Browse Items (868 total)

• gimme shelter

  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.

• walkside, lost

  walkside, lost
  by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
  Text by Darcie Dennigan

  Commissioned by Gaudeamus Muziekweek for Slagwerk Den Haag.
  World Premiere: Utrecht, Netherlands – September 13, 2015

• Second Study for Alto Saxophone, Video, and Electronics: pulp

• Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy

  Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy was written over a three month period while traveling and hitchhiking throughout Europe, surrounding time spent attending at the IRCAM Manifeste Festival in Paris and the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. As one might imagine, composing with pencil and paper while constantly on the move can be rather cumbersome, having only short periods of time available to focus, and often taking place in awkward workspaces like cafes, restaurants, hostels, and the apartments of my various hosts. Most of these environments were quite busy and chaotic spaces. This situation presented a challenge after having spent most of my compositional activity to date in an academic setting with a piano or other musical equipment readily available.

  My original intent when I set out was to explore the timbral possibilities of the bass clarinet, utilizing a variety of techniques to produce complex soundscapes and microtonal sonorities that would provide germinal material for the work while unifying the ensemble. In addition to the sonorities that are worked out through sampling and spectral analysis of multiphonics, additional pitch content is generated through an acoustic analogue to a process known in electronic music as “single-sideband modulation,” resulting in a series of combination tones made by adding two frequencies (for instance, a bass clarinet tone and an open scordatura string of the cello), to one another, producing a series that grows exponentially (i.e. 100Hz+200Hz=300Hz, 200Hz+300Hz=500Hz, etc.).

  The title comes from an arguably conceptual device: the low E-flat that simultaneously pervades the work and is non-existent. I imagine that the ensemble is always reaching towards this E-flat as a point of centricity, but never quite arrive; analogous to an asymptote, as it approaches infinity. Entropy can be described as the “measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system,” or the “tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.” (source: American Heritage Dictionary). Taking some poetic liberties in reducing the scientific definition of “entropy” to simply a unit of measurement for chaos, one might say that this work conveys a state of high entropy in music, in stark contrast both to my previous work and to the classical tradition itself. This is a characteristic that I feel reflects not only specific elements of the compositional process, but also the result of the technical demands made on the performers, as well as my state of mind throughout the creation of this work.

• Graveyard Shift

  Graveyard Shift is a piece inspired by the events that I experienced while working overnight at a retail store. I filmed the videos over the course of two days and then spent one week editing the video and one week writing the music. All videos were shot in Lincoln, Nebraska and in an abandoned pioneer-cemetery in western Iowa called Slates Cemetery (est. 1878). Layers of film and sound are combined in various ways to complement one another or cancel one another out.

• Irrational Rationalities

  Irrational Rationalities (2015) is loosely inspired by Alvin Loving’s painting Rational Irrationalism (1969).Loving was a cubist painter who concentrated on spatial illusionism, and at first glance, his painting appears to be a series of simple hexagonal shapes intertwined with each other. However, upon closer examination, one begins to see the irrational nature of the work, as none of the lines actually create completed shapes. Much like an M. C. Escher print, a line that at first appears to be the top of a shape is later seen as the bottom, or the side. The lines in Loving’s painting interact with each other and themselves, creating a series of illogical geometric shapes.

  Irrational Rationalities explores a similar play but from the opposite direction. The piece is comprised of three distinct thematic ideas, all of which are perfectly rational in isolation: an invented folk tune; weaving polyrhythmic polyphony; and violent – almost cubist – chords. These three thematic ideas are then irrationally layered upon each other and taken out of context, challenging the notion of passive listening.

  Irrational Rationalities was commissioned by and written for ensemble mise-en.

• Seeing the Past Through the Prism of Tomorrow

• crook'd

• oNe

• White Canvas

  I woke up one morning after a performance in Connecticut, and I realized that everything I had recently composed was following a similar pattern and, to some degree, was actually just the same piece slightly reimagined. White Canvas was a compositional exercise in which I challenged identify each of these characteristics, and then intentionally do the opposite.