Browse Items (868 total)

• Pranayama

  for fixed media with optional video

• Prayer Flags

• Premonitions, Landscape at Twilight for electronic fixed media

  Premonitions, Landscape at Twilight for electronic fixed media (2017) is based upon Salvador Dali’s pastoral, Spider of the Evening (1940). In this work we see the painter’s signature depiction of misshapen figures: a stretched female nude, a molten cello, and a softened airplane; each of which have lost their familiar rigidity, existing beyond the boundaries of conscious reality. These are cast before long shadows in an arid landscape at sundown. Amidst the leafless olive tree, the weeping cherub, and the two lonesome figures dancing a dispirited Spanish sardana, we are witness to a scene that is both apocalyptic and tragic. Salvador Dali drew from French peasant folklore which claims that the sight of a spider in the evening was auspicious, a sign that must have filled the artist with the hope for a speedy end to armed conflict. However, history shows that the war was still to proceed for another five tumultuous years, the worst of the devastation yet to unfold.

  In our time, the U.S. has been at war continuously for numerous years. Although much has been done to dominate and suppress our adversaries to preserve our way of life, much has also been spent in the cost to life, limb, peace of mind, and property for an incalculable many along the way. In our time, there is talk of endless war. In our time, there are those who wield great power and influence to profit from the pursuit of war at the expense of untold others. There are never any easy solutions to dire political conflicts, but there are arguably far fewer persuasive justifications for the scale of terror and destruction that affects innocent, vulnerable lives as a consequence of war.

  The recorded cello samples featured in Premonitions, Landscape at Twilight were drawn from an improvisation by Noah Johnson at the Dancz Center of New Music, Hugh Hogdson School of Music, University of Georgia, Athens, on 08MAY17.

  Note: It is recommended, but not required, to project an image of Dali’s Spider of the Evening during playback of the work in a darkened hall.

• Primary experience A

  Electro-acoustic piece composed using primtive tape techniques and recordings of children. Early tape music piece using sounds of children composed at the University of Oregon.

• Primary Experience B

  Electro-acoustic piece composed using primtive tape techniques and recordings of children. Early tape music piece using sounds of children composed at the University of Oregon.

• Primary Experience C

  Electro-acoustic piece composed using primtive tape techniques and recordings of children. Early tape music piece using sounds of children composed at the University of Oregon.

• Prism

  An interactive acoustic piece for pianist, Disklavier, and Max

• Protect Your Domain Name

  Protect Your Domain Name was commissioned by the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication for a conference on business communication. Poet Ava Haymon collaborated with the conception of the work, contributing found techno-babble from the World Wide Web, and excerpts from her poem “The Word”, which parodies the use and misuse of language for religious and political discourse. Protect Your Domain Name raises the issues of identity and anonymity on the internet, and the embodiment and manipulation of meaning within words that are both conversant and unspeakable.
  
  The music/sound design of the piece took recitations by Ms. Haymon of the found techno-babble and recomposed their temporal, spectral and pitch contours. The transformations were done independent of one another and then assembled in collaboration with animator Michael Daugherty. The interaction between sound and image was organically derived through a regular interchange between artist and composer. All of the sounds were derived from those recordings.

• Puzzle Pieces

  Puzzle Pieces was commissioned by The Stockhausen Response Project for pianist Brianna Matzke

  As a composer of electroacoustic music, the figure of Stockhausen – the indelible German (or Sirius-ian?) explorer, technician, and mystic philosopher of 20th century music – looms large. In Mikrophonie I (the specific work that we were asked to respond to), Stockhausen breaks ground that the medium of electroacoustic music has in some ways been responding to ever since. From a technical standpoint, as one might surmise from the title, this work elevated the status of the microphone from a passive piece of hardware to an instrument capable of an extremely subtle range of expressive gestures. In fact to perform the work, one must become something of a virtuoso microphone performer in order to execute Stockhausen’s incredibly detailed notation for the instrument. This perceptive restructuring liberated the status of electronics in music by putting the ‘microphonist’ on the same plane as the violinist. From this perspective, all of my music, which seeks to integrate electronics in nuanced and novel ways in order to enhance the range of expressive possibilities, is made possible by Stockhausen’s contributions.

  Mikrophonie I is also a primary example of another of Stockhausen’s influential ideas: moment form. Simply put, Stockhausen’s conception of a moment form is one in which, “no developmental direction can be predicted with certainty from the present one.” Far from a license for piecemeal composition, Stockhausen was searching for a means to restructure the dimensions of music. By calling our attention to the ‘Now’, he seeks to, “make vertical slices, as it were, that cut through a horizontal temporal conception to a timelessness I call eternity: an eternity that does not begin at the end of time but is attainable in every moment. I am speaking of musical forms in which apparently nothing less is being attempted than to explode (even to overthrow) the temporal concept.” By seeking to expand upon the dimensional planes in which the structural logic of the piece is projected, Puzzle Pieces is my humble attempt to expand upon the implications of Stockhausen’s ‘Now’.

• Queen of Heaven

  Five movements for piano and electronics presenting five meditations on the Virgin Mary. Written for pianist Kari Johnson.