Browse Items · COMPEL Omeka Dev

A cappella choral work constructed in the computer from fragments.

This piece is included on the Six Projects CD/LP released on the Innova Recordings label in 2015.

Noopiming is a single movement a cappella choral piece. The title of the work is also the text. Noopiming is an Ojibwe word, which translates as “in the North, inland, in the woods”. All of the vocalizations in the piece are created using various elements of this single word.

The piece has as it’s primary aesthetic underpinning, some of my own personal impressions of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I have been doing canoe trips in the BWCA my entire life and have often felt a sense of connection with the natural world there. It’s a feeling of being connected to something ancient and primordial – something darkly beautiful that seems to draw me in, while at the same time, if I’m not mindful, could swallow me whole, leaving no trace.

Noopiming was created using my fragment-based compositional process. I started by recording a group of eight singers performing various musical gestures and textures. The recording was done at the St. Paul Seminary Chapel. This material was then edited down into a palette of hundreds of short audio recordings, which I then layered, combined and endlessly manipulated to create the finished work. There was no actual score for the piece. Instead, I created two lists of verbal instructions for the singers. One was for inspecifically pitched material and the other for specifically pitched material, using only three chords, which could interlock in ways that I liked.

Adding the visual component came after the music was completed. I searched for a photographer who had a significant body of work focusing on the BWCA, and who’s work had the right aesthetic to match the music. I came upon the work of Dale Robert Klous and felt it had the right kind of primordial nature vibe about it. I approached Dale about allowing me to use some of his images, and not only did he agree, but he even went out and shot some additional material for the project. I think his work is a great fit for my piece and I can’t thank him enough for his collaboration on the project. Once I had the images, I synchronized them with the music in a way that reinforces the overall emotional/aesthetic impact of the work.

North Loop

Live/studio hybrid composition using hardware-based electronic instruments.

I completed work on this project in the Winter of 2016. It’s a fragment piece, which uses as it’s source material a recording of the live electronic music performance I did at my Six Projects record release party, and also some recordings of the rehearsals for that performance. I deliberately chose to NOT use a computer in this live performance, which was something new for me. I’m calling the piece “North Loop” for several reasons: 1.) The live performance took place in a part of downtown Minneapolis called the North Loop, 2.) though the piece is not particularly loop-intensive, it does make use of some loops, and 3.) I live and work in Minneapolis – a Northern city.

The attached video is of the live performance. The music you’re hearing is the actual finished piece, which was created later in a computer, using audio from the performance and from rehearsals for that performance. There are multiple layers of audio, which have been highly edited and mixed to create the finished product. I edited the video to more or less line things up to match as best I could, but it’s really just an approximation. There was a lot of improvisation involved in the performance, and the finished music actually has more simultaneous layers than I would have been able to pull off live as a solo performance. Still, it’s nice to see the video with the music and I also like that we have some documentation of Paul Christian’s visual projection work. He was using the Processing software environment to create the imagery. I was feeding him about eight separate audio lines that he was working with live.

now our grief is put away

now our grief is put away uses the poem titled Khao Lak Paradise Resort by Anne Shaw in her book, Undertow. I found Anne after searching for poets I wanted to set for a different project. This poem leapt off the page with its vivid imagery and haunting descriptions of the tsunami that occurred on December 24, 2004 in the Southeast Pacific which included Thailand, the setting for this poem. Due to its length and singularity of subject, I decided to not include this poem in what would eventually become Transit for soprano, vibraphone, and double bass but rather set the work as its own piece. The poem is filled with Anne’s own description of her experience in the relief efforts, sayings from Thai culture, and descriptions from survivors of the tsunami. Shaw writes, “Thai culture allows a mourning period of 100 days, after which the soul of the departed - and the lives of the living - must move on,” as a description for the line, now our grief is put away.