Name: If We Could Unfreeze Time by Joseph Chiu
Duration: 7 min 36 s
Description: Written for and performed by the Dior Quartet. Recorded at Tippet Rise Art Centre in Fishtail, MT, July 10, 2021

Written for and performed by the Dior Quartet. Recorded at Tippet Rise Art Centre in Fishtail, MT, July 10, 2021

If We Could Unfreeze Time

She Wishes

Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare II (Official Soundtrack)

El Sin Nombre

Borderline

NOTE DE PROGRAMME
avec et sans feinte est une contemplation post-carnatique, une désidentification des mondes sonores qui m'habitent.

PROGRAM NOTE 
avec et sans feinte is a post-carnatic contemplation, a disidentification of the sound worlds that inhabit me.

Quatuor Bozzini
https://www.quatuorbozzini.ca
March 06, 2019 at 7:00pm
Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur - Montréal (CANADA)
Recording engineer: John Klepko

Avec et sans feinte

please listen with headphones — the beginning is very quiet!

performed by the Argus Quartet
May 6, 2019
Alice Tully Hall, New York

drip music

Performed by Standing Wave

They Sing and They Clap and They Shout 
2019 | 12'

Commissioned by Standing Wave
for alto flute, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, violoncello, and electronics

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" is based on the songs of Swedish-American labour activist Joe Hill (1879-1915). Hill was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, an international labour union founded on principles of “revolutionary industrial unionism”, and he contributed numerous protest songs to their “Little Red Songbook”. In 1915, Hill was executed for murder in Salt Lake City after a lengthy and widely-publicized trial. The IWW—and many subsequent historians—have maintained that Hill was framed, and he has since been held up as a martyr for the labour movement. After his execution by firing squad, his ashes were divided into 600 packets and sent to various branches of the IWW and their allies. The ashes were marked with the epitaph: “Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915”. 

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" incorporates many of Joe Hill’s songs, or, more specifically, many performances of his songs. The piece is peppered with transcriptions of tiny fragments from performances by Joe Glazer, Cisco Houston, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, Pete Seeger, Earl Robinson, Barbara Dane and, particularly, Swedish folk singer Finn Zetterholm (drawn from his 1969 album "Joe Hill på svenska"). 

Joe Hill travelled across America lending his voice and his songs to IWW strikes and protests. In 1912 he travelled to British Columbia where he joined the Fraser River railway strikes and composed several new songs specifically for the striking workers. These included “Where the Fraser River Flows” based on the then-popular tune “Where The River Shannon Flows” by James I. Russell. They Sing and They Clap and They Shout incorporates a recording of “Where the Fraser River Flows” by the great American folk singer and activist Utah Phillips, used here with the generous permission of his estate.

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" takes its title from Joe Hill’s most famous song “The Preacher and the Slave” in which he coined the phrase “pie in the sky”:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked how 'bout something to eat 
They will answer in voices so sweet

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay 
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" was commissioned by Standing Wave.

They Sing and They Clap and They Shout

A piece for four violins, written by me performed by Aliayta Foon-Dancoes and Lea Fetterman, during quarantine.

Ensembles In Exile

Eletronic piece, visuals by Paul MacIntyre forthcoming

Glimmering

The concept for this piece comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of words invented by John Koenig that “aims to fill a hole in the [English] language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.” The title for this
piece comes from the definition for “the meantime.”

the meantime
n. the moment of realization that your quintessential future self isn’t ever going to show up, which forces the role to fall upon the understudy, the gawky kid for whom nothing is easy, who spent years mouthing
their lines in the wings before being shoved into the glare of your life, which is already well into its second act.

This piece was commissioned by the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival for the Callisto Quartet, who premiered the piece at St. Hugo of the Hills in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in June 2019.

This recording features the Aizuri Quartet, recorded by Andrés Villalta at Princeton University in November 2020.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: the meantime (2019) // Aizuri Quartet

Ensembles in Exile explores the intersection between electronic, ambient, and acoustic sounds, combined with field recordings from the natural world. Ensembles in Exile was conceived by Lea Fetterman (violin, vocals) and Richard Charter (guitar, keyboard) Find out more: www.leafetterman.com and www.richardchartermusic.com.

If We Could Unfreeze Time

Joseph Chiu

Related tracks