Browse Items (868 total)

• Playing Fields

• Once Again to the Light

  Commissioned and premiered by saxophonist John Sampen, and recorded on AMP Records: AMPREC 016. Written in memory of Cameron Benjamin.

• Fantasy in Earth Tones

  Fantasy in Earth Tones takes its name from Earth Tones, a piece for fixed media written by the composer in 1978 on the Moog Mark IV and the Arp 2600 synthesizers. The sounds of the times were dominated by the warm pulsing of square wave pads and glissing lead lines. Groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the Moody Blues fixed these sounds firmly in my ears when I was a high school student. So when Jay Gilbert and his 26 colleagues asked me to write a piece combining fixed media with high school band, my mind and my ears went immediately to those days, and those sounds. The opening runs in the synth and the last 30 seconds of the piece borrow from Earth Tones, but the remainder of the piece is pure fantasy.
  
  I am delighted to have been asked to write this piece for them, and to bring a little of my own youthful musical experiences to the ears of the talented young players of a new decade.

• The Unpurged Images of the Day

  Premiere performance in Kansas City, MO on March 3, 2016 with JoDee Davis, trombone and Robert Pherigo, piano.
  
  Click track provided. Requires two additional channels with volume control separate from the main speakers. Also requires ability to synchronize playback file and click file. Instructions included in performance notes.

• Blueprints of Eternity

  Blueprints of Eternity is a ten-minute fixed media work that uses the simple yet reliable kitchen timer as its sole sound source. As the work progresses, time is deconstructed, leading to the discovery of a reality occurring at the microtemporal level. After exploring this sound world, the listener hears the rebooting of time itself, before being snapped back to the present.

• Creatures from the Black Bassoon

  Creatures from the Black Bassoon is an acousmatic work consisting entirely of processed and unprocessed bassoon sounds. The work explores the attributes of a variety of animal-like and environmentalish sounds, including key clicks, reed squeaks, multiphonics, and other traditional and extended techniques. These sounds were organized by similar properties into characters, which were placed in a number of tableaus of length based on the golden section. Certain tableaus in the work are designated as “windows”, where developmental method is determined by significant contrast to the surrounding sections.

• Music, Walk with Me

  My musical work Music, Walk With Me sonifies data in response to my starting timbral and textural pointillistic musical concept of a few simultaneous sine waves. What interested me was how the sound of a chord could change based on changing volumes of its notes.. I imagined music with a slow tempo that would analyze a chord from different viewpoints, or “soundpoints.”
  
  I preferred to collect a data set that related to my life. After about a week of hard thinking I realized the answer was sitting in my pocket: I’d been collecting my own data set for over a year now with the Samsung S Health app, a step counter on my phone. The two primary parts of the data are daily and hourly steps taken. I thus had a number for frequency and for amplitude. While the information captured has itself become more and more interesting to me, I am still most proud of how I have expressed it artistically. To create chords, this piece draws on data created by myself and 3 friends. The four of us together thus create fluctuating harmony just by walking (i.e., by having walked). I mapped the data as such: for each day, every person is represented by only one pitch, which changes in volume based on quantized temporal averages. Walking 10,000 steps will therefore yield a tone of 1,000 Hz with a static pitch but a subtly or dramatically changing volume.
  
  Time is compressed in this piece in both its concert and installation forms. Moving through each day, 1 second represents one hour. A whole month of 30 days will thus last exactly 12 minutes.

• T(rr)t

  This piece was dedicated to Szilárd Benes
  
  Premiered June 23rd 2015 in Graz, Austria.

• White/Waves

• Harmonibots

  A sonic and kinetic installation of harmonica-playing inflatable sculptures