Browse Items (868 total)

• Ring, Resonate, Resound

  Ring, Resonate, Resound is an acousmatic composition written in homage to John Chowning. The piece tips its hat to Chowning’s Stria, Turenas, and the beautiful sonic landscape Chowning explored through his research and discovery of FM synthesis. Ring, Resonate, Resound is dedicated to him.

  The composition explores timbre through dozens of bell sounds, which provide the harmonic and timbral material, structure, foreground, and background for the piece. The composition is comprised of five sections, each examining a different set of bells and materials that interact with them. The piece begins thin and bright, then gradually increases in spectral and textural density until the listener is enveloped by a thick sound mass of ringing bells. The bells gently fade into waves of rich harmonic resonances.

  The piece was composed using a multidimensional timbre model Reid developed while at Stanford University. The model is based on perceptual timbre studies and has been used by the composer to explore the compositional applications of “timbre spaces” and the relationship between reverberant space and timbre, or rather the concept of “timbre in space.”

  Ring, Resonate, Resound was premiered at Stanford University’s Triple CCRMAlite: 40, 50, 80 celebration in October of 2014.

• synapse_circuit

  What is the voice inside the machine? While computers perform tasks that extend the abilities of our own minds, they increasingly act as independent entities. Synapse_circuit serves not as a direct analogy between these two ideas, but rather as a symbol of human-machine interaction. The computer augments the percussionist’s performance, and improvises sounds based on his or her playing using algorithmic processes in Pure Data. The percussion performance consists of glasses, bottles, and a bowl, which the performer hits, scrapes, blows and sings into. All sounds produced by the computer are derived from the real time performance. Both human and machine performers work from a score, but listen and respond to the performance of the other. Synapses and circuits – human and computer – together find the music inside the machine. This work honors the complexity both of the human mind and its digital counterpart, taking us from wonder, to discovery, to celebration.

  Score and Pd patch available at www.vidiksis.com.

• Things That Live in the Whirligig

  Spinning, spinning, spinning… we greet the wondrous creatures that live within the whirligig. This piece explores textures created through spinning, or that evoke whirling. As the whirligig goes round and round, I imagine a menagerie of creatures great and small that reside within. This work is based on a poem composed by my mother when she carried me, and I dedicate it to my newborn daughter. Things That Live in the Whirligig is for solo multi-percussion and live processing, composed in Pure Data. “For things once seen are pulled within the whirligig of mind, where they are tamed and in the heart framed to be used over again in time…”

  Score and Pd patch available at www.vidiksis.com.

• Mitochondrial Dreams

  The mitochondria within my body will perish at the time of my death.  Like all men and women who will not in the course of their life carry a child within them, the long chain of information passed through these cells exclusively from mother to child will be destroyed and forgotten.  Mitochondrial Dreams is a musical work for found percussion items and electronics produced using Csound, Pure Data, and Logic.  It explores the wonder that can be felt when contemplating the ancient genetic history these cells carry.  They are part of us; indeed we could not exist without them, yet these small creatures are genetically dissimilar from our own code.  They are an essential part of our shared human heritage.  The community of mitochondrial cells within me has propagated in a line unbroken since before the first humans walked the earth – yet this genetic lineage will unquestionably end with me.  Mitochondrial Dreams is a celebration of the marvelous complexity of life and a reckoning with mortality.

  Score and Pd patch available at www.vidiksis.com.

• Transfigurations

  For ages, the orchestra served as the most advanced tone generator available to the musical art. The history of the orchestra has been one of continual development toward a diversity of timbre, loudness, and register. The computer is the only musical instrument capable of making all sounds discernible by the human ear; it is logical then to bring the computer into the orchestral tradition. Transfigurations combines the vast musical forces provided by these two mediums. All the sounds one hears originate in the orchestra itself live during the performance, except for the last sound. The computer processes these sounds in real time – manipulating, augmenting, and reinventing the performance. As with human musicians, no two iterations of the computer realization are exactly alike.

