The Ship

"Edge of Town" from Songs of Cowboys and Hobos by Daniel Nass

I have been dreaming of alien life since I was a child. Perhaps I’ve watched and read too much sci-fi. Perhaps my father taught me too much about biology, evolution, and zoology on Earth and we spent far too much time looking in remote streams and caves for different types of salamanders. The truth is, our own planet is so rich in biodiversity, with so many types of animals that can live anywhere from the ice in the polar regions to the deepest depths of the oceans. Biologists on Earth have discovered the concept of convergent evolution. This is the idea that unrelated organisms will develop certain features and functions depending on the conditions in which they develop. They develop to fill specific niches, which is why the hummingbirds of the Americas and the sunbirds of Southeast Asia both developed long beaks to sip nectar from flowers although they are not closely related.
 
Although we won’t see birds on extra-solar worlds, if the conditions are right, we will see flying creatures. They may not have feathers, hollow bones, and a syrinx, but they will fly. They will catch smaller aliens to eat or devour alien fruits or seeds. They will communicate. Maybe they will sing. Maybe they will have a syrinx like Earth birds, or maybe they will have a built-in organ more akin to a percussion ensemble. “Flight and Song” features several species of newly-invented (by myself and others) bird-like aliens, such as the Trappist Neon Mote Catcher, the Giant Land Strider, the New Laconian Sunbird, and the Deathwatch Aviar that resides on Drominad First of the Sun.

World premiere performance at Louisiana Music Teachers Association conference, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on October 8th, 2023. Performed by Yuki Tanaka, violin; Sixto Franco, viola; Rachel Hseih, cello; Katalin Lukacs, piano.

Flight And Song Recording

Heartbeats (José Gonzáles cover)

Performed by Hypercube 
Andrea Lodge, piano and Jay Sorce, guitar
February 17, 2016 @Cafe Istanbul, New Orleans, Louisiana

In January 2014, I went to Banff for a short winter residency. While there, I was allowed to play with the entire collection of Stockhausen’s Tierkreis music boxes. I loved all the mechanical sounds these little boxes made – particularly the whirring of the gears, the noise of the winding mechanism and the gradually distorting, sinking, slowing sound of the music boxes as they gradually wound down. In this piece, the piano and guitar are used like gargantuan broken down, spastic music boxes, sometimes spitting out noise, sometimes warping chordal and spectral materials and occasionally spitting out fragments of the Virgo, Sagittarius and Taurus music boxes.

Music Box

Minnesota Percussion Trio: Bob Adney, Erik Barsness, Paul Hill
Oct. 15, 2016 Antonello Hall, MacPhail Center for Music
Cameron Wiley, recording engineer

Land of Cloud-Tinted Water depicts the beauty and diversity of five wilderness areas throughout the state of Minnesota. Minnesota is home to vast areas of prairie, wetland, shoreland, and woodland that are set away from urban areas and are unspoiled by human-created noise and activity. While there are countless places in Minnesota worthy of a piece of music, I chose five locations that reflect the diversity of the state’s landscape: Voyageurs National Park, known for its boreal forest, glacial rock formations, and interconnected lakes; the Superior Hiking Trail‘s scenic overlooks above sprawling lakeshore; the thick deciduous woodlands of Solana State Forest; the wide open prairie of Blue Mounds State Park; and Itasca State Park, known for its old-growth pine forest and the Mississippi River Headwaters.

Voyageurs

Avoidance is a short work for baritone saxophone, percussion, and piano. The basic idea for composing this piece is to connect the sound system of a language with music. By transforming each letter of the Greek alphabet and other speech sounds, in specific music sounds, I was attempting to create an algorithmic system which will be able to be used through the compositional process. In this cage, the sounds are based on the letters and words from a poem
'Αποφυγή' (Avoidance) by the Greek writer Iannis Ritsos. This composition strictly follows the
sounds of the words, and the punctuation marks, as well as the form of the poem, aiming to give its own interpretation.

First Performance by Trio Accanto at Impuls Academy, in György Ligeti Seal, Graz, Austria, 16 February 2017

Avoidance (2016)

Mrs. T

Commissioned by FRIENDS of the Minnesota Orchestra as part of their Kinder Konzerts series.

Performed by members of the Minnesota Orchestra, with narration by Katie Condon.

One-Dog Canoe

Daniel Nass

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