OBDay

Rane Moore, Matt Gold, and Steven Gosling from Talea Ensemble performing OK Fantastic! March 2022

OK Fantastic!

Performance by Ensemble Adapter and Ensemble Pamplemousse, November 2013, Berlin Germany.

A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not (III)(Ens. Adapter + Pamplemousse)

"Wax Catalog" for string quartet, premiered by JACK Quartet at Taplin Auditorium on 11/28/2023

Transfigured Song

Estelle Costanzo - harp
Julien Mégroz - percussion
Flavio Virzì - guitar

Larry Polanski - For Jim, Ben & Lou - I. Preamble

Larry Polanski - For Jim, Ben & Lou - II. (Rue Plats) (Resting Place)

Larry Polanski - For Jim, Ben & Lou - III. The World’s Longest Melody

you are invited to play this recording at a low volume 

for 5 players and electronics
for TAK ensemble

LAURA COCKS  |  FLUTE
CARLOS CORDEIRO  |  CLARINET
CHARLOTTE MUNDY  |  VOICE
MARINA KIFFERSTEIN  |  VIOLIN
ELLERY TRAFFORD  |  PERCUSSION

sergio cote | electronics, recording, and mixing 
recorded at Cornell University 
April 2019

t [five players and electronics]

All audio in this track is from 12 slide whistles played by 12 small electric blowers. The blowers are programmed to carefully oscillate at a flow rate close to that at which the whistles overblows. These sounds are pretty quiet in real life even though they sometimes sound intense.

No electronics were added and I made minimal adjustments to the original sounds, mostly moving things around a bit.

12 Whistles Playing the Break, for 12 mechanically controlled slidewhistles

plastic trombone with lots of plastic sounds, featuring a 1960s reed organ I found in a pawn shop back home... 

many thanks to Matt Teodori, Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk for the inspiration and the samples.

two panels [for line upon line]

If a composer wishes to avoid tonality, wishes to avoid the monarchical tyranny of tonic, then a simple (but not sure-fire) recipe consists in working a symmetrical treatment of the totality of pitches (with said totality often going by the name "total chromatic," or more generally "aggregate," but aggregate can also mean a totality of anything).  The twelve-tone system treats pitch classes symmetrically by design, and aleatoric methods also prove quite effective.  Other tyrants can arise aside from tonics.  So if mezzo-forte, or the central octave, or the 16th-note should threaten domination, a composer can also serialize (or randomize) dynamics, tessitura, or duration, etc.  In practice, all this fair treatment of possibilities, all this fiat symmetry, can ironically make tyrants out of the relevant aggregates themselves, effectively replacing monarchy, one might say, by obsessive bureaucracy, with the ear experiencing concomitant fatigue (not necessarily a bad thing depending on the composer's artistic goal).  In any case the emergence of this irony perhaps explains the briefness for total serialism's vogue.  Long ago, atonal composers working more freely discovered the trick of "keeping a note in your pocket" only to pull it out again when you need it to sound fresh---and it will.  

This piece plies a latter-day total serialism (but a serialism not anchored in rows) which governs pitch, tessitura, rhythm, dynamics and articulation, but which has the note-in-the-pocket wisdom inscribed in its genetics.  The 81 sections survey all 80 hexachord-up-transposition classes (the final section reprising the first, a whole-tone scale), with each section signaled by the entrance of a single pocketed pitch class and less noticeably by the departure of another (so traversing a Hamiltonian circuit through hexachord space).  Likewise, a Hamiltonian circuit through time-point "hexachords" (a la Babbitt) characterizes the rhythm.  But then each hexachord gets developed by a special type of Hamiltonian circuit through all 20 of its own sub-trichords, with the instantiation of each trichord pulling a note of a shallower pocket. 

The spare texture of the present work pays homage to John Cage, specifically works from his Lou Harrison period, to Morton Feldman, specifically his late pattern pieces, to Jo Kondo, specifically his hockets, and to Jonathan Kramer, specifically his process pieces and works with restricted pitch sets.

A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not (III)(Ens. Adapter + Pamplemousse)

Andrew_Greenwald