all-forgetting-is-retrieval (2019) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
septet, augmented conductor, and electronics
July 8, 2019, Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium

Video: https://vimeo.com/386270819

TACETi Ensemble
Pisol Manatchinapisit, saxophone
Christhatai Paksamai, bass clarinet
Siravith Kongbandalsuk, trombone
Noppakorn Auesirinucroch, guitar
Pipe Kantapong, percussion
Tapanat Kiatpaibulkit, violin
Kantika Comenaphatt, cello
Piyawat Louilarpprasert, augmented conductor
Jason Thorpe Buchanan, electronics

Engineers: Book Pongtorn and Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Mix: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Remastered Jun 7, 2021

This work explores the formation of human memory, retrieval, and failure, drawing from two sources. The first was a passage titled “Myth of Permanent Memory” from R.A. Chechile’s book 'Analyzing Memory: The Formation, Retention, and Measurement of Memory': “There is a common belief that forgetting is strictly due to a retrieval failure. It is curious why this idea of a permanent memory is so appealing...the storage of information is not perfect. Storage as well as retrieval is subject to failure. Thus, the hypothesis that all-forgetting-is-retrieval is incorrect. For information in this state of permanent [long-term] memory, all subsequent forgetting is assumed to be caused by a retrieval failure. Yet...there is no known biological mechanism to stop the adaptive changes in memory from continuing and thereby possibly destroying the prior learning record. If the learning environment changes, the same adaptive mechanisms that created the memory in the first place will continue to rearrange the structure of memory and potentially destroy the former memory representation.”
   The second source is dialogue from a 1978 ephemeral film, 'Human Memory', by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, used as sonic material for the electronics throughout the work, written for eight musicians including a conductor and percussionist who have been augmented by contact microphones and wearable electronics to trigger and govern the behavior of temporal events and media, manipulated through the use of wrist-worn sensors and gestural tracking mapped onto discrete musical parameters. The title is both perplexing and quickly disproven in the above passage, reflecting the strange and unfamiliar space that, for me, the piece inhabits, with “failures” both large and small. Artistically, my apprehension toward falling into familiar patterns and relying on my past compositional work shares a similar cognitive and emotional space as “lost” experiences—the inability to be truly present in a moment, or failure to commit to memory experiences that are simultaneously both formative and fleeting. The rapid loss of their fidelity is staggering, and this work attempts to confront that impermanence and decay. To reflect this, I was interested in both paraphrasing and sampling elements of my past work, alongside the recontextualization of “found” media and sonic material deeply familiar to me. How can we be certain of things we have experienced, and that the events that took place were not, in fact, radically different than what we remember? These inaccuracies and discrepancies that form over time through internal repetition, how information storage and retrieval may be influenced by context, and what kind of experience might interrupt a memory from being formed, are explored.
   “The subject of our film is memory. Imagine what your mental life would be like if you had no memory at all..

More at www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

all-forgetting-is-retrieval (2019) - TACETi Ensemble

Preliminary Mix of Tech Rehearsal for World Premiere Concert Preview (nine minute version), Oct. 4, 2013 - Eastman School of Music



IKTUS PERCUSSION: Chris Graham, Josh Perry, Piero Guimaraes, & Cory Bracken

…durat(A)ions: “broken landscape” – Written for IKTUS PERCUSSION, this quartet is in a way (both) a commentary on (and exercise in) the futility of unwavering adherence to rigid systems of organization and the culture embracing intellectual self-gratification that has become rampant in our relatively obscure (and seemingly insignificant) "new music" social system. I have observed this behavior both in myself and in dozens of other composers in my generation, with unnecessarily complex compositional processes that are highly inefficient (and perhaps also ineffective). I find my own artistic motivations (and those of many others) for producing creative work in this manner both troubling and extremely questionable; my compositional processes have become increasingly convoluted, perhaps due to a variety of conflicting external influences (both academic and otherwise), and I truly question the incentive and justification for what we do. This work functions as self-reflection, criticism, and exploration of the creative issues that I have encountered while producing works of this nature, and the artistic issues that arise from varying degrees of complexity on both the part of the composer and performer.  Just beyond the realm of possibility (or practicality), the score's notation offers one potential realization of randomly generated time points, blocking out the length of event streams that regulate contrast and form in the work.  The composer’s role then was firstly in assigning sonic materials to each of these events, based largely on alignment points between twelve individual streams (three for each percussionist: sustained sounds, articulated sounds, and vocalizations) and guidelines based on contrast /similarity.  The entire process became increasingly varied and intricate; some events were notated precisely by parsing data taken from the proportional relationships of event streams to generate rhythmic material algorithmically, while others were worked out intuitively, and some marked only "ad libitum" with an assigned object or sound type and minimal performance directions. I’ve found that this surrender of control allows for greater variability and virtuosic potential by bringing the performer’s own creative experiences and self into the work.  The sheer mass of notated information necessitates a state of constant real-time prioritization of select musical parameters or events (at the discretion of the performer) over others, due to both physical and cognitive constraints, resulting in heightened intensity and spontaneity throughout the course of the work.  In other words, it is not expected that the notation will be executed rigidly, or be consistent from one performance to the next.  Rather, the score is utilized as a point of departure.  While both performer and composer are forced to navigate this spectrum between control and loss thereof, my intention is that enough passages are so completely saturated with information that they will gradually infect the performer's gestural reservoir and behavior, informing their quasi-improvisational passages by context alone.  A number of homemade instruments are utilized in the work, including lightbulb chimes, prepared snare drums, and a large amplified “box” or resonating chamber with extension springs, metallic studs, and contact microphones, that pull together individual event streams for greater timbral cohesion. The relationships between individual percussion parts are governed not by a conductor, click track, or other audible means, but rather by a digital stopwatch that corresponds to markers in the score.  The result is a completely fluid and elastic sense of time, with individual event streams functioning as simultaneities rather than synchronizations, allowing greater interpretive and creative freedom to the performer.  The third stream (ahem, of data) for each performer consists of vocalizations, derived from a broken down translation of the Wikipedia article Duration (philosophy): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duration_(philosophy) into the International Phonetic Alphabet and drastically fragmented/redistributed between each part, with related syllabic groups from each sentence scaled proportionally to the duration of the corresponding event stream.  These vocalizations are always obscured/distorted, and assimilated into the texture as abstract timbral coloring rather than tangible semantic content.

for more information, please visit http://www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

…durat(A)ions: “broken landscape” (Tech Rehearsal, Mix B, first 9 minutes)

Asymptotic Flux: Second Study in Entropy (Static Foxy Lump: [II] Second Nudist Tyre Pony) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan

for Alarm Will Sound

Written for the 4th Annual Mizzou International Composers Festival

Rough Audio for this preliminary version is from a stereo field recorder in the audience below the stage. Professional Multitrack audio will be available in early 2014.

