Browse Items (868 total)

• BabyBirdBeat

  “BabyBirdBeat” is an étude inspired by a quote from artist Bruce Nauman: “And sometimes the question that you pose or the project that you start yourself turns into something else, you know, but at least it gets you started.” (Art21, 2001)

• Back and Forth

• Bamboo's Ghost

  In Bengal, young children are told that the whispers and crackles they hear near bamboo bushes are the voices of the ghosts that live there. With this story in mind, I have created a piece where I have elaborated the natural sounds made by bamboo trees when they are moved by the wind. These natural sounds are then mixed with other ambient sounds (street, traffic, conversations) and processed so that the resulting composition is characterized by a remote and abstract atmosphere. The original sounds have been recorded in Jakkur, India, in the summer of 2006.

• Bambuchla Shadows

  Bambuchla Shadows is a short exploration of colorful responsive sounds and live sound processing, for homemade bamboo flute and SuperCollider. It's my first fully realized piece for SuperCollider and live performer. The computer-generated sounds create a sparkling, shifting cloud in response to the very rustic and woody flute melodies, punctuated sometimes by live granulation and triggered samples from an ancient Buchla. I am an intermediate SC user, and I worked out the coding for this piece over several months; moreover, I also made the (admittedly rather crude) bamboo flute myself. It took several attempts to figure out how to cut and bore the finger holes and mouth hole correctly, and also how to cure the bamboo in the oven without setting the flute on fire. (That did happen on a previous attempt.) I like the contrast between high-tech computer sounds and low-tech flute I've painstakingly created in this piece, as both the digital and physical musical elements required experimentation and attention to detail. This piece is largely improvised, with scored cues for improvisation popping up as images triggered by the performance code.

• bats with baby faces in the violet light

  bats with baby faces in the violet light was created using the sounds of various objects the composer found around his home. the sounds are arranged into various gestural contexts, often with very little signal processing. the primary aesthetic aim of the piece is to exploit the unplanned and frequently unpredictable pitched sounds which often burst forth from, or which are components of, noisier, percussive gestures.

• BEAMS!

  Written for and recorded by trombonist John Leisenring.
  
  Composer contact: mobberleyj@umkc.edu
  
  Website (scores, recordings and info): http://jamesmobberleymusic.com

• Behind the Back

  Work for pipa (traditional Chinese lute) and electronics (triggered fixed media and some live processing). Commissioned by The Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra for Su Yun-Han.
  
  The musical inspiration for this piece comes from my fascination with the murals of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China. The artwork famously depicts musicians performing while dancing and flying though the air. One image – that of a woman playing pipa behind her back – is so iconic that many Chinese dancers train in order to recreate her graceful pose. Behind the Back alludes to the ceremonial atmosphere of the Mogao murals while imagining the sort of music provided by the acrobatic women depicted within – a music which incorporates passages suggestive of dance and aerial maneuvers. At all times, the virtuosity and lyricism of the pipa is the focal point.

• Bellowing Thunder, Crimson Sky

  With Bellowing Thunder, Crimson Sky I was trying to capture a feeling I had in the summer of 2013 while walking home just a storm was rolling in over my southeast Ohio town. The sun had not fully set so the sky was an eerie dark red and I could hear thunder rolling in the distance and see brief flashes of lightning. I was on my way home from an evening walk and I started to worry that I was going to get caught in a nasty storm; I made it home just before a massive cloudburst of rain and thunder. I wanted to recreate that sense of the “calm before the storm” that can arouse conflicting feelings of serenity and unease all at the same time.
  
  Bellowing Thunder, Crimson Sky was commissioned by Patchwork Duo (Noa Even and Stephen Klunk) and was premiered in spring 2014.

• Below the written pitches of Brian Ferneyhough's Superscriptio for solo piccolo

  Another installment in my found soundscape series; Below the written pitches spectrally extracts sound beneath the written pitches of Brian Ferneyhough's Superscriptio for solo piccolo to reveal recording anomalies, latent undertones, and mechanical noises.

• Beneath the Mountains