...a suite of 4 compositions for electric guitar based on processes of realtime audio transformations programmed and performed by K.Stewart. All sounds in this collection originate from the live electric guitar signal and are manipulated and recombined in a hardware/software environment.

I am the amplifier.

A set of 4 compositions for electric guitar based on processes of realtime audio transformations performed and programmed by the composer.

I. Trill

II. Southern Spring

III. You Are That Way

IV. Temporary Ballet

According to Puju, the psychic advisor I spoke to in regards to this piece, locking yourself into a frame of mind restricts one’s creativity. He also said that when one is in the Theta State (a hypnagogic or subliminal state), you are at one with whatever you are attempting to deal with, in this case the music should come from your higher self and let the creativity flow freely without allowing yourself and your mind to get in the way.

The piece ‘t h e t a s t a t e' was conceived of as an ambiguously evolving meditation on the ambiguity surrounding the creation of written music. 
‘t h e t a s t a t e' attempts to encompass many differing sound-worlds from noisy clicks and beeps, to extended slow modally-driven improvisations, as well as fast and virtuosic music in the trio combining and clashing with the sounds in electronics.

These electronic sounds are based on the sounds of my voice speaking to the operator from the call-center; my conversation with the psychic advisor Puju; the menus detailing the disclaimers, the terms of use and the price guide of the Psychic telephone service. In its current form, the piece tries to allow the music to move freely from the firmly composed music to sections where the ensemble take control and improvise over the supplied chord changes for a flexible amount of time.

As the work comes to a close, returning to the opening musical texture, the sound of my voice telling Puju about the project and the reason for my calling leaves the piece unresolved, emphasizing both the open-mindedness required to fully appreciate his advice as well as the stark irony associated with a psychic telephone service.

Link to the Score ( PDF ): <a href="http://bit.ly/Thetastate" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">bit.ly/Thetastate</a>
Recorded and Performed by Reid Anderson, Ethan Iverson, and Dave King of The Bad Plus at SoundPure Recording Studios in Durham, NC by Jason Richmond

T H E T A S T A T E - as performed by The Bad Plus - (2010)

Phase Locked Loop and Modulo Games contains stories. Little, poem-sized short  stories filled with puzzles and riddles. These prose-poems with sewn-together  unfoldings and refoldings of ideas are always in transition, ever changing and stuck in a  perpetual state of becoming. As the story progresses the boundaries between the stories erodes the many into a single continuous utterance. (Note: In the above descriptive image  ‘story’ is intended to mean a musical narrative and ‘game’ or ‘riddle’ means a pitched, rhythmic  or metric device used to develop the principle theme.) 

In more technical terms, the notes of this moto perpetuo are treated using a  modulus. A form of division of whole numbers, a modulus emphasizes the remainder  rather than the quotient. A 14-note musical idea is transformed thusly while other materials use similar patterned processes of rhythmic accumulation, acceleration and  deceleration. The piece moves from these stricter processes into a pastiche of stylistic  and melodic music that expands smaller motives into larger song-like phrases. (Note: A  reoccurring palindrome is the central device to this particular musical process.) 

In other words, Phase Locked Loop and Modulo Games uses evolving loops to move  into several lightly contrasting grooves that themselves are locked in a steady state of transition; ever changing, and always becoming. 

Phase Locked Loop And Modulo Games - LIVE @ Baldwin Auditorium, 10/25/2015

Point of Origin, for Ukulele

This is an version of the solo ukulele piece 'What Rhymes with Life?'. This version uses two echoes of the ukulele's audio at a time interval of one and two seconds. The first echo is transposed up one octave while the other echo is transposed down, thus filling the textural and registral space in a way the solo uke couldn't on its own. Other techniques include campanella fingerstyle plucking of the uke and percussive techniques upon the top of the instrument. 

The joke of the title is that when you look up 'Life' in a rhyming dictionary there's actually not much that actually rhymes with life.

Precarious Music for Ukulele

What Rhymes with Life for Electric Ukulele - Délétude No. 2 - Live from Baldwin Auditorium

Performed by Kate Soper, Erin Lesser and Eric Wubbles of the Wet Ink Ensemble

I - Night
II - Water Lily
III - Slumber Song
IV - Music

Images of Solitude - Four Settings of Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the first movement of the work Divergence.

This movement was generated using spectral procedures of analyzing a recording of a chime and orchestrating the principle components of the chime into the ensemble.

Divergence - 1. Solitude

Multichannel guitar with LRBaggs hex pickup processed with custum 6 channel preamp and multichannel processing in Ableton Live with custom Max For Live Patches plus additional synthesis with a Leap Motion scrubbing a buffer for time-stretching and pitch shifting.

Oblivion - Astor Piazzolla - Recomposition by KDS

FTL - Fourth Splice

The introductory track to the 2015 release of The Plenary Art Ensemble's Cathedral Sessions

Jamie Keesecker - Synthesizer
Kenneth Stewart - Production

Kenneth Stewart & Jamie Keesecker - Prelude Descending - The Plenary Art Ensemble

I'm Kenneth Stewart. Please call me Ken. Thanks for reading. I'd say I'm a bit of a ‘renaissance man’. If I'm playing, it usually has strings. If I'm in the role of curator or composer, a background in performance becomes useful in other ways.

In a previous utterance, music assisted by physical interfaces and sound processing played heavily on my work, however once I finished school my desire to stay behind the desk dwindled. I took to acoustic genres. I'd say for a couple of years I became fascinated with the subtle differences between Jazz and Bluegrass, yet the vast differences in the harmony, sets and motifs specifically in Old-Time and New Acoustic show that what you hear is not always what you expect.

Using the instruments I play I seek to explore the roots of the music that happens around me here in Durham, NC.

The scholarly study of composition prepared me by to use the tools of a composer to develop musical ideas far beyond my own. I took to standards as experimental tools for learning how to create works with rich, melodious textures and romantic harmony.

I'd like to think that the time away from school helped me enhance my original obsession with weaving into my work an underpinning of the ambient electronic music and that of the avant-garde. Or my insistence a perversion for unusual sounds and peculiar timbres somehow coalescing into something familiar and hopeful.

While I do musical research that engages concepts of instrument modification and design and his non-compositional creative work of signal processing (linear and digital) and the hacking and modifications of electronic and acoustic musical instruments and their electronic effects, sometimes what's necessary is putting that all away and singing a simple song.

As a quasi-alumnus member of the Slippage Lab formerly at Duke University now at Northwestern, under the directorship of professor Thomas DeFrantz. Most of my time with Slippage was when I was a graduate student at Duke..
Some other things of note: I was one of Gordon Epperson's final cello students. Nancy Green, and protege, Nelvimar Neves and two summer festivals of lessons and masterclasses as a teenager with Brinton Averil Smith and countless lessons via conversation with colleagues. 

My composition mentors, whom shaped my vision for music creation: Daniel Asia, Pierre Jalbert, Durham’s Scott Lindroth and as well as a summer in Berlin with Samuel Adler; ditto on the colleagues.

Ph.D. from Duke University, and additional degrees from Rice University, The University of Arizona and Pima College in Tucson, AZ.
KennethDStewart.com

Kenneth D. Stewart

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