Browse Items (868 total)

• untangle my tongue

  untangle my tongue (2011) is a piece for fixed media in collaboration with poet, Alix Anne Shaw. We sent each other small samples of new work for use as material to inspire new words or music. After months of trading work back and forth, the piece was realized. Some sounds in the piece are cicadas, cars/trains, text being read by Alix and whispered by Hilary Purrington, and various instrumental sounds.

  The title is taken from Alix's poem inspired by my sounds, Small Bang Theory. It directly references that there is text that is altered, distorted, and overlapped. However, a deeper statement is being made about the current pace of our lives. I am a culprit of this technology and social media-driven lifestyle. Yet, when I went on walks to record sounds for this piece, I was forced to slow down, listen, and be present and engaged in the sounds around me.

• Vale Vêneto Remix

  VVR was composed during my residency at the 2013 Festival de Internacional de Inverno UFSM in Vale Vêneto, Brasil.  All of the sounds in the piece were collected, processed and recomposed during the week-long festival. I am personally fond of two specific sounds. The first is the siren, which came from the town police car. Near the end of our sound walk that day, one of the students went up to the policeman and asked if he would play the siren so that we could record it.  The policeman was reluctant at first, and I didn’t want to cause any kind of commotion. But he went ahead and played the siren, much to the delight of the kids in the town square.

  The other sound is the background “pop” music heard near the end of the piece. The winter festival coincides with the Italian Heritage festival in Vale Vêneto, and the town plays a variety of Italian pop/folk songs across loudspeakers throughout the town square.  You can hear it almost everywhere outside, and it is a persistent part of the audio landscape.  I felt it was impossible to create a soundscape of the town without it.

• Vanished into the Clouds (雲隠)

  (SCORE AVAILABLE BY REQUEST – jacob.sudol@gmail.com)

  stereo version also available for rehearsal and performance

  Vanished into the Clouds (雲隠) takes its title from a chapter in the ancient Japanese novel The Tale of Genji. This chapter is significant because it has no content. There are two theories about this chapter. The first theory is that the chapter is lost. The second theory, and the one that I prefer, is that the chapter was left intentionally blank so as to express the narrator’s sorrow about the death of Genji which occurs between the end of the preceding chapter and the following chapter.

  Unlike the aforementioned chapter, this work for cello and live electronics is not left blank. This said, many conventions of music such as melodic or motivic development, clear phrase structure, and rhythmic motion are regularly obscured and ignored. The resulting work instead focuses on exploring the inner sonic regions of the cello’s open and muted C string, sudden ruptures in motion, and the gradual degradation of material. The goal of this approach is to create a sort of new musica povera that reflects on both a narrators’ or authors’ difficulty of writing as well as the sort of inequalities of wealth that pervade our world.

  The work was written for and premiered by cellist Jason Calloway and is dedicated to him.

  – Jacob David Sudol Kaohsiung, Taiwan July 28, 2013

• Variations on a theme by Rachmaninoff

  Source material from the Rachmaninov 'Etude Tableau'.

• Verdacht

  12-minute piece for viola, live electronics, and glove controller.
  
  Verdacht situates the viola in a “suspicious” context, bookended by a chaotic punk-aesthetic, extended with a glove made specifically for it, also acting as an autonomous controller here. Fully notated, with space for rhythmic and melodic improvisation in a fixed order of scenes. Contextual sounds are produced on the fly from live samples looped or frozen with extreme panning – again, a suspicious context for the instrument, stylistically approached in this piece maniacally but traditionally.

• Voices: In Memoriam

  Written for pianists Leah Hokanson and Daniel Koppelman, and dedicated to the 343 New York City Firefighters who lost their lives in the attacks on 9/11/2001.

• VolcaBeatsJam Day #326!

  From "The Unrecordables 4" Electronic Music Showcase at Wayne State University: Composition, one day at a time 2022-2023

• Vorticose

  Vorticose was performed at the Sound Horizons music festival in Boston, in a live-control sound diffusion setting using Harvard University’s 40-speaker “Hydra” sound system. -May 2015
  
  A quadraphonic (4-channel) version of Vorticose was featured at the New Ideas in Music and Sound concert series in Boston. -October 2015

• Vous l'Inaccessible

  Vous l’Inaccessible is for soprano and electronics, and was inspired by the Guillaume de Machaut virelai “Douce Dame Jolie.” Machaut’s melody and text are presented in a variety of forms, as a chant, spoken word, and a direct quotation of the melody. As the piece unfolds, the voice becomes more free and independent of the original melody, creating a process of development followed by deconstruction and finally reconstruction into completely new material free from the original melody. The final spoken text is a modern text, related to the theme of unattainable love (like the Machaut text), but presented in modern French as opposed to Medieval French text of “Douce Dame Jolie.”

• Vox Metallica

  VOX METALLICA (2006), for fixed 2-channel digital media, uses a collection of recordings of non-singing sounds from several different voices, plus recordings of guitars, bass guitar, drum set, and organ as sound sources. Context being a critical part of our memory and pattern-recognition processes, Vox Metallica plays with familiar and non-familiar juxtapositions of elements from “classical” electro-acoustic and popular music. After all, it’s both a short walk, and a very long walk, from uptown to downtown…