"The Library of Babel" for two 5-octave marimbas is based on the short story by the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, which describes a nearly-infinite library containing every possible book of a certain length and format, in every possible language, known and unknown. In addition to every book ever written or someday to be written, the library includes every possible misprint of these books. As the volumes are organized at random, nobody can ever find anything. Yet, somewhere in the library is the answer to every possible question.

This piece was commissioned by Jack Van Geem and was inspired by his seemingly boundless virtuosity and love of the marimba. The recording is an excerpt from the premiere performance at the Zeltsman Marimba Festival in Arcata, California in July 2013. Performed by Jack Van Geem and Fumito Nunoya. 

For more information, including information on obtaining score and parts, please visit jaffe.com


The Library of Babel (excerpt)

Introduction by Prof. Andrew Schloss to the 2013 Orion Visitor Lecture, University of Victoria, November 6, 2013, given by David A. Jaffe D.M.A (https://soundcloud.com/david-a-jaffe/jaffeorionlecture2013-1)

2013 Orion Lecture - introduction by Andrew Schloss

2013 Orion Visitor Lecture, University of Victoria, November 6, 2013. David A. Jaffe D.M.A. discusses his approach to composition, his studies with Henry Brant, the early days of computer music at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the making of his landmark work Silicon Valley Breakdown (<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/xxist-century-mandolin/id316117992">iTunes</a>), the development of time maps and the first practical physical model of a musical instrument, and his collaborations with Juilus O. Smith III and Bernard Mont-Reynaud and others. The lecture was preceded by an introduction by Professor Andrew Schloss (<a href="https://soundcloud.com/david-a-jaffe/jaffeorionintro"></a>) and followed by a performance of the quadraphonic version, newly restored (not included on this recording.)

2013 Orion Lecture - David A. Jaffe

This is the first part of a lecture given by David A. Jaffe at Mills College on the "Songlines" series.  He discusses the processes of composing, how he gets inspiration and plays examples from his music. 

2015 Mills College Talk

Movement III from "How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" dress rehearsal by Karen Bentley Pollick (violin) and the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Robertas Šervenikas, August 26, 2016, Vilnius, Lithuania.

"How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" was premiered on August 27, 2016 at the Tytuvėnai Festival, in Lithuania.  The work is in three movements that may be performed independently, with  "The Sneetches" being the third section. The title "How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" comes from the poem by that name by political cartoonist and beloved children's author Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Dr Seuss"). The piece is an homage to Geisel, whose satirical creations included the megalomaniacal tyrant Yertle the Turtle,  the inflexible narcissistic  Zax pair,  the status-craving  xenophobic Sneetches and the capitalist who preys on their fears.  It recalls folk songs from the Great Depression of the 1930s, songs of struggle with striking relevance to the contemporary world.  Much of the material in the work is derived from Appalachian fiddle and religious tunes, African-American blues and religious hymns.  There  is also frequent use of American bluegrass fiddle idioms, drawing on my background playing this music (1970-1975) and traveling  extensively to festivals, where I performed with many of the original inventors of this style and absorbed its characteristics. - David A. Jaffe, 2016

How Did It Get So Late So Soon? - movement III

Movement II (dress rehearsal), "How Did It Get So Late So Soon?", Karen Bentley Pollick, Robertas Šervenikas (conductor), Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre Orch., 8/26/2016, Vilnius, Lithuania.

"How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" was premiered on August 27, 2016 at the Tytuvėnai Festival, in Lithuania. The work is in three movements that may be performed independently, with "The Zax" being the 2nd section. The title "How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" comes from the poem by that name by political cartoonist and beloved children's author Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Dr Seuss"). The piece is an homage to Geisel, whose satirical creations included the megalomaniacal tyrant Yertle the Turtle, the inflexible narcissistic Zax pair, the status-craving xenophobic Sneetches and the capitalist who preys on their fears. It recalls folk songs from the Great Depression of the 1930s, songs of struggle with striking relevance to the contemporary world. Much of the material in the work is derived from Appalachian fiddle and religious tunes, African-American blues and religious hymns. There is also frequent use of American bluegrass fiddle idioms, drawing on my background playing this music (1970-1975) and traveling extensively to festivals, where I performed with many of the original inventors of this style and absorbed its characteristics. - David A. Jaffe, 2016

How Did It Get So Late So Soon? - movement II

Final two minutes of the last movement of Songs of California, commissioned by Chanticleer, as part of my NEA Composer-in-Residency with them. The movement, entitled "From the Valley to the Pinnacles," has a text assembled from the writings of John Muir. From a live recording, 1991. 
The passage in the recording has the following text:  

There are no stiff, frigid, stony walls between us and heaven.  

