*Two pieces are provided below for my portfolio. Each piece includes a score, a recording that excerpts the suggested times for listening/viewing, a full recording, and a description. Clicking on the title of the piece will take you to the piece’s dedicated page on my website.
Electric Dreamscape no. 2 (2021):
Suggested Viewing
5′:00″ – 7′:30″ (Moment Group 2, Secondary Moment 1, Moment Group 1)
Electric Dreamscape no. 2 is an improvisatory, electro-acoustic multimedia work for trumpet and computer that I performed myself. Heavily inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s concept of “Moment Form,” the piece unfolds in three distinct “moment groups.” Each group contains three models upon which I based my improvisations. Segments of my improvisation were recorded into a buffer and played back by the computer at six different rates simultaneously. This approach was influenced by the micro-polyphonic textures of György Ligeti, and the collage form textures of Anthony Braxton. A frequency follower allowed me to navigate non-linearly through the three moment groups and to change the processing of the live trumpet signal in real time. The video is audio reactive and also changes at important structural moments of the performance.
Suggested Viewing:
Entire work
The text for this piece, Tears, is a 1956 poem by Allen Ginsberg. One aspect of the poetry that drew me in was Ginsberg’s use of allusion. In one such allusion, Ginsberg refers to the music of Bach. This reference turned out to be the seed for all of the pitch material in the piece. The combination of listening to Bach and crying immediately made me think of the figure that occurs in the violins in the first measure of the Et Incarnatus Est from Bach’s B Minor Mass. This figure’s pitch-class set was used to generate all of the pitch material. This is the premiere recording, from a performance given on July 21, 2021 by Dora Ammerman (Soprano) and Sar Shalom Strong (Piano). The piece was composed for the 2021 Cazenovia Counterpoint Festival in Cazenovia, New York.