Name: Steve Reich Electric Counterpoint Iii Fast by Daniel Starling 5
Duration: 4 min 26 s
Description: A studio cover of Electric Counterpoint iii by Steve Reich I created for my Studio Techniques module for my Mmus.

The Chipmunks play a holiday classic on a 16 speed turntable

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

A Neo Soul inspired track, composed and produced for my first Compositional Study. The original idea was to create an easy listening minimalistic Jazz flavoured piece where a constant chord progression would chromatically shift up in semitones.

The concept of this study is that a progression of minor eleventh chords moving down in minor thirds creates a perfect circle of four chords that wouldn't naturally exist in the original minor scale.

The piece therefore consists of modal interchange techniques and metric modulation for the breakdown section.

Minor Circles

The original impetus for this piece lies with an interest in the musical features and qualities found in sounds that themselves lie outside of a musical context; those that occur accidentally, or incidentally without any musical intention behind them. Due to this interest, my goal was to create a sample-based piece. Using samples from such a source, the musical elements of the piece would be determined by the qualities of this source, and the musical trajectory of the source would be extrapolated over a longer time range to form the structure of a full-length piece.
The sound source used was the 19-second long sound produced when connecting to dial-up internet, which was first used commercially in 1992, before losing ground to broadband since the mid-2000s. The sound has significance in the history of internet technology. Alexis Madrigal provides some technical context and an account of the experience of hearing it: “the sounds weren’t a sign that data was being transferred: they were the data being transferred. This noise was the analogue being bridged by the digital”. Concerning the musicality of the sound, “...the patterns of the beats and noise meant something. The sound would move me, my head nodding to the beeps that followed the initial connection. You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were they computers or me and my version of the world?”.

I found this source particularly engaging to work with as saw it as evocative of a number of extra- musical themes, as well as relatable to aesthetics in other established genres of music. I found the historical context of the sound interesting, in that hearing the sound was a regular occurrence for many people during a certain time period, but it has since disappeared from everyone’s daily experience due to the redundancy of this technology. The sound can be found on Brendan Chillcut’s website The Museum of Endangered Sounds, whose intention is to archive both intentional and incidental sounds, which are like “technoaural nostalgia whippets” (Madrigal, 2012) for those who grew up in a certain time. Just as music is a soundtrack to an era, so are the sounds of our technologies.

Absorptions

Part 1 of a 2 movement study for my Composition A submission at Surrey Uni.

The concept of this piece is that each instrument is playing only fragments of its whole part so that they gradually come into place.

The idea is to keep each instrument part as synthetic and repetitive as possible using a sustained pattern of a two-note melody on the piano.

This piece explores minimal loops through textures and timbre.

Settetto In Quattro

From my upcoming 'World of Guitar'  series...more to follow. Tribune Bay is on Hornby Island B.C.

Tribune - Tim Pells

A studio cover of Electric Counterpoint iii by Steve Reich I created for my Studio Techniques module for my Mmus.

Steve Reich Electric Counterpoint Iii Fast

This is one configuration of my mobile form work, Albumleaves, for trumpet and string quartet. There are 12 pages in the piece (although only eight were recorded for this session) and the trumpet and quartet can play them in any order they choose, i.e. they need not play the pages in the same order (although the quartet have to agree on theirs). In this session trumpet and quartet were recorded separately and then various orderings were tried during the mixing stage. This ordering is not quite as effective as configuration 1 but gives an opportunity to hear the pronounced changes a different ordering creates. The performers are Simon Desbruslais (trumpet) with the Ligeti Quartet.

Albumleaves (2013, configuration 2)

These are the tracks I covered, arranged and composed for my college FMP.

1. another day, another idea
Song by Mateus Asato

2. Nowhere to Tree
Song by FTISLAND
Arranged by JunHee Kim

3. Fire Place
Composed by JunHee Kim

4. Memory Forest
Composed by JunHee Kim, Toby Harsant

5. Don't Dream It's Over
Song by Crowded House
Arranged by Mateus Asato

Bonus track
6. Memory Forest feat. Pera
Composed by JunHee Kim, Pera

Memory Forest feat. Pera

Day 3 and song 3 of my 3-day-in-a-row-composition-frenzy.
I wanted a song to start with a B but not Bass, so here's 'Bioluminescent Forest' 😂

Originals

Bioluminescent Forest (2020.6.9)

Visions of Skye is an original piano composition written for my Masters many years ago. It was considered as a finalist for performance in Los Angeles as part of the new world composers concert season. Based on a road trip out to the Isle of Skye and around the island by day and night. The photography is mostly by myself on one of my trips to the island. Skye is one of my favourite places on the planet and has the most diverse landscape imaginable. The piece has different sections to convey the different moods and sceneries on the journey around.

Steve Reich Electric Counterpoint Iii Fast

Daniel Starling 5

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