Caprice for solo violin, performed by Ari Streisfeld, June 2014

Caprice, for violin

Composed for and premiered by Chamber Cartel

Program Notes:
Years ago, while taking an accompanying class in undergrad, two of my colleagues were working on the Brahms Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 78. It is piece that continues to floor me. Of the many astonishingly beautiful moments throughout, the piano chords at the outset have always been of particular interest. Brahms takes simple triads and voices them perfectly—the register, the spacing of the notes, the way those chords provide a buoyant cushion over which the violin melody stretches out—all of these elements combine to create something sublime.

In a way, I’ve been trying to live within the world of those chords for some time now. Brahms’ chords serve a traditional role in harmonizing a melody, and yet, is the melody necessary? More simply put, can chords, these monolithic musical creatures, rome free?

//

Domination of Black is taken from a poem of the same title by Wallace Stevens. The notion of a singular color exerting “dominance” reminds me of a James Turrell exhibit I once attended. For one of Turrell’s pieces, I entered a room that seemed pitch black. My eyes, however, adjusted and I realized there was a light sculpture in the corner. The darkness, once absorbed, provided a focus that illuminated so much subtlety.  

//

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

(closing stanza to Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens)

Domination Of Black

Pedro Alvarez 
Inherent Nodes (2009)
for soprano, alto, tenor, bass and contrabass guitars. 
Consort Guitarrístico de Chile. 
www.pedroalvarez.info

Inherent Nodes

The first canon of J.S. Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is known as a “crab” canon: two voices play the famous theme and its elaboration simultaneously, one moving forward from beginning to end, the other backwards, running in reverse. They meet in the middle, exchange direction, and return to their original starting points, at which they repeat the process ad infinitum. The work is thus a Möbius Strip, possessing a moment of initiation, but no clear beginning or ending; it is a music that nullifies the arrow of time, presenting the past, present, and future simultaneously at each moment.

Canons in Entropy, commissioned by Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest and the SONICBernheim Series, is a site-specific 4-channel audio installation that uses the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester’s recording of Bach’s crab canon as its source material, both sonically and conceptually. Just as Bach constructs the work by layering the music upon itself, I proliferate this layering in an accretive process: after I present the original recording as Bach had composed it, I splice the recording in half at the midpoint and layer the two halves atop each other. I then splice it in thirds and do the same, then in fourths, fifths, and so forth, a total of 231 times. The music undergoes entropy, as its conventionally “musical” qualities — melodies, rhythms, harmonies, instrumental attacks, etc. — are eroded to a liquefied, homogenized stasis. Over the course of 11 minutes, what began as an awe-inspiring example of human sonic construction begins to bear more resemblance sound as it’s found “in the wild”: the roar of wind, the hum of insects, the enveloping din of a flock of birds. Just as Bach inverts the music in his canon’s center for it to return, symmetrically, to its starting point, so do I begin to reconstitute Canons in Entropy from its molten endpoint back to the original recording so that the cycle can perpetuate endlessly.

At Bernheim Forest, the speakers that played back the work were placed between four Norwegian fir trees along a wooden path between the parking lot and the Visitors Center. As the sounds rotated across the four speakers in various circular patterns, listeners could experience the piece from multiple vantage points and proximities. Though the stereo mix on this page presents a version of the piece from a fixed distance, listeners’ constant movements and shifts in perspective with regard to the sound sources — from close to far, centered to angled — are integral to the work’s sonic experience and its integration in Bernheim Forest’s environment. 

Special thanks to Aaron Rosenblum, Sara Soltau, Andrea Jane, and Claude Stephens for their organizational, technical, financial, and moral support, and for their innumerable contributions to sustaining adventurous art in the Louisville, KY region. 

Canons in Entropy

Commissioned by Ensemble Apparat for their Science Fiction Double Feature. References include the Shrike from Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and the collective consciousness of the Borg.

Performed by Ensemble Apparat on October 3, 2015 at the Akademie der Künst in Berlin. Radio broadcast rights held by deutschlandfunk.

Proxy

Live recording by Oerknal! new music ensemble.
Gregory Charette, conductor

Breather

Shield Your Eyes unreleased track

Performer:
Schuyler Tsuda

Plates I

live recording, first performance

Weston Olencki, trombone
Eric Wubbels, prepared piano

St. Peter's Church, Chelsea
New York, NY
June 10th, 2016



contraposition I. IMAGE

The two enharmonic madrigals found in "L'antica musica ridotta alla prattica moderna" (Rome 1555), played on a reconstruction of Vicentino's Archicembalo, built by Marco Tiella and Formentelli in 1974. Live performance by Johannes Keller. 

Canons in Entropy

Jacob Gotlib