_______________

Asymptotic Flux: Second Study in Entropy (Static Foxy Lump: [II] Second Nudist Tyre Pony) was written between February and April of 2013 for Alarm Will Sound as the second work in a cycle utilizing shared musical objects and compositional devices. The first, for amplified bass clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, was composed over a three-month period while traveling and hitchhiking throughout Europe, surrounding time spent in Paris and Darmstadt.  The experience of frantically seeking opportunities to compose while on the move proved challenging, mostly due to the awkward, impromptu workspaces available to me such as cafes, restaurants, hostels, and the apartments of my various hosts. These were typically quite busy, noisy, and chaotic spaces, influencing the character of the music, as well as the title.
        Asymptotic Flux describes an arguably conceptual device: the low E-flat that simultaneously pervades the work and is non-existent.  In the quartet, I imagined that the ensemble is always reaching towards this E-flat as a point of centricity, but never quite arriving, analogous to an asymptote as it approaches infinity. In this Second Study, the low E-flat is finally provided by a contrabass subharmonic that both initiates and concludes the work, scarcely audible as a definite pitch, completely unstable, and on the lower threshold of human hearing.  The parenthetical subtitle, an anagram of the title proper, alludes to the structural design of the work, borrowing musical snapshots from the quartet while fragmenting and re-contextualizing them throughout stages proportionally related to the 19.6 Hz E-flat in both temporal and harmonic centricity.
          Originally, I had set out to explore the timbral possibilities of the bass clarinet, utilizing a variety of techniques to produce rich, complex soundscapes and microtonal sonorities that would provide germinal material for the work while unifying the ensemble. This second work is an extension of that same process of exploration.  In addition to spectral analysis of bass clarinet multiphonics in various states, additional pitch content is generated through an acoustic analogue to a process known in electronic music as "single-sideband modulation," resulting in a series of combination tones with intervals that grow exponentially (a shape inverse to that of the harmonic series). Many instrumental techniques in this work are employed explicitly to destabilize or distort the timbral qualities of each instrument; the use of vocalizations, scratch tones, and other techniques color the sound to modulate or destabilize the written pitch material, leaving it quite disfigured.  
        The last element regarding organization of pitch material revolves around the scordatura tuning of the cello to the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 11th partials of a virtual low E-flat fundamental (19.6 Hz, slightly sharp), which is now extended to the contrabass by halving the 3rd and 7th partials while maintaining the same open G as the cello. This allows the execution of unique sonorities very rapidly and with a great deal of precision through the use of natural harmonics.  These three verticality types are often superimposed upon one another, with resultant voicings sometimes similar to an "E-type" symmetrical hexachord possessing interval content that I've become partial to (no pun intended). 
        Entropy can be described as the "measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system," the "loss of information in a transmitted message," the "tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity," or the "inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society" -- taking poetic liberties in reducing the thermodynamic property of "entropy" to simply a unit of measurement for chaos, one might say that this work conveys a state of high entropy in music, thus reflecting the compositional process, the result of the technical demands made on the performers, as well as my state of mind throughout the creation of these works.

Asymptotic Flux: Second Study in Entropy (Static Foxy Lump: [II] Second Nudist Tyre Pony) *ROUGH CUT

World Premiere Concert Preview (nine minute version), Oct. 4, 2013 - Eastman School of Music

IKTUS PERCUSSION: Chris Graham, Josh Perry, Piero Guimaraes, & Cory Bracken

…durat(A)ions: “broken landscape” – Written for IKTUS PERCUSSION, this quartet is in a way (both) a commentary on (and exercise in) the futility of unwavering adherence to rigid systems of organization and the culture embracing intellectual self-gratification that has become rampant in our relatively obscure (and seemingly insignificant) "new music" social system. I have observed this behavior both in myself and in dozens of other composers in my generation, with unnecessarily complex compositional processes that are highly inefficient (and perhaps also ineffective). I find my own artistic motivations (and those of many others) for producing creative work in this manner both troubling and extremely questionable; my compositional processes have become increasingly convoluted, perhaps due to a variety of conflicting external influences (both academic and otherwise), and I truly question the incentive and justification for what we do. This work functions as self-reflection, criticism, and exploration of the creative issues that I have encountered while producing works of this nature, and the artistic issues that arise from varying degrees of complexity on both the part of the composer and performer. Just beyond the realm of possibility (or practicality), the score's notation offers one potential realization of randomly generated time points, blocking out the length of event streams that regulate contrast and form in the work. 

The composer’s role then was firstly in assigning sonic materials to each of these events, based largely on alignment points between twelve individual streams (three for each percussionist: sustained sounds, articulated sounds, and vocalizations) and guidelines based on contrast /similarity. The entire process became increasingly varied and intricate; some events were notated precisely by parsing data taken from the proportional relationships of event streams to generate rhythmic material algorithmically, while others were worked out intuitively, and some marked only "ad libitum" with an assigned object or sound type and minimal performance directions. I’ve found that this surrender of control allows for greater variability and virtuosic potential by bringing the performer’s own creative experiences and self into the work. The sheer mass of notated information necessitates a state of constant real-time prioritization of select musical parameters or events (at the discretion of the performer) over others, due to both physical and cognitive constraints, resulting in heightened intensity and spontaneity throughout the course of the work. In other words, it is not expected that the notation will be executed rigidly, or be consistent from one performance to the next. Rather, the score is utilized as a point of departure. While both performer and composer are forced to navigate this spectrum between control and loss thereof, my intention is that enough passages are so completely saturated with information that they will gradually infect the performer's gestural reservoir and behavior, informing their quasi-improvisational passages by context alone. 

A number of homemade instruments are utilized in the work, including lightbulb chimes, prepared snare drums, and a large amplified “box” or resonating chamber with extension springs, metallic studs, and contact microphones, that pull together individual event streams for greater timbral cohesion. The relationships between individual percussion parts are governed not by a conductor, click track, or other audible means, but rather by a digital stopwatch that corresponds to markers in the score. The result is a completely fluid and elastic sense of time, with individual event streams functioning as simultaneities rather than synchronizations, allowing greater interpretive and creative freedom to the performer. The third stream (ahem, of data) for each performer consists of vocalizations, derived from a broken down translation of the Wikipedia article Duration (philosophy): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duration_(philosophy) into the International Phonetic Alphabet and drastically fragmented/redistributed between each part, with related syllabic groups from each sentence scaled proportionally to the duration of the corresponding event stream. These vocalizations are always obscured/distorted, and assimilated into the texture as abstract timbral coloring rather than tangible semantic content.

for more information, please visit www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

…durat(A)ions: “broken landscape” (World Premiere Concert Preview, first 9 minutes)

World Premiere, March 21, 2014
Eastman School of Music, Kilbourn Hall

HD Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSRjKcoRLWw

Score: http://www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com/music.php

Double Concerto (2014) for Two Horns and Chamber Orchestra was written between November 2013 and March 2014, premiered by Jeff Nelsen, Michael Walker, and the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble with conductor Brad Lubman on March 21, 2014. 

