Performance by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, November 2008, in St. Johns, Newfoundland. 

Program Notes:
In searching for a satisfactory definition of “music” I have come across several remarkable and important contributions, a few of these are revealed by a cursory search of the Internet. The novelist Victor Hugo said, “music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent” (a sentiment held by many today). Oscar Wilde, remarked that “music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.” And, in the experimental environment of the early Twentieth Century, Luigi Russolo refers to “the art of noise,” and perhaps more famously, Edgard Varèse described music as, “organized sound.”
It is from this last definition that most of my thought on the matter has stemmed. In considering these and others together with my experiences in music listening, performance, study and creation, I have come to the following definition: that music is the artful parsing of memory by sound, or as is the case with acoustic music, by performed sound. I do not propose here that this definition is superior or more complete than any of its ancestors, nor that “Skeleton,” by any stretch of the imagination, exemplifies or epitomizes it. But in order to discuss the piece it is necessary to understand that the origins of its form and content depend very directly on the concepts in this definition.
An important addition to the Varèse definition is the term “artful.” In order for music to have a quality (be it ‘good’ or ‘bad’), there must be a scale by which it may be judged, even if that scale is as ambiguous and subjective as artfulness most certainly is. It is however, in my opinion, a better criterion than the degree to which a piece of music is organized. It is art’s very subjective nature that gives it such power and sway over the hearts and minds of those who receive it, and its capacity to provoke thought. Music is more than organized sound.
A slightly less important addition, but perhaps more pertinent to the piece at hand, is that which was hinted at by Oscar Wilde above, “memory.” In order to hear pitch for instance, one’s brain compares the memory of the sensations interpreted and transmitted to it by the ear in the past to those in the present. In music we are always comparing what we hear in the present to what we have heard in the past and the trained listener will apply learned structure to what he or she is hearing and thereby devise an interpretation. This, in combination with the term “artful,” elucidates a point that, though only implicit in the definition itself, is perhaps its most important feature: that music requires human agents and interpreters to be.
The meaning of the title, and the subsequent philosophy of the piece, is twofold. Skeleton simultaneously refers to the foundational function of the score to the music and the music to the memory, and to the ever-fleeting infinitesimal nature of the present moment. It alludes not only to the musical and social structures that support it as a ‘piece of music,’ but also to the decaying remains of the present as it passes through our memory of it.
The piece is made up of many short segments or quanta that are constantly developing or repeating in order to directly address the memory of the present as it flows through the mind the listener. The rate at which this flow occurs is also of interest to me, and methods of its control varying from the proportioning of silences to the fluctuating of tempo to the point of extreme rubato are employed herein. The quanta’s eventual combinations and interactions produce increasingly larger chunks of time to the point where their identities are indistinct from one another and little of their origins remain other than the inevitable silence that follows them.
The quanta are designed with the aim that they are fundamentally units of human expression (i.e. a gentle or melancholy ‘sighing’ motive, or clamorous outburst of anger). This directly ties the identity and humanity of the performers to the musical output of the piece.
-Michael Berger, Sept. 1, 2008

Skeleton

This sample represents the sound world of my upcoming piece "Drying Up" composed for the Berlin-based trio "Accordion/Clarinet+" featuring Seth Josel on Electric Guitar.

This track does not feature performance by the trio, rather it features recordings made by me running through a MaxMSP effects/mixer patch I created for the piece.

Drying Up - Preliminary Sketches

Dead Machinery (13m, 2007) 
A series of seventeen contrasting movements exploring reactions to the then recent news of Kurt Vonnegut's passing with precise durations mapped down from the 1990 Karl Böhm, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's recording of the Mozart Requiem. The title is taken from a line in "Breakfast of Champions", "Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

Dead Machinery

"Greeeeeeen" was originally composed as a blind music plus film collaboration project with the Stanford Documentary Film Masters students. Each party was given the cue "Green" and this is what I made.  I used recordings of my cat, Czar King Rex, the Glorious Leader eating 'Greenies' cat treats to drive the convolution of bell sounds from behind Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Greeeeeeen

"Monkey Picnic" is a response to a prompt given to me by Mark Applebaum to create a short piece of music using only sounds present in a recording of his daughter improvising a story. It also sounds great stretched to be 20 minutes long, but who has the time?

Monkey Picnic

"Boom Boom" is a plunderphonic piece plundering sounds from the no. 1 track on iTunes for about three months back in 2010. I tried to wait for it to be another song, but it did not happen within my allotted time frame.

Boom Boom

"In Nomine Innominabilis" (2007) is a meditation for Saxophone Quartet on the question of he who must not be named, and on the thought that those who would invoke Him/Her/Shim by name are probably missing the point.  The piece itself is based loosely around the structure of the 'In Nomine' plainchant from which it cheekily draws its name.

In Nomine Innominabilis

"SOLVENS CHORDA" is a reflection on the accumulation of entropy and its implications on identity and being.

SOLVENS CHORDA

This is something I cannot use in the piece I am currently working on... so I made it its own piece.  

VCR!