Dam Hetch Hetchy?  
As well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals!
For no holier temple has ever been consecrated 
by the heart of man.

The loss is hard to bear. 
But nothing that we do on the side of justice can be wholly lost.
Be of good cheer.

Songs of California - From the Valley to the Pinnacles (text by John Muir)

"How Did It Get So Late So Soon?", Karen Bentley Pollick, Robertas Šervenikas (conductor), Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre Orch., 8/26/2016, Vilnius, Lithuania.

"How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" was premiered on August 27, 2016 at the Tytuvėnai Festival, in Lithuania. The work is in three movements that may be performed independently. The title "How Did It Get So Late So Soon?" comes from the poem by that name by political cartoonist and beloved children's author Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Dr Seuss"). The piece is an homage to Geisel, whose satirical creations included the megalomaniacal tyrant Yertle the Turtle, the inflexible narcissistic Zax pair, the status-craving xenophobic Sneetches and the capitalist who preys on their fears. It recalls folk songs from the Great Depression of the 1930s, songs of struggle with striking relevance to the contemporary world. Much of the material in the work is derived from Appalachian fiddle and religious tunes, African-American blues and religious hymns. There is also frequent use of American bluegrass fiddle idioms, drawing on my background playing this music (1970-1975) and traveling extensively to festivals, where I performed with many of the original inventors of this style and absorbed its characteristics. - David A. Jaffe, 2016

How Did It Get So Late So Soon?

Here's a short excerpt from Hugh Livingston, Irene Mitri and Andrew Schloss' performance of "Bull's Eye" at Cornish College of the Arts, ca. 2002.  "Bull's Eye", commissioned by violinist Irene Mitri, is an intricate rhythmic/melodic exploration that combines stringed instruments with African percussion. The underlying texture of the piece is defined by a specially-tuned Thumb Piano (also known as Kalimba or Mbira), containing a single row of tines. Alternating with this are three different drums. Appearing early in the piece is the Talking Drum, also known as the Dundum. This is an hour-glass shaped instrument that comes from Nigeria or Ghana. Later, two Cuban Bata drums are played at the same time. These are two-headed drums of African Yoruba origin (a large tribe in SW Nigeria.) The piece concludes with the Djembe, a large drum from Senegal, Gambia or Mali.

live performance excerpt

Bull's Eye by David A. Jaffe

Would You Just as Soon Sing as Make That Noise!? (1983) is a celebration of rituals and cultures, both ancient and modern; a kaleidoscope of peoples who find themselves forced to coexist, to step on each other's toes, to clash and, eventually, to resemble one another. The title of is from the poem "The People, Yes" by Carl Sandburg. The piece is dedicated to Elon Berger, born January 28, 1983, as a way of saying good luck and welcome to a world where there are five hundred ways of saying "Who are you?" of asking, "Where do we go from here?" and of saying, "Being born is only the beginning."

The piece is in the form of a double concerto for violin, mandolin and small orchestra. It was commissioned by the Mostly Modern Orchestra and premiered by Laurie Steele. It has also been performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic under Lukas Foss.

The mandolinist on the recording is David A. Jaffe and the violinist is Paul Brancato.

For more information, please visit jaffe.com.

Would You Just As Soon Sing As Make That Noise? (opening)

Carl Sagan challenged and inspired a generation to consider a universe not made for us, to look beyond our planet, and at the same time to recognize its fragility and preciousness. He played a leading role in space exploration, planetary science, the study of the origins of life and the hunt for radio signals from extra-terrestrial civilizations. I attended a series of lectures by Sagan at Cornell University in the early 70s and have been a fan ever since. In "Other Worlds," I have tried to paint in sound a vista such as might be seen by the shores of the nitrogen lakes of Triton, freshly covered with methane snow and irradiated into the material of life.

The violinist on the recording is Andrew Jennings, with H. Robert Reynolds conducting the University of Michigan Wind Ensemble.


Other Worlds (an homage to Carl Sagan), for electric violin and symphonic band (excerpt)

“Racing Against Time” (2001) by David A. Jaffe  is based on personal experience with the peculiar time distortion that results from being the father of two children under the age of three. The piece was commissioned by Dale Stammen, Kimm Brockett Stammen and Judy Kehler Siebert of the Quarks! Trio.

