Constance Demby,
When Classicism Becomes Visual Music

By: Ariadna Martín.

Constance Demby has in some occasions been defined as the initiator of meditative music, an internationally famous innovative artist of sonic creativity, and an original renovator of musical instruments who shows her undeniable creativity in this field. A fifth-generation Californian, Constance was born in Oakland, where at age eight she would begin her musical studies specializing in the piano. Later she moved to the Eastern coast, at the same time deciding to expand her studies to the field of painting and sculpture. This versatile artist and composer, also plays other instruments besides the piano, like for instance the Chinese cheng, the Persian dulcimer, the Indian tamboura, the Balinese gamelan, the Austrian harpalek, plus any other ethnic instrument from any other cultures all over the world she can lay hands on, always in a most un-traditional way which turns out to be highly innovative.

Demby started to engage in the formal meditative arts in the sixties, an experience she would then use to develop new ways to express a style of space music in contemporary musical terms having a definite touch of the classic. Actually, this is how she explains her peculiar musical style, a style she literally refers to as "space symphonic classical contemporary music". During the seventies, Constance Demby gives several live concerts, and also participates in different workshops as well as multimedia presentations along the eastern American coast, together with the band Central Maine Power and Light Company. By the late seventies she creates her own label, most specifically in 1978, called Sound Currents, where her first albums of meditative space music are released: Skies Above Skies in 1978, and Sunborne in 1980. In this year Demby starts her electronic musical experiments. As she gets access to digital keyboards and samplers, her studio becomes a hundred per cent electronic. Constance also releases a new recording under her own label, Sacred Space Music in 1982, an album where the composer combines with unsurpassed mastery the piano, dulcimer and synthesizer, thus creating one of the first classical compositions whose brilliant performance place it amongst the pioneering works to be classified under the generic label New Age. In this recording Demby prompts the listeners to explore their inner selves, their spiritual nature, in an introspective exploration of their souls: "You must temporarily suppress the control of your ego, let the music lead you to territories that are perhaps new and unexplored so far", the artist comments, with respect to this album. This recording would be followed by Live At Alaron and the compilation album Light of This World, this one including the best pieces composed by the artist during this period.

Some time later Constance contacts the label Hearts of Space, belonging to producer Stephen Hill, and it would be under this label that this wondrous composer would release her best masterpieces. In 1986 Hearts of Space releases her wonderfully glorious Novus Magnificat, a recording that reaches the top lists of countless radio stations, a key work of art for the lovers of space music, where the synthesizers, the percussion, the organs, the different string instruments, plus an etheral choir of more than human voices are intertwined with the particular electronic effects by Michael Stearns, all this resulting into a symphony that some critics have compared to Mozart's Requiem, in a New Age style, a piece of art that definitely appeals to the highest spiritual potential of the human being, and whose positive effects are praised by doctors and nurses in clinics and hospitals given its healing powers on their patients. Constance Demby herself explains that this work is some sort of a "Magnificat" and an "Exultate" of a contemporary nature for digital orchestra and choir, where the artist creates an inspired fusion of Western traditional sacred music with classical influences in an electronic atmosphere of a contemporary character based on the timeless archetypes of a musical journey having a deeply transcendental nature aimed at transforming the listener from within. This music, composed and performed by the artist using an Emulator II synthesizer, where the real symphonic instruments are digitalized by means of samplers on magnetic disks, later being re-combined and orchestrated by the author herself, was directly created on the same synthesizer, in a masterful combination of violas, violins, celli, bassoon, harp, piano, organ, French horn, bells, electronic effects, tympani and chorus. All that woven into a whole with the added sound of a Roland Juno 60, plus a Yamaha grand piano. Both the general public and the critics have acclaimed this magnificient creation, which also meant for Demby a noteworthy commercial success.

Also under the label Hearts Of Space, Constance Demby releases her album Set Free (1989), where the influences of other musics such as the Balinese and African sounds are likewise perceived, a trait that points out the universal character that pervades Demby's works. In fact, the author never ceases to experiment with different acoustic instruments of an ethnic character from all over the world, adapting them to the digital electronic environment, in an unquenchable thirst for discovering new sounds that lead to a musical universality of a classical-contemporary nature. Soon after, the composer begins her international tours, at the time visiting several European countries, among them Spain (Canary Islands), besides Egypt, South America, Japan, Indonesia, and others.

