last haiku

what harbor shelters peace (after Peter Grimes)

those fuckers

miserere

Sacred Tension (2022) string trio

Electroacoustic composition made with Logic

For my piece, I wanted to create an atmospheric soundscape that incorporates tactile, stimulating textures. This is most notably heard with high-pitched wood block noises in the middle section, which I shaped by echo and delay designer. 

All that I really knew going into this piece was that I wanted to begin with a loud resonant bang in the beginning. From there, I arranged the djembe recording in various ways, which remains the core sound bucket recording throughout the piece. With these different djembe arrangements–namely the gong-like sound and the beating sound–I began to envision a specific atmosphere: cavernous and underground, with something massive lurking, and with an underlying sanctity. 

This sacred sound is expanded in the latter section of the piece, where swells alternate between two pitches over an ambient drone, reminiscent of spiritual minimalist composers like Arvo Part or Henryk Gorecki. 

Because of this development between the two sections from dark and cavernous to sacred, I thought Via Negativa would be a suitable title, which refers to theology that reaches the divine by negation, by what is supposedly opposite of the divine, like traveling through darkness to find light. 

In addition to the Via Negativa theme of reconciling dark and light, blasphemy and sacrosanct, I wanted to reconcile other binaries such as pitched/unpitched sounds by using enharmonic sounds, such as the gong-like sound throughout the piece. Via Negativa is a work that represents this reconciliation of opposites and an apophatic mystical journey to the divine.

Brock is Dead

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