JBRH 002

Marilyn Nonken, Live from Roulette (May 23, 2016)
"Vortex Temporum Revisited" Project
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Patricia Franchini:  What is your greatest ambition in life?
Parvulesco: To become immortal… and then die.
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Patricia Franchini: It’s sad to fall asleep.  It separates people.  Even when you’re sleeping together, you’re all alone.
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"À bout de souffle" (English “out of breath”) takes its title from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film (English: Breathless).  My piece shares no direct relation to the narrative of the film, but the compositional process drew inspiration from both the (then) innovative use of jump cuts that film critic Andrew Sarris analyzed as representing “the meaninglessness of the time interval between moral decisions”, and the two quotes above.

Written for the same scordatura tuning as Grisey’s magnus opus Vortex Temporum, it was a great hurdles to compose something new in dialogue with such a monumental and personally influential work.  I focused on simultaneously highlighting and obscuring the relationship between the piano’s standard equal temperament and the four quarter-tones available.  I play with the idea of Grisey’s structural arc and the Ravel arpeggio by presenting repetitive ostinato gestures nested in sonic, resonant arcs that bloom and decay through processes of dynamics, timbre, and registral expansion – a sort of restless breathing.

À bout de souffle (2016) for piano scordatura

IMPORTANT: Please listen at a LOUD comfortable volume that makes your ear parts move a little. You should hear a lot of air shifting. (Ideally headphones or biggish bass-friendly speakers.) 


Written in close collaboration with Distractfold Ensemble, featuring: 


Rocío Bolaños - bass clarinet (w transposition pedals)
Daniel Brew - electric guitar
Linda Jankowska -  bowed kick + snare drums (drums outfitted with bridges + strings)
Christian Smith - bowed kick drum (as above)+ other percussion
Alice Purton - cello (w transposition pedals)
Sabrina Schroeder - transducers (playing bass drum, floor tom, and plywood cubes via live-manipulated sound waves through transducers).

Transducer performance interface developed with programming and design support from Josiah Oberholtzer, and from Michael Acker of the Experimentalstudio de SWR Freiburg. 

This live-performance recording was made at the 48th Internationale Ferienkurse in Darmstadt (Aug. 7th, 2016)

BONE GAMES (2016) for amplified ensemble

for soprano, double bass, and electronics

Anika Kildegaard - soprano
Will Yager - double bass

JBRH 002

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