Partita No. 2 | An Deilf | V. Fugue

Partita No. 2 | An Deilf | IV. Currachs - Double

Partita No. 2 | An Deilf | III. Fripperies - Double

Partita No. 2 | An Deilf | II. Currachs

Partita No. 2 | An Deilf | I. Fripperies

Scriptorium IV - Verdigris

Scriptorium III - Lampblack

Scriptorium II - Orpiment

Scriptorium I -  Tyrian Purple

Second performance of Wegmarken, a work composed for Camilla Hoitenga. 
(recorded in Bielefeld, Germany, March 2023)

This is a piece with birds, with references to birds, with representations of particular birds and their particular songs.  It has the names of birds right in the score.  And yet, I will say here that it is not a piece 'about' birds, but more, it is around birds, about the-nature-of-being-around birds.

Six years ago, I came here to the Blue Ridge for a chance to escape the collapse of the demos and recover some health and energy.  This change reconnected me with some simple joys, like walking my dog, with family, and also on my own (well, just the two of us), and has also reminded me that joys are never all that simple. Their complexity is what enables them to be joyful.

As I have explored various neighborhoods, parks, and vistas with my fierce, 7-pound companion, I'm finally coming to understand something of the fascination of ascended masters,  of Messiaen, of Bartok, and in particular, of Lee Hyla; Lee was a good friend and a mentor of sorts.

Though my experience so far is far less studied; as I said, this is piece is not about birds, but is about the experience of being surrounded, and overcome by the environment.  While the fascination of Messiaen and the others make sense, I take issue with the term 'song' in this context - the avian activity is varied and intense, from the territorial negotiations and renegotiations, as described in Deleuze and Guatarri's' ritornello', the amorous pursuits described in Uexkull, and the yet to be successfully named meditative stance of birds in the crepuscular and auroral walks.

To the birds, these may be events or just the workings of their quotidian experience.  To me and my companions, they are the markers of our paths through their domain.  Wegmarken is a term from Heidegger, and it is, as you say, pretty much equivalent to Wegzeichen, but for Heidegger, his coinage let him consider the multiplicity of the paths marked, and of the multiple layers and significances, the personal, the historical, the emotional, the scientific.  A walk through the forest full of comments and altercations and romances, all barely glimpsed, only partially understood, but glorious in the respondent divergence.

Wegmarken for Solo Flute

Ars Poetica is a collaborative work, developed with poet Marlanda Dekine,  resulting in a hybrid collection of text and music drawing from the poet's cultural and biological roots as a Gullah-Geechee person, juxtaposed with the shifting textures, dense harmonies, and rhythmic energy of the North Atlantic Modernist concert tradition. Here we see a paratactic resolution to the tension of text and music; the congruences here in affect and in structure are both enriched by the delicacy of their interplay  Written for violin, guitar, cello, and spoken word, the piece surfaces insights into the powers of being itself: into the gift of heritage, and spiritual technologies which defy any terrifying ‘thrown-ness’ of subjugation, technologies that speak to us through myth and history and the world-transforming action of art. Ars Poetica consists of a long poem in five parts, with four substantial, sometimes virtuosic intermezzi between each. Speech, music, and poetry from different traditions are braided together, an endeavor to resuscitate dormant artistic traditions predating modern musical or literary categories, reconstituting a multi-dimensional “ars poetica” for the Now. 
https://www.douglasboyce.net/ars-poetica

I. Wilderness [ 0:00 | https://on.soundcloud.com/K3qSt ]
II. Intermezzo I [ 5:06 | https://on.soundcloud.com/mWMPA ]
III. Returning [ 7:33 | https://on.soundcloud.com/dnu5P ]
IV.  Intermezzo II [ 10:39 | https://on.soundcloud.com/v8Ank ]
V. Out There [ 12: 27 | https://on.soundcloud.com/6aEvN ]
VI. Intermezzo III [ 14:30 | https://on.soundcloud.com/UttFo ]
VII. Reclamation [ 15:31 | https://on.soundcloud.com/1VWXZ ]
VIII. Intermezzo IV [ 17:29 | https://on.soundcloud.com/S5YKa ]
IX. Risk [ 19:08 | https://on.soundcloud.com/DXpHF ]

Ars Poetica

Stevens Fragments for guitar quartet is a multi-movement prismatic engagement with the poet Wallace Stevens' 'Harmonium.' It engages the technical mastery of the performers through complex harmonic transformations, intricate counterpoint, and rhythmic juxtapositions, juxtaposing my musical aesthetic and technics with Steven's profound but aphoristic descriptions of time, music, and experience.

