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Hazy Moonlight
"Hazy Moonlight for soprano saxophone, percussion, and electroacoustics takes its inspiration from five haiku by poet Wally Swist:
thistledown seeds the falls
a full moon shatters
into stars
slipping through moonlight
a waterthrush rushes
rock to rock
cloud wisps across the moon
gusts of rain patter among
piles of fallen leaves
bracing the chill
moonlight rushes
in the icy river
mountain laurel blossoms
a luminous moth
ascends into moonlight
Swist’s vivid scenes depict the moon’s appearance across the seasons, creating an organic foundation for the work’s structure and soundscape. The instrumentalists’ virtuosic foray through Swist’s evocative work conjure varied images of the moon as a brilliant force, a mysterious beacon, and a luminous orb. Hazy Moonlight was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for the Bent Frequency Duo, and is dedicated to both with admiration and appreciation. The haiku appear with the author’s permission and are published in Modern Haiku, The Silence Between Us (Taylorville, IL: Brooks Books, 2005), and The Windbreak Pine (Ormskirk, UK: Snapshot Press, 2016.)" -
Plasticine
Plasticine explores the organic and gestural aspects as well as the semi-chaotic and generative possibilities afforded by modular synthesis, specifically the Eurorack format, in the context of electroacoustic composition. The plasticity and malleability of sound, space, and motion is a central theme to the composition. The piece focuses on the juxtaposition of abstract synthesized sounds and natural sound textures. -
I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds
Ten years before composing "I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds", I composed my Trio, for violin, piano, and percussion (plus electronics) for Toronto’s Arraymusic Ensemble. I developed several important compositional practices during my work on that piece that I still employ today, one of which is my approach to combining electronic sounds with live performers. In my Trio, the electronics are fairly sparse, consisting entirely of a few sustained tones that support the instrumentalists and help to define the formal structure. Although electronics are often more significantly audible in many of my works, the relationship between performers and electronic sounds, which places a more significant emphasis on the acoustic sounds made by performers, has remained fairly consistent.
I composed the Trio at an important transitional period in my life, right as I started my first academic position and shortly after getting married and finishing my Ph.D. For whatever reason, I found myself thinking about that time and composing the Trio while I was working on I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds, and so as a kind of homage to myself I decided to blatantly rip off the technique I first developed for the Trio of dropping in a couple of sustained sounds to help differentiate form. I stood on the shore and looked up at the birds was composed in fall/ winter 2013-14. -
Hyperthermic
Hyperthermic" is based on sound material that in various ways is associated with global warming and extreme weather phenomena: wind, rain, storm, fire, flooding, heat, meltwater and deforestation. The harmonic material, and in part the formal structure of the work, is derived from the Earth’s resonance frequencies in the electromagnetic field that vary in response to global lightening activity, which in turn intensifies in response to global warming. The work is composed for a multi-channel loudspeaker setup surrounding the audience.