Browse Items (868 total)

• Remembering Allen

  2- & 4-channel mixes available
  
  Published on 60×60 Crimson Mix, 2010
  
  (www.60×60.com/2010_Crimson_Mix.htm)
  
  Composed in memory of Allen Strange (1943 – 2008)

• Redundancy in Perceptual and Linguistic Experience

  Algorithmic text based programming; Nyquist Programming Language

• ReCycle

  ReCycle uses my recordings of a refrigerator, a freezer, a floor furnace, ice melting, water boiling, a Jacob’s ladder I built, a faulty faucet, and noise between pieces in old 78 recordings. Some of these sounds have large cycles such as the refrigerator, freezer and floor furnace cycling on and off, but there are also cyclic patterns within their “on-times.” The Jacob’s ladder has an irregular cycle. The faulty water faucet, the penultimate sound in the piece, and the looped noise between pieces from an old recording at the very end have the most consistent rhythmic cycles. The “Re” in the title comes from both the use of the sounds of my re-frigerator, and the recycling of unused source materials from some of my previous works, including Distant Thunder, Fluid Dynamics, and System Test.

• Recombinant Serenade

  This work is based on Serenade by Benjamin Britten and was for Lin Foulk.

• Random Access

  The title Random Access reflects the process used with random access memory (RAM) in computer hardware, where all incoming data can be stored and small chunks of data can be retrieved regardless of the order in which it was stored. Similarly, in Random Access all of the input from the live saxophonist is stored in the computer’s RAM. As the piece progresses, short samples of the performer are retrieved and reordered to create new contrapuntal lines. The piece begins with a simple duet between the live saxophone and the reordered material, but gradually evolves to large orchestra of sampled saxophones. While the title may imply that the retrieval process is random, it is anything but random; the input from the saxophone is precisely scripted and all electronic sounds created live.

• rain over tallin (dedication to Arvo Pärt)

• Quiff

  Fixed Media Piece

• Quiet Piece

  An adaptation of Burdock Birds.

• Queen of Heaven

  Five movements for piano and electronics presenting five meditations on the Virgin Mary. Written for pianist Kari Johnson.

• Puzzle Pieces

  Puzzle Pieces was commissioned by The Stockhausen Response Project for pianist Brianna Matzke

  As a composer of electroacoustic music, the figure of Stockhausen – the indelible German (or Sirius-ian?) explorer, technician, and mystic philosopher of 20th century music – looms large. In Mikrophonie I (the specific work that we were asked to respond to), Stockhausen breaks ground that the medium of electroacoustic music has in some ways been responding to ever since. From a technical standpoint, as one might surmise from the title, this work elevated the status of the microphone from a passive piece of hardware to an instrument capable of an extremely subtle range of expressive gestures. In fact to perform the work, one must become something of a virtuoso microphone performer in order to execute Stockhausen’s incredibly detailed notation for the instrument. This perceptive restructuring liberated the status of electronics in music by putting the ‘microphonist’ on the same plane as the violinist. From this perspective, all of my music, which seeks to integrate electronics in nuanced and novel ways in order to enhance the range of expressive possibilities, is made possible by Stockhausen’s contributions.

  Mikrophonie I is also a primary example of another of Stockhausen’s influential ideas: moment form. Simply put, Stockhausen’s conception of a moment form is one in which, “no developmental direction can be predicted with certainty from the present one.” Far from a license for piecemeal composition, Stockhausen was searching for a means to restructure the dimensions of music. By calling our attention to the ‘Now’, he seeks to, “make vertical slices, as it were, that cut through a horizontal temporal conception to a timelessness I call eternity: an eternity that does not begin at the end of time but is attainable in every moment. I am speaking of musical forms in which apparently nothing less is being attempted than to explode (even to overthrow) the temporal concept.” By seeking to expand upon the dimensional planes in which the structural logic of the piece is projected, Puzzle Pieces is my humble attempt to expand upon the implications of Stockhausen’s ‘Now’.