In 2008, I had written Mike Walker a work for horn and electronics that I now consider a turning point in my creative output, and throughout my undergraduate studies he remained one my closest friends and colleagues. The seed was planted for a horn concerto as far back as March 2011 through correspondence with Mike, and by June we had confirmed our plans to collaborate. The following year Mike suggested that I write a double concerto for himself and Jeff Nelsen, an exciting prospect and opportunity to explore the musical relationship between two hornists. We discussed the use of a "fluid" early valve horn technique that would utilize the natural partials available on each of the instruments, following in the footsteps of Ligeti's Horn Trio (1982) and Hamburg Concerto (1998-99; 2003), one of his last works. Ligeti writes about his own work on the Hamburg Concerto: "In this piece I experimented with very unusual non-harmonic sound spectra. In the small orchestra there are four natural horns, each of which can produce the 2nd to the 16th overtone. By providing each horn or group of horns with different fundamentals I was able to construct novel sound spectra from the resulting overtones. These harmonies, which had never been used before, sound "weird" in relation to harmonic spectra. I developed both "weird" consonant and dissonant harmonies, with complex beats." 

My own Double Concerto utilizes four valved horns, the two soloists accompanied by two obbligato horns in the ensemble, each freely alternating between valved and natural horn technique. In this work I sought to explore my (complex) relationship as a composer to classical repertoire, and in the same way that Ligeti draws from Brahms, I in turn take a page or two from Ligeti's book, among others. Throughout my creative life, perhaps no other composer has had such a strong an influence on me; he was the first living composer I became aware of, and I was immediately fascinated by his music. While living in Hamburg from 2010-11 I had the opportunity to study with a number of his former students and close colleagues, including Manfred Stahnke who helped me begin to raise many important questions in regard to my own creative process. I like to think of this work as a return of sorts after several years questioning the relevancy of pitch as a larger artistic dilemma; what is it about pitch that we as composers, performers, and listeners gravitate towards, perhaps above all else? We acknowledge music as organized sound, and thus all intentionally organized sound may be considered music. Yet, I find that the majority of composers, even today, remain fixated on this musical parameter more than any other. In the last three years I have quite intentionally been working to neutralize definite pitch and harmony in my works, favoring the exploration of nearly all other musical parameters and inharmonic spectra. For me, the horn is an instrument that is simultaneously very powerful and yet somehow still extremely fragile and organic in character. In being confronted with a musical situation featuring two horn soloists, I was faced to deal head-on with the issue of pitch within the context of my own musical language. 

Many thanks both to Brad Lubman and Jeff Nelsen, without whom this undertaking would not have been possible. This commission was funded in part by the Meir Rimon Commissioning Assistance Program of the International Horn Society.

Double Concerto (2014) for Two Horns and Chamber Orchestra

antistasis 1 (2014) for Ensemble Nikel
by Jason Thorpe Buchanan

Tzlil Meudcan International Festival and Summer Course for New Music Performance and Composition

Patrick Stadler, saxophone
Brian Archinal, percussion
Antoine Françoise, piano

World Premiere: Tel Aviv, Israel - July 10, 2014

antistasis for tenor saxophone, percussion, and piano, written for Ensemble Nikel, was commissioned by the Tzlil Meudcan International Contemporary Music Festival. The Ancient Greek word ἀντίστασις (antístasis), meaning opposition, is defined as a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase in a different or contrary sense. This concept is translated into sound through the repetition of a small number of musical gestures, or objects, that are continually recurring and recontextualized so as to contribute to the composite in a different way. There is a stark structural division halfway through the work where the trio begins to play in strict rhythmic unison, with formulaic durations derived from simple mathematical relationships that become increasingly complex. With each repetition of the rhythmic cycle, the space between cycles increases, while material from the first half of the work gradually penetrates the gaps in the formula until it deteriorates completely. The ensemble members drift apart from one another with complete temporal independence until another structural pillar gives way to a recapitulation of sorts, presenting the original material through the lens of having experienced the abrasive, cyclical material preceding it.

antistasis 1 (2014) for Ensemble Nikel

oggetti I (Omaggio a Sciarrino) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan was written June 2-5, 2014 in New York, NY for Chamber Music Campania as composer-in-residence, and premiered by the Fiati 5 wind quintet in Lucera, Italy on June 25, 2014. This is the first movement of a larger cycle of works for wind quintet exploring concise musical objects, gestures, and formal structures. While composing this work, I was concurrently finishing antistasis for Ensemble Nikel and composing very rapidly to complete both commissions. Many concepts and compositional devices are shared between the two works, although there is no explicitly shared material. The Ancient Greek word ἀντίστασις (antístasis), meaning opposition, is defined as a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase in a different or contrary sense. In the work for Nikel, this concept is translated into sound through the repetition of a small number of musical gestures, or objects, that are continually recurring and recontextualized so as to contribute to the composite in a different way. oggetti I functions in a similar manner, drawing upon extremely limited materials that are reconfigured in various ways, something like a musical jigsaw puzzle.

Alice Jones, flute
Lauren Blackerby, oboe
Ben Hauser, clarinet
Michael Walker, horn
Christina Dioguardi, bassoon

Recorded June 24, 2014 in Lucera, Italy
Mixed by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Remastered by Jason Thorpe Buchanan May 30, 2021

oggetti 1 (2014) for wind quintet

 "Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy" written in 2012, electronics completed May 7, 2014. The version with electronics was premiered by the [Switch~ Ensemble] on June 2 at the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival.

A recording session from Nov. 2013 will be released with the completed electronics soon!

**The complete score can be viewed at the following link: jasonthorpebuchanan.com/asymptoticflux/page1.html

“Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy” was written over a three month period while traveling and hitchhiking throughout Europe, surrounding time spent attending at the IRCAM Manifeste Festival in Paris and the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. As one might imagine, composing with pencil and paper while constantly on the move can be rather cumbersome, having only short periods of time available to focus, and often taking place in awkward workspaces like cafes, restaurants, hostels, and the apartments of my various hosts. Most of these environments were quite busy and chaotic spaces. This situation presented a challenge after having spent most of my compositional activity to date in an academic setting with a piano or other musical equipment readily available.

My original intent when I set out was to explore the timbral possibilities of the bass clarinet, utilizing a variety of techniques to produce complex soundscapes and microtonal sonorities that would provide germinal material for the work while unifying the ensemble. In addition to the sonorities that are worked out through sampling and spectral analysis of multiphonics, additional pitch content is generated through an acoustic analogue to a process known in electronic music as “single-sideband modulation,” resulting in a series of combination tones made by adding two frequencies (for instance, a bass clarinet tone and an open scordatura string of the cello), to one another, producing a series that grows exponentially (i.e. 100Hz+200Hz=300Hz, 200Hz+300Hz=500Hz, etc.).

