Browse Items (868 total)

• crook'd

• Seeing the Past Through the Prism of Tomorrow

• Irrational Rationalities

  Irrational Rationalities (2015) is loosely inspired by Alvin Loving’s painting Rational Irrationalism (1969).Loving was a cubist painter who concentrated on spatial illusionism, and at first glance, his painting appears to be a series of simple hexagonal shapes intertwined with each other. However, upon closer examination, one begins to see the irrational nature of the work, as none of the lines actually create completed shapes. Much like an M. C. Escher print, a line that at first appears to be the top of a shape is later seen as the bottom, or the side. The lines in Loving’s painting interact with each other and themselves, creating a series of illogical geometric shapes.

  Irrational Rationalities explores a similar play but from the opposite direction. The piece is comprised of three distinct thematic ideas, all of which are perfectly rational in isolation: an invented folk tune; weaving polyrhythmic polyphony; and violent – almost cubist – chords. These three thematic ideas are then irrationally layered upon each other and taken out of context, challenging the notion of passive listening.

  Irrational Rationalities was commissioned by and written for ensemble mise-en.

• Graveyard Shift

  Graveyard Shift is a piece inspired by the events that I experienced while working overnight at a retail store. I filmed the videos over the course of two days and then spent one week editing the video and one week writing the music. All videos were shot in Lincoln, Nebraska and in an abandoned pioneer-cemetery in western Iowa called Slates Cemetery (est. 1878). Layers of film and sound are combined in various ways to complement one another or cancel one another out.

• Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy

  Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy was written over a three month period while traveling and hitchhiking throughout Europe, surrounding time spent attending at the IRCAM Manifeste Festival in Paris and the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. As one might imagine, composing with pencil and paper while constantly on the move can be rather cumbersome, having only short periods of time available to focus, and often taking place in awkward workspaces like cafes, restaurants, hostels, and the apartments of my various hosts. Most of these environments were quite busy and chaotic spaces. This situation presented a challenge after having spent most of my compositional activity to date in an academic setting with a piano or other musical equipment readily available.

  My original intent when I set out was to explore the timbral possibilities of the bass clarinet, utilizing a variety of techniques to produce complex soundscapes and microtonal sonorities that would provide germinal material for the work while unifying the ensemble. In addition to the sonorities that are worked out through sampling and spectral analysis of multiphonics, additional pitch content is generated through an acoustic analogue to a process known in electronic music as “single-sideband modulation,” resulting in a series of combination tones made by adding two frequencies (for instance, a bass clarinet tone and an open scordatura string of the cello), to one another, producing a series that grows exponentially (i.e. 100Hz+200Hz=300Hz, 200Hz+300Hz=500Hz, etc.).

  The title comes from an arguably conceptual device: the low E-flat that simultaneously pervades the work and is non-existent. I imagine that the ensemble is always reaching towards this E-flat as a point of centricity, but never quite arrive; analogous to an asymptote, as it approaches infinity. Entropy can be described as the “measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system,” or the “tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.” (source: American Heritage Dictionary). Taking some poetic liberties in reducing the scientific definition of “entropy” to simply a unit of measurement for chaos, one might say that this work conveys a state of high entropy in music, in stark contrast both to my previous work and to the classical tradition itself. This is a characteristic that I feel reflects not only specific elements of the compositional process, but also the result of the technical demands made on the performers, as well as my state of mind throughout the creation of this work.

• Second Study for Alto Saxophone, Video, and Electronics: pulp

• walkside, lost

  walkside, lost
  by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
  Text by Darcie Dennigan

  Commissioned by Gaudeamus Muziekweek for Slagwerk Den Haag.
  World Premiere: Utrecht, Netherlands – September 13, 2015

• gimme shelter

  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.

• HUNGER (Part III): A Multimedia Opera in Four Parts

  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)

• Hajiki (Pluck)

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