Browse Items (868 total)

• 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.

• Filhos da Nana

  The first of several songs for children in Brazilian orphanages sung by those children and Marlui Miranda.

• Five Songs

  In Five Songs, analyses of the flute performance drive the electroacoustic music, modifying various parameters that affect its realization in a way that is closely related to the flutist’s sound and gesture. Each part complements the musical capabilities of the other: sometimes they fuse into a compound voice that is simultaneously narrative and abstract, and at other times they oppose one another in stark relief. Inspired by the poetry of Stephen Crane, the five brief sections of the work manifest contrasting moods, interaction strategies, and approaches to material.

• Fizz

  Two sounds primarily sparked FIZZ. The first was a disequilibrium in a toilet tank that caused almost inaudible cyclic, but constantly changing, sounds: a faint rising squeak that occurred at the valve where the rod attaches, coupled with water trickling down the refill pipe, resulting in a squeak, trickle, squeak, trickle sequence. I stretched this sound using granular synthesis and layered the results. There is an ebb and flow that floats naturally across the space. It provides the long section that occurs after the rhythmic filtered faulty faucet valve that begins the piece. Disk drives turning on and off then spiral us into a section in which a malfunction in my system caused cyclic low frequency feedback. This is accompanied by fizz, a sound that I never captured satisfactorily until a student, Alison Johnson, played her wonderful recording of fizzing for me. She divulged her method of producing fizzing, providing the second spark for this piece.

• Flown

• Fluid Dynamics

  My original intent for Fluid Dynamics (2002) was to use two rhythmic sounds I recorded—a raucous faulty faucet in a men’s restroom near the Concert Hall and a gently squeaking gas service regulator outside of Lisser Hall, both on the Mills College campus. As the piece developed, though, the rhythmic elements were set aside as the more subtle sound of gas traveling through the pipes and the soft purring sound that the faucet made on its way to the clacking rhythm became the foci. To these sources I added the sound of a large steel ball and a small brass ball bearing being propelled across a wooden floor, a spare MCI tape machine part rolling on a linotype sheet, and very thin brass sheeting gently swaying. The other main sound is that of a large steel ball rolling down two strings of a miniature koto-like instrument.

  The sources are processed using phase vocoding, convolution, granular synthesis, equalization, and extensive layering. Although residual attachments to the original sounds remain, often their origins are rather obscured. The spatialization is natural. At times more static sources are convolved against naturally moving sources so that they take on the spatialization of the moving sources.

• Flurry

• For Daniel Frantz: an algorithm

  Samples recorded by Daniel Frantz and Will Huff in the University of Iowa’s anechoic chamber by percussionist Andy Thierauf (theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS). The piece is algorithmically generated in Max and can last for any duration desired.

• Foreign Masonry

  The narrator in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1945 story “The Aleph” describes a remarkable singularity under an acquaintance’s cellar stairs: a point where the universe in its entirety can be experienced at once. At the end of the story, he describes other Alephs that might exist in the world:

  “The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court…No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum…The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: ‘In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.’”

  “Foreign Masonry” uses a single multiphonic built from the baritone saxophone’s lowest note as the mysterious column, its multitudinous harmonic series representative of the entire universe.

• Forgetfulness VR

  Immersive virtual reality interactive installation, a communal rendering of Denise Duhamel's poem from the Mobius series for virtual reality, motion tracking, and biofeedback (heart rate and galvanic skin response) in collaboration with Zachary Duer and Meaghan Dee.