The title comes from an arguably conceptual device: the low E-flat that simultaneously pervades the work and is non-existent. I imagine that the ensemble is always reaching towards this E-flat as a point of centricity, but never quite arrive; analogous to an asymptote, as it approaches infinity. Entropy can be described as the “measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system,” or the “tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.” (source: American Heritage Dictionary). Taking some poetic liberties in reducing the scientific definition of “entropy” to simply a unit of measurement for chaos, one might say that this work conveys a state of high entropy in music, in stark contrast both to my previous work and to the classical tradition itself. This is a characteristic that I feel reflects not only specific elements of the compositional process, but also the result of the technical demands made on the performers, as well as my state of mind throughout the creation of this work.

- Jason Thorpe Buchanan

Video (without electronics): www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMel9NUt30s&feature=plcp

OSSIA New Music Concert, Eastman School of Music - Oct. 4, 2012
Madison Greenstone, amplified bass clarinet
Lauren Cauley, amplified violin
Kelsey Farr, amplified viola
Julia Nilsen, amplified cello

For more information, please visit: www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy (with electronics)

Emergent Phenomena (2023) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
for electric guitar, alto saxophone, bass trombone, and generative electronics
TACETi Ensemble - IntAct Festival
December 24, 2023 - Bangkok Art and Culture Centre

Emergent Phenomena for the TACETi Ensemble was composed in November of 2023, following the development of a sophisticated system for real-time structural analysis of live microphone input. A trio for alto saxophone, trombone, and electric guitar, the electronics are entirely generative, using a self-training machine learning system. A clustering algorithm alongside an index of data from rapid analysis searches for temporal points of spectral self-similarity across all three microphone inputs. When patterns in harmonic spectra, amplitude, and other musical parameters are recognized, the system gradually learns from what it hears and classifies these sonorities to create a temporal map of musical ‘objects’ in the work. This perpetually growing store of data is used to respond to the musicians accordingly with generative material. Four layers of generative electronics take place: Each “novel” sound that the computer perceives is immediately recorded into a series of perpetually recording buffers, which are categorized and written to disk. When the computer perceives a match between past and present, it retrieves the samples written at each point in the past to perform a variety of manipulations, based upon what is heard in the present moment. Secondly, based on the amount of time that has elapsed since the matching sample was taken, how many times it has occurred, and the spectral and musical characteristics of each “object”, the computer will combine discrete pre-recorded samples to generate a composite sound in response. Thirdly, each of the three microphone signals are processed according to perceived patterns and sonic data, such as amplitude, density of musical activity, or frequency spectra. Lastly, a variety of other processes are performed both on the input from the musicians, and from the sounds generated by the system itself. In each moment, this may result in new material similar to what is performed by the musicians, or new material in stark contrast to what it perceives, a dynamic, mercurial system which is learning and changing with each passing moment.
This work was conceptualized while recovering from an injury in the Summer of 2023 outside of Berlin. Inspired by the lasting neurological effects this injury had on my body, which was contorting itself to protect my spine from further injury, I was struck by the behavior of my own human body as a complex system that in fact, I had little control over. Correspondingly, I felt renewed interest in developing new systems of interactivity between human musicians and machines. My goal was to create a work that does not rely on temporal synchronicity between electronics and the musicians, such as a click track or precise soundfile triggering, nor sensors and gestural tracking, but rather a system which truly responds to the spontaneous and nuanced details of the musical material itself, and the ways in which these sounds unfold over time to create complex networks. – Jason Thorpe Buchanan

“The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole…Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained.” ― George Dyson

More at jasonthorpebuchanan.com

Emergent Phenomena (2023) - TACETi Ensemble

HUNGER Part III, Scene 2, m.61
A new multimedia opera in four parts by composer Jason Thorpe Buchanan & librettist Darcie Dennigan

Premiered by the [Switch~ Ensemble] on the MATA Interval Series, DiMenna Center, NYC - May 15, 2015
Sophia Burgos, soprano
Lucy Dhegrae, soprano
Jeff Gavett, baritone
Daniel Bassin, conductor
Jason Thorpe Buchanan, composer, artistic, and technical director

Knut Hamsun’s novel Sult is a point of departure for a libretto by award-winning poet Darcie Dennigan, exploring themes of psychological decay, irrationality, and self-destruction. Oumenos is a starving and delusional young writer who is unwilling to compromise his work even as his intellect and body gradually deteriorate.  He is split in two; the baritone and soprano form a composite, each depicting aspects of his inner/outer selves and suppressed madness. His hunger and self-disgust lead him to consider stealing bread, and to thoughts of self-mutilation. He despises his baseness. He is a dog. He is drawn to Ylajali (mezzo-soprano), a young girl who appears to him in various manifestations. At the bloodbank, Ylajali draws his blood. At the spermbank, she coaxes his orgasm. In a butchershop, Ylajali as countergirl displays the meat before him. He fights his coarseness and hungers to appear presentable, normal. He finds himself examining her on the counter as if she were meat. Humiliated by his inner self, and by Ylajali, he in turn humiliates her. He has again become, in his mind, a dog.

The complete opera in four parts is being composed over the course of 2014-2017 via residencies and workshops throughout the U.S. and Europe. The first completed scene of the opera (Part III, Sc. 1) was selected for the Internationales Musikinstut Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop and premiered August, 2014 in an acoustic version for three singers, alto flute, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello. This ensemble was augmented by the inclusion of electric guitar, baritone saxophone, live electronics, and video projection of both live capture and pre-recorded film for the L.A. premiere of Part III, Scenes 1 & 2 at The Industry's "First Take", and the [Switch~ Ensemble]'s NYC premiere on the MATA Interval Series at the DiMenna Center.

The score, electronics, and video for Part 1 will be finalized during a three-month residency appointed by the City Council of Bergen, Norway at USF Verftet in Fall of 2015. Our vision is a multimedia opera whose musical and dramaturgical narrative is driven not by dialogue or action, but rather psychological and musical states and situations that integrate video projection and electronics seamlessly, contextualizing the extremely fragmented music and text. While obfuscating much of the semantic content, this fragmentation and oscillation between intelligibility and unintelligibility demands a focus on phenomenological qualities and filmic subtlety, with physical, aural, and visual cues indicating context for the behavior of the singers and the interaction with their digital surroundings.

More information and synopsis: www.hungeropera.com

HUNGER Part III, Scene 2, (m.61) - the [Switch~ Ensemble], MATA Interval Series

World premiere of "Second Study for Alto Saxophone, Video, and Electronics: pulp" performed by Matt Evans during the World Saxophone Saxophone Congress in Strasbourg, France on July 13, 2015

This work was co-commissioned by Matt Evans, Casey Grev, Emily Loboda, Marta Tiesenga, Sean Fredenburg, and Sumner Truax for regional premieres TBA.

