Browse Items (868 total)

• Soggiorno

  Written for violinists Tiberius Klausner and Sylvian Iticovici. Concert recording by David Abel.
  
  Supported in part by a grant from the Missouri Arts Council.
  
  Composer contact: mobberleyj@umkc.edu
  
  Website (scores, recordings and info): http://jamesmobberleymusic.com

• Solis Overture

  This is an overture to my opera Pedr Solis, though the instrumentation is quite different.
  
  

  Though atypical in many ways, this piece is in fact an overture for my upcoming opera, titled Pedr Solis. For one thing, it will probably never be heard in front of the opera as the instrumentation is quite different. It was also written before the opera, and thus acts as more of a sketch pad than a summation of primary themes. The material types and the melodic fragment toward the end of this piece do play key roles in the larger work however, which had been under development for some time when the overture was composed.

  The opera chronicles the fictionalized tale of an actual Norwegian author, Pedr Solis, whose work was best known in Scandinavia during the 60s and 70s. Solis wrote only two novels, the most famous of which is Stillaset, published in 1970. It is perhaps the most extreme example of literary modernism to emerge from Norway, and, as with many of his writings, takes literary modernism itself on as a subtext. A third, still unpublished novel was apparently well underway when Solis disappeared from the public eye. Many speculate that he isolated himself in the far north of Norway, though this was never officially confirmed. The libretto for the opera, by Paul Schick, draws upon this account of Solis’ life, as well as von Hofmannsthal’s play The Tower.

  The melodic fragment heard toward the end of the overture in the strings is a modified version of a traditional Finnish song reminiscent of a joik, the traditional song form of the Sami people of northern Scandinavia. The song is Kuu kulta kivestä nousit as performed by Me Naiset. Regarding the electronics, though all the instruments are amplified their sound receives no further processing. The piece does include electronic sounds though, all of which are pre-recorded and played back by laptop onstage.

  This piece is dedicated to Wild Rumpus.

• Solis-EA

  The percussion is accompanied by a virtual 8-string instrument with LOTS of feedback and distortion.
  
  

  The electronics for Solis-EA are organized around a physical model of an 8 stringed instrument capable of producing a huge amount of distortion and internal feedback. This instrument responds to the material played by the percussionist, attempting to track the pitch of these sometimes “unpitched” instruments as best it can.

  The piece is loosely inspired by the novel Stillaset Brandt, by the Norwegian author Pedr Solis. Having created several other pieces that are tightly connected with the principle (unnamed) character in the novel, Solis-EA is more concerned with the author himself, his unusual and dichotomous life, and his mysterious disappearance (or tragic end, depending on which biographer you read).

  This piece is dedicated to Ryan Packard

• Sonaria for Choir and Synclavier

  Performed live at the 1978 Dartmouth College Glee Club’s Winter Carnival Concert, Spaulding Auditorium, Paul Zeller, director.

• Sonaria for Synclavier Alone

  Bregman Electronic Music Studio.

• Sones de san Blas

  Bregman Electronic Music Studio. Source material collected in Mexico with the voice of Marysa Navarro.

• Sonification Study No. 1: Music from the Isomer Project

  By deconstructing the sonic features of a recorded sound and applying a model-based musical framework to the result, it’s possible to re-imagine the original audio in an instrumental context.

• Sorrows Weep Not

• Sound of the Baskervilles

  A fixed media sound collage, whose title was granted permission by Milton Babbitt.

• Space-time Julienne

  As Einstein showed us, time and space are intimately linked. Space-time Julienne seeks to draw upon this concept by presenting a phenomenological experience that tugs at our understanding of this relativistic drama. In more musical terms, this is music that attempts to use space as a contrapuntal axis – a source of tension, development, and drama.

  An incredibly condensed history of painting would tell the story of perspective: how a two-dimensional surface can give the impression of the third. (Modern painters have abstracted and subsumed this concept in the best possible ways.) Over the past hundred years or so, the history of sculpture shows a similar yearning. From Calder’s mobiles, to Smithson’s earthworks, to the kinetic sculptors of the present, sculptors have broken down the three-dimensional constraints of their medium by adding the fourth dimension – the temporal. Can music, which has always existed in this four walled arena, achieve a similar goal?

  What these advancements offer to these other mediums is a reflexive perspective. The perspective that asks, “What is a urinal?” A perspective that allows the medium to abstract upon its potentials, so perhaps you can see it for what it really is. In this way, I want to write music that looks at music. Music that uses time to explore what it is inside of space. A ball of energy that extrudes itself from time.