performed by the Eastman Graduate Composers' Sinfonietta. Conducted by Maurice Cohn.

Machine Turn Quickly, for 17 instruments

Written for the Royal Danish Academy of Music's "Accordion Festival - The New World" (2021), performed by Arcangelo Pignatelli

Our breaths are what keep us alive. They take from the air around us and give back. Usually the phrase “catch my breath” refers to our own selves taking a pause, defined as “to wait and rest for a moment when you have been very active, so that you can begin to breathe more slowly” (Cambridge Dictionary). The saying “hold my breath” literally means stop breathing briefly, and figuratively means waiting on the edge of one’s seat for something, as in “I won’t hold my breath.”  But imagine if a breath could be caught and held in your hands…if it was something material, instead of being one with the air. Saying it to someone as opposed to applying it to yourself. Who would you say this to? What would this sensation feel like? How is it let go?

I connect breathing with time; both invisible, intangible yet inescapable, coming and going every moment. This piece is as an expression of breathing patterns, thinking about certain memories based on a graphic provided for the performer involving at times blurry dualities between still vs. moving, spoken vs. wordless, broken vs. healing, forgotten vs. relived, wrong vs. right, deafening vs. nothing, distant vs. suffocating, absent vs. present. The performer inhales and exhales the sound into the audience, with them, as if pushing them away and pulling them back in. But there is also another "audience": people in the performer's memories (especially if playing alone), and the sound qualities that memory would have...the nature of the breath in that memory. Connecting the physical and psychological, the accordion is the brain constantly sponging and absorbing life, with all the ever-oscillating neurological activity molding the mind ranging from emotions to logic. It’s about both the physicality of the body and accordion as well as the mentality fueling it. 

Physical breakage and repair are a definitive present moment that turns to past, dictated by real time. Mental breakage and repair, however, are ethereally connected between past and present, cycling back and forth more ambiguously in slow or fast motion, governed by our singular minds’ idiosyncratic perceptions; the eyes and ears through which we see, hear and process the world.

In this piece, there is always a common note bridging the left and right hands, either vertically or horizontally, in harmony or melody, representing this thread between two energies, passing breaths between each other. Often, the chord clusters grow bigger and add to what’s already there, carrying the past to the present to the future, constantly re-contextualizing the accumulation of emotional energy and memories, and playing with all the possible frameworks that could color a chord or note. In theory, to catch one’s breath, one has to meet halfway and pass it. The left and right hands become more than just functional components of the body; they are two living breathing bodies trying to connect with each other. They actively maintain their joint balance amidst sonic fragility that creates a kind of illusion of physical fragility, as if there is a possibility of suddenly falling through a floor, or beneath a high-wire, at any moment.

Cover art: Annie Nikunen

Catch My Breath And Hold It

Yarn/Wire
New Music Brandeis - March 2022

Russell Greenberg, Sae Hashimoto, percussion
Laura Barger, Julia Den Boer, piano

Thank you, James Praznik, recording engineer

memory-palace: Quilts for San Francisco (2022)

for percussion and fixed media.

I. Chroma
II. Value
III. Hue

performed by Joanne Chiang.
premiered in Duke's Hall, Royal Academy of Music in May 2022.

artwork: Sol LeWitt - Composite Series, Plate #01 (1971)

Three Studies

Performed by Eighth Blackbird and the U.S. Navy Band, Capt. Kenneth Collins, conductor.

Full performance video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHMabYCLKrI

Eighth Blackbird + US Navy Band, Kenneth Collins, conductor

Vital Sines

April 11, 2023
Eclipses
electronic fixed media (stereo)

Eclipses

"A brief investigation on distilled melancholias, nostalgias & summer brightness 
or 
the land of belonging placed at the liminal verge of shattering identities."

Premiered by Ekmeles (ekmeles.com/) at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

Special thanks to Evan Caplinger for creating the best laugh I’ve had in years and lending your ears multiple time throughout this project. Additional thanks to Marcos Balter, Maximillian Coburn & Zosha Di Castri for providing me with incredibly useful advice for this piece.

Voice I : Charlotte Mundy
 Voice II : Elisa Sutherland
 Voice III : Timothy Parsons 
Voice IV : Gregório Taniguchi 
Voice V : Jeffrey Gavett
 Voice VI : Steven Hrycelak

like a frog on the road to it

Commissioned by the U.S. Navy Band for Jonathan Yanik

Completed Oct. 17, 2023
Premiered at the International Saxophone Symposium on January 12, 2024 at George Mason University

As a child, I used to obsessively rewatch my favorite movies. Seeing the same sequences over and over, I would begin to notice little mistakes across cuts - misplaced items, inexplicable outfit changes, loose strands of hair - and I started to wonder how actors managed to keep their characters consistent if they could barely maintain their physical appearances. I soon realized that many actors, quite simply, did not. 

Continuity Errors, true to its name, celebrates the unexpected surrealism of inconsistency. The piece is filled with sudden, frenetic shifts in tone, register, and key, with these drop-of-a-dime changes kicked off by the clapboard-like ‘crack!’ of a whip. The solo saxophone is the star of the show, eager to shine but occasionally out of step with the whip’s cues. The music frequently invokes the stylings of grand, cinematic soundscapes, even as the soloist obsessively brings the music back toward a more mischievous, off-kilter dance. As the piece builds towards its relentless climax, it cycles again and again through the soloist’s dance, as though trying to rehearse it again and again. The piece ends explosively with a series of wild jump cuts, culminating in a final exhausted smack of the whip. 

Many thanks to Jonathan Yanik and the amazing musicians of the U.S. Navy Band for realizing this piece.

Large Ensemble

Continuity Errors, for alto saxophone and wind ensemble

for solo cello & tinfoil speaker sculpture

performed by Nick Photinos October 10, 2023 at Taplin Auditorium, Princeton University

CRINKLE CUDDLE CRUMPLE CRUNCH

Performed by City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in January 2023, conducted by Clark Rundell.

programme note:

egress – to go out of or leave a place. A strategy of exit.

Writing music often feels like an exercise in learning how to escape a trap I’ve set for myself, like creating a little world with certain rules that have to be broken in order to progress. Sometimes I imagine that it’s not me doing this but the music itself, like an autonomous AI thing scanning random bits of music in real time, trying to understand itself. As if programmed by a machine, the orchestra starts and stops, switches material, gets things wrong, tries them again – always manically searching for some kind of logical thread, a way forward and out, an egress.

Egress

Performed by singers from Yale Voxtet and Yale Schola Cantorum:

Conductor: Jasmine Gelber
Sopranos: Addy Sterrett, Isobel Anthony
Countertenor: Bradley Sharpe
Alto: Emma Simmons
Tenors: Hannah Goodwillie, Will Watson
Basses: Ned Vogel, Zak Fletcher


selections from "Marginal at Best," (2014), Anonymous
i: all I am//
ii: if I was anything more (her)

i
all I am is marginally curious
in my head, curiosity is some unrelenting force that propels people to explore their
world
yet all I am is marginally curious
I would know
yet I can't build the courage to break down my limitations
I begin to fall asleep
conversations
her
I would talk to her
it took her to set
who am I

ii
if I was anything more, I would build up the courage to talk to her
we'd compare perspectives and laugh at the differences
and appreciate the world anew

marginal at best

Composer, bassist, improviser
Based in Princeton, NJ

contact: maxvinetz@gmail.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8SCUUMzUDA&ab_channel=ScoreFollower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDhK67Gsq-I
https://www.maxvinetz.com/

marginal at best

Max Vinetz

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