Performed by János Ávéd, Marton Fenyvesi, Balazs Horvath, and Ákos Benkó

Hungarian Jazz

Performed by Emily Hanna Crane and Hui-Ting Yang

Metamorphoses II

Performed by William Koeler. Recorded by Jeri-Mae Astolfi for Capstone Records. http://www.capstonerecords.org/CPS-8777.html

Patty, My Dear

Performance by the Pacifica Quartet. First Prize National Association of Composers, USA Young Composers Competition

Relativity

Rarefaction

Glass

Recording by Piotr Szewczyk.
The gegenschein, or counter shine, is a very feint brightening of the night sky centered on the point directly opposite the sun.  It is a very indirect source of light—sunlight reflecting off of the very fine particles that make up interplanetary dust.  This is an appropriate metaphor for the kind of sound world I have tried to create using a solo violin, a work consisting mostly of very fast arpeggiated and tremolo-like figures involving natural harmonics.  Due to the speed of these figures, the harmonics only have time to partially sound, yielding a rapid succession of very feint overtones.  The result is a fragile yet brilliant flickering of sound, mostly quiet and diffuse yet played with great intensity and aggression.  My thanks to Piotr Szewczyk who commissioned and premiered the work as part of his Violin Futura project.

gegenschein

Canonic Offerings performed by the T'ang Quartet as part of Mathemusical Conversations: https://sites.google.com/site/mathemusicalconversations/home

Canonic Offerings

Chamber Concerto, for clarinet, trumpet, piano, percussion, 2 violins, cello, and contrabass, performed at the Composers Conference, Wellesley College, July 1999.

ChamberConcerto3

ChamberConcerto2

ChamberConcerto1

Performed by Donald Berman at the 2003 Florida State University Festival of New Music. reflections on the nature of light is a set of three piano pieces which are inspired by recent preoccupations with the nature of light, sparked by Leonard Shlain’s Art and Physics and Richard P. Feynman’s QED: The strange theory of light and matter. While not intended as programmatic depictions of light, I have no doubt that the ideas inspired by these books were an indirect influence on the composition of, and my subsequent reaction to, these pieces.
refractions is a musical analogy for the way in which light gives way to numerous, previously imperceptible, colors when passed through a prism. At times, all of the musical material is drawn from partials of a single fundamental, while in other passages the two hands separate into independent streams yielding multiple spectra.
Leonardo da Vinci used the term “sfumato” to describe the phenomenon in which shadows and outlines of objects become less crisp and increasingly blurred as they recede into the distance. In sfumato, as in Impressionistic paintings, blurring becomes one of the most prominent features as melodies blur into harmony, harmonies into resonance, and successive phrases blur into one another in a continually and gradually evolving improvisational architecture.
la Sainte-Chapelle opens with a series of slow, sustained chords—a progression of harmonic colors with each sonority leaving its distinctive mark on the cumulative resonance. The slight variations in harmonic color from one chord to the next may be likened to the various shadings of natural light by the magnificent stained-glass windows at la Sainte-Chapelle and other cathedrals. Just as the color of this transformed light is an integral part of the cathedral’s architecture, the resonance of these chords is central to the design of the movement, gradually coalescing into a peal of bells near the end.
These three movements may be viewed as musical metaphors for the physical, perceptual, and spiritual natures of light, respectively.

la Sainte-Chapelle

sfumato

refractions

Chain Reactions was commissioned for the 75th Commemoration of Chicago Pile-1, the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction achieved under the supervision of Enrico Fermi. The first movement, Subcriticality, refers to the situation in which neutron losses (due to absorption) exceed neutron production (due to fission) leading to eventual termination of the reaction. Throughout the movement, processes are initiated that inevitably dissipate energy and terminate. The second movement, Criticality, is stable without being static. The rhythms of the movement are determined by a guided probabilistic structure that determines the likelihood of a new note at each pulse in much the same way that the “cross section” of a nucleus characterizes the probability that the nucleus will undergo a nuclear reaction.

Chain Reactions

Point and Line to Plane

Premiered by Benjamin Sung and David Kalhous, Opperman Music Hall, February 1, 2013.

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