Score and more info available at http://www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com/music.php

Video with live processing coming soon, a sample of the video processing is available here: https://vimeo.com/136739543

Second Study for Alto Saxophone, Video, and Electronics: pulp

HUNGER: Part III, Sc. 1 (m.48, Clip 4) - August 14th & 15th, 2014
A new multimedia opera in four parts by composer Jason Thorpe Buchanan & librettist Darcie Dennigan

Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop with Ensemble Interface, soprano S.Aston, mezzo-soprano B.K.Majewska, baritone S.Storck. 
Musical director/conductor Stephan Schreiber, stage director L.Steier, Dramaturg P.Hahn, composer H.Thomalla, and vocal instructor D.Michel-Dansac.

Knut Hamsun’s novel "Sult" is a point of departure for a libretto by award-winning poet Darcie Dennigan, exploring themes of psychological decay, irrationality, and self-destruction. Oumenos is a starving and delusional young writer who is unwilling to compromise his work even as his intellect and body gradually deteriorate. He is split in two; the baritone and soprano form a composite, each depicting aspects of his inner/outer selves and suppressed madness. His hunger and self-disgust lead him to consider stealing bread, and to thoughts of self-mutilation. He despises his baseness. He is a dog. He is drawn to Ylajali, a young girl who appears to him in various manifestations – her physical existence and a distortion/projection in his mind. At the bloodbank, Ylajali draws his blood. At the spermbank, she coaxes his orgasm. In a butchershop, Ylajali as countergirl displays the meat before him. He fights his coarseness and hungers to appear presentable, normal. He finds himself examining her on the counter as if she were meat. Humiliated by his inner self, and by Ylajali, he in turn humiliates her. He has again become, in his mind, a dog.

The first completed scene (Part III, Sc. 1) was selected for the Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop and premiered August, 2014 in an acoustic version for three singers, a.flute, b.clarinet, perc, pno, vln, and vc. This ensemble was later augmented by the inclusion of e-guitar, bari sax, electronics, and video projection. Scenes 1 & 2 were premiered in a concert version with electronics at The Industry’s FIRST TAKE in Los Angeles on February 21, 2015. LA Times critic Mark Swed called Hunger (Part III) “elliptical” – “Hunger is a kind of training session in mental disintegration… An ungodly opera needs ugly music, singers who produce primal sounds, an electric guitar that sounds scraped raw, a wailing orchestra effects, cuts the ear like a knife. Buchanan delivers.” The first complete staged performance of "Hunger (Part III, Scenes 1 & 2)" with live video processing was premiered by the [Switch~ Ensemble] on May 15, 2016 as part of MATA’s Interval Series at the DiMenna Center in NYC.

Our vision is a multimedia opera whose musical and dramaturgical narrative is driven not by dialogue or action, but rather psychological and musical states seamlessly entwining electronics and real-time video capture of liver performance against pre-recorded film, with multiple projection surfaces and electronics. At its core, Hunger evokes the deeply “internal” quality of Hamsun’s Sult, while reason and semantic content are obfuscated through the fragmentation of both music and text. Oscillation between intelligibility and unintelligibility demand focus on phenomenological qualities and filmic subtlety, inviting participants to explore and engage with a multiplicity of potential narrative threads played out as contradictory physical and digital manifestations occurring simultaneously. Because its true subject is, as Hamsun described, “the delicate fluctuations of a sensitive soul, the strange, peculiar life of the mind,” "Hunger" invites participants to construct and engage with a multiplicity of scenarios and readings. Hunger breaks with operatic conventions by eschewing grandeur and dramaturgical coherence in order to explore the volatile city of one man’s psyche. The edge of comprehensibility itself becomes a means of structural integrity, reflecting the central themes of deterioration and fragility.

More information and synopsis: www.hungeropera.com

HUNGER Part III, Scene 1 (m.56) - Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop

soliloquios del viento (2016) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
six singers (s, ms, ct, t, bar, bs) and eight instrumentalists (b.fl, b.cl, t.sx, pno, perc, vln, vla, vc)
Commissioned by the Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles 	     	
Premiered September 9, 2016, Asnières-sur-Oise, FR
Talea Ensemble & EXAUDI, James Baker, conductor

"soliloquios del viento" was commissioned by Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles, written in August of 2016 and premiered by the Talea Ensemble & EXAUDI on September 9, 2016, conducted by James Baker. This fourteen-minute work is a meditation on eight poems of Pablo Neruda, reflecting love, distance, and despair. The six singers are set against eight instrumentalists whose fragile and often voiceless sonorities gently color and obscure the murmuring of the text and pointillisic vocal material. The Spanish text is predominantly unintelligible, with the content of Neruda's words instead conjured by the composite texture. He writes of two lovers, their romance characterized by abrasion – a rendezvous between two scorched, ascetic souls, who consume and destroy one another, entangled yet divided by both sublime transfiguration and inexorable chaos. Neruda’s texts evoke not only the conflict between darkness and light in both persons, but through this lens, the experience of being confronted with the subjectivity of another’s consciousness. That otherness is manifest in lurid, destructive passions, revealing mutual incoherence, frailty, and sophism beyond endurance. Each poem seems to present discrete, parallel scenarios, some in which each is awoken by their confrontation rather than destroyed – in others suffering to the point of intolerable anguish and desolation. Eroticism and sunderance run throughout Neruda’s powerful imagery, his lover depicted as an enemy with whom he pleads for voice – who has disgraced their love. For the poet, love is the sole means with which two people may “weather” one another. A source of both euphoria and utter devastation, there is a vastness that is evoked in his texts, an attempt to span immeasurable time and distance. Each braves the other, an intimacy and corrosive embrace that both breaks and absolves each person.


More information at www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

soliloquios del viento (2016) - Talea Ensemble & EXAUDI - James Baker, conductor

European premiere by Insomnio
Ulrich Pöhl, conductor
Recorded live at TivoliVredenburg (Hertz)
Utrecht, September 12, 2015

Video here: https://vimeo.com/204631263

*2014 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award
*2014 Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize awarded by the Eastman School of Music
*2015 Nomination for Gaudeamus Prize, Netherlands

"Asymptotic Flux: Second Study in Entropy (Static Foxy Lump: [II] Second Nudist Tyre Pony)" was written between February and April of 2013 for Alarm Will Sound as the second work in a cycle utilizing shared musical objects and compositional devices. The first, for amplified bass clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, was composed over a three-month period while hitchhiking throughout Europe, surrounding time spent in Paris and Darmstadt. The experience of frantically seeking opportunities to compose while on the move proved challenging, due to the awkward workspaces available to me such as cafes, restaurants, hostels, and apartments of various hosts. These were noisy and chaotic spaces, influencing the character of the music, as well as the title.