The piece uses the seemingly-magical flexibility of the Boie/Mathews Radio-Drum to extend and abstract the sounds of the instruments, and transform them into sounds that we don't usually think of as "musical," including a racing car, a jet plane and a "weird string." These are rendered using computer “physical models,” simulations of the actual physics of the objects, which allow the Radio-Drum to impart a finer degree of expressive nuance than would be possible with conventional samples.The Radio-Drum part was written for Andrew Schloss, a virtuoso on the instrument.

The physical model simulations were created using software written by the composer at Staccato Systems, Inc, a company he co-founded in 1996 to develop applications of physical modeling technology. (Staccato Systems was purchased by Analog Devices, Inc. in 2001.) The technology has been used not only for music, but also to impart a sense of hyper-realism to computer game sound effects. “Racing Against Time” is the first use of this technology in a contemporary music context.




Racing Against Time (excerpt)

"Impossible Animals" was commissioned by the Hamilton College Choir. It is scored for live ensemble and a tape of computer-synthesized voices, created at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. There are several versions of this piece, all with computer-generated voices (four-channel recording; stereo version also available) and one of the following choices:

1. SATB Chorus(1986)
2. SATB solo voices (1989)
3. Violin (1989)
4. Oboe (1990)
5. Fute, clarinet, tenor saxophone, trombone and bassoon (1994)
6. SSATB solo voices (1995)
7. Trombone (2003).

The piece is a fanciful exploration of the boundary between human and animal expression and behavior, and between the realms of Nature and imagination. An antiphonal interplay is set up between the live ensemble and the synthesized voices, with the live instruments assuming the role of narrators of an abstract story, while the computer voices serve as actors, taking on improbable voices of unthinkable animals, and emote in an unknown language. The "story" is concerned with the lives of various imaginary animals seen when looking at the clouds, concluding with a description of a more familiar, though no less unlikely, beast ("...has an upright posture, has an opposable thumb...") with its own special vocalization.

One of the more novel aspects of the tape part is a half-human/half-bird vocalise, a true hybrid between human and bird singing, as if the brain of a Winter Wren had been transplanted inside a wildly-gifted human singer. It was produced by beginning with a recording of a Winter Wren and analyzing it using the PARSHL program (Julius Smith). Frequency and amplitude trajectories were then extracted, segmented into individual "chirps" and tuned to the underlying harmonic background using specially-written software. The range was modified over time and the frequency axis was mapped onto an evolving set of vowels. Finally, the data was resynthesized, using human vocal synthesis (Xavier Rodet), into a new and greatly-transformed rendition of the original wren's song.

The disconcerting combination of human and bird vocalizations is typical of the composer's interest in combining diverse seemingly-irreconcilable elements into a single musical context, manipulating the material in such a way as to bring out and resolve (or not) its inherent contrasts and contradictions. The result is a music that is both radically challenging on the one hand, and strangely reminiscent of past experience on the other. As in a cubist painting, a nose may be sideways, sticking out from the wrong side of the head, but its identification as a nose gives it an expressive power that an abstract shape would not have, while simultaneously setting up a rich network of associations with everyday life.

The violinist on this recording is Karen Bentley Pollick.

For more information, please visit jaffe.com

Impossible Animals (excerpt)

"The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" by David A. Jaffe is a piano concerto performed by a percussionist. It is the premier work for a new hybrid acoustic instrument, the "Radio-Drum-driven Disklavier," which allows the gestural vocabulary of a percussionist to speak with the voice of an acoustic grand piano. The sound of this new instrument is massive and grand, even monumental, giving a new sense to the word "pianistic", and is further extended by a unique ensemble of acoustic plucked string and percussion instruments. All sound is entirely acoustic and performed as it would be in a concert setting--there are no loudspeakers, electronic sound or over-dubbing.

Commissioned by a National Endowment for the Arts Collaborative Fellowship, it involved a collaboration between composer David A. Jaffe and percussionist Andrew Schloss. The two worked as Resident Artists at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1992-1993, where they developed the new instrument and refined the solo part. The work was released on CD in October, 1996 on the Well-Tempered productions label. The premiere live performance was January 20, 1998 by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the Yerba Buena Theatre in San Francisco.
 
