Browse Items (868 total)
-
Winnowing
Winnowing is a work for piano and electronics inspired by the movement of birds. The electronics part brings another layer to the piece by introducing synthetic piano sounds that follow their own laws of nature. In the culmination of the piece the acousmatic birds appear. -
Wintersun
Bregman Electronic Music Studio -
Wood Machine Music
This piece is an exercise in distortion and overpressure. The string quartet is processed, while the clarinet and percussion are merely amplified.
Though the term noise describes a wide variety of sonic terrains, my interest is with what might best be described as disrupted resonance and distortion. The piece is made up of three basic material types, the most significant of which is the opening sound bed. This is expressed in the strings through various types of overpressure, on the clarinet with multiphonics, and in the percussion as grinding wood against metal. Though each of these techniques results in a certain level of unpredictability, the actions undertaken by the performers are highly prescribed. The second material type involves the contrapuntal use of pitch, and the third, percussive effects distributed across the various instruments. Each of these material types has its own developmental trajectory. It is these trajectories, along with the interaction between the material types, which guides the piece through its various distinct and cyclical sections.
Wood Machine Music is dedicated to the Callithumpian Consort.
-
Wunderkind
“Wunderkind” is a well-known German term historically applied to a person who possesses an extraordinary talent or brilliance (particularly musical) at an early age. The creative impetus for this work was the desire to explore the intellectual workings of a developing child prodigy, the electronic component used to expand the palette of such a restricted instrument while representing the mind’s ear of the child. The opening cadenza begins clumsily as the “child” seemingly explores the instrument for the first time. Musical ideas begin to mature, congeal, and find meaning. The fixed media playback begins after two minutes of solo, and a complex and harmonically-saturated sound world emerges from and interacts with performed gestures, meant to be perceived as imagined musical structures, astonishingly advanced for a mere child. All of the sounds in the fixed media were created by recording and processing my own toy piano.
Wunderkind was awarded First Prize in the 2013 Prix Destellos competition, mixed media category.
-
Yamanotesen to Ko
Source material recorded in Tokyo, Japan and by Kojiro Umezaki, shakuhachi. -
You can't have it both ways (I don't believe)
Written shortly after the congressional hearing regarding Planned Parenthood in September 2015, this work seeks to address the concept of duality while denaturing the toxic rhetoric that has dominated our political landscape. The audio samples used are from the hearing, and changes in the electronics are triggered by pitch input from a contact microphone attached to the oboe–no intervention on the part of the performer is required. -
Yuri Does America
Source material from Russian music, internet, and voice of Yuri Spitsyn and the composer. -
Zelik
On a Yiddish folk song. The fixed media for this piece was created by progressive equalization of triadic accordion samples, in addition to fully-composed klezmer fiddle and organ excerpts. -
Zoetrope
First compositions using the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer composed at the Thayer School of Engineering.