for 4 Disklavier Pianos and Stereo Tape Playback

"I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.” - William Gaddis

Saloon Wars

All tracks performed and recorded by Laura Cocks at CIRM in Nice, France.

Atolls is for solo piccolo and twenty-nine spatialized piccolos. The  auxiliary performers surround the soloist and the audience. The pitch content is derived from the  twenty-nine most salient spectral components of a crash cymbal occurring (and analyzed) within  the shrill range of Janet Leigh's infamous scream from Hitchcock’s Psycho.

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Atolls - for Solo Piccolo and 29 Spatialized Piccolos

All tracks performed and recorded by Laura Cocks at the Columbia Computer Music Studios in New York City.

Amidst the transmission of a musical idea, between the composer, score, performer, and audience, there is invariably a rich capacity for interpretation, contingency, and variability. It is often in these inconsistencies that a work finds its depth, as variable interpretations inevitably cast new light on a musical subject, imbuing it with a variety of perspectives, energies, and characterizations.

This work, ”Multiplicities”, is scored for indefinitely multi-tracked (pre-recorded/live-looped and layered) bass flute, in it, I aim to objectify the variabilities that occur from one performance to the next. I attempted to develop a notation that is, in one sense, quite specific in its prescriptive instructions, yet in another, highly receptive in its harnessing and objectifying of the nuances and variabilities that happen from one performance to the next. When the instruments become layered, these variabilities infuse the work with a variegated color, allowing what is essentially one part, to sound like a swarm or a mass of individual lines. The challenge was how to develop material in a range of variability, and to allow this range to dilate and contract as I saw fit, but not let these variabilities run out of control and obstruct my ability to articulate cohesive structural and formal shapes.

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Multiplicities - for Multi-Tracked Bass Flute

Apocrypha - for violin, viola, and electronic sounds, composed by David Bird, performed by andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), February 25, 2017, at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music, NY 

"Apocrypha" is written for violin, viola, and electronics, and is loosely inspired by Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel "Solaris". Lem's work follows a team of scientists stationed on a distant planet covered by a vast and gelatinous ocean. In the novel, the ocean demonstrates a bizarre ability to manipulate the emotions and memories of the scientists. "Apocrypha", exploits a similar process, where the enveloping presence of the electronic sounds prompt turmoil and sensation within the duo's intimate performance. “Apocrypha" was written for andPlay (Hannah Levinson and Maya Bennardo), and was developed in the summer of 2016 at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute.

“In the budding, growth, and spread of this living formation, in each of its movements separately and in all taken together, there was something one was tempted to call a cautious yet not timid naivety, as it strove frantically and rapidly to know, to take in, an unexpectedly encountered new shape. Then, in mid-journey, it had to withdraw when it was in danger of transgressing certain boundaries established by a mysterious law. This agile inquisitiveness was so utterly at odds with the immensity that stretched to every bright horizon. I had never before been so aware of its vast presence, its powerful, inexorable silence breathing evenly through its waves. Staring in wonderment, I was descending to regions of inertia that might have seemed inaccessible, and in the gathering intensity of engrossment I was becoming one with this fluid unseeing colossus, as if—without the slightest effort, without words, without a single thought—I was forgiving it for everything.”

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Apocrypha - for Violin, Viola, and Electronic Sounds

House Of Wires - for flute, saxophone, string trio, and electronic sounds, composed by David Bird, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), flute - Laura Cocks, saxophone - Ryan Muncy, violin - Josh Modney, violoncello - Mosa Tsay, bass - Lizzie Burns. Performed at Abrons Arts Center, April 14, 2018.

"House of Wires" takes its inspiration from the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 psychological thriller "The Conversation". The film follows a surveillance expert, Harry Caul, in his attempt to stitch-together fragmented surveillance recordings for his shadowy clients. The film explores the surveillance expert’s growing obsession with the characters he is spying on. This obsession imbues the act of surveillance with a chilling sense of affection and poignancy. By the end of the film, Caul believes that he in turn in being surveilled, and destroys every object in his apartment in search of evidence that he's being spied on. In the final scene, Caul sits against an exposed beam of his destroyed San Francisco apartment with the only object he is unwilling to destroy, his tenor saxophone. In a slow 360 degrees pan, Coppola fixates on the destruction Caul has induced, the broken drywall, torn portraits, stripped electronics, as Caul plays his saxophone quietly into the night.

House Of Wires - For Flute, Saxophone, String Trio, and Electronic Sounds

“Mirrors” by David Bird
Composed and Produced by David Bird 
Mastered by Christopher Botta 
Cover Art by Erika Kari McCarthy

Other Ratios

Migratory Patterns Of Warblers And Seasonal Travelers

City

Modulus Of Rupture

Chet Holifield Federal Building

Yellow Dead Centre

Ghost

From Album “Mirrors”
Composed and Produced by David Bird 
Mastered by Christopher Botta 
Cover Art by Erika Kari McCarthy

Available for Download at david-bird.bandcamp.com

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