Have you ever looked at a pile of coupon sheets or glass jars in your home and wondered: “I’m never going to use these. Why on Earth am I giving them so much real estate?” Well, there’s a free and easy solution: recycling! Toss whatever useless junk is lying around the house into a recycling bin, but beware: only specific kinds of useless junk, like paper, plastic, and glass, can be tossed in those bins. You can even go so far as to repurpose that junk into something new: turn your old t-shirts into quilts, use those jars as pencil holders or flower pots, or build makeshift musical instruments for the whole family to enjoy! Speaking of new music, recycling can be found throughout all kinds of musical styles. Simple themes, melodies, and motives are constantly repurposed and manipulated in countless ways to keep songs and compositions both interesting and cohesive. In fact, the musical material for this piece’s cello line is rather limited, exclusively using a five-pitch motive to derive melodic lines and gestures. This motive, C-B-D-E-Eb, which roughly spell a cryptogram of C-H-R-I-S, demonstrate different ways of repurposing a small amount of thematic matter while paying homage to Chris Santos, a close friend and cellist with and for whom this piece was conceived. Through this simple and reliable crash course, we believe everyone can learn a thing or two about reducing, reusing, and recycling!

performed by Chris Santos 
with the voice acting assistance of Andrew Russell 

composed and produced by Evan Fontaine 
April/May 2021, Bloomington, IN

Recycling, with Chris Santos (2021) for cello and electronics

For a class assignment, I was given a single vocal track, the objective being to build an original song around it.

Featuring "Surrendering Love", an AI-generated painting.

Stay With You

Performed by Chris Santos
in Read Hall, Bloomington, IN
February 2019

Featuring "Shredded Concept", an AI-generated artwork

String Theory (2019) for solo cello

"For as long as I can remember, my efforts as an artist have all been attempts to remember, recreate, or understand the past. Four Places is a brief effort to recollect what happened and how things were before, working only with what fragments of memories are left in one’s head."

Inspired by a poem by Lukas Cavar

Written & Directed by Sydney Scholl
Music Composition by Evan Fontaine
Sound Design by Ben Wesenberg

Part of the IU Double Exposure 2021 collaboration

Four Places (2021) - Original Film Score

Meaning "diabolical joke" in English, this piece captures the essence of bombastic scheming, comical wickedness, and the absurd malice of cartoon villainy. 

Miranda Warner, violin
John McCaffrey, violin
Jennifer Gaffney, viola
Chris Santos, cello

Performed on December 3rd, 2018 at the Jacobs School of Music, Bloomington, IN

Scherzo Diabolico (2018) for string quartet

This was created using only the sounds of a fridge and a washing machine.

featuring "Moon Child" by Samuel Rodriguez

Composed by Evan Fontaine, Fall 2021

Going Up

Written for HAVEN Trio at Connecticut Summerfest 2022

Lindsay Kesselman, soprano
Kimberly Cole Luevano, clarinet
Midori Koga, piano

Performed on June 14th at the Hartt School of Music in West Hartford, CT

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Program Notes:

Owl details the pensive anxiety, claustrophobic introspection, and bittersweet acceptance of staying awake for an entire night, from dusk until dawn. Lately, I've found myself in this exact situation, losing sleep over assignments and projects that bleed into the night hours. While not a healthy or enjoyable activity to find oneself in, this kind of auto-insomnia has become necessary from time to time. During this extended period of quiet darkness, my living space becomes a liminal space, as my senses succumb to numbness and my emotions spiral into a strange mixture of productivity and mania. To provide the text for this piece, I wrote a poem to illustrate these feelings:

So dreamt, unkempt with harsh malaise,
stays awake for several days,
shrieks the body gray.

So hushed, blushing beaks of sap
tap a leaky maze, perhaps
turning heads in ways
that crack my amber gaze.

Hurry a recurring phase,  
paste it with glue traps 
that activate while night music plays. 

A makeshift home, crafted from artifacts I own:
I suppose I’ll kindle those, but then
they’ll swindle my repose again. 

