Browse Items (868 total)

• Shadow Play

• SHADOW

• Shadows of the Electric Moon

  This is essentially a solo snare piece, though a few other ancillary instruments are called for. An audio exciter, controlled by an onstage laptop, directly vibrates the head of the drum.

• Shadows

  Based upon selected words by David Trinidad and Tim Dlugos. Premiered at the University of Colorado-Denver, March 24, 1995. Additional performances at the Community College of Aurora and Colorado College.

• Shaula: The Sting of Scorpius

  I was inspired to write this piece after attending a Colorado Symphony Orchestra performance of only Claude Debussy works. In that spirit, the piece uses only the notes and harmonies found in the whole-tone scales, starting in E whole-tone and ending in D-flat whole –tone.
  
  Shaula: The Sting of Scorpius is a reference to the final star that makes the point of the stinger in the constellation Scorpius. The story of Scorpio is that the great Greek hunter Orion was on a hunting excursion with Apollo and Artemis. While on their journey Orion boasted that he was such a great hunter that he would kill every animal there was to prove himself. Apollo was the Greek God of animals and was so upset by this threat that he created Scorpio, a giant scorpion, to kill Orion. In one version of the tale the scorpion kills Orion, in another Artemis accidentally shoots Orion with an arrow trying to defend him from the scorpion. Both Orion and the giant scorpion were preserved in the stars by Zeus to remember their great battle.

• Sheremetyevo Airport Rock

  Uses source material from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and from interviews on Stary Arbat in Moscow and two professional actresses. Includes modified music of Glazinov and Khachaturian.

• Singular: an algorithm

  Following the loss of a loved one, this piece attempts to capture that je ne sais quoi of someone dear. In a sea of similar pitch collections, a single chord answers.

• sliced attractor

  Chaos has a theory. Despite the implications of the word itself, the study of chaos has revealed that there is a high degree of order (and predictable disorder) in the places where we have observed chaos. Research in this field has lead to insights into turbulence, the formation of snowflakes and galaxies, and the rhythm of our own heartbeats. In fact, one might say that natural order itself is ruled by chaos. It quite literally surrounds us.

  Simple systems can easily be described with simple equations. (Think of linear equations from high school). Therefore, it was always believed that complex systems, such as the one finds in nature, would require equally complex mathematics to describe. Remarkably, this is not true. Complex chaotic systems can be described with astonishingly simple equations. The complexity of nature is great, but it is perhaps even more wonderful to note that the logic which balances it all is in essence elementary.

  Simply put, sliced attractor is chaotic music in this sense. It is complex music that is achieved through simple means. A simple (but chaotic) pattern permeates the piece and is found at all levels of magnitude, yet it is used to generate a high degree of complexity. This music is orderly in its disorder, predictably unpredictable, and simply complex.

• Small Groups of People Bring Collapse (Laptop Anarchy)

  There are six parts written in Max/MSP. No conductor is needed and the time is automatically set in the patches.

• smudge

  smudge attempts to take the tuba’s sound and blend, smear and shade it in the same way a visual artist would create a charcoal drawing. The two electronic effects used in the piece serve this goal. Reverb, which acts like the damper pedal of a piano, blurs the sound horizontally in time while ring modulation creates pitched sidebands around the tuba’s sound, blurring the sound vertically. The melodic material is also “smudged” in a similar way. The materials always heard with reverb are musically expanded in a vertical direction while the materials associated with ring modulation are horizontally developed – creating a paradoxical and elastic experience with an instrument that usually draws in a straight line.