Browse Items (868 total)

• Contraposition

  This is a work for piano modeled on a Baroque keyboard suite. There are five movements, any of which can be performed in any order.

• Contrails

  Aus Liebe Will Mein Heiland Sterben
  
  

  The idea of a “contrail,” a trail left behind after something’s passing, is interpreted in several ways in this piece. The electronics serve as a “contrail” to the flute, capturing and sustaining certain resonant frequencies of the flute’s sound. The whole work is also a contrail of Bach’s aria, “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” from St. Matthew’s Passion, about the compassion of Christ’s self-sacrifice. Most of the material in this piece was derived from a spectral analysis of the aria. The compositional process involved using an original computer algorithm running in ACToolbox to “morph” smoothly between spectrally generated material and the original flute melody found in the aria. This interpolation occurs in nearly every parameter of the music (rhythm, pitch, dynamics, etc.). The effect is that one musical idea gradually recedes from the texture revealing a second idea hidden within or beneath it. As this patina dissolves, notes or phrases from the original aria are sometimes heard to emerge from the resonant, fluttering abyss from which the work begins.

  A stereo version of Contrails exists as well.

• Composition for S#|††¥ Piano, Drum Samples, Concrète Sounds, and Processing

  (Originally written for 8 channels, can also be performed with 4 or even 2 channels)
  
  Composition of this piece was funded by an Allen Strange Award from the Washington (State) Composers Forum. As per a request from Shiau-Uen Ding, my goal was to combine my interests in musique concrete, electronica/techno, and live computer music as part of a large-scale solo piano work.
  I decided to work with a shitty piano as sound material. The shitty piano has interesting kinds of indeterminacy associated with it. You know that some notes are going to be “out”, but you’re never sure which ones. The details of this composition, though always following the same basic dramatic and formal outline, are always different at each performance. Every shitty piano is different. The musique concrete sounds can be re-realized in different combinations at each performance. Because shitty pianos are unreliable in producing exact pitches, I notate much of the piano part in a “graphic” way, specifying only general contours. Thus, the piece is mostly a “percussion” piece, largely devoid of melody and harmony, but chock-filled with funky rhythms and general joyous chaos and cacophony.

• Columbia etude no. 1

  Tape spliced exercise in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

• Coelacanth

  For Bass Trombone, Amplified Octet, and Responsive Electroacoustic Environment
  
  The bass trombone, in the foreground in Coelacanth, snakes through a landscape populated with brittle noise, buzzing tin foil, homemade rubber-band instruments, and bouncing Ping-Pong balls. Exploring extreme juxtapositions of noise versus pitch, density versus sparsity, and synchrony versus asynchrony, the piece is pervaded by a feeling of tension and disquiet. Like an oscillating spring–mass system, Coelacanth constantly seems to be losing energy, in danger of grinding to a halt, only to receive another push just in time to continue on a bit further. Central to the aesthetic of the work is an eight-foot suspended walnut-wood plank. The sound of this instrument, referred to by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis as a “simantra” in reference to an instrument of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox providence, is rich in noise and high harmonic partials. These pitches, untangled from recordings of the instrument with the help of software, form the basis for the harmonic language of Coelacanth. Equally important to the work is the timbre of another unusual instrument, the bullroarer. Consisting of an airfoil swung around the head to produce an eerie buzzing noise, examples of suspected bullroarers have been found in caves in France dating from the Palaeolithic Era. The timbre of this instrument is explored in Coelacanth through software algorithms that translate the unmistakable pulsing drone of the bullroarer into chords that slowly transform as they disperse throughout the ensemble. Like the work’s namesake, Coelacanth is bony and awkward, but among all the sharp teeth and superfluous fins, a fearful beauty seems imminent.

• Class Notes

  Community College of Aurora Commission, first aired on Aurora Public Television (KACT, Channel 28), Spring, 1986.

• Chordochromies

• Chimera's Garden

• Cherry Blossom and a Wrapped Thing; After Hokusai

  Inspired by a subtle print by Hokusai, this piece was commissioned by F. Gerard Errante, for his CD 'Delicate Balance.'
  
  Cherry Blossom and a Wrapped Thing: After Hokusai was inspired by a print of the same name  by the extraordinary Japanese printmaker known as Hokusai (1760 – 1849). I encountered it in a sumptuous collection of his prints in Tokyo and was immediately struck by the subtle mystery of both its subject matter and execution. The cherry blossom speaks of the beauty and brevity of life; the wrapped thing of its ineffability. My compositional response is scored for amplified clarinet and multichannel audio. The electronics were made from cuttings of a previous piece commissioned by clarinetist F. Gerard Errante, to whom the piece is dedicated. They have been transformed into an entirely different form and take root in new ways, wrapping around the performer and audience, sometimes drifting to earth, sometimes floating above. The sound processing and multi-channel audio path were designed using RTcmix. F. Gerard Errante commissioned the piece for his Delicate Balance CD, available on Aucourant Records. –JS

• Chef's d'oeuvre

  First electronic music composition in the Griffith Electronic Music Studio. The most well-known of all the composer’s works.