This is a demo recording of the third in a suite of three pieces for classical guitar that I composed for Philip Lawson in 2012. 

Philip Lawson is the guitarist here (twitter.com/PLawsonGuitar).

It’s a composer’s cliché that the classical guitar is amongst the hardest instruments to write well for. But clichés are clichés because they’re true. Like the orchestra (also an instrument), you want to forget it’s there and just write your music. But you can’t. The guitar is it’s music and vice versa.

In writing these interludes, I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to my own tactile experience of the instrument. To what Feldman called the ‘reality’ of the sound. And to my affection for the clear-voiced beauty of its timbre.

More info on the piece here: garrettsholdice.ie/three-interludes

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www.garrettsholdice.ie

Three Interludes 3 - Ketawang  [demo]

This is a demo recording of the first in a suite of three pieces for classical guitar that I composed for Philip Lawson in 2012. 

Philip Lawson is the guitarist here (twitter.com/PLawsonGuitar).

It’s a composer’s cliché that the classical guitar is amongst the hardest instruments to write well for. But clichés are clichés because they’re true. Like the orchestra (also an instrument), you want to forget it’s there and just write your music. But you can’t. The guitar is it’s music and vice versa.

In writing these interludes, I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to my own tactile experience of the instrument. To what Feldman called the ‘reality’ of the sound. And to my affection for the clear-voiced beauty of its timbre.

More info on the piece here: garrettsholdice.ie/three-interludes

/////////////////////

www.garrettsholdice.ie

Three Interludes 1 - Tanka  [demo]

This is a demo recording of a the second in a suite of three pieces for classical guitar that I composed for Philip Lawson in 2012. 

Philip Lawson is the guitarist here (twitter.com/PLawsonGuitar).

It’s a composer’s cliché that the classical guitar is amongst the hardest instruments to write well for. But clichés are clichés because they’re true. Like the orchestra (also an instrument), you want to forget it’s there and just write your music. But you can’t. The guitar is it’s music and vice versa.

In writing these interludes, I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to my own tactile experience of the instrument. To what Feldman called the ‘reality’ of the sound. And to my affection for the clear-voiced beauty of its timbre.

More info on the piece here: garrettsholdice.ie/three-interludes

/////////////////////

www.garrettsholdice.ie

Three Interludes 2 - Organum  [demo]

From the album "Winter" by Ficino Ensemble.
https://ergodos.bandcamp.com/album/winter

Winter

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

“You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa...All mass is interaction.” -Richard Feynman

This piece is a collage-like ecosystem of interacting sounds that are constantly re- contextualized throughout. The same material builds on different relationships between the players, which become stronger and more dependent as the piece progresses. The duality of memory and present tense is strewn throughout the piece in the form of warm and sharp textures, basking in a moment and snapping out of it. There is an open-ended question in the sound regarding who is in the present tense and who is still in the memory, and how these two realms of time become blurry.

Performed by TMC New Fromm Players:

Sage Park, violin
Tiffany Wee, violin
Elizabeth Doubrawa, viola
Benjamin Fryxell, cello
Dominique Kim, flute
Sangwon Lee, clarinet

2023-08-06 1000AM CD2

all mass is interaction

Captação da estreia da obra Ruins On My Chest no dia 18 de outubro na BackBox do Centro para os Assuntos da Arte e Arquitectura. 

Coletivo Phoebus: Luís Miguel Leite; Leonor Teixeira; José Teixeira. 
Áudio: Helena Margarida. 


‘Ruins on my chest’ é uma peça para ensemble flexível de carácter performativa e teatral. Esta, procura (ainda de que de uma forma abstrata e pessoal) responder a duas perguntas: se uma ferida falasse que nos diria? E de que forma falaria? A resposta surge, primeiramente, não na música, mas sim no teatro físico. Incorporado na peça através do uso da voz, da palavra, do corpo, do objeto e do instrumento-como-objeto. Estes, são libertos da sua primeira condição e trabalhados de forma plástica e material, realçando as suas características não apenas sónicas, mas também físicas, procurando a presença humana, o esforço e a exaustão. Agora, ‘STOP’. Permita-se parar, ouvir, e escutar. Deixe-se envolver ativamente pelo ambiente que o rodeia. Quanto às perguntas lançadas, a imaginação fará o resto!

Com apoio da Fundação GDA, Antena 2, Centro de Investigação & Informação da Música Portuguesa e Município de Fafe.

Ruins On My Chest - Rúben Borges [premier live]

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

Piano Quartet no2

A Feather For Voltaire

"Path to the Serene" for solo flute and chamber ensemble (violin, viola, cello, harp, piano) with Max(2003)
Premiered at Merkin Concert Hall, New York. Commissioned and performed by the Azure Ensemble, with solo flute by Susan Glaser.

Path to the Serene

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).