This work took one year to make, the longest I've spent with a single piece. It exists in a beautiful gray area between a simulated 'real' ensemble performance and a surreal 'acousmatic' abstraction of these instruments. To me, its powerful, beautiful, and striking. It was a back and fourth collaborative process between Mark Hetzler (Trombone), Vincent Fuh (Piano), Nick Moran (Bass), and Todd Hammes (Percussion) performing traditionally notated material, recording it, my electroacoustic processing and composition using these materials in the studio, then sending these processed compositions back for them to play over top of, sometime with notated music, sometimes improvised.

Persistence Of Memory

The Uirapuru is a bird native to Brazil's Amazon region and has inspired many composers including Heitor Villa-Lobos and Luiz Gonzaga. It has the most beautiful and haunting song, a melody that I transcribed to serve as the pervasive theme throughout the work. Uirapuru is a Travelogue piece inspired by a service trip that I took into the heart of the Amazon River basin in Brazil. A large riverboat was the only form of transportation available to get us from one place to another and a branch of the Amazon River, a deep and black expanse called the "Negre" and its vast ever-changing network of canals called "Parana," was our only road. My total experience is quilted out of seemingly contrasting individual episodes in my memory. I recall several moments realizing that if the boat were to go under or if I were to fall overboard, it would mean certain death, and then turning around and finding myself engulfed in what seemed like millions of fireflies or watching schools of elegant pink dolphins (I�m not lying!) break the surface of the same menacing water for air. There are moments of confusion and awkwardness that comes with the territory of being a "stranger in a strange land" contrasting with moments of comradery and acceptance as we labored together and participated in song and dance. A Native guide through the Rainforest showed us a tree whose sap could treat all kinds of diseases and then an anthill at the base of the tree where a bite from a single inhabitant would be painfully debilitating. This work progresses much like my journey. A special thanks to Dr. Paul Richards, my composition professor, and a very special thanks to Dr. Welson Tremura - professor of Music and Latin American studies. Your suggestions were extremely insightful and when I could not go back to Brazil, you brought it to me.

Uirapuru for Brazilian folk Pierrot ensemble

The Student Commission for SEAMUS 2011
"The Native American Trickster is a figure who defies category. He is at once the scorned outsider and the culture-hero, the mythic transformer and the buffoon, a creature of low purpose and questionable habits who establishes precedent, dabbles in the creation of the world that will be, and provides tools, food, and clothing to the people who will inhabit that world. He may assume an array of contradictory personae in the course of a single narrative, moving from one to the other with the skill of a practiced shape-shifter while tripping on his tail at every turn. Trickster creates through destruction and succeeds through failure; his mythic and cultural achievements are seldom intentional. 'Defining such a various creature,' writes Jarold Ramsey, 'is a little like trying to juggle hummingbirds.'" - Larry Ellis
Wakdjunkaga, the coyote, is the mythological trickster of the Native-American Winnebago tribe. The saxophone part is an attempt to musically approximate a variety of coyote vocalizations that I had recorded. The goal was not to reconstruct a coyote sound using a soprano sax per se, but to use an external source to inform the gesture, contour, and timbre of the musical phrases. The role of the saxophone and the degree of effect it has on the electroacoustic sound is always in flux. As the piece unfolds, the saxophone converges closer and closer to the coyote vocalizations until moments of almost-counterpoint between these two voices can be perceived. This piece was commissioned by the SEAMUS/ASCAP Student Competition and is dedicated to Saxophonist Susan Fancher. 

Wakjunkaga for Soprano Saxophone and Live Electronics

As a child growing up in my rural hometown, torrential summer downpours were very common. Some of my favorite memories were running out to the fields or through the forest floor after these storms to see what interesting treasures the rain had revealed on the surface of the earth. Things like: flint arrowheads, railroad spikes, broken pottery, colorful glass medicine bottles, and rusty logging equipment of all shapes and function could be discovered - with a good eye. Wiping away the dirt, I couldn't help but feel the shadows of the people who left these things behind long ago. 

Atavistic Vestiges [after the Rain]

This work is comprised of a single sample of my electric stove-top coil heating up and then cooling back down which is then used to drive spectral impulse responses of a kalimba and a temple gong. The harmonic reconstruction of the kalimba and temple gong evolves in complexity, pitch range, and density over the duration of the piece. To me, the work operates on several levels: aleatoric, surreal, and spectral.

Solar Flare

Steel Golem: Formerly titled, Concertino for Twisted Metal, is a piece for fixed media. 
— n (in Jewish legend) an artificially created human being brought to life by supernatural means. [from Yiddish goylem,  from Hebrew gōlem  formless thing] Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition.

Chester Udell