Assembly for Recorder Trio

When I was little, I played with Legos.

A lot.

It’s possible entire summers were spent on the floor of my room, sunlight streaming in, blocks in hand. I never bothered to follow the instructions and just made whatever I felt like. I think that may have influenced my present compositions.

Assembly, for recorder trio, is simply playing with some musical blocks, building new things from the basic materials of a work. Little musical objects (a clockwork rhythm, a murmuring gesture, stillness), are presented in varied states of construction.

Premiered in London, March 2019 Charlotte Barbour-Condini, Tabea Debus, and Olwen Foulkes

(performers in recording below)

Radiance for Bassoon, Electronics, and Lights

Radiance for Bassoon, Live Electronics, and Lights depicts moments in scripture in which God’s presence is made manifest.

The first movement, Genesis, refers to Genesis 1:2, in which His Spirit came over the deep. The bassoon moves between it’s lowest Bb, a fundamental note, and mutliphonics while the program refracts the sound into four harmonies, emanating from each speaker. The lights create a sun rise over a sea, with occasional amber bursts as reflections from the waves.

The second movement, Elijah is a meditation on Elijah as he waits by the brook (1 Kings 17). The bassoon moves between three musical materials: a repetitive note (time passing); low, manic outbursts (despair/psychosis); and a high, lyrical line (hope/calling out). The lights and electronics react to each register of the bassoons sound; obscuring, granulizing, and distorting the sound.

This movement moves directly into the third, Prayer. Here is Christ praying on the mountain (Luke 9:28-36). The bassoon alternates between multiphonics which emerge from the lowest and the highest notes of the instrument. This metaphor works on two levels: us/Christ reaching up to the Father and him reaching down to us, and Christ’s literal transformation on the mountain top in Luke 9. The electronics are mapped to the register of the bassoon, partitioning the sound to visually illustrate the dialogue between low/high, Father/Son.

The fourth movement depicts the appearance of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:19). The bassoon plays a fanfare, with each staccato note triggering a building harmony and a jewel color from the lights. This builds in anticipation until the glory of the New Jerusalem is fully revealed in large masses of harmony and unrestrained fanfares.

The piece ends in a reflection on His Glory as revealed Exodus 34:35. The bassoonist, bathed in golden light (as Moses was when he descended from the mountain), moves between multiphonics, tremolos, and frenetic, upwards scales. This builds towards an ecstatic climax before meditating on some final multiphonics.

The electronics were written in Max/MSP and use DMX-512 protocols. Each sound and visual element is derived or controlled by the incoming sound of the bassoon.

Radiance was premiered by Dominic Panunto in Philadelphia at he Live/Wire Opera Festival.

WELL-PLAYED GAME

In A Well-Played Game, we reframe the simple game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to present its ramifications in a new light. While the traditional game is one of straight-forward victory, A Well-Played Game emphasizes agreement rather than adversity as the desired objective. This naïve and beautifully simple game is transformed to become an immersive musico-dramatic experience, combining music, film, and theatre.

A Well-Played Game puts an interesting spin on the nostalgic singlemindedness of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Through the connection and subversion of nostalgic elements and childhood games, we hope to explore what it means to agree, to disagree, and to toe the line between the sentimental sublimity of childhood and the chaos of conflict.

In A Well-Played Game, we use 2 LEAP Motion controllers to recognize hand gestures which trigger changes in the video and music. As we disagree, the visuals and audio get increasingly disturbed. Only on agreement is there respite, though it is short-lived. This is a

GHIRLANDA SACRA: REGNUM MUNDI

Does a space remember? Since the early 16th century, musicians have filled the halls of the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia with sounds, affecting and arresting listeners. People in 1530 might have heard the motet Ghirlanda Sacra: Regnum Mundi by Julio Cessare Martinego which runs through this piece, reverberating off the walls, much as you do, as a never-before-heard music in an unexperienced space.

What was new then is new now.

Ghirlanda Sacra: Regnum Mundi is a process of discovery, connected by architecture, fulfilled by two performers with phones, interacting with imagined memories of historic places. An algorithm mediates their interactions with the sound and the space, creating unique environments derived from the motet and the hall. Each performer must use their phones as aural flashlights, illuminating the sound in the space.

Ghirlanda Sacra: Regnum Mundi was premiered June 19, 2019 at the Brunel Museum in London, UK

Perception Study #1

In the installation Perception Study #1, I sought to use environmental light, color, and sound to

alter the mood of people in the space. Inspired by the work James Turrell, I designed a colored light

display to highlight the natural light which entered into a space through a foggy glass ceiling. I measured

the resonant frequencies of the space and designed an audio world consisting of synthesized tones, and

filtered noise, and filtered audio samples. The pitches of the oscillators in the synthesized version and

the filters for the samples were based on the resonant peaks of the space, highlighting its natural

acoustics.

I created a randomized program which altered the lights and sounds in the installation over 20-

30 minutes. This timespan was chosen so that the changes would be imperceptible to people in the

space. The lights would simply change color, but the audio aspect had more variation. Whether the

program was running a synthesized sound or filtering samples or noise, the oscillators/filter would shift

slowly out of tune with the resonance of the room. This created an effect of the room going from a ‘wet’

sound to a ‘dry’ sound (sound it’s really going from an ‘extremely wet’ sound to a ‘somewhat less wet’

sound).

In addition to this, I wrote a companion piece for soloists from a string quintet with double bass,

Resonance Fragments. The performers would enter the space alone and cue a programmed sequence to

start. There would be a suspended microphone capturing the room sound and playing it back at key

points. The piece culminated in a superposition of all the recordings from the current and previous

performances, which would then dissolve into filtered noise, then arpeggios of harmonics, then filtered

recordings of crowds speaking. This work was never performed due to technical issues, but it is being developed into another

iteration.