Even in fragmentary form,  the poetry's ekphrasis of the physicality of performers, the symbolic significance of physical instruments, and the songs of birds push the reader always away from mundane life out to the Beyond.  The composition of the work and the premiere have been funded through a generous grant from the George Washington University in Washington DC.

'Fishing Boats, Keywest' (1903)
Winslow Homer

Stevens Fragments

Anticipation of the Arrival of a New Lover, The (Etude for Piano No 2_

Audio capture of remiere in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, December 2024 by Rommel Fernandes and Elisa Galleano.

"Perfidia | Sonata" derives its name from Torelli's perfidia concept, where 'per fidia' ("between the strings") represents the site of musical invention, both technical and affective. This work for violin and piano demonstrates complexity and virtuosity in its composition, with thematic origins from the great tradition of soggetto cavato and its evolution across centuries, from Josquin to Bach to Ravel. It playfully engages with sonata history through four movements ranging from heroic Romantic virtuosity to mechanical scherzando, geometric quietism, and playful dance.

Image: Still Life with Books, Violin, Skull, and Hourglass (Stilleben mit Büchern, Violine, Totenschädel und Stundengla) Rembrandt van Rijn 1627

Perfidia | Sonata

The many violent foldings of the Tertiary era took place at the expense of this very ancient Mediterranean, much larger than the present one. All the mountains, from the Baetic Cordillera to the Rif, the Atlas, the Alps and the Apennines, the Balkans, the Taurus and the Caucasus, were heaved up out of the ancient sea. They reduced its area, raising from the great sea bed not only sedimentary rocks-sands, clays, sandstones, thick layers of limestone-but also deeply buried primitive rocks. The mountains surrounding, strangling, barricading and compartmentalizing the long Mediterranean coastline are the flesh and bones of the ancestral Tethys. Everywhere the sea water has left traces of its slow labour. The sedimentary limestones outside Cairo, "so fine-grained and of such milky whiteness that they allow the sculptor's chisel to give the sensation of volume by working to a depth of only a few millimetres"; the great slabs of coraline limestone from which the megalithic temples in Malta were built; the stone of Segovia which is easier to work when wet; the limestone of the Latomies (the huge quarries of Syracuse); the Istrian stones of Venice and many other rock formations in Greece, Italy and Sicily-all these came from the sea bed.
Fernand Braudel
"Memory and The Mediterranean"




-=- )( -=-=- )( -=- )( -=-=- )( -=-




"Statues so thoroughly shattered that out of the debris a new work of art is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the footrace; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it ...a profile in which beauty survives with a complete absence of human or divine anecdote"
Margerite Yourcenar, 
"That mighty sculptor, time"

-=- )( -=-=- )( -=- )( -=-=- )( -=-

Tethys is a peculiar mythic figure; sister and consort of Oceanus, her position in the mythic structure of ancient Greece and Rome assigns her tremendous power, reordering the stars and constellations, and giving birth to rivers and lakes as well  as the sea nymphs.  And yet, she never inspired the development of any cult in the ancient world, or any trace of worship.  A forgotten member of the elder divinities, she remains as an often invisible yet extraordinarily powerful presence– like the forces of deep time, she is slippery, omnipresent and often invisible within the human time frame. In the modern, she presides over new matters and regions while maintaining the link to deep time and the transcendent; she is the metonymic (and matronymic) of one of Saturn's moons and is the name given to the sea which existed between the continents of Gondwana and Laurasia during much of the Mesozoic era (25 to 65 million years ago).


