Four interlocked excerpts from the electronic part of "quiet down" (2021) for flute, saxophone, bass clarinet, piano and electronics.

quiet down: four interlocked excerpts

Robin Meiksins, flutes
Phil Pierick, saxophone
Alejandro Acierto, bass clarinet
Daniel Baer, piano

**concert recording mixed with original electronics**
Ear Taxi Festival: Celebrating LGBTQ Musicians in Chicago
September 19, 2021
Elastic Arts (www.elasticarts.org)
Chicago, IL

quiet down (2021)

Chicago Composers Orchestra
Allen Tinkham, conductor
Michelle Nordmeyer, visual artist
September 25, 2021

Artist Michelle Nordmeyer made "Work with Whatchya Got" in pandemic lockdown, using found-objects to express the idea of “limitation.” I've taken Michelle's work and used the timbres of the orchestra to echo the beautifully tactile quality of the layered visual objects: a slowly blossoming, misshapen chorale for muted violins; incisive, broken-sounding percussion; muted and out-of-tune brass. 

There are also dramatic breakthroughs and a nostalgic, faded epilogue that echo the human struggle against limitation, whether from the pandemic, or from disenfranchisement and poverty, as Michelle and I discussed during our visit to the Sweet Water Foundation in 2019.

whatchya got [Sweet Water prints] (2021)

Recorded at the 2012 Wellesley Composers Conference, Wellesley, MA, USA.

Mary Nessinger, mezzo-soprano
Barry Crawford, flutes
Sarah Crocker, violin
Joshua Gordon, cello
Ben Paysen and Stephen Paysen, percussion
Christopher Oldfather, piano
James Baker, conductor
--------------------------------
PROGRAM NOTE:

	Shakespeare’s The Tempest finds Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan and a learned magician, stranded on a remote island. Twelve years prior his own brother, Antonio, had conspired with his rival Alonso, King of Naples, to depose him. When Prospero divines that Antonio and others are on a ship passing close to the island, he conjures a tempest that wrecks the ship, bringing those who have wronged him ashore. Prospero then uses his powers and those of his servant, the spirit Ariel, to torment Antonio, Alonso and the others.    But Prospero cannot sustain his quest for vengeance indefinitely. In this scene from the play’s last act, Ariel reports to Prospero on the suffering of his enemies, saying that “if [he] now beheld them, [his] affections would become tender...Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero responds: 
		
		“Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,
		  Yet with nobler reason ‘gainst my fury
		  Do I take part. The rarer action is
		  In virtue than in vengeance.”	

Believing them penitent, Prospero prepares to cast a a powerful spell to restore his enemies, end their punishment and, most importantly, exorcize his own demons. The Rarer Action traces the fantastic invocations of Prospero’s final spell and his (arguably) tragic resignation from magic. It concludes with a representation of Prospero’s enemies immobilized in the circle he had traced on the stage. The ending - the distant glow of a major triad in the piano and feeble, flickering harp harmonics - invokes the ambiguous tone of the play’s end, best summarized by Prospero’s final monologue:

		"And my ending is despair,
 		Unless I be relieved by prayer,
 		Which pierces so that it assaults
 		Mercy itself and frees all faults.
 		As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
 		Let your indulgence set me free."

-------------------------
TEXT AND STAGE DIRECTIONS:

Act V, Scene 1, lines 33-57:

			[PROSPERO makes a circle on the stage.]
PROSPERO:   Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,
		And ye that on the sands with printless foot
		Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
		When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
		By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
		Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
		Is to make midnight-mushrooms, that rejoice
		To hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid
		(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimmed 
		The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
		And twixt the green sea and the azured vault
		Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
		Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
		With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
		Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
		The pine and cedar. Graves at my command
		Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
		By my so potent art. But this rough magic
		I here abjure, and when I have required 
		Some heavenly music (which even now I do)
		To work mine end upon their senses that		
		This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
		Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
		And deeper than did ever plummet sound
		I’ll drown my book.
			[Solemn music. Here enters ARIEL before, then ALONSO with a frantic gesture, attended by Gonzalo; SEBASTIAN and ANTONIO in like manner attended by ADRIAN and FRANCISCO. They all enter the circle which PROSPERO had made, and there stand charmed...]

