In the Back of My Mind
In 2024 I was asked by the Valette Ensemble to write a new work for them to record. I would not know until I began working on it, but the piece had begun its inception many years ago, when I first listened to the music of the Beach Boys. Their early work dating from 1962 to 1966 is undeniably music written by young people, for young people. It really resonated with me at the time I first discovered it. It speaks of summer romances, trips to the beach, lovers' quarrels, surfing and all the other clichés of the 1960s upper-middle class California lifestyle. It is, when at its best, a direct, uncomplicated celebration of life for its main writer, Brian Wilson.
In 1983 Dennis Wilson’s body was recovered by divers in a slip in the Marina del Rey. He had drowned whilst diving off a friend's boat, drunkenly searching for items he’d thrown off his own yacht, long ago sold to pay for bills and loans. This brought an end to the bands original incarnation, and to decades of struggle, fraught practically from the start with narcotics abuse, mental illness, involvement with strange figures including Charles Manson, and a swift decline in relevance after the 1967 album Smiley Smile, when Brian Wilson was no longer able to usefully contribute to the group, due to his crippling psychological issues which lasted for decades. The band’s entire history is marbled through with an undercurrent of tragedy, from the Wilson brothers’ continued abuse at the hands of their father (and eventual band manager), to their song rights being sold without their permission, constant in-fighting and legal disputes and deaths of its members.
When I wrote the piece, Brian Wilson is the only one of his brothers remaining. Mike Love, founding member and cousin to the Wilsons tours separately as The Beach Boys, and sued Brian over songwriting credits in the ‘90s. In 2023 Brian’s wife of over 30 years died, and he has since been entered into another conservatorship. I wondered how he felt about songs like Kiss Me Baby, from the 1965 album The Beach Boys Today! I wondered whether to him these felt like distant memories of another life, as they feel to me?
Just weeks after recording the piece, it was announced that Brian Wilson had passed away.
This dichotomy between the band’s generally positive, joyful music and innocent public reputation, and the surprisingly tragic reality of their lives (especially that of their singular artistic director Brian) was a major influence behind the piece. There is another aspect as well, that of memory. The composition represents the loss and distortion of memories with age. For several reasons, I decided to create my own Beach Boys ‘sample’ to use in this work. I did this by appropriating various assets (harmony, structure, melody, lyrics, instrumentation, recording techniques) from many Beach Boys songs from 1963 to 1965. (See part b) of this submission)
This electro-acoustic composition features two processes, one totally linear, the other more arch-like.
Across the piece's duration, the loop that the string quartet plays becomes diminished with each recurrence, from 7 bars down to 1. In combination, 7 levels of increasing vibrato are employed.
Simultaneously, the electronics become clearer and less noisy, and combined with regular intermissions the sample becomes gradually more discernible. At around two thirds of the way through, the connection is made the most apparent between the electronics and the chordal loop that the quartet play. The electronics return to noise afterwards, leaving the remaining instances of the string’s loop as the last memory of anything that took place.
The loop the strings play is drawn from the quartet’s material I wrote into the first verse of the Beach Boys ‘sample’, which the Valette ensemble recorded for me in the early stages of working on this piece.
Creating the sample myself gave me access to the basic materials of the piece in a way I would not otherwise have had if using a recording of the Beach Boys, as well as reinforcing the themes of memory, the ‘sample’ intending to sound like a long-forgotten Beach Boy’s B-side while not quite convincing us of its authenticity.
The electronic tape part of the composition is derived entirely from the ‘sample’, except for some sounds drawn from the analogue devices I was using in the creation of the electronics. I used physical cassette tape manipulation as my basis for creating the layers of sound that comprise the electronic tape part. Taking my ‘sample’, I recorded onto a cassette tape, which I unspooled, crumpled between my fingers and then rewound into playable form again. I played this tape back into my DAW, and used this new audio as the basis for another repetition of the process. In the end I had five versions of the ‘sample’, with a gradual variance of noise and artifacts present. These are looped and layered to create the dense noisy layer in the electronics.
This score and recording represent the current version of the composition, written to fit the performance duration given to me by the ensemble.
The creation of the above work for string quartet and electronics began with the creation of the ‘sample’.
When I first set out to write the electro-acoustic, I planned to use the beach boys’ own recordings. After discussion and research, I learned that the Valette ensemble would likely face difficulties performing the work in public or uploading it online, which they planned to do, so of the choices I had, I decided to create my own sample to use. The piece is thoroughly researched, and I made sure to reference every element of it.
I took elements from several Beach Boys songs ranging from 1963 to 1966. The melody is taken from the 1963 song The Surfer Moon, while the large form harmonic structure is one found in a number of their songs including The Surfer Moon and Keep An Eye On Summer. The pizzicato string riff heard in the beginning which returns transposed in the middle eight most clearly references Wouldn't It Be Nice, while the general orchestration closely follows the 1965 song Kiss Me Baby, with a multi-layered rhythm section of two acoustic guitars, piano, electric guitar, bass (recorded with a scarf dampening the bridge to emulate the plucky fender sound of Carol Kay), and the triple reed combo (bass clarinet and two alto saxophones). The drum pattern is also from Kiss Me Baby, while the woodblock is from In The Back Of My Mind. The vocal harmonies are based on numerous sources, the only specific reference being Kiss Me Baby with the baritone riff in the outro fade. (this looped ending, fading after an upwards modulation is found all over their early music).
The lyrics were created by noting down characteristic lyrics from the 1965 albums The beach Boys Today!, and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), which I then crafted into a narrative of regret and nostalgia, which ties into the narrative of the electro-acoustic work.
The writing for the string quartet on the song is the only ‘original’ aspect. I did not base it on any particular Beach Boys song, but more generally on my knowledge of pop string arranging. I did make effort to reference Brian Wilson’s incredibly moving writing for the Sid Sharp sextet on the piece Don't Talk Put Your Head On My Shoulder.
In the end, the piece that resulted doesn’t sound quite like the Beach Boys, and the reference may not be picked up if the song were played to someone without context. However, it does sound plausibly like a song from this time period (if anything actually aided by my poor American accent which likens it to a lot of British Invasion bands.) I feel it accomplishes much of what I would have used a real Beach Boys recording for in this context, with an added uncanny feeling I could not have achieved by sampling their music. The resulting electro-acoustic composition was something that could only have arisen from my own understanding of this band and their music.