composed for red panel
performed 02. April 2024 at Neue Musik Zentrale, Essen

clarinet: Kevin Kay
cello: Eden Lonsdale
electric guitar: Levin Zimmermann
clavichord: Forrest Moody

currents and wires

Premiered by The Van Swietens
March 21, 2024, Salzburg, Austria
Recorded live by Valentin Malanetski

dualities and symmetries

Premiered Nov. 5 at The University of Chicago by New Music Ensemble musicians Emma Hospelhorn (flutist of Dal Niente), Ben Melsky (harpist of Dal Niente) and Doyle Armbrust (violist of Spektral Quartet).

The Universe is Vibrating is an introspective contemplation on the idea that everything in the universe has a measurable frequency and is therefore vibrating. Even further, should string theory hold true, the most fundamental particles of life are just vibrating strings. By channeling energy through vibrational timbres specific to the instruments in the trio, I reflect on the idea that the universe has an innate symphony of sounds unheard by human ears.

The Universe is Vibrating

"reaching" for string quartet and electronics
M.A. Thesis, University of Chicago

Premiered 4/5/2018 by Spektral Quartet (Clara Lyon, Maeve Feinberg, Doyle Armbrust, Russell Rolen)
Cover art: Matt Omahan (www.mattomahan.com)

This piece is about striving for something - a goal, an aim, a success, etc. - and subsequently failing. However, it is not about the failure; rather, it is about the repetition of trying, attempting, reaching.

reaching, for string quartet and electronics

Premiered 5/12/2018 by the Imani Winds at Rockefeller Chapel (University of Chicago). 

Legs shaking, neurons firing. This feeling will pass. Anxiety: a feeling "marked by excessive uneasiness and apprehension, typically with compulsive behavior," (en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/anxiety).

Quiver, for wind quintet

Motions of Breath and Air for solo flute (2017)
Recorded by Robin Meiksins (http://robinmeiksins.com/)

Motions Of Breath And Air

limits (2018) for viola and piano

Recording of the premiere on 7/30/18 at Les Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau by violist Kunbo Xu and pianist Kyrian Friedenberg.

Convergence, divergence. These provide the framework by which mathematical limits can be described. At its core, this piece is about the psychoacoustic phenomena resulting from a duet between viola and ebow, by which the viola converges to/diverges from the ebow as x approaches infinity. On a personal note, this piece is about the limits that I have placed on myself with the way I compose and the pressure that I feel to break these constraints.

limits

Recorded by percussionist/composer Bryan Michael Wysocki

The goal of this piece was to capture the acoustic resonance of a snare drum within a fixed media track and then to engulf the sounds of a live snare drum within this acoustic resonance. I wanted the timbral changes of the piece to guide the listener through a journey, mainly structured by the type of mallet/stick and the use of the snares. All sounds heard in this piece are from a snare drum, occasionally supplemented with a single crotale for some extra flavor.

enSNARE for snare drum and electronics

Commissioned by the William and Mary Wind Ensemble under Dr. Richard Marcus. This recording is of the premiere on April 22, 2019.

Thixotropy is a time-dependent shear thinning property, by which certain viscous fluids will flow when agitated or stressed. Such can be observed with water-saturated sand, such as that by the sea. However, like sand, humans too tend to be moved by stress, both in physical action and in mental thought.

Thixotropic, for wind ensemble

Recording of the premiere in Paris on 6/28/2019 by soloists from Ensemble Intercontemporain Jean-Marie Conquer and Pierre Strauch

"damped" was written for the ManiFeste Academy at IRCAM, 2018-2019
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This piece began with the notion of a damped harmonic oscillator. At the very beginning, it was truly the visual representation of a damped harmonic oscillator that got my attention: a sine wave that continues to compress until it's nothing at all. This became musically abstracted with the interplay of the violin and cello pitch contours in the first section of the piece. However, I began to think about what damping could really mean, musically speaking. The idea that most consumed me while composing was the application of bow overpressure, which threads the piece together. The last section of the piece mimics the cycling and crunching effect of a damped harmonic oscillator. The material builds until at the very end it becomes so high in frequency that it essentially calls for the musician's fingers to "push" their bows off the strings and onto the bridge, such that sound becomes so high that it is, metaphorically speaking, "no longer heard."

damped, for violin and cello

Written for PinkNoise
Roberta Michel (flute); Eric Umble (clarinet); Johnna Wu (violin); Isse Herr (cello) Han Chen (piano)
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I am fascinated by the physical and psychoacoustic properties of sound. duality ii is one of several pieces I've been working on lately that specifically concern the rhythm-pitch duality; that is, a pitch, when slowed down enough, becomes a rhythm, and a rhythm, when sped up fast enough, becomes a pitch. This physical principle is literally presented and symbolically represented throughout the piece by means of shaping sounds in ways that may reveal their physical phenomena and make them perceptible. However, the goal is not to know exactly the processes underpinning the music; rather, the goal is to feel the overall physicality of the sound itself.

Duality ii - ensemble and electronics

Cellist: Mariel Roberts

"thoughts on imperceptibility" aims to let listeners "hear" frequencies that are below and above what is normally perceptible.

Composed for the 2020 Online Cortona Sessions

thoughts on imperceptibility

Recorded by Austin Wulliman
Version for 4 violins

"dx/dt" recontextualizes music notation as a position versus time graph. Utilizing a unique Pythagorean tuning system where 4 instruments cover a full 12 note series of perfect 5ths, this piece can be performed on 4 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos, or 4 double basses. Only open strings and natural harmonics are used throughout the piece, through which delicate and pure sounds immerse the listener.

dx/dt

Kevin Kay (b. 1995) is a composer interested in the physicality of sound. Working in just intonation, his music is concerned with the structuring and understanding of rational tonal structures through framework based on the physical, mathematical, and psychoacoustic properties of sound. Accordingly, his work is informed by the sensation and perception of sound as a physical phenomenon. Through an obsession with patterns and numbers in music, such mathematically oriented harmonic spaces often become entangled with temporal processes. Recurring threads in his body of work include the notions of duality and symmetry.

Kevin’s music has been performed by ensembles and musicians such as Spektral Quartet, Imani Winds, soloists from Ensemble intercontemporain, Divertimento Ensemble, Density512, PinkNoise Ensemble, Ghost Ensemble, The City of Tomorrow, MotoContrario Ensemble, and the Brouwer Trio, among others. As a clarinetist, he performs his own solo works. Festivals and academies that have performed his music include: the Cortona Sessions for New Music (2022, 2020 Cortona Prize winner), the International Workshop for Young Composers (2020), IRCAM’s ManiFeste Academy (2018-19), Les Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau (2018), New Music on the Point (2017), the Yarn/Wire Institute (2017), the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival (2017), the Valencia International Performing Arts Summer Festival (2016), and the Charlotte New Music Festival (2016). Kevin has been in residence at Arts Letters and Numbers (2023) and the Hambidge Center for the Arts (2022).

Currently, Kevin is a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University. He holds an M.A. in the humanities from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in physics and music from the College of William and Mary. He has studied with Margaret Schedel, Nirmali Fenn, Sam Pluta, and Sophia Serghi, among others.

Kevin Kay

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