Chamber music
Unanticipated Impressions
Writing “Unanticipated Impressions” began with my decision to structure the composition on the basis of a single experience. As it happened, I was inspired enough to write about two, seemingly unrelated experiences. The first movement – “Happiness is Impersonal” – attempts to articulate in music, the state of grace that accompanies a sensation of happiness, unbidden and independent of circumstance. The second movement – “The Unlikely Beauty of Pigeons in Flight” – tries to illustrate the natural choreography, both graceful and ungainly of our urban cohabitants. I have discovered that attentively observing the mundane can reveal a hidden beauty that can lead to unanticipated happiness in the observer…
Appropriately enough, perhaps in reference to the origin of the philosophy behind movement one and the organism behind movement two, the harmonic content of the piece is derived from a non-western mode. Chords and melodies evolved naturally enough with mutation and selective cross pollination from this introduced mode into the music of “Unanticipated Impressions”.
Thanks to Deb and the Presidio Ensemble for being so damn fine and to Aram and Nicole for the good sports that they are. Special thanks Nathalie Senécal for all her support and to Mills for financial support. And to Alvin Curran for being a mensch and having some great advice. And the pigeons – of course.
Movement 1: Happiness is Impersonal
Movement 2: The Unlikely Beauty of Pigeons in Flight
Untying the Knot
A piece for woodwind quintet, played here by the City Winds. The name “Untying the Knot” is a reference to the story of the Gordǐan Knot. A problem easily solved by Alexander with brute force… I seemed to have none of the necessary incisiveness when writing this piece… As things often unfold, completing it happened only when I was on the verge of putting it aside. The final fifty measures of the composition were completed in a fraction of time that it took to write the opening.
In Pastures Green
Kanoko Nishi: piano, Caroline Penwarden: Hammond Organ, Quentin Sirjac: piano, Peter Valsamis, drums and percussion.
This piece is scored with traditional notation and sections of structured improvisation. For two pianos, Hammond Organ with a Leslie Speaker,and Drum set.
In Pastures Green score
From Stone
The title “From Stone” refers in part, to the elemental materials of music making and composition; from the most basic materials we create refined musical instruments. Perhaps the first instruments were stones (to be spoken with a Spinal Tap quasi-mystical inflection). The other basis for the title is the difficulty I encountered in writing the piece – it was quite like drawing blood from stone.
I’m discovering that composing is both sophisticated and elemental at once. From a divided octave of only twelve pitches incredible complexity can result. In this piece I decided on eight pitches and did everything that I could to hear them from all angles.
“From Stone” unfolds in three loosely structured movements. The opening section serves as a brief meditation, exploring the tonalities and sonorities that form the foundation of the piece. In the second movement, I employed a restricted set of pitches, expressed through chords and their interwoven melodies. To enhance the cohesion of the composition, I derived the rhythms played by the percussive instruments in this movement from the intervallic relationships between the pitches in the original set—an effort to translate vertical harmonic space into horizontal rhythmic space.
Though based on the same elemental set of pitches and their derivative rhythms, the final movement is the most free form of the three. The ideas for this part of the piece came out of recordings of my own vocal improvisations that I later distilled into notated music.
Molly Bradbury created the video accompaniment for “From Stone” with limited visual input and editorial suggestion from me. The idea of the movie is to have a visual analog to the arithmetic intersections of pitch and rhythm in the musical counterpart.
Southern Cross
Piano Music
