COMPEL Omeka Dev

Browse Items (868 total)

  • First movement of the three movements piece for Saxophone and live electronics. Live processed with Max/MSP and RTcmix. Premiere: Mar. 2015, Cohen Family Studio, CCM, Cincinnati

  • Justly-tuned guitar harmonic samples composed with rhythmic ratios and pleasant squares.

  • Kyma processing of human voices and lobby sounds

    Lobby Reforms is a live computer processing audio environment that brings the pre-concert sounds of people passing through the lobby into the concert hall (as well as back into the lobby) in an informal collage of social activity. Microphones are placed at key locations in the lobby to gather the sounds of people arriving for this concert, buying tickets, discussing the printed concert program, chatting about the day, and just milling about before the concert itself begins. The audio sources are processed in real-time and then directed back through the sound system to create a sonic environment that leads organically into the concert itself as the lobby sounds eventually diminish as a result of the audience leaving that space for the concert hall.

  • Fractus I received first prize in the 2012 ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Competition.

  • Fixed media piece using recordings of a Japanese shamisen. Best diffused over a multi-channel playback system.

  • embed (live) is a recorded improvisation for electric guitar and interactive electronics. When faced with a new electric guitar sound, some audience listeners might brush it off as just another effect. However, it is the effect itself that is the focus of their attention, which, in turn, minimizes the electric guitar and its role as a sound producer. Thus, in a sense, the effect supersedes its source. One way to get listeners to distinguish the instrument from that which is being processed is to invite them to confront the discrepancies between live and recorded sound. While recorded sound is a fixed representation or history of some sonic event, live sound is (sometimes) heard for the first and only time. In embed (live) the electric guitar acts as both an instrument that produces sound and a controller of another. While one sound is a live product of electromagnetism, the other, although composed in real-time, is a fabrication of fixed recordings contingent on the electric guitar input.

  • CREATION & BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

    Knut Hamsun’s novel Sult is a point of departure for a libretto by award-winning poet Darcie Dennigan, exploring themes of psychological decay, irrationality, and self-destruction. Oumenos is a starving and delusional young writer who is unwilling to compromise his work even as his intellect and body gradually deteriorate.  He is split in two; the baritone and soprano form a composite, each depicting aspects of his inner/outer selves and suppressed madness. His hunger and self-disgust lead him to consider stealing bread, and to thoughts of self-mutilation. He despises his baseness. He is a dog. He is drawn to Ylajali (mezzo-soprano), a young girl who appears to him in various manifestations. At the bloodbank, Ylajali draws his blood. At the spermbank, she coaxes his orgasm. In a butchershop, Ylajali as countergirl displays the meat before him. He fights his coarseness and hungers to appear presentable, normal. He finds himself examining her on the counter as if she were meat. Humiliated by his inner self, and by Ylajali, he in turn humiliates her. He has again become, in his mind, a dog.

    The complete opera in four parts is being composed over the course of 2014-2017 via residencies and workshops throughout the U.S. and Europe. The first completed scene of the opera (Part III, Sc. 1) was selected for the Internationales Musikinstut Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop and premiered August, 2014 in an acoustic version for three singers, alto flute, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello. This ensemble was augmented by the inclusion of electric guitar, baritone saxophone, live electronics, and video projection of both live capture and pre-recorded film for the L.A. premiere of Part III, Scenes 1 & 2 at The Industry’s “First Take”, and the [Switch~ Ensemble]’s NYC premiere on the MATA Interval Series at the DiMenna Center.

    The score, electronics, and video for Part I will be finalized during a three-month residency appointed by the City Council of Bergen, Norway at USF Verftet in Fall of 2015. Our vision is a multimedia opera whose musical and dramaturgical narrative is driven not by dialogue or action, but rather psychological and musical states and situations that integrate video projection and electronics seamlessly, contextualizing the extremely fragmented music and text. While obfuscating much of the semantic content, this fragmentation and oscillation between intelligibility and unintelligibility demands a focus on phenomenological qualities and filmic subtlety, with physical, aural, and visual cues indicating context for the behavior of the singers and the interaction with their digital surroundings.

    Hunger breaks with operatic conventions by eschewing grandeur and dramaturgical coherence in order to explore the volatile city of one man’s psyche.  Because its true subject is, as Hamsun described, “the delicate fluctuations of a sensitive soul, the strange, peculiar life of the mind,” its narrative threads are unclassifiable and non-contiguous within the confines of conventional logic, and its protagonist is splintered and psychologically erratic, with theatrical time that is compressed through multimedia into situations that are claustrophobically intimate, constantly in flux, and contradictory. It thus invites participants to construct and engage with a multiplicity of scenarios and readings. The edge of comprehensibility itself becomes a means of producing structural integrity and coherence while reflecting the central theme of psychological deterioration and fragility.

    – Jason Thorpe Buchanan & Darcie Dennigan
    (October 3, 2014)

  • 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.

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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.