Completed July 29, 2024
Premiered December 4, 2024 by the Attacca Quartet

Dedicated to the Attacca Quartet, whose omnivorous enthusiasm for music was as infectious as it was inspiring

When preparing to write a new piece for the incredible Attacca Quartet, I had to reformulate my attitudes toward music. Where other ensembles would specialize, Attacca approached a stunningly wide repertoire with wit, joy, and open-mindedness. For them, there could be no music too high or too low, too silly or serious, too old or new. Instead, any music could serve as its own justification. 

Loosely inspired by William Blake’s parallel poetry collections ‘Songs of Innocence & Experience,’ this piece is structured in two halves that correspond roughly to the titular themes. Blake completed Songs of Experience six years after Songs of Innocence, and he originally intended the former to be exclusively centered on adulthood while the latter concentrated on youth. By the time he finished the collections, however, neither half was purely innocent nor experienced. The two contained poems of the same subject matter, the same titles, and in some cases, the same content - Blake actually moved some of the poems in 'Innocence' to 'Experience' upon completion, suggesting a complex relationship between the halves. 

I reflected on the soundworld I had developed over the six years or so since I started composing: a music of rushing motion, extended techniques, and mischievous self-awareness. This style stood in stark contrast to the first few pieces I had written: pop-like chord progressions, simple melodies, emotional transparency to the point of embarrassment. I decided I would set these old, ‘naive’ ideas in conversation with my current musical language. 

I hope that by juxtaposing and interweaving these musics that I can cast some doubt upon the linear narratives of growth we often feed ourselves. Sometimes, perhaps, one must double back to go forward.

Music of Innocence & Experience, for string quartet

For Confluss

The process of deconstructing your core belief system is often painful and isolating. In the case of leaving “the church,” it’s a messy combination of stripping away both the moral foundation of your ideals and abandoning a community that has surrounded you for decades. So much of the Christianity I grew up with emphasized alienation from the “world” and that people and community would ultimately fail you unless you had your one true friend, Jesus. Stepping away from the church meant abandoning real community, real support. It took me years to learn that wasn’t true. 

This promise of isolation should one leave is prevalent throughout much of my experience with Evangelical Christianity. Nothing quite exemplifies it as well as the hymn, This World Is Not My Home, which was a favorite of my congregation growing up. There’s something deeply sinister about the refrain, which says, “Oh Lord you know, I have no friend like you,” and “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” 

I Can’t Feel at Home is my way of looking back at my own deconstruction and represents my first musical foray into better understanding the impact the church and the process of leaving it has had on me. The text for the work comes from two sources, excerpts from the poem “ABSCENCE/PRESENCE VARIATIONS” by writer and long-time collaborator, Caroline Preziosi, and interpolations of the refrain of This World Is Not My Home. 

Excerpts of the hymn weave their way throughout the piece. A recording of my childhood church singing it crests in and out of a pad of tape delay feedback, built from its melody before erupting into the chorus. Electronics and live performers lock perfectly in sync, a flashback to when times were simple and faith was strong. Things begin to warp and glitch however, eventually shunting us back to a more complicated present where the only way forward is “to continue turning.”

I Can't Feel at Home

Stuff #2 (2025)

Redshift by Eric Guinivan 
Emily Stevens and Brian Willey, Percussion
Video performance: https://youtu.be/r4U8-0EjtQ0

Recorded December 2024 

Program note and perusal score: https://www.ericguinivan.com/redshift.html
Music available from the composer: https://www.ericguinivan.com/contact.html

Redshift for Percussion Duo and Electronics

for low string trio and resonating snare and bass drums

(my grief is a compass)

we searched for a new world as the sky fell down around us.

even then, we admitted it was beautiful.

(i search for love in every world and i find it every time)

premiere:
april 24, 2025 by catinblack ensemble (Javad Javadzade, contrabass; Ema Grćman, cello; Sofia von Atzingen, viola) at harvard university’s paine hall

eroding sky; a new and brighter star | catinblack ensemble | 2025

performed by Adrian Mantu at Cellissimo Festival, May 2024

In an Occupied Space (for solo cello)

Paul Novak - a diagnosis (2024/25) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and sextet
performed May 8th, 2025 by Mycelium New Music at Fulton Street Collective

Mycelium New Music
Justin Weiss, conductor/co-artistic director
Paul Novak, flutes/co-artistic director 
Michael Tran, clarinets
Dylan Feldpausch, violin
Isidora Nojkovic, cello
Jonathan Hannau, piano/keyboard
Rebecca McDaniel, percussion
with guest artists:
Kristina Bachrach, soprano
Emily Price, mezzo-soprano

"a diagnosis" is a catalog of bodily aches, a list of symptoms which grows strange and resonant. It will eventually be the opening piece in my in-progress song cycle when i was nine i couldn’t walk, which draws from my recollections of a childhood diagnosis with a psychosomatic illness. a diagnosis focuses on the body and the things it unknowingly stores: memory, trauma, ache, desire. The text is adapted from my poem “a diagnosis.”
Paul Novak

Art: Max Ernst, "the Triumph of Surrealism"


a diagnosis (2024/25) for voices and sextet

Brooklyn Toccata (2024)

Light Leak II. by light, by shadow (2025) by Camila Agosto

World premiere performed by The Rhythm Method at Fridman Gallery on March 1, 2025 in NYC. 

Light Leak II. by light, by shadow

Casey Cangelosi, percussion
Video performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMBCd9PfuMA
Casey's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIw9gkSYmyj21uAd85Ydu8g
Casey's Website: https://www.caseycangelosi.com/

Hypernova (2020) for percussion solo and electronic playback was written for Casey Cangelosi.  In outer space, a hypernova is a type of stellar explosion which ejects material with unusually high kinetic energy, an order of magnitude higher than most supernovae.  The piece is centered on broad and expansive explosive gestures that give birth to sparkling and technically virtuosic phrases.  The soloist plays a small kit of vibratone, five tuned gongs, tamborim, hi-hat, and kick drum.  The accompanying electronic part is made entirely of acoustic hand-stopped or bowed piano samples that were recorded during and assembled as digital instruments.  There are four main types of these samples used throughout the piece:
 
- Piano with the string hand-muted and the pedal up.  The most agile tape parts are primarily made with these sound samples.
- Piano with the string hand-muted and the sustain pedal down.  Most low, resonant tones and some mid-range notes use these samples.
- Bowed piano, modified with post-production effects to give it an organ-like quality.
- Hand-muted, no-pedal piano samples with the envelope reversed to play backwards as a swell gesture.  You hear this sound at the very beginning of the piece.
 
Check out and follow along with the performance part: https://issuu.com/ericguinivan/docs/guinivan_hypernova_performance_part
 
Please contact the composer at https://www.ericguinivan.com if you are interested in purchasing a physical copy of the music for performance.

Music of Innocence & Experience, for string quartet

Bobby Ge

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