It is this later trajectory which interested me while look for a framework for composing a concertino for violin and ensemble. The Tethys Sea, over its aeons years of existence was site of both the constructive and ruinous forces of nature and time; it was the site of the evolution of the whale, and the origin of the modern Mediterranean, and its destruction and fragmentation can be found in the floors of the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Aral seas.  Geologic time is always undermining the order of the present, but it is also the means by which new orders are composed.


This resonates with my interest in the special role that a soloist can have on the unfolding of a piece; transforming material, but also the relationships between performers, and the sense of the performance space experienced by the audience.  In Tethys the soloist couples and decouples from three distinct groupings of instruments, pushing and pulling harmonies and motives, but also forming connections which pull the music across the space of the performance.  

The work was written for violinist Miranda Cuckson, and counter)induction. (DB)

Tethys for violin and ensemble

La Deploration is written as a memorial to Robert Suderburg, my first teacher in composition, and in what it is to lead a life of composing.  The work draws its material from three sources: Josquin's  motet Nymphes de bois (La déploration de la mort de Johannes Ockeghem); Bob's own  Chamber Music III: Night Set for trombone and piano; and from a soggetto cavato on Bob's own name.  
Robert Suderburg (January 28, 1936 – April 22, 2013) was born in Spencer, Iowa. He studied composition with Paul Fetler at the University of Minnesota (1953-57), Richard Donovan at the Yale School of Music (1957-60) and George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania (1964-66). After having taught and conducted at Bryn Mawr, the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington, Suderburg was appointed Chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1974. He was the recipient of numerous awards and commissions including two Guggenheim Fellowships. As a conductor and pianist, he was very active in the performance of new music, especially in his role as co-director of the University of Washington Contemporary Group (1966-74). From 1985 to his retirement in 2001, he taught at Williams College in Massachusetts, and was chair of the Music Department from 1986 to 1995.
"Solo Music II was one of first pieces of Bob's that I heard, previewed as it was in spring of 89, the spring of my freshman year at Williams. The performance by Donald McInnes was, naturally, masterful, and the recital as a whole had a substantial impact on many future choices that I would make in life; a sentimental attachment to the viola, an understanding of the dramatic impact of virtuosity, and, most of all, a sence of the importance of engaged pluralism, always a major part of Bob's compositional voice.  While his 'official' publisher-approved biography states the "he abandoned twelve-tone procedures in the late 1960s, a move which allowed his music’s inherent romanticism and lyricism to blossom"  I found it was Bob's retentions of the modernist language that allowed the lyric elements of his music to speak so strongly.  His interest in engagement with vernaculars was simply one part of his same interest in connecting with whatever musical traditions and practices presented themselves to him.
This term refers to the Renaissance technique of 'carving subjects' from the sounds and letters of a person's name.  My system of mappings derives from Ravel's refinement of the system described by Zarlino; each letter of the alphabet 'maps' on to one of the 12 pitches, producing a more chromatic fundamental set than either Ravel's or Zarlino's system.  This chromatic material sits in opposition to the modal material derived from the Josquin, and the static, blues inflected material of Night Set.  The ensemble is distributed around the performance space, with the clarinet changing positions and roles over the course of the piece.  It is a tribute to Bob's music, but more, I hope, to his teaching; acknowledging his love of collage and reference and (mis)appropriation, as well as his theatrical sense of space  seems a fitting way to remember his presence through his absence.

Epitaphs

La Deploration for cl, vln, vc

the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great in one direction as in another

Fortuitous Variations Edit 2

Fortuitous Variations: II. the vastness hitherto spoken of...

III. so it is rather the whole river that is place, because as a whole it is motionless.

Fortuitous Variations: III. so it is rather the whole river that is place

IV. The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to musement

Fortuitous Variations: IV. The dawn and the gloaming...

Piano Quartet no2

'Eventail' From 'The Winter Journey'

Performance of the complete work by the ensemble Yarn/Wire.

Note that in this performance, the first and last movements, usually sung, were performed offstage by a student brass ensemble.