Constance Demby cringes over the term New Age due to the negative stigma that's been attached to it over the years. It seems anyone that manages to turn out an album using electronic symphonics falls under the label New Age, no matter their level of expertise or if they truly are contributing to expansive, meditative musical style. The use of the New Age bin as an eclectic dumping ground where the listener finds more "bad" than "good," has caused a gradual reduction in sales over the years. Couple this problem with the negative connotations various religions place on the term New Age by connecting it with Paganism and other cult practices, and you have a real stew. It is because of this that Constance and many other truly professional and highly versed musicians that have been "stuck" with the New Age label would love to see this title changed. Which presents an even greater challenge: What to call it? The problem is, at a commercial level, there is a great confusion about how to classify these kinds of musics; those who are in charge of marketing, or even the shop assistants, keep trying to assign them a defined categorization, yet they are not sure whether they should call these musics classical, contemporary, new musics, New Age, alternative musics...

In her quest to find new sonic qualities and sounds never heard before, Constance Demby has mastered the art of tuning each emotion to its complementary tonal resonance, thus provoking different, impressive experiences on the part of the listener and awakening in them a sort of emotional catharsis that reaches deep within the innermost recesses of the very soul, causing an awareness of conscience in the harmonization of the mind, the body and the spirit. This particular aspect of her art has led her to develop, already in the seventies, the most innovative creativity in the field of sound, since it was then when this artist conceived and constructed the first Sonic Stainless Steel instruments to ever exist: The "Space Bass" and the "Whale Sail". In both cases we basically have enormous sheets made of stainless steel that are played with bows, and that generate deep sounds whose primordial resonance has never been achieved in other, more conventional instruments. The "Space Bass" consists in a horizontal sheet of stainless steel measuring about ten feet, with an attachment of five octaves of rods that are fixed to a bar. These rods are then played either hitting them in a percussive style, or by means of a bow, as if it were a violin, or a cello. It appears that the sound waves generated by the lower notes in this peculiar instrument can reach a longitude of up to thirty feet. On the other hand, the "Whale Sail" is in fact some sort of a cetacean sister version of the "Space Bass", this time consisting in a vertical sheet of eight feet, interwoven with a number of wires that are likewise played with a bow. The sonic quality thus achieved with such peculiar instruments has a strange touch of the unearthly, hinting at an undescribable emotional potential.

In 1995, Constance Demby releases Aeterna, a work inspired in classical composers of the romantic school, namely Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. In this work, the author takes her music far beyond the earthly landscapes. The melodic atmosphere that pervades the works of these two Russian master musicians combines with the sublime virtuosity typical of a Bach, in a harmony where the piano becomes the king of all instruments par excellence, thus resulting into a composition of a highly spiritual character, passionate, deep, whose beauty surpasses all descriptions. It looks as if Demby recreated herself in the sculpting of sounds, thus giving birth to a sonic landscape which is to become a classic whose power transforms the listener, expanding the mind, opening the heart to what is to become the classical music of the twenty-first century in its most exquisite symphonic quality. A dreamworld music, portraying feelings from outer space, delightfully adequate to be used in some planetarium, or maybe as the soundtrack for a movie about the space lanes, this music takes us to a deeply emotional and spiritual experience of a transcendental, sublime nature.

Nowadays Constance Demby continues to create new sonic worlds of a contemporary orchestral character in her studio. To do this she utilizes the latest in electronics technology, including digital samplers and synthesizers. The composer never ceases to work, so that she can succeed in achieving the complete mastery of the instruments she uses, computer controlled, of course, a world that nonetheless she finds rather arid as well as challenging. To her, it is somewhat frustrating to find she cannot perform her music just because she forgot to press some key. This is why she perseveres in achieving a thorough control of these new technologies. On the other hand, she plans to continue engaging herself on live world tours as she already did before. Constance is a great believer in the power of music to transform the people, as well as its capacity to awaken the consciousness of the human being taking it to its most elevated heights. She herself claims that music is the highest of the arts, it helps us to connect ourselves with the spirit by means of sound, thus leading us to our highest faculties, ascending through music to a greater perspective of the universe surrounding us, of our inner self, of our spiritual essence. Her music can certainly have a therapeutical quality, given its relaxing, fluid nature, with a fresh, expressive, irresistible air that shapes sonic figures in a classical atmosphere that in her hands become sonic sculptures, in a word, giving us a present of a classicism that, should we close our eyes, becomes visual music within our perception, within our minds.

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