Industry and the Arts (2023)

voice and electronics

Industry and the Arts is a set of five short songs for alto voice with MUGIC controller and electronics. This piece was written for Heather Byford in 2022. Industry and the Arts explores the relationship between industry and art. The initial inspiration for this piece was a passage that describes a newly-opened Parisian Arcade from the opening pages of Walter Benjamiun’s unfinished Arcades Project:

De ces palais les colonnes magiques
À l’amateur montrent de toutes parts,
Dans les objets qu’étalent leurs portiques,
Que l’industrie est rivale des arts.
-Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris (paris, 1828), vol. 1, p. 27

Benjamin describes the 19th-century arcades of Paris as the birthplace of modern consumerism, and in this piece, I connect this idea with current technology of the Internet and machine learning as the focal point of industries incursion into our lives and art. While writing this piece, I met with vocalist Heather Byford to create a corpus of recordings that were used to create the electronic elements of this piece. This electronic part takes the form of a motion controller (MUGIC) that is attached to the performers hand, triggering electronic sound.

Canticum (2023)

bowed steelstring guitar and computer improviser

Canticum is a quasi-improvised piece for bowed guitar with improvising software that reacts to the bowed guitar in realtime.

Pileup (2020)

trumpet, piano, and percussion

Pileup is dedicated to the Splice Ensemble for the occasion of Splice Festival, 2020. This recording is from the premiere in Oxford, Ohio.

This piece is focused on the integration of a computer improvisor with live performers. After the computer improvisor has been “trained” in guided solo improvisations, the software analyzing the incomoning audio for a variety of features. Later in the piece the computer improvisor then listens and reacts to the improvising trio using the audio material from the solos. In this group section, the computer improvisor moves between a set of predetermined behaviors that define how it reacts, or does not react, to what it hears from the live musicians.

The behaviors of the computer improvisor as well as the instructions for the live improvisors are sequenced to create a gradual build up of intensity until all the sound has “piled up” to maximum saturation.

SCORE

Cube (2018)

trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, bass, and live electronics

Cube was written for the International Contemporary Ensemble in the Winter of 2018.
The title, Cube, comes from the idea of the four instrumentalists arranged in a square with the extra dimension of
depth added by electronics. Each of the four performers is paired with a set of stereo speakers that both amplify
their instrument and enhance their parts using per-made soundfiles.
The music itself explores harmonic ideas in extended just intonation system, focusing on a tonic of E, but at times
drifting far afield from this central pitch. The microtonal harmonies are most clearly perceived in slow, drone-like
sections where the pacing of the music is modeled on breathing. These slow sections are juxtaposed with energetic
solos and duos where each instrument has a chance to emerge from the texture and lead the ensemble.

Concert recording by International Contemporary ensemble at Abrones Arts Center NYC, March 2018. Mixed by Taylor Brook.

Wane was written in fall 2015-Spring 2016 for Olivia DePrato.

Wane takes advantage of the multi-tracking possibilities of a recording session, where instead of a piece for a single solo violin, there is a lead soloistic part with four additional “shadow” violins, all of which are recorded by a single performer. While this piece finds an ideal form as a recording, it may also be performed live in two ways: playing the first violin line with prerecorded second through fifth violins, or with five violinists performing live.

Each of the five violin parts features a slightly different tuning and when the open strings of each violin are played in turn, one hears something like a downward slide. However, this slide or glissando effect is actually a smearing of discrete pitches that are extremely close together. This smearing effect provided the title of the piece, as the pitches seem to melt or wane.

While the tuning between the open strings of the violin parts is extremely close, they are all part of the same extended just intonation harmonic system that treats G as the tonic note. The importance of this systematic tuning is that all the pitches now have a double meaning: part of the downward smear effect as well as a harmonic identity. In practice, it need not be one or the other and the ambiguity between a smearing effect and a stable harmonic identity can be explored in interesting ways to suggest perceptual switches and surprising yet smooth chord changes.

Lush (2015)

11 players and electronics

Lush was written in the Winter of 2016 for Wet Ink Ensemble. This piece was conceived as a hybrid between concert music and orchestral film music. As a composer of concert music, the attempt to draw out new ideas from mainstream film music may seem unusual, however, as I began exploring the possibilities provided by commercial sound libraries, sampler instruments, and synths, I was drawn to the idea of retuning these electronic instruments to create an electroacoustic part that fills out and expands the chamber ensemble into a bigger, richer sound. The majority, if not entirety, of new film scores are produced using samples along with the occasional sprinkling in of a few live performers to heighten a sense of realism. By creating music in this way, the ideal realizationof this score may be as a recording, where the precise level between live and sampler instruments can be completely controlled.

A second impetus for using an electronic part made from sampler instruments is to facilitate the performance of precise microtones through pitch matching. This method has allowed me include unusual harmonies and chord changes since the pitches of the live instrumental parts are almost always doubled in the electronics.

Sui Genris (2014)

guitar and electronics

Sui Generis was written during the Winter of 2014 for Kobe Van Cauwenburghe for his album with Carrier Records, Give my regards to 116th street.

