Browse Items (868 total)

• Human Music 1

  Collaboration with Don Cherry, 6 tracks from 2006 re-release of 1970 LP.

• Human Music 2

  Collaboration with Don Cherry, 6 tracks from 2006 re-release of 1970 LP.

• Human Music 3

  Collaboration with Don Cherry, 6 tracks from 2006 re-release of 1970 LP.

• Human Music 4

  Collaboration with Don Cherry, 6 tracks from 2006 re-release of 1970 LP.

• Human Music 5

  Collaboration with Don Cherry, 6 tracks from 2006 re-release of 1970 LP.

• Human Music 6

  Collaboration with Don Cherry, 6 tracks from 2006 re-release of 1970 LP.

• 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)

• I Fioretti in Musica

  Co-composed with Sasha Zamler-Carhart. Directed by Gian Marco Lo Forte. Commissioned by Pioneers Go East for La MaMa Experimental Theatre.

• Icarus Wept

  Icarus Wept is a five-movement work commissioned by Keith Benjamin for his trumpet and organ duo Clarion, with organist Melody Turnquist-Steed. This version of the work is for trumpet and tape only, with organ sounds on tape. It was funded by a Composers Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, “a federal agency”; therefore the original concept, involving full frontal nudity, had to be abandoned. The tape sounds are drawn from an impromptu recording session and brain fry in which we came up not only with trumpet sounds of all kinds but also with the formula for a partially androgynacious anodized serial copolymer (patent pending). We also recorded a wide variety of other sounds (e.g. Keith’s trumpet stand, swirling coins, laughter/vocal sounds, and various expletives). The title, Icarus Wept, was loosely inspired by the legendary flight of Icarus toward the sun and the sudden realization of the fatal mistake. Three movement titles reflect themes of Icarus or of the sky. Getting Waxed, Climbing the Blue Staircase (from a Native American Peyote Song), and Eleven Feet from the Sun. However, Somebody Else’s Face and the newly completed first movement, Strap on Your Lobster, have nothing to do with Icarus at all, or with weeping either, pretty much.

• iMonkeypants

  An album of five algorithmically generated compositions in the form of an iOS app