Feasting on vermin, preaching sermons,
breaching my own docile domicile:
I’ll attempt my humble homily 
for just a little while.

Somnambulant rambling hosts my ghostly feathers,  
rattling weathered, hollow bones, 
inhaling soot sought within a liminal space
to try and sate my hasty sight.

Overbearing, unending night, 
sadly ephemeral, fleeting:
I wait for a taste of sky-eating 
grapefruit and clementine greeting. 

Unhinged, untethered locus,
choked, revoked, unfocused, 
bears resemblance to the body balanced
on a branch of honey locust.

So fowl, unfit to practice passion,
howls dreadful, shakes out the ash of aspen:
keeps awake, awake remains the sash across 
the owl.

The owl,
perched upon treasured swings,
devouring capillary things, poses:
“Who trembles at my omen, 
boasting woven, torn-open wings?” 

To no avail, no answer. 
The hours have all but passed,
until the mourning doves begin
to break the day at last.

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Owl (2022) for soprano, clarinet, and piano

John Woodward, double bass
Fernando Garcia, piano

I wrote this for John Woodward's Senior Recital in April 2022. It's my first piece, Scherzo Diabolico, but jazzy. Enjoy!

Diabolical Joke (2022) for double bass and piano

Written for and performed by PRISM Quartet during the 48 Hours Composition Symposium at IU.

PRISM Quartet
Timothy McAllister, soprano sax
Zachary Shemon, alto sax
Matthew Levy, tenor sax
Taimur Sullivan, bari sax


PROGRAM NOTES

tl;dr: I smash weird noises and pretty melodies together for a little bit. It sounds like bubbles, kind of. 

For a handful of minutes, the saxophone quartet becomes trapped inside a bubble, using every tool at its disposal to pop the transparent, iridescent, spherical wall. The music explores many physical properties of the bubble, from rubbing its soapy surface to poking sharp dimples into its buoyant body. The sonic landscape shifts between wildly different emotions and styles, bounces between the inspirational and the industrial, and ends with a final cry of clamor in hopes that the bubble will finally burst.

This idea comes directly from my own experiences as an artist in a conservatory: in many ways, we become trapped inside a clear, spherical wall. We nest within our social alcoves and fields of study while constantly peering beyond our comfort zones, elsewhere. We become isolated, consumed entirely by our own creative endeavors, while the freedoms of opportunity and human connection lie just beyond that wobbly wall. 

This idea also surrounds my identity as a growing, professional composer. My most primary and prominent struggle is choosing what kind of music to write, balancing the two questions of "What do my ears want me to write?" and "What does my industry want me to write?" While I know that I should simply compose what I enjoy, there are countless other variables shaping my music, variables outside the jurisdiction of art as a subjective field. Variables such as financial stability, social perception, and survival leave me paralyzed deciding what direction I should take my music and how "contemporary" and "unique" I should make it.

Perhaps this piece is an attempt to reconcile these two questions I balance every time I write a measure of music, every time I think of my profession, and every time I think about my future. Maybe all I need to do is to write some damn good tunes.

Performed on November 6th, 2022 in Recital Hall, Bloomington, IN.

Bubble Machine (2022) for sax quartet

Evan Fontaine (b. 2000) is a composer, vocalist, and saxophonist from Greenfield, Indiana. He recently graduated from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music with a B.M. in Composition with a Minor in Music Scoring for Visual Media. During his time at Jacobs, he studied with Felipe Tovar-Henao, Don Freund, PQ Phan, Aaron Travers, Andreia Pinto-Correia, and Han Lash.

His compositional palette draws from an eclectic range of styles, including jazz, folk, pop, and electronic music. The sound of his work tends to blur the lines between these idioms, often toying with non-sequiturs and collage techniques to craft a kaleidoscope of colors, tones, and patterns. He is especially intrigued by new types of harmonic and acoustic beauty, which explore the boundaries between consonance and dissonance, the sentimental and the satirical, and unusual instrument combinations. These fundamental aesthetic values culminate in a sound that can only be described as whimsical, groovy, absurd, dramatic, playful, and, perhaps, mildly scatterbrained.

Evan Fontaine

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