during its 99 years of existence. Among the pieces that first sprung into life at MacDowell have been Our Town, Appalachian Spring, Porgy and Bess, and more recently, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Whatever Oehlers produces at the colony, it’s sure to sound both quirky and captivating. Ask him to compose a piece for harp, and he’s liable to wrap the strings in aluminum foil or run a paper clip up and down them—and then digitize it all for further distortion. Ask him to write a piece for steel drum, and the result won’t be a calypso party. He’ll play in the spaces between the notes, or write instructions on his sheet music to pour rice into the drum or drag a Super Ball across it. And then, of course, it will mutate in the computer. Sometimes he doesn’t even use the standard quarter-notes and half-notes. What he wants the music to do requires the invention of whole new musical notations. His only limitation? “I try not to break the instrument.” But it’s not just about unexpected sounds. His particular quest is to create music that tests the limits but also rivets the listener. He sees digital technology as a new tool. Much as the full orchestra was a new tool for nineteenth-century composers, today’s technology expands the possibilities for composers but shouldn’t be seen as an end in itself. “Once you have interesting sounds, what do you do with them? Once you’ve got people’s attention, how do you keep it? It’s like marriage,” he says. “There has to be some initial attraction that hooks you, then something that keeps you.” His sensibility is one that suits independent filmmakers looking for multi-layered, highly textural scores. One recent undertaking was Most High, a grim and intimate story of a man’s descent into drug addiction that has won a number of awards at film festivals. Oehlers’s musical score earned a “critic’s pick” from the New York Times. Oehlers quips that his music sounds like what an audience expects to hear before the monster enters. “When the bad stuff happens, there I am. When stuff goes downhill, I’m your man.” Composing is something he knew he wanted to do from the time he was eight. He began music lessons at seven, and the recital he gave the next year convinced him of at least one thing: He loved music but definitely didn’t want to perform. By the time he was fourteen, he was asking for lessons in composing, and his father, a school superintendent and principal, was curious enough about the pedagogy of music to find him opportunities to learn. Oehlers now teaches audio technology in AU’s department of Computer Science, Audio Technology, and Physics (CAP), which he estimates is one of fewer than a dozen departments in the country where a composer might be found alongside a physics professor and computer scientist. There are historical roots to the unexpected grouping. Back in the 1970s, AU’s physics department was home to faculty interested in acoustics and performance space design. At the same time, popular music was beginning to incorporate technology and involve more work in the studio. Students gravitated to courses on the physics of sound or worked with the computer science department to master the increasingly sophisticated technology used in recording studios. Many of Oehlers’s students are looking for careers in the music industry that require a strong technological background—perhaps as sound engineers or perhaps as composers who, like Oehlers, find that technology and creativity can go hand in hand. But he doesn’t expect to inspire an “AU School” of young composers writing music for spinning pennies. “I take great pleasure,” he says, “in having no student remotely sound like me.” |
