COMPEL Omeka Dev

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  • Can also be performed in three channels, with one speaker on stage between the performers. Feel free to contact the composer for performance materials.

  • Funnel Cloud explores the relationship between artifice and reality through the metaphor of a tornado. After the tornado rumbles through a small village, a lone survivor wanders into an art gallery only to find the paintings coming to life with a dancing man, swirling jazz and aboriginal incantations. The last image in the gallery is surprisingly a painting of a tornado that comes to life, grabbing the survivor and drawing him into the artistic netherworld.

    The music in Funnel Cloud plays an important role in representing the various states of the art vs. reality paradigm. The tornado sounds are all synthetic while the sounds within the gallery are transformations of familiar music. Inversions of “Dorothy’s arrival in Oz theme” from The Wizard of Oz carry the survivor through the various exhibits in the art gallery. Reversed jazz, vocal music from Bali and odd transformations of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantstique bring the individual paintings to life. The question of what is real and what is synthetic is ironically presented through music, image and transformation.

    Funnel Cloud received the Animation Award from the 11th Annual Louisiana Video Shorts Festival (1999) in New Orleans, LA.

  • Eight channel acousmatic composition awarded First Prize in the 2014 ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Competition.

    Completed in 2013, GATES is an electroacoustic composition that was partly inspired by the Pleiades constellation. A musical mapping of an image of the constellation occurs in the middle and at the conclusion of the composition. One can hear this depiction in the “wood block” timbres. This representation of Pleiades relates to a passage from Ignatius Loyola’s autobiography, St. Ignatius’ Own Story as Told to Luiz Gonzalez de Camara (1555).

    It was his [Ignatius’] greatest consolation to gaze upon the heavens and stars, which he often did, and for long stretches at a time, because when doing so he felt within himself a powerful urge to be serving our Lord.

    (From A Commentary on Saint Ignatius’ Rules for the Discernment Of Spirits, Jules J. Toner, 1979.)

    I chanced upon this unique passage after an evening of stargazing. Initially, I did not think much of it, but re-evaluated the occasion after unintentionally opening to the following passage in Vladimir Solovyov’s essay, “Nationality from a Moral Point of View” (1895). … “the Spanish genius Ignatius Loyola founded the order of the Jesuits for the struggle with Protestantism on peaceful grounds” (Ed. & Trans. Wozniuk). Following this discovery, and seeing as it was one of two mentions of Ignatius in Solovyov’s entire collection of essays, I resolved to use the musical mapping of the constellation as a central and unifying element in this composition. The title refers to the use of noise gates during the creative process. Bending string and brass timbres, time stretched voice, and layers of filtered noise contribute to the drama of this composition. The composer is grateful for the assistance of the many musicians who participated in recording sessions that were utilized in this composition; especially Chicago-based musician, Tyler Beach, for his valuable insights and session performances on the acoustic and electric guitars.

  • Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

  • for tape and early digital sound sources.

  • Incidental music to the play of the same name.

  • The Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, established in 910 by William I of Aquitaine, was the leading center of monasticism in the Middle Ages and boasted the largest church in Christendom prior to the 16th-century reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Today only the bell tower of the church and a fraction of the great abbey remain, having been devastated by plundering during the French Revolution.  Otherworldly echoes of the millennium-old ruins resound in Ghosts of Cluny, a piece which evokes both the sacredness and the immense acoustic space of the former monastery.

    The work was realized in the IMPACT Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and was named a Finalist in the International Composition Competition “Città di Udine,” ninth edition.

  • gimme shelter
    by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
    Text by Darcie Dennigan

    Commissioned by Eklekto Percussion, Geneva, Switzerland
    World Premiere: Geneva, Switzerland – November 14, 2015

    gimme shelter is the second in a cycle of compositions for three percussionists, electronics, and live video processing on texts by American poet Darcie Dennigan written specifically for these works, and was commissioned by Eklekto Percussion Geneva. The piece revolves around the obfuscation and recontextualization of semantic content in speech, and the way in which confusion and ambiguity distort a participant’s perception. The live processing generates a reservoir of data that can be drawn from, manipulated, and re-composited against itself through parameters that control its behavior, resulting in visual, aural, and temporal dissonances between multimedia and human performance. Poet Darcie Dennigan writes: It was Halloween when the New York Times showcased their story of a German town and its 102 inhabitants “bracing” for their mandated embrace of 750 asylum seekers. Catastrophe visits the world’s inhabitants unevenly, disproportionately, and then its victims, costumed in their catastrophe, must visit us. gimme shelter evokes three starkly contrasting sociopolitical viewpoints in a text written concurrent with the mass exodus of citizens of poor, war-ravaged, and environmentally unstable countries seeking home elsewhere. No single perspective or line is more important here than the other. Rather, consider the accretion of speech in overlapping entreaties alongside the stagnant drone of statistics and rhetoric. We are not free to listen to one side, to make one account readable, livable– hospitable.

  • A continuation of my fascination with the sounds of metal objects, Glassy Metals explores the sounds of tungsten filaments in burned out incandescent light bulbs, magnetic (iron oxide) tape rushing across a head stack, small ball bearings, ball chains of various sizes, sheet metal, tiny gear motors, bikes, BART (which permeates the sonic landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area), freight trains, and other metal objects.

    Some sounds are used in their raw state; others, such as the BART train, which now sounds like the wind, are transformed beyond recognition. Selecting only small portions of the spectrums of several sources and layering them results in new constructs with constantly fluctuating details. The ending exaggerates these perturbations, as sources emerge from the texture and fold back in as if they are fluttering insects hovering close by briefly, then flitting away, only to return later. Although several sources are cyclic, none are precisely so, nor are they synchronous with other sources combined in the layers, so apparent synchronous relationships occur only briefly, then drift apart. Glassy Metals takes its title from non-crystalline (amorphous) metallic materials.

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If you see an error or would like to add content to COMPEL, please leave a comment or contact Hollis Wittman at hollisw@vt.edu.