Fracture (2013) for alto saxophone by Lucas Marshall Smith

alto saxophone, Andrew Somerville

Premiered November 2013 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign

Fracture(2013)for amplified alto saxophone

Performed by Ensemble Mise-En (Maria Johnson, fl; Yumi Ito, cl; Mark Broschinsky, trbn; Yumi Suehiro, pn; Molly Germer, vn; Evan Runyon, cb) directed by Moon Young Ha at the 2016 Red Note New Music Festival .

Through A Glass, Darkly - for sextet

Based on the text "Zur abstrakten Kunst" by Kurt Schwitters.
Baritone: Omari Tau Williams
Ensemble Ictus, featuring: Takeshi Yamane, bass clarinet; Géry Cambier, contrabass; Ludo Mariën, accordion; directed by Georges-Elie Octors.

pgblu - nicht anna

Stages For Stereo Fixed Media

The performance of Dutty Tough", the second of a six song cycle entitled" Jamaican Plight" Performed by: Mikhail Johnson (piano) and Autum Cochran-Jordan (soprano)at the 2016 SCI Composers Conference at Ball State University's Sursa Hall on November 19, 2016.

Program notes: 
The Jamaican saying, “Rain a fall, but dutty tough,” which means that although the rain is falling, the ground is still dry and parched, is a Jamaican proverb that has a deeper meaning when applied to a person’s finances, as it could refer to the all-too-familiar situation in which income is being earned, but it is just not enough to cope with all the bills. Your money evaporates as soon as you get it, just as a drizzle of rain in the arid desert. The anecdote was popularized by Jamaican poet Louise Bennett Coverly in the 1940s where she expounds on the proverb in live an direct narration of her own experience in the Jamaican patois dialect. The soloist is the voice of the people and the pianist is the metaphoric and dramatic enactment of the situation being explained. The percussive effects of the piano represents hitting the ground (i.e. times of economic hardship and the magnitude therein) and the aftermath is mere dust as a sign of no breakthrough. There are instances of relief (some big, some small) but all is short-lived.

Dutty Tough 2016 SCI Student Concert

Illinois Modern Ensemble, Stephen Taylor, conductor.  8 February 2017.
Sonic Illinois Festival, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Cold Horizon, for chamber orchestra, grew out of a piece for vibraphone and piano entitled Cold, which I wrote in Paris in January 2001.  The basic musical ideas and icy, shimmering instrumental colors of Cold have been stretched out into a supple, continuously flowing, and dramatic form, and colored as if seen at twilight under a fading and distant light.  

In a sense, Cold Horizon explores resonance as a model or metaphor for developing musical gestures and forms.  Often resonance is used to create a sense of perspective, reminding us that music takes place not only in time but also in space. Musical lines that are slightly out of alignment shadow each other as they seem to echo in a reverberant space.  Similarly, rhythmic processes and subtle changes of orchestration create the illusion of musical gestures that approach or recede.  The opening of the piece, a quasi-Doppler effect, is one example.  Another typical idea is the filtering of complex harmonies into simple intervals, floating points of stability that form a thread of consonance woven across the span of the piece.  The use of quarter tones blurs the line between harmony and instrumental timbres to create a sense of depth and shadow against the well-tempered, “normal” pitches.

Cold Horizon has passed through a series of incarnations, beginning with an initial sketch premiered in 2002 by the Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon-Provence under Sylvio Gualda at the Centre Acanthes contemporary music festival in France.  The complete piece was premiered in 2003 by the University of California, Berkeley Symphony conducted by David Milnes, followed by a revised and expanded version performed by the Minnesota Orchestra at their Composer Institute in 2006 with David Alan Miller.  I revised the piece one last time in early 2017 for this performance, making some minor adjustments to its pacing, clarifying the orchestration and several harmonic details, and pruning back some pretentious complexity in the notation.

Cold Horizon (2017 Version)

#acousmatic;  #electroacoustic; #musiqueconcrete; #electronic

Pictured Remnants

Medical text pp. 57: Age is an aggressive, virtuosic, and remarkably vulnerable piece crafted around the text found in the educational tome Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine Vol. 1 published in 1845. 
The chapter that this piece addresses is on the topic of age and its effects on the body through the multiple stages of life, beginning with nascent burgeoning growth and advancing to eventual unerring onset of decay. This piece manipulates the coherence of text and plays off of humanities want to comprehend speech in voices, often crafting phones and consonants that are similar to speech but contorting them beyond understanding. When juxtaposed with recognizable text and married with a plethora of timbral driven gestures and extended vocal techniques, smooth transitions between nonsense and meaningful text help to drive the piece through continuums of obfuscation and clarity.

Medical Text p.57 - for voice and live electronics

A little piano piece in C Major I wrote in November 2013.

Reynold Tharp's Album

A Sentimental Little Album Leaf for November (und Delius und Grainger sind auch dabei)

Hide and Seek

Composer: Lucas Marshall Smith
Poem: Lucas Marshall Smith
Conductor: Timothy Brown

Recorded live June 9, 2018 at Church of St. Luke in the Fields, NY
Audio recording: Noriko Okabe

cover art by Byron Gibbs

http://c4ensemble.org

Water Music

Hide and Seek

Lucas Marshall Smith (b.1989) 
Education: Bowling Green State University (BM, 2012) ; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (MM 2014, DMA 2024)
Teachers:  Burton Beerman, Philipp Blume, Carlos Carrillo, Christopher Dietz, Erin Gee, Mihai Popean, Andrea Reinkemeyer, Marilyn Shrude, Stephen Taylor, Reynold Tharp
Electroacoustic composition with Elainie Lillios and Scott Wyatt

Contact composer at smithlm77@gmail.com

Fracture(2013)for amplified alto saxophone

Lucas Marshall Smith

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