Browse Items (868 total)

• Patriot Missile

  This is a five movement workreflects abstractly on concepts and events described in journalist Robert Fisk’s book “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.”

• pathways, bursting [neurosonics 2]

  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.

• Passacaglia on a theme by Mark Rothko

  Passacaglia on a theme by Mark Rothko began as an idea I had while sitting at the Menil Collection in Houston, TX looking at four Mark Rothko paintings, all from his color field period. The piece comments on how I look at Rothko’s art and the process my eyes take when dissecting each work. At first, the surface simplicity is very attractive to me. Looking deeper, I notice brush strokes and movement. I am drawn to the outlines of each field and how they straddle the role of background and foreground. I focus on sections of the work; the particular texture, color, role in the work. Finally, I am able to see the work as a whole and how each element functions with the framework.

  This piece is constructed with several processes working at once. First, the passacaglia aspect provides a harmonic background. The chords forming the passacaglia begin as simple three note chords. With each repetition, a new pitch is added. As the piece moves on the chords duration progresses from longer to shorter and more and more noise is introduced to the chords which distorts them. The other sounds come from objects from my kitchen. This is a literal reference to the history of the steel pan (an everyday object becomes an instrument). Also included is the sound of a comb.

  The steel pan functions as an observer, commenting on the sounds with his own. While the part is mostly improvisatory, guidelines such as pitch, ratio, and dynamics are given. At a point just over the middle of the piece, the steel pan enters a process of gradual unfolding of a melody in which the sum of the parts can only be seen at the end and the listener does not know where these parts begin or end.

• 

  Particle Forge

  From "The Unrecordables 4": I created the majority of the code for Particle Forge back in grad school, plugging away in Pd when I should have been paying attention in studio class. The idea was to create a chaotic sound design tool that created a variety of sounds through frequency modulating extremely small sine wave blips (anywhere from 20-22000 per second) heavily bandlimited by logic gates to keep the frequency modulation under control. The result was something like spraying a firehose of subatomic particles inside a supercollider...
  Fast forward nearly a decade, and I rediscover the code while upgrading my computer. A little bit of tweaking, and it becomes a very interesting Max4Live patch that creates highly unstable sounds using a game controller by banging small particles together, until they collide and become something else entirely. A small reflection on super colliding particles using sine waves.

• Pacific Rimbombo

  A solo work for a computer music instrument invented by Max V. Mathews.

• OverDrive

  As early as high school, I had fallen in love with the toy piano. I resolved to purchase one as soon as possible, and midway through college, I finally purchased my first Schoenhut “concert grand” toy piano. A 37 key wonder, the instrument was a very diminutive grand piano, striking metal rods instead of strings, and reminding everyone who saw it of Schroeder from Peanuts. I quickly immersed myself in the (then) small toy piano repertoire, and composed two pieces myself for toy piano.

  Several years later, I commissioned composer Matthew McConnell to write a concerto for toy piano and orchestra – one that would challenge the notion of the toy piano as a cute, quaint, humorous toy. He succeeded with this challenge better than I could have ever hoped, and I have since had the honor of performing this piece twice. The last time was in 2005. Since then, though his concerto has ballooned in popularity thanks to the wonders of YouTube, my toy piano has sat relatively unused in my studio.

  Then in 2010 I received an unexpected flurry of toy piano related requests. Three different pianists (in the USA, Canada, and Australia) scheduled performances of my earlier toy piano compositions. Two different pianists (in the USA and Germany) commissioned me to write new toy piano pieces. French pianist Jérémie Honnoré contacted me regarding an article he was writing on toy piano music, and Polish author and multi-instrumentalist Pawel Romanczuk interviewed me for inclusion in his upcoming book chronicling the history of the toy piano. Perhaps there was something in the water, but it became clear the toy piano was on the rise.

  With this much attention suddenly on the instrument, I wanted to write something that challenged the notion of what a toy piano could or could not do. By now, nearly everything has been explored on this instrument, including various keyboard and extended techniques. What I felt had been explored very little was the instrument’s unique overtone structure and the potential in fusing this with electronics. This piece, then, explores the percussive capabilities of the toy piano and the rich overtones created when the keys are violently struck. Roughly 75% of the electronic material heard is derived directly from the toy piano.

• Ossi di seppia (cuttlefish bones)

  These five short pieces are inspired by poems by Eugenio Montale, italian Nobel laureate in 1975. In his work, starting from the first collection, Ossi di Seppia (1925), Montale focused on the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, love, and human existence in poems that are characterized by the hermeticism of the message if not of the language, in a dramatic and psychological dynamism.
  In each of these compositions I explored the dilemma of the sound in a multiform collection of audio manipulations that create dynamical and evocative portraits of the poet’s words.

• Oskuldens Dröm (The Dreams of the Virgins)

  Uses EMS synthesizer in Stockholm with software by Michael Hinton. Commissioned by the Swedish Society of Virgins, the title translates ‘The Dreams of the Virgins.’

• OSCines

  “OSCines” focuses on the process of translating melodies found in birdsongs. The nightingale belongs to the clade Passeri also commonly known as Oscine, from the Latin root oscen meaning “a songbird.” Its birdsong is composed of a wide range of whistles, trills, and gurgles, which create a rich and vibrant melodic contour. Nightingale and clarinet samples serve as source and target materials (interchangeably) for spectral information collected via signal-processing detection systems. “OSCines” explores the alignment and collisions of distinct timbre features and melodic topologies within the virtual aviary of the speaker space.

• Opus Palladianum: Voice and Drums

  beat-based rhythmic complexity; integration of stylistically diverse materials; discontinuity
  
  Opus Palladianum: voice and drums explores relations and contrasts, from those that are clear, such as the juxtaposition of opposites (soft, loud), to those that are ambiguous, such as the juxtaposition of synthetic and intimate. Contrast is created by presenting the voice and percussion elements in a variety of rhythmic, harmonic and technological settings. These organizations illuminate timbral identities, associations that are connected to production processes, and the relationship between an object and its development. Such juxtapositions and superimpositions invite listeners to consider how context, and not just timbre, influences the aesthetics of recorded, sampled, and synthesized sound. The piece creates unity and connections among these disparate elements through its formal construction. As a result, there is connection despite heterogeneity; there is fluidity despite disruption; there is peace despite agitation; there is continuity despite discontinuity.