Browse Items (868 total)

• T(rr)t

  This piece was dedicated to Szilárd Benes
  
  Premiered June 23rd 2015 in Graz, Austria.

• Music, Walk with Me

  My musical work Music, Walk With Me sonifies data in response to my starting timbral and textural pointillistic musical concept of a few simultaneous sine waves. What interested me was how the sound of a chord could change based on changing volumes of its notes.. I imagined music with a slow tempo that would analyze a chord from different viewpoints, or “soundpoints.”
  
  I preferred to collect a data set that related to my life. After about a week of hard thinking I realized the answer was sitting in my pocket: I’d been collecting my own data set for over a year now with the Samsung S Health app, a step counter on my phone. The two primary parts of the data are daily and hourly steps taken. I thus had a number for frequency and for amplitude. While the information captured has itself become more and more interesting to me, I am still most proud of how I have expressed it artistically. To create chords, this piece draws on data created by myself and 3 friends. The four of us together thus create fluctuating harmony just by walking (i.e., by having walked). I mapped the data as such: for each day, every person is represented by only one pitch, which changes in volume based on quantized temporal averages. Walking 10,000 steps will therefore yield a tone of 1,000 Hz with a static pitch but a subtly or dramatically changing volume.
  
  Time is compressed in this piece in both its concert and installation forms. Moving through each day, 1 second represents one hour. A whole month of 30 days will thus last exactly 12 minutes.

• Creatures from the Black Bassoon

  Creatures from the Black Bassoon is an acousmatic work consisting entirely of processed and unprocessed bassoon sounds. The work explores the attributes of a variety of animal-like and environmentalish sounds, including key clicks, reed squeaks, multiphonics, and other traditional and extended techniques. These sounds were organized by similar properties into characters, which were placed in a number of tableaus of length based on the golden section. Certain tableaus in the work are designated as “windows”, where developmental method is determined by significant contrast to the surrounding sections.

• Blueprints of Eternity

  Blueprints of Eternity is a ten-minute fixed media work that uses the simple yet reliable kitchen timer as its sole sound source. As the work progresses, time is deconstructed, leading to the discovery of a reality occurring at the microtemporal level. After exploring this sound world, the listener hears the rebooting of time itself, before being snapped back to the present.

• The Unpurged Images of the Day

  Premiere performance in Kansas City, MO on March 3, 2016 with JoDee Davis, trombone and Robert Pherigo, piano.
  
  Click track provided. Requires two additional channels with volume control separate from the main speakers. Also requires ability to synchronize playback file and click file. Instructions included in performance notes.

• Fantasy in Earth Tones

  Fantasy in Earth Tones takes its name from Earth Tones, a piece for fixed media written by the composer in 1978 on the Moog Mark IV and the Arp 2600 synthesizers. The sounds of the times were dominated by the warm pulsing of square wave pads and glissing lead lines. Groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the Moody Blues fixed these sounds firmly in my ears when I was a high school student. So when Jay Gilbert and his 26 colleagues asked me to write a piece combining fixed media with high school band, my mind and my ears went immediately to those days, and those sounds. The opening runs in the synth and the last 30 seconds of the piece borrow from Earth Tones, but the remainder of the piece is pure fantasy.
  
  I am delighted to have been asked to write this piece for them, and to bring a little of my own youthful musical experiences to the ears of the talented young players of a new decade.

• Once Again to the Light

  Commissioned and premiered by saxophonist John Sampen, and recorded on AMP Records: AMPREC 016. Written in memory of Cameron Benjamin.

• Playing Fields

• Ascension

  Ascension was originally composed in 1988 for Gary Hill and the UMKC Conservatory Wind Ensemble. It is dedicated to my college roommate Kenneth Wayne Hill, who was killed in action in the Persian Gulf in April, 1988, shortly before I was scheduled to begin this work. It is also lovingly dedicated to his family and to our mutual friends. Kenneth's volatile, hilarious, energetic, and complex personality formed the basis of my musical ideas, while my own emotional reactions to the news of his death and to the heroic and poignant events surrounding the last day of his life, which were released by the U.S. Marines only very slowly and ultimately in incomplete form, shaped the work's structure.

  Kenneth's life was often marked by tremendous obstacles, but my lasting memory of him is one of a spirit impossible to keep down. I imagine his life and his death as one grand ascension.

  The original version was composed using the technology of the day, primarily with synthesized sounds that were selected for their timbral similarity to those of the wind ensemble. In this new version, most of these sounds have been replaced with sampled sounds of various instruments, providing an even more integrated sonic environment. I am very much indebted to James Smart for suggesting this idea. In the process of putting the new accompaniment together, I also fixed several score errors, added some more audible cues, adjusted the score and the playback for more precise synchronization, and lengthened the opening gesture to aid synchronization.

• Phenomena

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