Browse Items (868 total)

• Planet Heart

  for clarinet and live electronics

• Pilobolus

  Score for a dance by Pilobolus

• PianoMusic: an algorithm

• Piano Roll

  Vidéomusique
  
  Piano Roll takes inspiration from Conlon Nancarrow and his studies for the player piano. While composing the work, I was interested in convergent and divergent distributions and different ontological problems that emerge when visualising and sonifying them. While the eye can be used to survey histories of consequence, the ear is only concerned with the immediate. Thus, I wanted to draw attention to the ear via the eye. To do so, I generated different distributions from a statistical feedback model and used them to sequence material, playing with ideas of ratio and space. Piano Roll was commissioned by the Laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille.

• Phenomena

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

• Phase Change

  for oboe and stereo fixed media (2013)
  written for Katherine Woolsey

  This piece is inspired by the three phases of water: vapor, liquid, and solid. The oboist begins the piece without the reed in place and only the sound of pure air. An atmospheric exploration with timbral trills leads to “condensation,” in which droplets begin to form and eventually give way to a flowing stream. The final section “freezes” the music into a stark, frozen texture which contains static harmonies, glacial multiphonics, and fractured melodic lines like shards of ice. Many melodic motives in the piece come from a three-note pitch set which is inspired by the shape of the water molecule itself.

  Katherine Woolsey, oboe

• 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.

• Pentecost

  Eight-channel fixed media meditation on the liturgical feast of Pentecost.

• Penelope's Song

  Penelope's Song, inspired by the Odyssey, dramatically combines electronics fashioned from recordings of wood looms with the agile power of the flute.
  
  Penelope’s Song was inspired by Homer’s epic, the Odyssey, the story of the travails of Odysseus, who was away from home for twenty years, first at war in Troy and then, due to the sea-god Poseidon’s wrath, for ten more difficult years. It also tells of his wife, Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, waiting for him, and of the many suitors, filled with greed and arrogance, who tried to woo her so they could become king. To stave them off she devised excuses. In one, she said she would take no suitor until she finished her weaving. But, since she unraveled at night what she wove by day, she made no progress. This piece is a tribute to her, and sings of her own adventures. The electronics were created from recordings of wooden looms. I processed and shaped these, weaving a new sonic fabric. This version of Penelope’s Song was commissioned by, and is dedicated to, Lindsey Goodman. The original was composed for viola, and there are now also versions for violin, cello, clarinet, recorded by clarinetist Andrea Cheeseman; and soprano sax, recorded by Susan Fancher.

• Peculiar Galaxies: UGC 4881

  a digital emulation (on a Kyma system) of woodwind multiphonics