Browse Items (868 total)

• White/Waves

• T(rr)t

  This piece was dedicated to Szilárd Benes
  
  Premiered June 23rd 2015 in Graz, Austria.

• Music, Walk with Me

  My musical work Music, Walk With Me sonifies data in response to my starting timbral and textural pointillistic musical concept of a few simultaneous sine waves. What interested me was how the sound of a chord could change based on changing volumes of its notes.. I imagined music with a slow tempo that would analyze a chord from different viewpoints, or “soundpoints.”
  
  I preferred to collect a data set that related to my life. After about a week of hard thinking I realized the answer was sitting in my pocket: I’d been collecting my own data set for over a year now with the Samsung S Health app, a step counter on my phone. The two primary parts of the data are daily and hourly steps taken. I thus had a number for frequency and for amplitude. While the information captured has itself become more and more interesting to me, I am still most proud of how I have expressed it artistically. To create chords, this piece draws on data created by myself and 3 friends. The four of us together thus create fluctuating harmony just by walking (i.e., by having walked). I mapped the data as such: for each day, every person is represented by only one pitch, which changes in volume based on quantized temporal averages. Walking 10,000 steps will therefore yield a tone of 1,000 Hz with a static pitch but a subtly or dramatically changing volume.
  
  Time is compressed in this piece in both its concert and installation forms. Moving through each day, 1 second represents one hour. A whole month of 30 days will thus last exactly 12 minutes.

• Creatures from the Black Bassoon

  Creatures from the Black Bassoon is an acousmatic work consisting entirely of processed and unprocessed bassoon sounds. The work explores the attributes of a variety of animal-like and environmentalish sounds, including key clicks, reed squeaks, multiphonics, and other traditional and extended techniques. These sounds were organized by similar properties into characters, which were placed in a number of tableaus of length based on the golden section. Certain tableaus in the work are designated as “windows”, where developmental method is determined by significant contrast to the surrounding sections.

• Blueprints of Eternity

  Blueprints of Eternity is a ten-minute fixed media work that uses the simple yet reliable kitchen timer as its sole sound source. As the work progresses, time is deconstructed, leading to the discovery of a reality occurring at the microtemporal level. After exploring this sound world, the listener hears the rebooting of time itself, before being snapped back to the present.

• Reverie of Solitude

• Crosswinds

  Crosswinds represents a melding of the traditional woodwind sound of the clarinet with digital live electronic techniques, and the piece explores the potential for this relationship in three parts.

  To begin the piece, the stage performer breathes through the clarinet, which serves to inform the electronic elements to come. This initial breath is captured by the computer program and is modified and reduplicated to create the sonic tone of a soft wind always present beneath the piece to come. This is the first step in uniting the digital and woodwind elements, as the same breath which animates the clarinet also activates the electronics.

  From this most fundamental element, the breath becomes a single sustained note from which the computer will generate all of its subsequent tones. The impression is one of a mentor relationship, where the traditional instrument provides the tools and the support for the electronic elements. The disposition is contemplative, though it alternates between a subdued easiness and a playful mystery, as if to introduce the digital aspects to the range and variety of the clarinet’s moods. The rapport between the two is hesitant in the first part: the electronics contributing a subtle reverb as the performer teaches the computer dexterity through a number of broad leaps, hinting at but never fully embracing the main motif.

  As the theme becomes more self-assured, the digital element now produces its own tones, parroting the clarinet melody to signal its readiness to be an equal partner in the conversation. As the clarinet begins the second part of the piece, the computer now provides a harmonizing undercurrent each time it is invited to do so by the performer.

  In the third part, the electronics play counterpoint to the skill of the clarinetist, the two elements intricately entwined. From the elemental sound of wind first produced by the performer and perpetuated by the computer, the piece concludes in a celebration of the relationship built between the two, and the main theme is fully expressed as the two take it in variations.

  Crosswinds is, in many ways, an experience of the history of our music through the relationship between traditional clarinet and modern digital techniques: the common elements they share, the singularity of their own particular strengths, and the beauty that can be experienced when they collaborate.

  Program note by Walter Jordan
  Please credit Walter Jordan when using this program note

• The Unpurged Images of the Day

  Premiere performance in Kansas City, MO on March 3, 2016 with JoDee Davis, trombone and Robert Pherigo, piano.
  
  Click track provided. Requires two additional channels with volume control separate from the main speakers. Also requires ability to synchronize playback file and click file. Instructions included in performance notes.

• Fantasy in Earth Tones

  Fantasy in Earth Tones takes its name from Earth Tones, a piece for fixed media written by the composer in 1978 on the Moog Mark IV and the Arp 2600 synthesizers. The sounds of the times were dominated by the warm pulsing of square wave pads and glissing lead lines. Groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the Moody Blues fixed these sounds firmly in my ears when I was a high school student. So when Jay Gilbert and his 26 colleagues asked me to write a piece combining fixed media with high school band, my mind and my ears went immediately to those days, and those sounds. The opening runs in the synth and the last 30 seconds of the piece borrow from Earth Tones, but the remainder of the piece is pure fantasy.
  
  I am delighted to have been asked to write this piece for them, and to bring a little of my own youthful musical experiences to the ears of the talented young players of a new decade.

• Once Again to the Light

  Commissioned and premiered by saxophonist John Sampen, and recorded on AMP Records: AMPREC 016. Written in memory of Cameron Benjamin.