This clip an excerpt from movement 5, "The Temple of Artemis."  the Mother Goddess (Ephesus, Turkey; 360 B.C.) Artemis, known also as Dianna, was the most revered and powerful goddess of Asia. Her sacred house at Ephasus inspired Philon to write, some 300 years later, "He who has laid eyes on it once will be convinced that the world of the immortal gods has moved from the heaven to earth." The music serves as the climactic center-piece of the entire work, and is an unbridled ecstatic celebration of this goddess of wild animals to the Greeks, and of all Nature and motherhood to peoples farther East. It depicts a gradually-coalescing religious procession, focused on the carrying of the cult statue, and suggests the collisions of cultural influences that resulted as such pilgrims encountered one another, while migrating West. The musical cultural references are draw from around the world, ranging from jazz to popular music to folk musics from Ireland, Mexico, Spain and the American Appalachians, suggesting the vastness of Artemis' influence and the rapidly-changing cosmology of the time.


The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - V (excerpt)

"Whoop for Your Life!" for orchestra explores the dynamic created when seemingly irreconcilable points of view are combined---in this case, a festive character of celebration is asserted in the shadow of impending disaster. To symbolize this contradiction, I invoke the music of Brazil: vibrant life-affirming music from a country where the rain forests are being destroyed at a catastrophic rate. The title refers to a visit to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (Texas) in 1986, where I watched the last of the Whooping Cranes going about their business---feeding, courting, mating, nesting and raising young---as if they were nothing special, and not the last of a species on the edge of extinction.

The piece employs a rich musical language abstracted from various regions---from the Brazilian carnival to the Texas fiddle contest---with a healthy dose of Aransas "whooping" thrown in. This diverse material is balanced by a rigorous sonata-like organization, with nearly all the harmony and melody generated by a single chord of gradually expanding musical intervals. The chord, which first appears in the brass, gives rise to a stubborn rugged march. In contrast, a second theme---introduced by the english horn---is wild, provocative, prodding and probing, like a crane feeding. Next, a developmental section combines fragments of these themes and pits them against one another, leading eventually to a return of the opening brass chord. This hint of a recapitulation turns out to be illusory and gives rise to a new theme in the muted strings. Entirely different in character, this theme resembles a Texas fiddle tune and suggests a personal, peaceful world of fantasy and imagination. Gradually, reality intrudes, as the original themes reassert themselves with renewed vigor and propel the music forward to a cacophonous percussion quartet which coalesces into a climactic concluding section. The piece ends with a mysterious invocation of the opening chord.

This work was commissioned and premiered by the Redwood Symphony and was featured at the 1991 Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz, California.

The recorded excerpt is performed by  the Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra of Krakow; Jose Maria Florencio, conductor.


Whoop For Your Life! (excerpt)

"Telegram to the President, 1984" is an epigrammatic work for string quartet and computer-generated tape, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. It is in the form of a prelude, fugue, and coda. The prelude features the computer as an imaginary soloist, while the fugue focuses attention on the quartet. The recorded excerpt is from the fugue and is performed by the Jefferson String Quartet. 

The title refers to my disappointment in the 1984 re-election of Ronald Reagan by a complacent American public. Yet, in contrast to this tone of indictment, the content of the telegram is a message of hope, a gentle faith in the continuing vitality of the grass roots American spirit. The text of the telegram, is taken from the 1933 poem of Langston Hughes: "Oh, let America be America again.

The computer part features an innovative plucked string synthesis technique developed by the composer in conjunction with Julius Smith, Kevin Karplus, and Alex Strong. It was realized at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University using the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer.

This work is available on CD. For more information, please visit jaffe.com

Telegram to the President

"May All Your Children Be Acrobats," by David A. Jaffe is scored for eight guitars, mezzo-soprano and computer-generated tape. Composed in 1981 for David Starobin and the SUNY Purchase Guitar Ensemble, the piece is a celebration of folk wisdom, as well as folly.  It is based on a text excerpted from "The People, Yes" by Carl Sandburg and consists entirely of proverbs, sayings and anecdotes from the rich and varied backgrounds of immigrants, natives, fools and other Americans. Complementing this text is a heterogeneous music that draws on such styles as bluegrass, Irish, Jewish and African-American music, as well as American popular and European classical styles. 

The computer part was created at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. It is entirely synthesized, yet often resembles voices and plucked strings, using techniques pioneered by the composer and others at Stanford University. These techniques, known as "waveguide physical modeling" have recently been adopted by the synthesizer industry and are considered an advance over more familiar techniques due to the enhanced degree of expression. This work is the first musical composition to use this form of synthesis. It was followed a year later by the composer's more well-known "Silicon Valley Breakdown."

The recorded excerpt is from the a live performance with Kim Wheeler, mezzo-soprano, and the Purchase Guitar Ensemble, conducted by David Starobin. 

For further information, please visit jaffe.com


David A Jaffe

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