Written for the Ensemble SurPlus.
SurPlus: Martina Roth - Fl., Nicola Miorada - Cl., Christian Kemper - Ob., Andrew Digby - Tbn., Bodo Friedrich - Vla., Beverley Ellis - Vc., Bernd Schöpflin - D.B., Pascal Pons - Perc.
February 24, 2009 - CCRMA Stage, The Knoll, 660 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CA.
July 1, 2009 - EWerk, Eschholzstr. 77 | 79106 Freiburg, Germany
w/ Thomas Wagner - Tbn., and Sven Kestel - D.B.

     Seven Gestures explores seven divergent yet complementary musical actions that had occupied the composer's thoughts for some time. The piece is divided into seven movements that may be performed separately or in any order, each featuring a distinct subset of the octet. They are presented her in the composer's preferred order.

Seven Gestures (2008)
I - Clench for Oboe, Clarinet, and Rachet.
II - Eupnea ("Regular Breathing")
          for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Trombone, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass.
III - Mano Cornuta ("Hand Horns") for Trombone and Cuica.
IV - Gurn ("to contort one's face") for Vibraphone, Cello, and Double Bass.
V - Hullabaloo for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Trombone, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass.
VI - Hack for Bass Drum and Double Bass.
VII - Articulate for Piccolo/Flute, Tom Toms, and Viola.

Seven Gestures

   “That Is Only A Mirror...” is approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed for the New York-based new music group the Talea Ensemble and is scored for Flute, Oboe, Bb Clarinet, Bb Trumpet, Trombone, Percussion, Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello.

   The piece is explores the question of what constitutes identity by inviting the comparison of nearly indistinguishable yet continually varied and recontextualized musical materials.
   Comparison and contextualization of simultaneous, sequential, and delayed placements of variously derived musical sound objects (i.e. musical materials) in time is the primary means of exploring this issue in the piece.

"That Is Only A Mirror..."

Canadian composer, MICHAEL BERGER was born in April of 1980. In 2001, after two years of preliminary study at Kwantlen University College in Langley, British Columbia, Michael transferred to the University of Victoria where he studied with Christopher Butterfield to obtain his Bachelor of Music in Composition and Theory in 2005. Michael has completed his Master of Music Composition in 2007 at the University of Alberta with the support of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (S.S.H.R.C.). There he studied with Drs. Howard Bashaw, Andriy Talpash, and Mark Hannesson. In the Fall of 2007 Michael began studies in the Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition program at Stanford University with Dr. Mark Applebaum with renewed funding from the S.S.H.R.C. and a full scholarship from the school. In addition to his DMA work at Stanford, Michael completed a Master of Arts in Music, Science, and Technology (MA/MST) in June of 2010.  Michael received his DMA in 2012 after working with Drs. Mark Applebaum, Brian Ferneyhough, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, and Erik Ulman. Currently Michael works at Smule in San Francisco where he leads the team of composers and arrangers who produce all of the musical arrangements into all of Smule's apps (Magic Piano, Sing! Karaoke, Guitar!, and AutoRap).

    Michael looks at music as an art of time through one’s experience of sound and memory. An important aspect to his subsequent approach to composition is his attention to both the innately physical nature of sound and its production, and the energies that go into and come out of that production. Additionally, Michael’s music is also often informed by extra-musical concepts, issues, and ideas. In past works, these have included: religious extremism, universal continuum, arbitrariness, epistemology, and death and identity.

Michael began his musical training in elementary school with study of the ukulele and later the trumpet and doublebass. He continued on these instruments together with voice through high school and participated in various extracurricular ensembles. In college and university Michael focused instrumentally on trumpet, studying with Tom Shorthouse (1999-2001) and Lou Ranger (2001-2004).

After many years of dabbling, Michael received his first formal classes in composition at the University of Victoria with Michael Longton in 2001. Excited by the field, he applied and was accepted to be a composition major at the end of that year. Similarly in 2002, Michael had his first real exposure to the idiom of electroacoustics and immediately became fascinated by it. During his undergraduate degree Michael was fortunate to work with many talented and gifted artists (both teachers and fellow students) including Dr. W. Andrew Schloss, Dr. John Celona, Dr. Dániel Péter Biró, Trimpin, Gordon Mumma, Dr. Gerald King, David Cecchetto, Adam Tindale, Kirk McNally and many others.

In 2006 Michael was one of six participants in the Quatuor Bozzini’s “composer’s kitchen,” a week long workshop dealing with composition for string quartet held annually in Montréal, QC. He also had the opportunity to meet with and have a piece read by the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal in October of that year. In the summer of 2007 Michael was one of three composers from across Canada to participate in Arraymusic’s 21st annual “Young Composers’ Workshop” in Toronto, ON. In 2008 he completed a commission from the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal as one of four participants in their “Génération 2008” Canadian tour. Michael then completed a piece for the Freiburg-based Ensemble Sur Plus that was performed in March of 2009 at Stanford University and in Freiburg in July of the same year. He is presently completing a solo Clarinet piece for his friend Heather Roche. In 2009-2010 Michael served as "Composer in Residence" for the Stanford University Philharmonic Orchestra under the directorship of Prof. Jindong Cai. Michael will complete a work for the ensemble for its premiere in Fall 2010.

    Michael's final project piece and dissertation paper "That Is Only A Mirror..." was composed and premiered in 2012 in Stanford, CA by the Talea Ensemble (New York). The piece and dissertation explore ideas of identity in an environment of constant change and reflection.

Popular tracks by MichaelBerger