The Rarer Action: A scene from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (2012)

Chicago Composers Orchestra
Allen Tinkham, conductor
St. James Cathedral
Chicago, IL
April 29, 2023

If you’re wondering what electroclash artist Casey Spooner could possibly have to do with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and his song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn, then compare some of the text of “Das Himmlische Leben”, one of the Wunderhorn songs:

"We revel in heavenly pleasures,
So we shun all that is earthly,
No worldly turmoil
Is heard in Heaven,
Everyone lives in sweetest peace;
We lead an angelic existence,
And yet we are perfectly happy,
We dance and leap,
We skip and sing,
Saint Peter in Heaven looks on…” (trans. Richard Stokes)

…to some of “Butterscotch Goddam”, a 2018 song by Fischerspooner (Casey Spooner’s old band):

“I jump off the mountain, I hang off the cliff 
Listen to you shower sing love scene shift 
Light it up with your weedy spliff 
Lovers tiff, dance around, plead the fifth 
Kiss me…” 
“I brought you sake and plums from Kyoto 
Gift shop stickers from the Bishōnen show… 
And that is just one idea of heaven…”

I find “Butterscotch Goddam” difficult to describe as anything other than an alternate queer universe - the near-nonsense lyrics, the dystopian erotic imagery and sexuality of the music video. And I’m reasonably sure St. Peter and the other saints in the Wunderhorn text - St. Cecilia, St. Martha, St. Ursula - wouldn’t exactly be the biggest fans of Fischerspooner’s work, of disco or electroclash music. But both of these texts are making the same fundamental promise: an escape to paradise.

I know I’m not only speaking for myself when I say that LGBTQ people, no matter what their sexuality or gender identity, struggle to feel safe in the world today. This fear comes from atrocities past and present, such as the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, FL in 2016 and the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting in 2022, or arson attacks on New Orleans gay bars in the early 1970s. But it also comes from ongoing threats, like the right wing moral panic surrounding transgender people today, and over four decades of HIV/AIDS. "One idea of heaven" is an attempt to create a joyous inward retreat from a disjunct, nightmarish reality of violence, hatred and chaos, one where music and imagery as incompatible as “Das Himmlische Leben” and “Butterscotch Goddam” can coexist as they provide the escapes they both promise.

one idea of heaven (2023)

Two excerpts from the electronic part of "protostellar" for the Flannau Duo (https://www.kyleflens.com/flannau-duo.html)

Many of the electronic sounds in "protostellar" are sonifications of publicly available data from the attached photo of the Cosmic Cliffs, the first publicly released photo of a star-forming region in the Carina Nebula from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

Full performance: https://www.youtube.com/live/VixhoO_RlGw?si=0jse1vQf5qlftKC-&t=5370

protostellar (2024) - electronic excerpts

5 years - that's how long I've been working on various forms of this piece. "Escape" is about navigating a sea of distress and frightening intensity of all kinds, but hopefully always with the goal of some eventual resolution in mind. It's a work that evolved from experiments quilting together samples of all kinds - everything from reversed, processed and highly spliced opera, house, pop and country music to modern orchestral and electronic music that includes my own. All of these never quite recognizable samples combine into a nightmarish journey through a slew of intensely quiet, dramatic, occasionally even violent electronic sounds in highly dynamic space. But the nightmares do have an end: the last 5 minutes are the "sunrise", and they can be a work by itself. The ultimate resolution is the gentle, distant but very bright illumination - like an ascent into the spaceborne sunrise in the attached image, bringing us to a gentle, exhausted evaporation from the nightmare we are escaping from.

Begin at or around 11:30 for "sunrise".

escape (2025)

Part of an extended passage for electronics alone. (The quartet sustains a cluster chord over the first 18 seconds but is silent after that.)

The neuron data controls some parameters of the ambisonic spatialization, making some sounds vibrate erratically in 3D space. These sounds include:

-direct sonification of the neuron pulses (white noise)
-filtered, drastically slowed down neuron pulses
-neuron data manipulating the pitch of justly tuned odd partials of Bb
-granulation, with neuron data controlling speed
-fragments of various acoustic orchestral samples from various sources
-both frequency and amplitude convolution of all of these sounds

More info about the project is available at: https://www.newmusicusa.org/projects/neurosonics-cont/

The Spektral Quartet (www.spektralquartet.com) will premiere the piece on May 5, 2017 at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts.

pathways, bursting [neurosonics 2]: excerpt from cue 4 (stereo reduction)

University of South Florida Wind Ensemble
John Carmichael, cond.
April 2017

0:00 The Fifth Concerto
2:03 imagining the Englne, from 1001 cars away
4:32 The Proloff Revolution

In the 2013 post-apocalyptic film Snowpiercer - based on Le Transperceneige, a French graphic novel from 1982 - a train barrels nonstop around the world, carrying the remnants of humanity through a world rendered uninhabitable by a human-caused ice age. These last people maintain order with a brutal totalitarian social structure, and both film and graphic novel follow one man as he leads a revolution against it.

