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in the back of a truck, joshua tree

monopiece with jaap blonk (excerpt)

monopiece w William Winant

Excerpts (i.e. nearly all of it but one bad section)of a piece for orchestra I wrote in my final semester at Oberlin Conservatory. I am very thankful to have had the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra (Raphael Jimenez conducting) do a reading of the piece.

Program note:
This piece is dedicated to Jacques Rutzky, and all of the members of the meditation group he leads of    which I am a member, which explores the integration of meditation and mindfulness philosophies into the performance of improvised music. One analogy that Jacques has used multiple times in discussion functions to distinguish between tranquility and equanimity in Buddhist Philosophy: if the mind is like a lake, it has tranquility if there are no ripples on the surface, and it has equanimity if there are no undercurrents in the deeper waters. This analogy, combined with the Vipassana practice of meditation (briefly described, the mind fixates on an imagined point in space without allowing it to move), reminded me much of the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem, a famous proof in mathematics. L.E.J. Brouwer himself has previously described the theorem simply by relating it to a cup of coffee, saying that while it is being stirred, there is at any time some point in the coffee cup where the liquid is not moving. I found a loose synthesis of the math and the philosophy comforting, suggesting that no matter how turbulent the mind gets, lacking perhaps both tranquility and equanimity, there is theoretically always some stationary point to fix the mind on in Vipassana meditation.
In the piece, a sound-world in which the harmonic undercurrents are shifting and the textural surface is agitated manages to very occasionally pick out some “fixed points” in the forms of stationary pitches and repeating harmonic cycles (the “wheels” in the title). However, these fixed points are ephemeral and unstable, and the mind gets distracted again. Wheels are also referenced in the title for Jacques, as his nickname (given to him by his teacher, a Thai Buddhist monk) is “Chaka,” meaning “wheel” in Pali, the language spoken in the Buddha’s time and place.

I'm going to miss Oberlin

Fixed Points in Wheels and Waters (Excerpts sightread by the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra)

Synthesized realizations of drone compositions by La Monte Young. Frequencies based on tables in Kyle Gann's article "The outer edge of consonance: snapshots from the evolution of La Monte Young's tuning installations" , in W. Duckworth and R. Fleming, eds., Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (Bucknell University Press, 1996). Sound was synthesized in MATLAB using a base frequency of 60 Hz, splitting paired frequencies between right and left stereo channels, and weighting amplitudes based on an approximate equal-loudness contour.

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