so simple & satisfying. kinda sweet, but not exactly... but fresh & bouyant. i really like it.

Wild Rumpus
Lisa Bielawa, conductor
San Francisco Conservatory of Music 9/20/15

'Timepass' for Pierrot ensemble

several other composer friends of mine & i linked up with these masters of modern music known as gnarwhallaby--a quartet made up of piano, cello, clarinet & trombone(!)--& wrote some pieces, had a concert & recorded it. here's their performance of what i came up with for them. you can read the program notes from the concert below...

This piece consists of two movements—a dance and a meditation (of sorts)—which both draw from the same basic musical materials. My intent was to create some sense of stability and groundedness using very unstable, dissonant sonorities: three note clusters made up of minor seconds, and also adjacent augmented triads. There is a loosely programatic quality to the title, “an ailing man & a thousand downward dogs,” and to the music itself. I imagined a man who is disintegrating… Physically? Mentally? I don’t really know. But he’s doing so in the midst of a bustling city, surrounded by the many tensions there. He’s well aware of his condition. He begins to dance as he falls apart. Despite the struggle he has with his descent, there’s a joyous kind of detachment—perhaps one that we all might hope to obtain(?). The meditation is an attempt to address the sense of helplessness many of us feel when we consider the entropic nature of all things. Maybe some of us view the madly dancing man as having “lost it.” Perhaps he’s one of the few of us who’ve actually “got it”—whatever “it” might be. After all, all things fall apart… right?  This piece is dedicated with great pleasure and privilege to gnarwhallaby.

an ailing man & a thousand downward dogs

when you reach the far shore..... in memory of ray lopez

I was invited to write a piece for the new york-based light matter trio--clara kim: violin, joann whang: cello & karl larson: piano--to be premiered in concert at cal state, northridge on 4-25-2018. I was pleased & privileged to be asked, so I got right to work on it. the three members of the light matter trio turned out to be real gems... all three of them. & they can reeeally play their arses off!!

shortly after I began sketching to figure out what this piece might be about, a friend who I hadn't seen a good long, while passed away. the circumstances were about as sudden, unexpected & tragic as could be imagined. I'll leave that at that.

I was left ruminating on death & wanting to write yet another elegiac piece for yet another friend who'd passed on much too soon. my mind moved quickly to a bit of writing by william s. burroughs called "the road to the western lands." this piece is about the individual's journey beyond death... this notion, though eerily suspenseful in burroughs' telling of it, resonates with me as supremely hopeful. there's a dark, sardonic sort of humor in it... & whatever source it was that burroughs tapped in to while he roamed the earth, & this mythology that sprang up from it all... my instinct is to trust its validity. one particular passage from this book really grabs me, & the title & overall arch of this piece comes from that passage... 

"your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore, or sell it if you can find a fool. it's full of holes, it's full of holes." -william s. burroughs

when you reach the far shore.....

this is the very first musical effort I made once all this crazy corona virus biz struck--started & finished in late march. it's a strange & janky little waltz number that takes it straight to the streets (of downtown los angeles--a field recording from back in 2014, when we still lived down there), & then gets a bit funereal. is that a word...? funereal? as in "funeral-like." I'll look into that in a minute... I feel like the street sounds are especially poetic in this new & drastic shift in... everything. anyway... I'm really pleased with this little piece. I hope you can dig it too.

'Timepass' for Pierrot ensemble

Kangmin Shin

Recent comments

rocco harris

Related tracks