The title, Sui Generis, is latin for “of it’s own kind”. This composition follows from a 2008 solo guitar piece entitled In Terra Nullius (empty land), that attempts to depict remote areas of Northern British Columbia in musical terms. Instead of depicting imagery, Sui Generis concerns itself with the nature of the steel-string guitar and music/sound itself. As a legal principle, Terra Nullius was invoked by colonizing forces to claim land inhabited by aboriginal populations. Colonizing forces claimed that there was no law among these groups and therefor the land could be considered an uninhabited, Terra Nullius. Some groups, such as the Inuits of Alaska, responded by invoking Sui Generis: we have different laws, laws of our own kind.

To perform this work, the guitar must be drastically retuned. Each string is tuned down in pitch, resulting in a generally mellow tone, closer to that of a baritone guitar. The intervals between the strings has also been altered to create a microtonal chord of naturally tuned intervals relating to a B-flat tonic, further altering the resonance of the instrument. The upper three strings form a B-flat major triad, while the lower three strings are tuned to more complex intervals: the just minor third, the just seventh, and the just tritone. The electronic sound pushes the harmonic possibilities of the piece further, blending microtonal guitar samples with the live guitar as seamlessly as possible.

Sui Generis was written during the Winter of 2014 for Kobe Van Cauwenburghe for his album with Carrier Records, Give my regards to 116th street.

The title, Sui Generis, is latin for “of it’s own kind”. This composition follows from a 2008 solo guitar piece entitled In Terra Nullius (empty land), that attempts to depict remote areas of Northern British Columbia in musical terms. Instead of depicting imagery, Sui Generis concerns itself with the nature of the steel-string guitar and music/sound itself. As a legal principle, Terra Nullius was invoked by colonizing forces to claim land inhabited by aboriginal populations. Colonizing forces claimed that there was no law among these groups and therefor the land could be considered an uninhabited, Terra Nullius. Some groups, such as the Inuits of Alaska, responded by invoking Sui Generis: we have different laws, laws of our own kind.

To perform this work, the guitar must be drastically retuned. Each string is tuned down in pitch, resulting in a generally mellow tone, closer to that of a baritone guitar. The intervals between the strings has also been altered to create a microtonal chord of naturally tuned intervals relating to a B-flat tonic, further altering the resonance of the instrument. The upper three strings form a B-flat major triad, while the lower three strings are tuned to more complex intervals: the just minor third, the just seventh, and the just tritone. The electronic sound pushes the harmonic possibilities of the piece further, blending microtonal guitar samples with the live guitar as seamlessly as possible.

Stagger (2012)

violin and electronics

Stagger was written for Mira Benjamin as part of the Musique de chambre (noire) project developed through a collaboration between Nathalie Bujold (video artist), Quatuor Bozzini, and myself.

The video/tape portion in Stagger consists of remixed/rearranged recordings of Mira Benjamin improvising on the violin in a pre-designed scordatura (retuning of the violin). A similar solo with video/tape was written for each of the members of the Quatuor Bozzini, comprising a set of four short pieces. In the framework of the larger project of Musique de chambre (noire), these half-improvised pieces represent the deep collaboration between myself and the string quartet. Through this compositional method I attempt to blur the boundaries between improvised and written music as well as between composer and performer.

There is a video part that only appears in the last three minutes of the piece, which features the image of a raven on a wire, superimposed with its own reversed image. This footage was taken on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and this particular raven was well-known as “Barky”, since he would bark like a dog. In the recording session with Mira, she made scratch-tones on the violin to impersonate the sound of barky the Raven that were then used throughout the piece.

In working with an Mira’s improvisation I wanted to make a piece that was almost co-composed by the performer and to allow the performer to integrate their own musical sensibilities and improvisational ideas into the work. Additionally, this workflow shakes up my usual method of composing and the techniques that I often rely upon as I must first understand the musical organization provided to me and react to a huge part of the work over which I have no control.

soprano, violin, clarinet, flute, percussion, and live electronics

Five Weather Reports was written for the TAK ensemble in the Winter of 2014 and was developed from an earlier composition for solo soprano and electronics of the same name. The text set in this piece comes from excerpts of David Ohle’s 1974 science-fiction novel Motorman. Five Weather Reports consists of five songs that set bizarre and absurd weather reports that are heard over the radio by the Ohle’s protagonist, Moldenke. Although the book was published many decades ago, these excerpts take on an intensified contemporary environmental and societal meaning.

improvising sampler created in max/MSP

The virtual improviser used to produce the tape part is a computer program that I’ve created that is still progressing through its infancy. For this piece, the rhythms are strictly predetermined while the pitches are improvised according to probabilities. A key aspect of this virtual improviser is that they understand pitch in terms of frequency ratios rather than discreet frequencies. Throughout this work, the virtual improviser cycles through different sets of probabilities of wavering harmonic complexity in order to provide a slowly shifting harmonic tensing and relaxation. However, it may be interesting to note that in this work the key never changes and the tonal center is always an A.

L’érotisme sacré (2011)

piano, flute, and electronics

The title of this piece comes from the work of the philosopher Georges Bataille, who connected eroticism with the sublime, religious rituals and death. This work takes slowed-down moan samples as it’s primary source, from which the melodic and harmonic material is derived. In my experience, these zoomed in moans tap into an immediate physical reaction in the listener, as perhaps hearing someone scream or a child crying does. However, due to the extreme time stretching of the sound files, the nature of the reaction is somewhat ambiguous and estranged. In the end, these samples serve as a theme from which I develop the all aspects of the work, creating variations and broader forms that are, hopefully, palpably connected to the original source.