"Asymptotic Flux" describes an arguably conceptual device: the low E-flat that simultaneously pervades the work and is non-existent. In the quartet, I imagined that the ensemble is always reaching towards this E-flat as a point of centricity, but never quite arriving, analogous to an asymptote as it approaches infinity. In "Second Study", the low E-flat is finally provided by a contrabass subharmonic that both initiates and concludes the work, scarcely audible as a definite pitch, unstable, and on the lower threshold of human hearing. The parenthetical subtitle, an anagram of the title proper, alludes to the structural design, borrowing musical snapshots from the quartet while fragmenting and re-contextualizing them throughout stages proportionally related to the 19.6 Hz E-flat in both temporal and harmonic centricity.

I had set out to explore the timbral possibilities of the bass clarinet, utilizing a variety of techniques to produce rich, complex soundscapes and microtonal sonorities providing germinal material for the work while unifying the ensemble. In addition to spectral analysis of bass clarinet multiphonics in various states, pitch content is generated by a process known in electronic music as "single-sideband modulation," resulting in a series of combination tones with intervals that grow exponentially. Instrumental techniques in this work are employed explicitly to destabilize or distort the timbral qualities of each instrument, coloring the sound to modulate or destabilize the written pitch material.
The last element regarding organization of pitch material revolves around the tuning of the cello to the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 11th partials of a virtual low E-flat fundamental (19.6 Hz, slightly sharp), which is now extended to the contrabass by halving the 3rd and 7th partials. This allows the execution of unique sonorities very rapidly and with precision through the use of natural harmonics. These three verticality types are often superimposed upon one another, with resultant voicings sometimes similar to an "E-type" symmetrical hexachord possessing interval content that I've become partial to (no pun intended).
Entropy can be described as the "measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system," the "loss of information in a transmitted message," the "tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity," or the "inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society" -- taking poetic liberties in reducing the thermodynamic property of "entropy" to simply a unit of measurement for chaos, one might say that this work conveys a state of high entropy in music, thus reflecting the compositional process, the result of the technical demands made on the performers, as well as my state of mind throughout the creation of these works.

For more information, please visit: jasonthorpebuchanan.com

Asymptotic Flux: Second Study in Entropy - Insomnio, Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2015

soliloquios del viento (2016; rev. 2017) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
version for sextet and electronics (excerpt)
Premiered July 2, 2017, Valencia International Performance Academy (VIPA) & Festival, Spain

Ensemble Interface
Gregor Schulenburg, bass flute
Andrea Nagy, bass clarinet
Guillaume Faraut, violin
Christophe Mathias, cello
Anna D'Errico, piano
Agnieszka Koprowska-Born, percussion
Carlos Amat, conductor

Audio Engineers & Camera Operators: Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie, Hallie Smith
Electronics: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Mix: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Video: Jason Thorpe Buchanan

Many thanks to the contributors of source material for the electronics: Matt Evans (tenor saxophone), Victor Lowrie (viola), Kirsten Ashley Wiest, Cindy Giron, Jake Bellissimo, Javier Rodriguez, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Diego Jiménez Tamame, Miggy Torres

Excerpt: 9 minutes 35 seconds
Total duration: 17 minutes

soliloquios del viento was commissioned by Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles, written in August of 2016 and premiered by the Talea Ensemble & EXAUDI on September 9, 2016, conducted by James Baker. This fourteen-minute work is a meditation on eight poems of Pablo Neruda, reflecting love, distance, and despair. Six singers are set against eight instrumentalists whose fragile and often voiceless sonorities gently color and obscure the murmuring of the text and pointillistic vocal material. The Spanish text is predominantly unintelligible, with the content of Neruda's words instead conjured by the composite texture. He writes of two lovers, their romance characterized by abrasion – a rendezvous between two scorched, ascetic souls, who consume and destroy one another, entangled yet divided by both sublime transfiguration and inexorable chaos. This revised version for sextet and electronics was completed in May 2017 for Ensemble Interface’s premiere at the 2017 VIPA Festival. 
Neruda’s texts evoke not only the conflict between darkness and light in both persons, but through this lens, the experience of being confronted with the subjectivity of another’s consciousness. That otherness is manifest in lurid, destructive passions, revealing mutual incoherence, frailty, and sophism beyond endurance. Each poem seems to present discrete, parallel scenarios, some in which each is awoken by their confrontation rather than destroyed – in others suffering to the point of intolerable anguish and desolation. Eroticism and sunderance run throughout Neruda’s powerful imagery, his lover depicted as an enemy with whom he pleads for voice – who has disgraced their love. For the poet, love is the sole means with which two people may “weather” one another. A source of both euphoria and utter devastation, there is a vastness that is evoked in his texts, an attempt to span immeasurable time and distance. Each braves the other, an intimacy and corrosive embrace that both breaks and absolves each person.

Original Version commissioned by the Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles for six singers (s, ms, ct, t, bar, bs) and eight instrumentalists (b.fl, b.cl, t.sx, pno, perc, vln, vla, vc)

More information at jasonthorpebuchanan.com

soliloquios del viento (rev. 2017) - Ensemble Interface (excerpt)

dou•ble•think

: a simultaneous acceptance of or belief in two contradictory ideas; thought marked by the acceptance of gross contradictions and falsehoods, especially when used as a technique of political or self-indoctrination.

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink." - George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949)

First Study for Alto Saxophone: doublethink (Part I; 2012) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan was commissioned by Michael Rene Torres to be premiered at the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Convention in Tempe, Arizona on March 15, 2012. The work was completed January 12, 2012 as the first segment of a larger harmonic blueprint for a series of five to six works for solo Alto Saxophone.

For more information on the composer or to request a score for performance, please visit http://www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

First Study for Alto Saxophone: doublethink (2012)

World premiere by the Talea Ensemble, Aug. 1 2017 at the TIME SPANS Festival in NYC. Jeffrey Means, conductor.

