Browse Items (868 total)

• Pentecost

  Eight-channel fixed media meditation on the liturgical feast of Pentecost.

• Petit Hommage a Rene Magritte for fixed media

  Petit Hommage a René Magritte for fixed media (2017) is inspired by “L’Usage de la Parole,” a painting by the Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte (1898-1967). Famous for his approach in depicting every day, recognizable images in unusual juxtapositions within a single work, the painting centers around a cut-out of notated music in the shape of a person wearing a bowler hat. The figure is situated on top of a dull pink box, mysteriously inscribed with the words “Le savoir” (knowledge), which drifts upon what appears to be choppy, rose-colored waters amidst a dark, menacing sky.

  Petit Hommage a René Magritte for fixed media combines transformations of the notated music, particularly the I6 inversion, in dialogue with a variety of other sounds related (and sometimes unrelated) to the disparate elements found in Magritte’s painting. In the central section, the audio was extracted from an interview with René Magritte describing his thoughts on poetic content in his art: “Yes, in fact…eh… I believe that there is a familiar feeling to poetry, and this familiar feeling to poetry would be what I would call, for simplicity’s sake, the ‘tourist’ feeling…who will look far for poetry.” The audio clip ends at this point; but in the original, Magritte continues: “…and the poetry they find they know it before, it is a familiar poem given by very strange things, so that the familiar can become the occasion to discover the poetry which is not familiar– unknown poetry.”

  Special thanks to Monique Osorio for the pre-recorded piano sample and Jennifer La Rue for providing the English translation.

  Duration: 2 minutes.

  Note: It is recommended, but not required, to project an image of René Magritte’s “L’Usage de la Parole” during playback in a darkened hall.

• Phase Change

  for oboe and stereo fixed media (2013)
  written for Katherine Woolsey

  This piece is inspired by the three phases of water: vapor, liquid, and solid. The oboist begins the piece without the reed in place and only the sound of pure air. An atmospheric exploration with timbral trills leads to “condensation,” in which droplets begin to form and eventually give way to a flowing stream. The final section “freezes” the music into a stark, frozen texture which contains static harmonies, glacial multiphonics, and fractured melodic lines like shards of ice. Many melodic motives in the piece come from a three-note pitch set which is inspired by the shape of the water molecule itself.

  Katherine Woolsey, oboe

• Phenomena

  Commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and written for pianist Anthony de Mare. Premiere performance March 14, 2007 in Kansas City, MO.

• Piano Roll

  Vidéomusique
  
  Piano Roll takes inspiration from Conlon Nancarrow and his studies for the player piano. While composing the work, I was interested in convergent and divergent distributions and different ontological problems that emerge when visualising and sonifying them. While the eye can be used to survey histories of consequence, the ear is only concerned with the immediate. Thus, I wanted to draw attention to the ear via the eye. To do so, I generated different distributions from a statistical feedback model and used them to sequence material, playing with ideas of ratio and space. Piano Roll was commissioned by the Laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille.

• PianoMusic: an algorithm

• Pilobolus

  Score for a dance by Pilobolus

• Planet Heart

  for clarinet and live electronics

• Playing Fields

• Post-Apocalyptic Biscuit

  Post-Apocalyptic Biscuit, jawbreaker, sea biscuit or Hardtack as it was commonly known. This biscuit, made of three ingredients was rationed out to soldiers in the American Civil War as well as other soldiers and sailors in various Countries throughout history. It will last a very long time, at least 20 years. This was what there was left to eat after the apocalypse.
  
  “Post-Apocalyptic Biscuit” (2020) is for Buchla 200, Electric Music Easel, Voice, and a variety of post-processing digital algorithmic plug-ins. The work is my response to the Strange Times that we are living through; especially the dark political tragedies playing out around the world, along with the horrific pandemic, and the subsequent self-isolation that we must all endure; a cautionary tale. The structure of the work follows this pattern of variants:
  
  “Post-Apocalyptic Biscuit” (8:12)
  Variants: I , III, IV, VI, VII, IX
  Watchtower
  Cathedral of the Winds
  Wailing at the Wall
  Bones
  Klangs & Drones
  Reminiscence