Browse Items (868 total)

• Dripstone

• Drop Dead (Long Top)

  Juxtaposition between Modern Dance Music and Baroque music

• Duo for Oscar

  Synclavier Concert, Lionel Hampton School of Music, University of Idaho, March 18, 1986. For one performer who plays alternately and together on both keyboard instruments.

• Duobatoni

• Dystopia

  Dystopia is a work for laptop ensemble that uses Max/MSP. There are 5 parts and a score. The piece is performed with a conductor that cues different gestures the performers should do with the patches. While the composition follows a score, time is not indicated and the conductor can choose to extended sections when they choose.

• Earth Tones

  Earth Tones was the first significant piece of electroacoustic music I wrote in graduate school (1978), and was created using a 4-track recorder, a Moog Mark IV, an Arp 2600 with sequencer and an EchoPlex (analog echo). It’s now become an homage to the wonderful synth sounds of the 1970s and to the meeting point between contemporary concert music and progressive rock — a place I’ve been exploring and mining now for decades. Thanks for the memories.

  Composer contact:  mobberleyj@umkc.edu    

  Website (scores, recordings and info):  http://jamesmobberleymusic.com   

• Earth

• Edgeplay

  Guided improvisation with spectral processing.
  
  Edgeplay is a guided improvisation for saxophone and live signal processing (Max). As the title implies, the piece explores boundaries, thresholds, and extremes. The saxophonist is instructed to push technique beyond the limits of control and investigate timbre as a delineator of sound: differentiating registers, distinguishing tone from breath and focused pitch from bands of noise. The score is a hybrid of text and graphics, left intentionally vague to suggest rather than dictate the performer’s investigation. The electronics (primarily spectral manipulations of the live saxophone) react to extremes, dynamic and durational, and adjust to the performer over the course of the piece. The sonic result is a mapping, albeit partial, of the sonic transformations idiomatic to the saxophone when in the capable hands of a trained performer.

• Effusion

  micro-collage, polystylism, rock, electronica; 2 channel recording
  
  In “Pleasure Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Current Electronic Music”, Ben Neill describes how popular and art music are distinguished along rhythmic lines. He predicts a future music where such distinctions are less clear; where the rhythmic vernacular of pop music is spoken in artistic territory. Much of my recent creative compositional efforts, including this piece, exemplify movement in this direction, both in terms of rhythm as well as other musical elements. Here, a foundation is set with materials from the pop world: verse-chorus form, 4/4 time signatures, fuzzy synth basses, rock grooves and EDM breaks. These materials are then manipulated in electroacoustic-art-music ways: timbres are transformed, grains are made and re-ordered, meters are changed, and earlier materials are restated in discontinuous sequences. The result is less a fusion and more a congeries where non-ironic choruses and dizzying jump-cuts cohabitate. These combinations are not motivated by a desire to influence the language of art music for its own sake, rather, they are expressions of cultural heterogeneity that is not compartmentalized.

• El Perdido

  Art song for voice and electronics in Spanish
  As there are not many pieces for solo voice and electronic media, I wanted to take the opportunity to work toward making a contribution in this medium. “El Perdido” is my title for the setting of Alejo Valdés Pica’s poem, “El Amor de los Amores,” which is about a rejected lover so traumatized by a failed romance that his entire vision of reality has become lost to him: his world is falling apart around him. Everything has become an eternal wasteland to him with only a faint reminiscence to momentarily alleviate the pains that lie within. The sandstorm that envelopes him at the end of the song is therefore appropriate; it reflects the inner turmoil that has lead him to yearn to be free of his life, a yearning that becomes as infinite as all the grains of sand lost in the desert. Pica’s work is representative of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century Filipino poets who incorporated contemporary Symbolist imagery in an overwrought style of Spanish writing.