Recorded by Caley Monahon-Ward
Mixed by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Remastered by Jason Thorpe Buchanan May 30, 2021

Video recording: https://vimeo.com/245320082
more at jasonthorpebuchanan.com

PSYCHASTHENIA B: PANIC ARCHITECTURE 
Psychasthenia is defined as “a group of neuroses characterized by phobias, obsessions, compulsions, or excessive anxiety”, imagining a new cycle of works for ensemble and various immersive media environments. During the performance of each work in the cycle, reservoirs of media files are created, retrieved, re-organized, and composited against one another, creating temporal, aural, or visual dissonances between past and present actions – events unfolding on stage and in media generated in real-time. The commingling of fluctuating chronologies creates temporal instability, challenges the mutability of memory, and proposes an alternative, speculative engagement with bodily-lived time. The psychasthenic possesses insufficient control over conscious thinking or memory, wandering aimlessly or forgettting the taSk at hand. Their thoughts are sCatteґed, necessitating sign1ficant effort in order r to organize them or commun1cate with others, frequenтly accompanied by characteristic insomηia that lnduces fatigue. Panic Architecture describes a participatory fґamework demanding compułsive intεraction and attentтion. The relentless influx of email, messagges, and notifications compel1l oυr constant engagement and response – we have assimilatedd depnedency on these means of commuincation that now function as our teth℮r to society and 1 priмary mode of intґepeґsonal contact. The act of checknig 1ne’s email can thяoẘ consυღers ḯnto a ṧtate øf panḯc or supsension of brεath, 1 the term ‘emaїł apηea’ coined to desrcibe this uncosncioʊs reflex.,, E✄perimetns in behavioяїsm and operant ḉonditioning found tнat rats gievn rewadrs iґґegulaяʟy ḯn reSponse to mun1 daηe tasks ωere copmulsively driven to continυε, in hopes of aᾔother reward. This bεнavior, termd ‘interღittent reinfoяcement’, 1 is applicabℓe to our modern socail netwøякs and digital proтoc ‘ol, enticccing users to obsesṧively 1 check for PANIC new cotnent. Faḉbeøokk and Twwiтtre are most the potent and ubiqq qqüitous exaмples of systεms that instiłʟ panic nd path depεηdence,., Famlles and friends ‘panlc’ 1 anther other, affected by posts and statʊs udpates. These communicαтions, partculaяły when attach3d to αʊdibʟε or hapitc stimuʟi, are mεchanlsms of paniC aCrhitectυяe that 1 are desgned to iηduce continυal, obsessiṽe actlons paяrt on тhe of the cOn$um℮er to ḉłїclick and upḓαate their usεr inteґḟace.,,’ Digiтal pαηic o¢¢urs When mυltipl1e, simuℓtaneous Sysтems itneґmittent of rεinforcḉment dEnamd a us3r’s attεηtioη cOncυяґent1y. Ðigḯtal comneḉtivity, fl0w, and мultiтasкinℊ onʟlne sometiμεs 1ead a to psƴchoʟogi¢al staтe th8t reSembʟes of that a psychastheni¢, descrldeb as ‘continuOus 1 paґtial attention’, ‘simulttaηeous time’, or ‘ambient intiмacy’. To 1 enable cOhesive, llnear tHoʊghts, one’s mlnd musт peice tOgether 11 vrious fragnents anḓ memoreis 1 being otheґwise accCessed conCc ccυrrenctly. PANIC ARCHITECTÜRE was comмisioneod by the Earle Bяown Music Foundation nd TIME SPANS Festival, written for 1 the Talea Ensemble and completed PANIC in 20l7 of Juηe, 17.
– JaSon ThOrpe BuChanan

PANIC ARCHITECTURE (2017, with intro) Talea Ensemble, TIME SPANS Festival

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY (2017) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan

Commissioned by Fondation Royaumont and premiered by Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble

Mimi Doulton, soprano
Kathryn Williams, bass flute/flute
Madison Greenstone, bass clarinet/contra
Michiko Saiki, piano
Alina Traine, harp
Pauline Vuillerme, violin
Nina Kazourian, viola
Elsa Dorbath, cello
Victor Hocquet, percussion
Zach Seely, conductor
Jason Thorpe Buchanan, electronics

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY was commissioned by Fondation Royaumont and composed between April and August of 2017 for the Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble's instrumentation of soprano and mixed ensemble, with electronics. The work is structured around two pages of text, culled from over 18,000 words generated by the DadaDodo engine, a class of program known as "dissociators" that "analyses texts for word probabilities, generating random sentences based on that." The result is sometimes nonsensical, but often reveals intriguing alternative meanings or associations. These fragments were then composed into a linear blueprint, using the resulting speech patterns as a temporal framework. ANT was developed by Latour and others as an analytical tool to map and attempt to explain relationships and interactions between human and non-human 'actors', exploring how material-semiotic networks are formed, hold together, or fall apart. These networks are precarious, in that the exchange between nodes must be repeatedly 'performed' or the network will dissolve. In some ways, the transhumanist movement embodies ANT, which suggests that all nodes within a social network are 'actors', whether human or machine — a boundary that is increasingly blurred. Mutual interaction between these nodes creates a feedback loop, in which the technology we have developed begins to influence and change the human 'actors' participating in this system. Developments in technology and digital communication increasingly influence not only our relationships with one another, but our behavior as individuals and our interaction with the world. We are forced to consider to what degree we allow technology to mediate our presence with other humans, fundamentally challenging the ways in which we think about consciousness and our identity as human beings. As stated by Benjamin Piekut: "Networks are never simply language, never simply sound, never simply personal contacts, never simply practices and institutions, but rather a messy mix of all types of things".

More info at jasonthorpebuchanan.com

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY (2017) - Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble

First improvisation with my homemade amplified box built using 2x4' (3/4") wooden planks, metal screws, hooks, tacks/studs, various springs of different weights and sizes, three contact microphones, and two condenser microphones.  

If you have a short attention span and/or love bows, skip to 3:29 or later!

This instrument was built for my first percussion quartet, a work in progress, (commissioned by Iktus Percussion), and will be used alongside a variety of prepared snare drums, kick drums, bass drums, congas, wooden and metal simantras, brake drums, cymbals, wind gongs, tam-tams, singing bowls, drinking glasses, bamboo and lightbulb chimes, glass bottles, garbage cans, thunder sheets, roto-toms, bongos, hi-hats, brass sheets, finger cymbals, thundersheets, metal chains, ratchets, guiros, coins, chopsticks, knitting needles, bows, mallets, and triangle beaters.

These recordings will be incorporated into a catalogue of sounds including improvisations with each of the above instruments, which will then be sequenced using both intuitive and algorithmic processes in computer software before transcribing and developing the material into precise musical notation.

This recording has not been processed or modified in any way, the raw audio was fed from the three contact microphones and two condensers, and simply panned as they are positioned and synchronized with the video.  No reverb, delays, equalization, or other adjustments were made other than limiting the very loud attacks, such as those made with the drinking glass, and boosting the overall volume.

The finished work is scheduled to be premiered in New York City in 2013.

