Browse Items (868 total)
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Sound of the Baskervilles
A fixed media sound collage, whose title was granted permission by Milton Babbitt. -
Turtles All The Way Up
Composed for New Music On The Point 2017 festival. -
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.
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Ritual Habit
An electroacoustic music composition and dance collaboration -
Star Map
Star Map (2014) is an electroacoustic piece for flute and quadraphonic playback that is inspired by the Forsyth Petroglyph, a rock with carvings that was first discovered in Forsyth County, Georgia in the early 1800s. The carvings consist of circles and other designs that are thought to be astronomical in nature, representing the constellations Draco, Scorpio, and a fragmenting comet. A comet event occurred around 3300 BC, and the carvings may represent this event due to the presence of other symbols that could be interpreted as the Cosmic Crocodile from Mayan mythology, which was decapitated, leading to a massive flood. The comet impact of 3300 BC caused tsunamis that destroyed coastal civilizations of the time.
The piece is in three sections: the first features the constellations Scorpio, Draco and Sagittarius, and more specifically, the red giant star Antares in the Scorpio constellation (evoked by the drones and flute centered around the pitches B and C) and x-ray flares sent out by the constellation Sagittarius. The second section illustrates the comet breaking into fragments, and the manipulated recorded flute signifies our perspective of time. The third section returns to the environment of constellations from the first section.
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The Tunnel of Quantum Love
The Tunnel of Quantum Love (2015) portrays the theory that an atom can be in many places simultaneously. The initial sound journeys through many states: gaseous shimmers, through warped high speeds, distorted slow motion, chaos, and unnamed atmospheres. Maybe one day we will discover the Tunnel of Quantum Love and experience this simultaneity ourselves. -
Vale Vêneto Remix
VVR was composed during my residency at the 2013 Festival de Internacional de Inverno UFSM in Vale Vêneto, Brasil. All of the sounds in the piece were collected, processed and recomposed during the week-long festival. I am personally fond of two specific sounds. The first is the siren, which came from the town police car. Near the end of our sound walk that day, one of the students went up to the policeman and asked if he would play the siren so that we could record it. The policeman was reluctant at first, and I didn’t want to cause any kind of commotion. But he went ahead and played the siren, much to the delight of the kids in the town square.
The other sound is the background “pop” music heard near the end of the piece. The winter festival coincides with the Italian Heritage festival in Vale Vêneto, and the town plays a variety of Italian pop/folk songs across loudspeakers throughout the town square. You can hear it almost everywhere outside, and it is a persistent part of the audio landscape. I felt it was impossible to create a soundscape of the town without it.