beat//tact, performed by Sō Percussion.

beat: as in microtonal beating, as in a rhythmic beat, as in hitting
tact: as in tactile, as in touch, as in thoughtfulness, as in skill


(image: Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross, Lema Sabachthani, Twelfth Station [detail], 1965)

beat//tact

This piece is one in a series of works for trumpet ensemble conceived and composed in the last year or so. With less in-person musical collaboration going on, I decided to write some works for me, myself, and I. The results vary widely but all center on the same question:

What can you do with multiple trumpets that you can't do with one?

Some answers are obvious: play chords, for example. This piece employs chords at points but is more concerned with another, perhaps less obvious answer (at least for non-trumpeters): complex lines with large leaps and little time to breathe. Some instruments can do this with relative ease—trumpet is certainly not one of them.

Where one trumpet simply cannot perform this material, four trumpets in a hocketing pattern can do the job—hence the title "Hyper-Hocket." While this was the initial idea for the piece, I'd like to think that the music took on a life of its own at some point and became more than an experiment in trumpet texture. Listen for yourself to find out.

Enjoy!

Trumpets 1-4: Me

Mixing/Mastering: Rain Johannes (IG: @rainjohannes)

Hyper-Hocket — for trumpet quartet (2021)

Written for the Merriweather District Artist in Residence. 

Premiered September, 2021, Columbia, MD, Jorge Ruvalcaba conducting.

Sam Carullo, marimba
Josh Blessing, vibraphone
Meng Chieh Chiang, crotales 

Nicolle Avilla, violin I
Claire Hebeisen, violin II
Rose Wodarcyk, viola
Natalia Vilchis, cello 
Yoshiaki Horiguchi, bass

Brittaney Pertsas, horn 
Jordan Shropshire, horn 
Anita Rodriguez, horn

Recorded October, 2021 

Juniper was written to be performed with an immersive staging, where the audience is surrounded by the performers. The strings and percussion may be arranged in a fairly standard orchestral configuration, but with enough spacing to create a slight semicircle around the front of the audience. The crotales and horns should be placed at a distance from the rest of the performers, completing the circle opposite the strings and percussion.

Juniper

Premiered by Now Hear This ensemble on 12/11. 
Quinton Folks conducting.

“I was thinking about the idea of our real selves or some deep version of ourselves not being represented in language. I always feel it most extremely at a dinner parties, you know everybody’s talking... and you have this deep despair that you’re entirely unrepresented as a self at this dinner party, and it’s like a primal scream that goes on inside. But when you have children, I just become very aware that you are part of the original sin. You’re creating language for them, you help them make it, and you see this kind of wild thing become a citizen, a person.”
            – Zadie Smith

Original Sin

Performed by The Rhythm Method at NYU Steinhardt
April 2022
Mixed by Tyler Neidermayer

Abridged program note:

It's so fascinating to me why certain people come into our lives, why they enter at the moments they do, why certain ones leave lasting imprints. Related to this, bell hooks’ all about love is a book I resonate with deeply, bringing love to light; how we experience it in our private lives, but rarely discuss so openly and fearlessly in the world we face as soon as we walk out the door. Among the countless noteworthy quotes hooks includes, I was particularly struck by the one opening Chapter 3, “Honesty: Be True To Love”:

“When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery—that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are…This kind of unmasking—speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges—is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.” -John Welwood

In this piece, the strings constantly strive and reach for this touch; they pass it between one another in developmental re-contextualization, but moving both forward and back, as development is not always linear. There are four movements fluidly connected; they bleed, build, breathe and find new meaning in each other:

Reaching - Imagining

Heartracing - Beginning

Embracing - Depths

Reaching - Self

Though the movements seem linear - progressing from imagining love, beginning it, experiencing the depths of it, and revisiting that first imagining in the context of self-love - they operate in an oscillating cycle. The piece predominantly rests in a Feldman-like stasis, but there is much activity embedded within incessant displacement of musical elements, including register, voicing, bow speed and pressure, dynamics, trills, timbre, vibrato, glissandi and harmonics. In exploring how to embody text in sound, I aimed to italicize sound on a scale from frailty to warmth, using these various elements of sonic manipulation to convey that lean, that stressed emphasis, of spoken words. Though the movements convey the heart at its fullest, they also trace the threads of heartbreak that shape and reveal us in that underlying sonic bed of fragility, breakage, and realness.

