side-scroller (2021) is inspired by “death music” in 2D platform video games (platformers). When a player loses or “dies” in a video game, often specific music will play, indicating to the player they have failed. Death music in early platformers often had upbeat descending melodic lines underlaid with triadic harmonies. In side-scroller’s opening phrases, failed jumps can be heard followed by death music. The piece chronicles a player’s progress through a game world. There’s extra health to be found. Secret passageways to be discovered. And a boss fight! Plus, a little “game over” sequence at the end.

"side-scroller" performed by JACK Quartet

three cans of beans

I Wore It Just For You

I'm Really Different Than My Family

I Really Love Talking To You

Filters is an exploration of color. A longing phrase by the horn provides this work's only explicit melodic line. Percussion underpins clustered harmonies from the winds and rhythmic motives from the triangle. These colors are initially presented in isolation but become increasingly blended or more tightly juxtaposed as the work approaches climax.

Filters

Girl Twirls Hair
for
piano, violin, cello

Prologue , 00:00 -- 2:31
I. The Hair , 2:32 -- 5:49
II. The Girl , 5:50 -- 10:55
III. Ids , 11:49 -- 16:58
Epilogue , 16:59 -- 18:25




An extra-musical narrative: Much of the inspiration for Girl Twirls Hair was drawn from conversations with two important women in my life. For me, Girl Twirls Hair is an aural, tapestry portraying the excessive value society places on physical beauty, especially feminine beauty, and its effect on those assigning value and those to which value is being assigned. The Prologue creates a world for the narrative. In The Hair a woman carelessly twirls her hair around her fingers while an inconspicuous observer looks on. The Girl signifies a child’s journey through sexual maturity in a world that values her for her outward appearance above all else. Ids depicts logical extremes that might result from a societal value system based upon physical beauty. The Epilogue is subtitled “final breaths”.

A description of sonic properties: Girl Twirls Hair is a work for violin, cello, and piano in five, short movements. The Prologue introduces the musical atmosphere. This movement moves through sustained sonorities in its beginning which grow to a pointillistic outburst that spins into a wash of the piano’s resonance. The Hair begins with an interplay between playfully introverted violin pizzicato and disparate, chordal voicings from the piano that grows into a mosaic of short, punctuated lines. For solo piano, The Girl consists of three sections. The first and last sections share the same melodic content though the second section’s harmony is more explicitly triadic, reflecting the lingering, functional sonorities of the middle section’s Magic Flute quotation. Ids uses sonic space both horizontally through extended space between phrases and vertically through extreme tessituras that create harmonic space. The Epilogue consists entirely of a counterpoint between “air noises” from both the violin and cello and the string players themselves.

Girl Twirls Hair

Between Breaths

Our breath is a personal part of who we are. How a person breathes can often tell something about that person or at least some particulars of their current situation. Have they breathed a sigh of relief? Huffed in frustration? Inhaled sharply with pain? Caught their breath? Are they out of breath?  In Between Breaths the sound of the flute and the human breath are reflected in each other and, in some instances, become one.

Flutist: Kathryn Holley

Between Breaths

Elevator Please

after effects

thanks reddit

Lyra 8 and Volca FM, Improv No. 2

Lyra 8 and Volca FM, Improv No. 4

Lyra 8 and Volca FM, Improv No. 3

Through the Wall

I am an intermedia composer (1991, Pittsburgh, USA) exploring liminal spaces between installation art, theater, performance art, video, and music to uncover the extraordinary in the everyday and the everyday in the extraordinary. 

My work requires that I interview physicists at birthday parties, pour buckets of blood over performance artists, improvise lighting performances to my music for audience members in my bedroom, sprinkle confetti over undulating loudspeakers full of milk, rip audio from acting pedagogy videos to write plays, make spectrograms of my voice reading Wikipedia articles, and build enclosures for three-channel video installations about daily life in my Pittsburgh apartment.

I’m finishing a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh right now.

Emerson Voss

Pinned to spotlight

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