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPJb1_bouLQ&feature=autoshare

For more information, please visit: http://www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

"Amplified Box" Improvisation 1.0 (Study for Percussion Quartet) - Jason Thorpe Buchanan, composer

soliloquios del viento (2016; rev. 2017) by Jason Thorpe Buchanan
version for sextet and electronics
October 19, 2019, TRANSIT Festival 20-21, Leuven, Belgium

Ensemble Interface
Bettina Danielle Berger, bass flute
Hugo Queirós, bass clarinet
William Overcash, violin
Christophe Mathias, cello
Anna D'Errico, piano
Joao Carlos Pacheco, percussion
Maurice Donnet-Monay, conductor

Electronics: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Audio Engineer: Simon Vander Beken
Mix: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Video: Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Remastered by Jason Thorpe Buchanan June 1, 2021

Many thanks to the contributors of source material for the electronics: Matt Evans (tenor saxophone), Victor Lowrie (viola), Kirsten Ashley Wiest, Cindy Giron, Jake Bellissimo, Javier Rodriguez, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Diego Jiménez Tamame, Miggy Torres

soliloquios del viento was commissioned by Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles, written in August of 2016 and premiered by the Talea Ensemble & EXAUDI on September 9, 2016, conducted by James Baker. This fourteen-minute work is a meditation on eight poems of Pablo Neruda, reflecting love, distance, and despair. Six singers are set against eight instrumentalists whose fragile and often voiceless sonorities gently color and obscure the murmuring of the text and pointillistic vocal material. The Spanish text is predominantly unintelligible, with the content of Neruda's words instead conjured by the composite texture. He writes of two lovers, their romance characterized by abrasion – a rendezvous between two scorched, ascetic souls, who consume and destroy one another, entangled yet divided by both sublime transfiguration and inexorable chaos. This revised version for sextet and electronics was completed in May 2017 for Ensemble Interface’s premiere at the 2017 VIPA Festival.
Neruda’s texts evoke not only the conflict between darkness and light in both persons, but through this lens, the experience of being confronted with the subjectivity of another’s consciousness. That otherness is manifest in lurid, destructive passions, revealing mutual incoherence, frailty, and sophism beyond endurance. Each poem seems to present discrete, parallel scenarios, some in which each is awoken by their confrontation rather than destroyed – in others suffering to the point of intolerable anguish and desolation. Eroticism and sunderance run throughout Neruda’s powerful imagery, his lover depicted as an enemy with whom he pleads for voice – who has disgraced their love. For the poet, love is the sole means with which two people may “weather” one another. A source of both euphoria and utter devastation, there is a vastness that is evoked in his texts, an attempt to span immeasurable time and distance. Each braves the other, an intimacy and corrosive embrace that both breaks and absolves each person.

Original Version commissioned by the Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles for six singers (s, ms, ct, t, bar, bs) and eight instrumentalists (b.fl, b.cl, t.sx, pno, perc, vln, vla, vc).

More information at jasonthorpebuchanan.com

soliloquios del viento (2016; rev. 2017) - Ensemble Interface, TRANSIT Festival

Jason Thorpe Buchanan is an American composer of operatic, orchestral, chamber, electroacoustic, and intermedia works which explore fragmentation, multiplicity, intelligibility, behavior, and the integration of live performance with technology. He is Artistic Director of the [Switch~ Ensemble] and Artistic Associate/Lecturer in New Media and Digital Technologies for Music at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, Germany in the Hybrid Music Lab. He served from 2018-2022 as Department Chair/Lecturer in Composition, Theory, and Electroacoustic Music at the College of Music, Mahidol University in Thailand, 2022 Interim Managing Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri, and 2020 Visiting Lecturer in Composition/Interim Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. His works have been described as “an unearthly collage of sounds”, “sharply-edged”, and “free jazz gone wrong—in a good way.”
        Jason is the recipient of a 2010-11 Fulbright Fellowship at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany as a visiting scholar, commissions from the Mizzou International Composers Festival for Alarm Will Sound (2013), Iktus Percussion (2013), the International Horn Society for the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble, soloists Jeff Nelsen, Michael Walker, and conductor Brad Lubman (2014), Ensemble Nikel/Tzlil Meudcan (Israel, 2014), the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra as winner of Iron Composer (2014), the NY Virtuoso Singers (2015), the Earle Brown Music Foundation for the Talea Ensemble and TIME SPANS Festival (NYC, 2017), the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium for the TACETi Ensemble and augmented conductor (2019), and for TACETi and extended no-input mixer (2020), a fellowship and commissions from Royaumont for the Talea Ensemble+EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (2016), and the Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble (2017), a German/American Fulbright Commission (2011), the Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize (2014), two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (2014 & 2015), an American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant (2015), 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Brush Creek Foundation (Wyoming), and 2015 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet/City Council of Bergen, Norway.
        As a nominee for the 2015 Gaudeamus Prize, three works were presented by Insomnio, the New European Ensemble, and Slagwerk Den Haag at Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL). His works walkside, lost and gimme shelter (2015), commissioned by Gaudeamus for Slagwerk Den Haag and by Eklekto Percussion Geneva, both explore the structural intersection of precise physical gestures, fragile sounds, and speech alongside live audio and video processing. As 2018 Artist-In-Residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, Switzerland, he developed a new, interactive processing environment for surface, tension (2018), responding directly to the discrete physical gestures of performers and governing the behavior of both signal processing and triggering through wearable technology, sensors, and gestural tracking. Scenes from his multimedia opera Hunger have received performances at Darmstadt (2014) with Ensemble Interface, The Industry’s FIRST TAKE in L.A. (2015) with wild Up, and the MATA Interval Series in New York City (2015) with the [Switch~ Ensemble]. “Hunger is a kind of training session in mental disintegration… An ungodly opera needs ugly music, singers who produce primal sounds, an electric guitar that sounds scraped raw, a wailing orchestra effects, cuts the ear like a knife. Buchanan delivers.” – L.A. Times
        Mentors have included Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Steven Takasugi, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Raphaël Cendo, Peter Michael Hamel, and Georges Aperghis. Jason served for three years as Executive Director of the Valencia International Performance Academy & Festival (Spain), for two years as a Curator for the San Francisco Center for New Music, as founding Director of the TICF International Academy for Young Composers, and as a Faculty Artist at the International Composition Institute of Thailand. As a doctoral student, he served as course instructor in electronic music and composition, board member of OSSIA, and assistant conductor for the Musica Nova Ensemble with conductor Brad Lubman at the Eastman School of Music. 
        As a guest composer, conductor, and lecturer, he is widely sought internationally at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, TRANSIT Festival (Belgium), TIME SPANS Festival (NYC), Chamber Music Campania (Italy), the Eastman School of Music, University of Miami Frost School of Music, Music Science Share Educators Conference (Shanghai), Queens New Music Festival, MATA, the Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Bergen Center for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK, Norway), and dozens of Universities throughout the United States. He holds a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, and degrees in Composition and Music Technology from San José State University (BM & BA, 2008) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (MM, 2010), where he taught courses in composition and theory as a graduate student. Current projects include "Ecology of Disruption" for Line Upon Line, a percussion trio with generative electronics, lights, and video, an immersive collaborative work for the [Switch~ Ensemble] at EMPAC, and development of new systems for gestural tracking and interactivity within the Hybrid Music Lab, Dresden. 
www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com

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