COMPEL Omeka Dev

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  • A cappella choral work constructed in the computer from fragments.

    This piece is included on the Six Projects CD/LP released on the Innova Recordings label in 2015.

    Noopiming is a single movement a cappella choral piece.  The title of the work is also the text.  Noopiming is an Ojibwe word, which translates as “in the North, inland, in the woods”. All of the vocalizations in the piece are created using various elements of this single word.

    The piece has as it’s primary aesthetic underpinning, some of my own personal impressions of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  I have been doing canoe trips in the BWCA my entire life and have often felt a sense of connection with the natural world there.  It’s a feeling of being connected to something ancient and primordial – something darkly beautiful that seems to draw me in, while at the same time, if I’m not mindful, could swallow me whole, leaving no trace.

    Noopiming was created using my fragment-based compositional process.  I started by recording a group of eight singers performing various musical gestures and textures.  The recording was done at the St. Paul Seminary Chapel.  This material was then edited down into a palette of hundreds of short audio recordings, which I then layered, combined and endlessly manipulated to create the finished work.  There was no actual score for the piece.  Instead, I created two lists of verbal instructions for the singers.  One was for inspecifically pitched material and the other for specifically pitched material, using only three chords, which could interlock in ways that I liked.

    Adding the visual component came after the music was completed.  I searched for a photographer who had a significant body of work focusing on the BWCA, and who’s work had the right aesthetic to match the music.  I came upon the work of Dale Robert Klous and felt it had the right kind of primordial nature vibe about it.  I approached Dale about allowing me to use some of his images, and not only did he agree, but he even went out and shot some additional material for the project.  I think his work is a great fit for my piece and I can’t thank him enough for his collaboration on the project.  Once I had the images, I synchronized them with the music in a way that reinforces the overall emotional/aesthetic impact of the work.

  • A string quartet amidst an ambisonic sea of sonified rat neurons.

    Pathways, bursting was written for the Spektral Quartet with support from a NewMusicUSA Project Grant and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago.  It is part of a long-term, multi-work creative project that has grown out of my collaboration with Tahra Eissa, a neuroscience graduate student at the University. Tahra’s lab puts rat brains on tiny electrode arrays, stimulates them and studies their behavior, with the goal of better understanding epilepsy in humans. More information is available here.

    I took an interest in her research because I have epilepsy myself (thankfully it’s under control), and I’ve wanted to creatively engage with it for quite some time. All of the electronic sounds in pathways, bursting bear some relationship – from straightforward to complex – to the neuron data. The pulses of white noise, for instance, come from direct sonification, while fluttering sine tones come from using it to manipulate pitch. More complex procedures are used in the realm of ambisonic spatialization, where sounds vibrate erratically in 3D space. I’ve assembled these diverse sounds into textures that often become harrowingly dense, even when the electronics are not particularly loud. This certainly is part of my intention: after all, this project is about overloads of electrical activity in the brain. Portions of the electronic track are uncomfortably loud, overwhelming, and even violent. But part of my motivation for this project has always been to communicate aspects of my own experience with the condition, as it has been quite harrowing at certain points in my life. I’m also motivated to communicate this on behalf of others with the condition. So instead of mediating the experience of the electronics, I’ve set up the quartet as a lyrical foil, particularly in the latter portion of the piece.

    When the electronics reach their loudest, most explosive point, the quartet reenters following over 5 minutes of silence, struggling against the overwhelming electronics. The quartet continues to push back, in fits and starts, as the electronics subside. Their jagged, erratic polyrhythms slowly become more regular, and they eventually achieve a much more peaceful space, one that I think realistically counterbalances the violence of the electronics. But in this final passage, there’s a slightly brightened consonance that bolsters the quartet’s role as a relieving counterweight to the harrowing electronics, one that may even provide an affirmative message in the end – even as it resolves to the justly tuned odd partials of B flat (5/7/9/11/13).

    The Spektral Quartet premiered pathways, bursting at the University of Chicago on May 5, 2017, with a repeat performance on May 12 at Constellation Chicago.

  • Commissioned and dedicated to Krisztina Dér, "And everything in-between" explores different harmonic and rhythmic material through pop-culture musical idioms.

  • Art song for voice and electronics in Spanish
    As there are not many pieces for solo voice and electronic media, I wanted to take the opportunity to work toward making a contribution in this medium. “El Perdido” is my title for the setting of Alejo Valdés Pica’s poem, “El Amor de los Amores,” which is about a rejected lover so traumatized by a failed romance that his entire vision of reality has become lost to him: his world is falling apart around him. Everything has become an eternal wasteland to him with only a faint reminiscence to momentarily alleviate the pains that lie within. The sandstorm that envelopes him at the end of the song is therefore appropriate; it reflects the inner turmoil that has lead him to yearn to be free of his life, a yearning that becomes as infinite as all the grains of sand lost in the desert. Pica’s work is representative of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century Filipino poets who incorporated contemporary Symbolist imagery in an overwrought style of Spanish writing.

  • 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.

  • Inspired by the spiritual visions of five individuals

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If you see an error or would like to add content to COMPEL, please leave a comment or contact Hollis Wittman at hollisw@vt.edu.