There are many different kinds of love…partnered, familial, friend, self...and the development of what those mean over time and life lived. This piece is inspired by various stages of partnered love: newness and exploration, transition phases and milestones, the depths of all that love truly embodies and every moment in between, as well as self-love, which is just as much of a development with oneself. The first movement expresses that initial reaching, trying to imagine who you will love in life while those people are usually beyond imagination until you meet them. The second movement is more physically active, presenting a sharp contrast to the surrounding glassy blurriness with heart-racing intensity. The third movement is sonically wed to the first and fourth, but explodes out of the glassy blurry confines into concentrated, steadfast warmth and shimmer. The final movement is essentially an echo of the first - both being titled “Reaching” - but coalescing the self with how others color it; the lifelong shift between our initial untouched palette and where we come to be after having mixed our palettes with another.

this kind of unmasking

Recorded by Andrew Burke 
Washington, DC 
September, 2022

Premiered by Charles Abramovic
Haverford, PA 
April, 2022

Commissioned by Haverford College for the inauguration of the Michael Jaharis Recital Hall, April 21, 2022. 

As a dedication to a new recital hall, Keepsake is a meditation on the possibilities of speaking across time through sound and space. The piano preparations seek to evoke an old, out-of-tune piano in dialogue with the “new,” unprepared piano notes. I imagine this dialogue as a conversation between the present and an imagined future, wherein someone reflects on our current time as a distant memory. With the creation of a new performance space, as we look to the future, we might also picture someone looking back at us.

Keepsake

Written for and premiered by TAK Ensemble. 

Recorded April, 2023.

When I started thinking about what this piece would be, my young nephew was going through a phase where he was asking all sorts of questions about reality: he wanted to know what was real and what wasn’t.

It made me think about how porous that border between the real and the imaginary is when you’re young. As a kid, for me, the negotiation between the two was complicated by the fact that I had depersonalization- derealization disorder where you have these prolonged episodes where you dissociate, and you essentially feel like you’re dreaming. At the time, I had no term for this, and no one around me did either. It could be a very lonely feeling — feeling like you’re off in your own strange reality.

Looking back what it made me realize is how important it is to have validation from others on our own perceptions. Reality only feels as real what other people will agree upon. What You Thought I Thought might be thought of as a strange sort of lullaby across time to my former self.

What You Thought I Thought

Released on Innova Records in March 2012. Performed twice at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in October 2011.

Eucalyptus (2011)

Finalist -- Kaleidoscope Orchestra Call for Scores 2020
2nd Place -- Prix d'Été 2020, Peabody Conservatory 

Premiered by Gemma Baek at Peabody Conservatory, 2019.

Frame

Lode

composed by Brendon Randall-Myers
performed by Dither - Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore and Gyan Riley
recorded and edited by Nathan Jasensky at Greenpoint Recording Collective
mixed and mastered by Mike Tierney
art by Andrew J Kay
design by Tristan Kasten-Krause

dynamics of vanishing bodies ii. auras

Greetings—I'm a Philadelphia-based composer and music educator. My wide-ranging work draws from many different traditions—including jazz, M-Base, Afro-Latin, electronica, metal, hip-hop, early music, and new music—and integrates linear and cyclic concepts to weave hypnotic musical narratives.

My music has been performed, workshopped, and recorded by loadbang, Daedalus Quartet, the International Contemporary Ensemble, counter)induction, confluss, the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, Sae Hashimoto, Matt Sharrock, Ellery Trafford, and more. It has been premiered at such venues as the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Symphony Space, OPERA America, the Spencer Museum of Art, the Staller Center for the Arts, and the Italian Academy at Columbia University.

My work has been featured by Score Follower and has been selected for a wide variety of new music festivals and concert series both domestic and international, including the Yarn/Wire International Institute (New York), Longy’s Divergent Studio (Massachusetts), CLICK FEST (Ohio), Ears to the Earth (Kansas), the School for Improvisational Music Summer Intensive (New York), and the Young Composers Meeting (Netherlands).

I'm currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study composition with Natacha Diels. I hold an M.A. in Music Composition from Stony Brook University (2023), where I studied composition with Matthew Barnson, Perry Goldstein, and Daniel Weymouth and taught several semesters of undergraduate music theory. I received the Ackerman Prize for Excellence in Graduate Studies in recognition for my work at SBU. Prior to this, I received a B.A. in Music from Columbia University (2019), where I studied composition with George Lewis, Georg Haas, Zosha Di Castri, and Andy Milne; trumpet with Andy Kozar, Adam O’Farrill, and Amir ElSaffar; and music theory with Joseph Dubiel.

Hyper-Hocket — for trumpet quartet (2021)

david_acevedo_music