  The piece comprises five sections. The first is a fast-paced interplay between the orchestra and the computer, filled with counterpoint and rising to a dark and threatening culmination. In the second part, the flute, clarinet, and computer intermingle and untangle again with interjections from the rest of the full ensemble. The third portion of the work is a hopeful adagio, expanded in color by the computer, which ends in a triumphant outburst. The fourth section is dominated by solo violin and percussion. Both are manipulated to create an dense, metallic texture with threatening interjections from the rest of the ensemble. In the final section, the orchestra takes off at brisk pace, as if trying to outpace the ever-increasing effect of the digital manipulation. It is finally overtaken in a moment of music controlled by the computer and completely transformed from the live performance. As this music fades away, the only sounds not manipulated directly from the orchestra are heard. These chime-like tones are determined stochastically by the computer from the notes of the opening chordal motive. As these play softly fading into the distance, the orchestra enters once again for a final weary statement.

  Score and Pd patch available at www.vidiksis.com.

• The Adventures of Norby

  When I was a child, one of my favorite books to read was a series of science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov entitled Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot. Although I remember very little of these books, the title character still holds a very sentimental part of my heart. In the books, Norby and his boy owner would travel the galaxy, inevitably get in to trouble, and somehow always manage to save the day. The Adventures of Norby (2007) is a theatrical work for piano and pre-recorded electronics that chronicles the exploits (unrelated to the novels) of Norby.

  The piece is very visual, and to be most effective, it must be seen in person, which I suppose makes it an unintentional statement on the societal obsession over recordings. During the piece, the pianist taps various parts of the case with his/her hands and fists, plays drumsticks on the floor, uses hard mallets inside the piano on the iron frame and the strings, and also improvises. The piece also blends several musical genres together.

• Local Equilibrium Dynamics

  Written for SPLICE Ensemble
  Local Equilibrium Dynamics is a work for two musicians, working both within and around a single piano. These sounds are processed in real-time both algorithmically by the computer, and by a small chamber ensemble of electronic musicians. The duo performs a number of interactions throughout the piece, including collaboration, disruption, and dispersion of the sound each produces. The live processing complicates this relationship even further as the sound is transmitted to the audience. As these two musicians perform within such an intimate space, they variably help and hinder each other as the work progresses. This creates increased moments of tension in both the musical output and the performance dynamic between these two musicians. The title refers to a principle in thermodynamics, whereby the thermal state of a system can be determined if the variations within it happen slowly enough in space and time. This concept serves as a metaphor for the system formed by the interplay between the two performers and the live processing.
  
  Score and Pd patch available at www.vidiksis.com.

• OverDrive

  As early as high school, I had fallen in love with the toy piano. I resolved to purchase one as soon as possible, and midway through college, I finally purchased my first Schoenhut “concert grand” toy piano. A 37 key wonder, the instrument was a very diminutive grand piano, striking metal rods instead of strings, and reminding everyone who saw it of Schroeder from Peanuts. I quickly immersed myself in the (then) small toy piano repertoire, and composed two pieces myself for toy piano.

  Several years later, I commissioned composer Matthew McConnell to write a concerto for toy piano and orchestra – one that would challenge the notion of the toy piano as a cute, quaint, humorous toy. He succeeded with this challenge better than I could have ever hoped, and I have since had the honor of performing this piece twice. The last time was in 2005. Since then, though his concerto has ballooned in popularity thanks to the wonders of YouTube, my toy piano has sat relatively unused in my studio.

  Then in 2010 I received an unexpected flurry of toy piano related requests. Three different pianists (in the USA, Canada, and Australia) scheduled performances of my earlier toy piano compositions. Two different pianists (in the USA and Germany) commissioned me to write new toy piano pieces. French pianist Jérémie Honnoré contacted me regarding an article he was writing on toy piano music, and Polish author and multi-instrumentalist Pawel Romanczuk interviewed me for inclusion in his upcoming book chronicling the history of the toy piano. Perhaps there was something in the water, but it became clear the toy piano was on the rise.

  With this much attention suddenly on the instrument, I wanted to write something that challenged the notion of what a toy piano could or could not do. By now, nearly everything has been explored on this instrument, including various keyboard and extended techniques. What I felt had been explored very little was the instrument’s unique overtone structure and the potential in fusing this with electronics. This piece, then, explores the percussive capabilities of the toy piano and the rich overtones created when the keys are violently struck. Roughly 75% of the electronic material heard is derived directly from the toy piano.

• 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.

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