Ensemble Dal Niente, Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, soprano, Michael Lewanski, conductor, Dan Nichols, recording engineer
Recorded on portrait album Without Words by Ensemble Dal Niente. Carrier Records 022, 2013.

Without Words for soprano, 11 instruments & electronics

I was inspired to compose "Kettle Fallen In Love" upon seeing a painting by Arsen Levonlee- an abstract, dreamlike scene of a golden kettle, gazing up into a night sky.

This is the original piano version of Kettle Fallen In Love, as premiered at the UW School of Music on June 7, 2022.

The painting: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/kettle-fallen-in-love/KAEG4XRqYvPbRA

Kettle Fallen In Love [Piano ver.]

*live recording of the premiere with Ensemble Proton Bern (01.02.2016 - Bern, CH)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG2QnvfyAyE

junkyard piece IIb - for ensemble & found objects [2015] *live recording

The Everlasting Voices

for Pierrot Ensemble.

Live recording from Atlantic Music Festival 2017

Over It

L'usage de la parole (1999) for clarinet, cello and piano

Performed at (and recorded by) Eavesdropping, London, March 16 2018.

Chikako Morishita - Etude

Duet for Violin and Cello (Electronic) 2020

String Quartet No.6

for soprano, double bass, and electronics

Anika Kildegaard - soprano
Will Yager - double bass

please continue (2020)

White Radiance TM (2020)
for voice, ensemble and electronics (12 min.)

Commissioned by Donaueschinger Musiktage for Elaine Mitchener and MAM.Manufaktur für Aktuelle Musik

"White Radiance TM" looks at the politics of skin bleaching creams, as it is elaborated upon by the Jamaican philosopher and writer Sylvia Wynter. Pushed by major Western cosmetic corporations they constitute—in Wynter's words—"the emergence of a global free-market-driven and consumer-oriented mimetic desire that is anchored to a single genre-specific Western European bourgeois model of being". By coopting the language of these commercials and putting it against Wynter's own powerful words, White Radiance (the brand name) tries to expose the mechanics of the strategies to generate this mimetic desire.

But the piece does not limit itself to a deconstructive gesture; it also seeks to reconstruct a new way of being together—"of being human as praxis", a guiding phrase in Wynter's writing. Taking Michelle M. Wright's concept of an "Epiphenomenal time" that is rooted in the now—in contrast to the notion of a linear time that is rooted in an origin and history—this piece tries to manifest what Wright calls a "horizontal interpellation" of subjective agency, rather than a "vertical interpellation" along hierarchical structures. Specifically, towards the end, the piece does not provide a synchronized score with a "master-timeline" that all performers are subjected to. Rather, it employs individual parts that are not synchronized and which encourage the performers to interpellate their musical agency through horizontal, rhizomatic negotiations among one another. These interdependencies manifest a way of moving through time collectively, rather than following a single timeline/narrative/history, that honors individual agency as something inherently dependent on one another—a praxis that can only ever be done in the making of it, not in the achieving of it.

__________
Donaueschingen, DE
October 16th, 2020

White Radiance TM

Composer from Detroit

D.M.A. University of Washington (in progress)
M.M. Manhattan School of Music
B.M. Michigan State University

Student of Reiko Füting, Richard Danielpour, Ricardo Lorenz, and Charles Ruggiero

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Joe Krycia

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