The Winter Journey

from 'Notes on Works'
The etude-concept is a superb example of the strife of Apollonian and Dionysian that shapes all music; the tension between the technical and the aesthetic. Consider the manuscript of the finale of Beethoven's Op 131: 'tantot libre, tantot recherchee' ("in part free, in part studied"), an indication not of the division of those characters, but rather their linkage. Consider the endless critiques of the 20th century music as an art shackled by its own abstractions, despite the intensity of experiencing that music, felt by its critics at least as much as by its supporters.  In the post-virtuosity of today's performance space, the superhuman is a commonplace, and so the elegant minutiae of music's 'techne' are revealed as the core of the mechanisms of meaningfulness. The challenges of an etude are made public be they performative of compositional. It is the expressive precision of both composer and performer that sustains such music at the edge of comprehension and apprehension– the public display of the private that is an etude

Etude for Cello and Piano No. 1 (from 'A Book of Etudes')

Partita for Solo Guitar

A Feather For Voltaire

Miranda Cuckson, violin
Daniel Lippel, guitar
Jeffery Irving, percussion

Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind

Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that draws on Medieval and Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity.  His approach is deeply historical and broadly philosophical.  Many of his works have an direct historical touchstone, such as his  Etude on 'Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit' (A Book of Etudes, Quire 4, No. 1) which features quotations of and elaborations on music from 15th century Cyprus, or La Deploration for clarinet, violin, and cello, which couples Josquin's lament on the death of Ockeghem with works of his own teacher Robert Suderburg, synthesizing jazz and Renaissance approaches. Other works draw on sources from antiquity, such as the string quartet Alcyone, a partially spoken setting of a tale of Ovid's Metamorphoses, or Tethys, a violin concerto which links the sea-goddess to geological time and tectonic change.
Literature and philosophy are also significant points of articulation: The Winter Journey, a current project commissioned from the ensemble Yarn|wire, is based on a short story by George Perec; the story itself  takes the form of a 19th century fairytale of memory and loss, and so the new composition will involve transformation of the French and German art-song tradition of the 19th and early 20th century. A song cycle focused on settings of American poets (Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens) entwines with the poems fragments from philosophers (James, Aristotle, Husserl, Bergson). The piano trio 'Fortuitous Variations' draws upon the language of William James and C.S. Peirce in inspiration, organization, character markings, and movement titles. This approach and the works themselves connect to many aspects of the scholarship in the humanities, including history, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy. 
His works have been praised many times in the press.  Regarding his Quintet “l’homme armé”, Allan Kozinn wrote “he couches [the medieval melody] in such thoroughly modern scoring that the ear is lured to other things, including the juxtaposition of eerie string writing with playful material for the clarinet and piano, or the lively interplay among all five instruments.” (The New York Times March 12, 2005.) Regarding A Book of Songs (2006), the Stephen Brookes wrote “[they] can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well written and insightful.” (The Washington Post May 23, 2006)  Regarding La Déploration, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that "...the violinist, cellist... and clarinetist... spread out throughout the crypt. Against vaporous harmonics and ghostly fragments of Renaissance music played by the strings, [a] warm, clear clarinet announced itself as very much alive as it sashayed in and out of blues territory and laughed in the face of their mournful keening." (The New York Times May 17, 2015.)
He has been awarded the League of Composers ISCM Composers Award (2005), the Salvatore Martirano Prize (2006), and the Robert Avalon Prize (2010), and a Fromm Commission (2012). He is a MacDowell Fellow in Winter 2017, and an Avaloch Music Farm Fellow in Fall 2017. His music has been performed by  counter)induction, Aeolus Quartet, Inscape Chamber Orchestra, Redlight Music, Dan Lippel, Robert Baker, Trio Cavatina, Edge Ensemble/Contemporary Music Forum (DC), pianists Ieva Jokubaviciute (Shenandoah University), Alice Belem (State University of Minas Gerais), and Ning Yu; cellists Elise Pittenger (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and Schuyler Slack (Richmond Symphony) and Lori Barnett (George Washington University); and clarinetists David Jones (Washington National Opera), Benjamin Fingland (Dorian Winds).
He is a founding member, curator, and composer-in-residence of counter)induction, a composer/performer collective active in the New York region (www.counterinduction.com).

douglasboyce

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks