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Cumulative Deviance

Uses Daniel Iglesia’s MobMuPlat platform for building mobile interfaces for Pd.

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.

Composition for S#|††¥ Piano, Drum Samples, Concrète Sounds, and Processing

(Originally written for 8 channels, can also be performed with 4 or even 2 channels)

Composition of this piece was funded by an Allen Strange Award from the Washington (State) Composers Forum. As per a request from Shiau-Uen Ding, my goal was to combine my interests in musique concrete, electronica/techno, and live computer music as part of a large-scale solo piano work.
I decided to work with a shitty piano as sound material. The shitty piano has interesting kinds of indeterminacy associated with it. You know that some notes are going to be “out”, but you’re never sure which ones. The details of this composition, though always following the same basic dramatic and formal outline, are always different at each performance. Every shitty piano is different. The musique concrete sounds can be re-realized in different combinations at each performance. Because shitty pianos are unreliable in producing exact pitches, I notate much of the piano part in a “graphic” way, specifying only general contours. Thus, the piece is mostly a “percussion” piece, largely devoid of melody and harmony, but chock-filled with funky rhythms and general joyous chaos and cacophony.

Erin

Chords voiced as beating sine tones.

Erin (2014) is constructed from five chords. Their harmonic vocabulary borrows heavily from jazz, but their sequencing is non-functional. The progression as originally conceived is heard in its unaltered form voiced by electric guitar near the end of the piece; this small fragment was composed in response to the tragic death of a friend, an accomplish jazz vocalist. The rest of the work is that fragment re-imagined by beating sine tones, spectrally compressed and temporally stretched. The electric guitar, electronically processed, appears throughout, demarcating structural boundaries.

Edgeplay

Guided improvisation with spectral processing.

Edgeplay is a guided improvisation for saxophone and live signal processing (Max). As the title implies, the piece explores boundaries, thresholds, and extremes. The saxophonist is instructed to push technique beyond the limits of control and investigate timbre as a delineator of sound: differentiating registers, distinguishing tone from breath and focused pitch from bands of noise. The score is a hybrid of text and graphics, left intentionally vague to suggest rather than dictate the performer’s investigation. The electronics (primarily spectral manipulations of the live saxophone) react to extremes, dynamic and durational, and adjust to the performer over the course of the piece. The sonic result is a mapping, albeit partial, of the sonic transformations idiomatic to the saxophone when in the capable hands of a trained performer.

Dreaming in its Shadow

""To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall..."" Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

Inspired by the collaboration with the commissioning flutist, this work incorporates elements from Franz Schubert’s ""Der Lindenbaum"", Deep Listening© movement practices and acoustic-ecology-inspired field recordings. The piccolo player must follow a series of choreographic steps and movements that correspond to the sounds and patterns of the fingerings as well as to the ways trees and forests are formed. This work invites the player to become part of the pre-recorded sounds and to inhabit the space in a way that embodies and sonifies the performer’s mythical transformation from human to tree. The work is designed to elicit memory, dreamtime and imagination to bring us closer to the elements of what make up the material of the instrument being played, and to remind of us of our dear old friends, trees."

Intersections

Machine expressivity is often thought of as involving precision, speed, rhythmic complexity, non-idiomatic (for human performers) pitch patterns and replication. Human expressivity is often thought of involving groove, phrasing, affect, contour, variation, articulation, entrainment and communication. While these attributes help shape our conceptions of what is human versus what is mechanical, they are not confined to one category or the other: humans can be precise and robots can groove. Expressive identity is more analog than digital. This does not preclude expressive spaces that are unique to humans and machines, rather, it suggests the areas between them are ambiguous and that the attributes that define them do not do so in a one-to-one fashion (instead, attribute-space relationships are a function of combination and context). The music explores these areas of ambiguity and clarity. Genre is treated in a similar way such that stylistic exemplars are presented authentically and in transformation. The intersections in expressive identity and style illuminate what is exclusive and what is shared.

Performed by the Juventas New Music Ensemble and the musical robots PAM and CADI, which were designed and built by EMMI and the Music, Perception and Robotics Lab at WPI.

Juventas New Music Ensemble:

Lidiya Yankovskaya, Conductor

Orlando Cela, Flute
Wolcott Humphrey, Clarinet
Nate Tucker, Percussion
Maja Tremiszewska, Piano
Olga Patramanska-Bell, Violin
Michael Dahlberg, Cello

Recorded and mixed by Scott Barton

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