Browse Items (868 total)

• Vous l'Inaccessible

  Vous l’Inaccessible is for soprano and electronics, and was inspired by the Guillaume de Machaut virelai “Douce Dame Jolie.” Machaut’s melody and text are presented in a variety of forms, as a chant, spoken word, and a direct quotation of the melody. As the piece unfolds, the voice becomes more free and independent of the original melody, creating a process of development followed by deconstruction and finally reconstruction into completely new material free from the original melody. The final spoken text is a modern text, related to the theme of unattainable love (like the Machaut text), but presented in modern French as opposed to Medieval French text of “Douce Dame Jolie.”

• Fractured Memories

  Fractured Memories is a piece that explores some thoughts I’ve had on my own perception of memory and thinking about the past. The piece presents and opening idea (the memory) and the rest of the piece a reworking of that idea in a dialog between the oboe and electronics. At times the memory is retold with refined accuracy, sometimes it is distorted, sometimes it’s made out to be more exciting than it actually was. The final section of the piece acts as the final retelling of the memory with fragments of each distorted re-imagining making their way into the musical fabric. Is it a true account of what originally took place? Maybe not, but the importance is more with the journey from beginning to end.

• Bowing to the Roaring Storm, Their Songs Never Cease

• Aphantasia

• Redundancy in Perceptual and Linguistic Experience

  Algorithmic text based programming; Nyquist Programming Language

• "Real-Time Processing Improv"

  real-time signal processing of improvisers

• Laniakea

• Antagonism Constellation Factory

  Stereo fixed media; found and synthesized sounds
  In this electronic piece I used the temporal aspect of the material to create contrast; instead of transforming the material over the course of the piece, I tried to make the sounds stay largely the same and build the piece out of the subtleties of the relationship between them. The opening section puts sounds that seemingly have little in common in close proximity; the relationship is not developed, and instead a contrasting section begins, which soon ends up combining with the opening sounds. The resolution of this section is not what would be expected, and instead the sounds are finally transformed into something new; this, however, is short-lived. In a manner similar to Varèse’s Poème électronique, the piece focuses on the unexpected, and creates an evocative narrative through the juxtaposition of material; Antagonism Constellation Factory presents this narrative in a terse and sometimes antagonistic fashion.

• Desert Presence

  Desert Presence reminisces on the landscape of the American West, dwelling on how the vast, open spaces of the region are both “quiet” and “loud:” silent and empty, but also overwhelming because of that very emptiness in such large space. The performer interacts in dialogue with an unseen presence. As this back-and-forth develops, the two voices begin to come together as echoes of one another, creating a fleeting sense of union between the known and unknown. The piece is performed through Max/MSP, using both recorded sounds and live processing of the guitar and electronics during the performance.

  Cues specified in the score determine the entrances of electronic elements; some sounds are triggered by volume choices made by the performer, while others use randomization. The cues may be controlled by the performer, with a pedal, or an outside person. The guitarist must be playing into a microphone, both for balance and to make use of the live electronics.

• Break Free

  A paper score is not used for performance; because there is very little to no sense of pulse in large parts of the work, video files of the scrolling score are provided (in three segments), for the players to read from. These files include the piece’s audio as well.
  
  A good set-up is: one person cueing the 3 videos on a laptop, which is fed to a larger monitor for the players to read from. Stereo audio comes out from the laptop. The only other component is the separate amplification of the violins, for blend purposes.