For more about the piece, check out my website:
 
https://andrewmcmanusmusic.com/2016/04/17/apocalypse-done-right-thoughts-on-snowpiercer/

Atlas Fractures

Atlas Fractures (2016) - USF Wind Ensemble

Spektral Quartet:
Clara Lyon, Theo Espy, Doyle Armbrust, Russell Rolen
Andrew McManus, electronics
Constellation Chicago
May 12, 2017

"Neurosonics" is a long-term, multi-work creative project that has grown out of a collaboration with Tahra Eissa, a neuroscience graduate student here at the University of Chicago. Tahra’s lab puts rat brains on tiny electrode arrays, stimulates them and studies their behavior, with the goal of better understanding epilepsy in humans. I took an interest in her research because I have epilepsy myself (thankfully it’s under control), and I’ve wanted to creatively engage with it for quite some time. All of the electronic sounds in pathways, bursting bear some relationship - straightforward or complex - to the neuron data. The pulses of white noise, for instance, come from directly translating the data into sound, while fluttering sine tones come from using it to manipulate pitch. I’ve assembled these diverse sounds into textures that often become harrowingly dense, even when the electronics are not particularly loud. This certainly is part of my intention: after all, this project is about overloads of electrical activity in the brain. Portions of the electronic track are uncomfortably loud, overwhelming, and even violent. But part of my motivation for this project has always been to communicate aspects of my own experience with the condition, as it has been quite harrowing at certain points in my life. I’m also motivated to communicate this on behalf of others with the condition. So instead of mediating the experience of the electronics, I’ve set up the quartet as a lyrical foil, particularly in the latter portion of the piece. 

When the electronics reach their loudest, most explosive point, the quartet reenters following over 5 minutes of silence, struggling against the overwhelming electronics. The quartet continues to push back, in fits and starts, as the electronics subside. Their jagged, erratic polyrhythms slowly become more regular, and they eventually achieve a much more peaceful space, one that I think realistically counterbalances the violence of the electronics. But in this final passage, there’s a slightly brightened consonance that bolsters the quartet’s role as a relieving counterweight to the harrowing electronics, one that may even provide an affirmative message in the end - even as it resolves to the justly tuned odd partials of B flat (5/7/9/11/13).

Special thanks to New Music USA and the Logan Center’s Art | Science Collaboration Initiative for their support of this project.

pathways, bursting [neurosonics 2]

Dendrites are receptors that branch outward from each neuron in extraordinarily complex, ever-changing three-dimensional networks. This piece brings to life the data from my Neurosonics project in new ways that reflect these visually stunning networks. 

The intricate spatial effects are best enjoyed with good headphones, or on a nice stereo system!

dendrites (binaural/stereo)

for tenor saxophone and spatial sound

Justin Massey, saxophone
recorded at the 2019 SPLICE Institute
Kalamazoo, MI

score: https://composers.com/products/mcmanus-impulse-response-neurosonics-4?srsltid=AfmBOopk2qO2j3K5mAhRo26Q3bVvTYVSKvCAsB0NeyYhgwlYSnJqAz45

impulse response [neurosonics 4] (2019) - tenor sax + electronics

Andrew McManus’ (b. 1985) orchestral work Strobe, premiered in 2014 by the New York Philharmonic, was called “riveting” and “breathless…surging…hazy…sometimes all at once” by the New York Times. His 2021 work "Quiet Down" for 4 players and electronics draws on a recording of LGBTQ activist Silvia Rivera's iconic 1973 speech. "Whatchya Got (Sweet Water prints)" (2021) for the Chicago Composers Orchestra, works with the “freedom, sentience, joy and mourning” assembled in a “lockdown print” by artist Michelle Nordmeyer. "Embers, fused to ash" (2015), for Alarm Will Sound, amalgamates Richard Wagner’s “Magic Fire Music” from Die Walküre with other fire-based imagery. In 2014 he began "Neurosonics", a multi-work collaboration with University of Chicago neuroscientist, which creates electronic soundscapes using data from experiments used in the study of epilepsy. The project was supported by residency awards at the Aaron Copland House (2018) and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (2018). New Music USA funded the project’s second work, "pathways, bursting [neurosonics 2]" for string quartet and electronics, which places the Spektral Quartet amidst a sea of alternately violent and tender spatialized sounds. Pathways was the winner of the 2020 Charlotte New Music & Beo String Quartet Competition. Other organizations that have featured his work include Latitude 49, NYCEMF, eighth blackbird, Fort Worth Opera, Aspen Music Festival, SPLICE Institute, New York Youth Symphony Chamber Music, Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the Minnesota Orchestra. In 2020 he was Limited Term Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Georgia. He is based in Chicago.

andrewemcmanus

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