if you have the transcription from that Rhodes descending lick please get in touch with me. I have to learn that pattern. so nasty!

Duo Axon:
Derek Granger, soprano saxophone
Dan Ingman, percussion
recorded April 2021, Hartford, CT

more info: http://www.robertrankinmusic.com/deepstate

Deep State: for saxophone and percussion (2020)

AWay2B

ensemble: string quartet
duration: 5 minutes
written: winter 2022
written for: Kuttner Quartet
premiered: May 6, 2022; Bloomington, IN

Note: 

“Far, far from everything, throw behind you a comb, a forest will grow”
                 - Far West, Czeslaw Milosz

	I have been a native east coaster for most of my life, having only made it to the other side of this country for the first time a little over three years ago. My first impression of the land was the simultaneous beauty and violence of it all; mountain ranges shooting out of seeming nowhere, the gnarly twisting and tangling of the trees. In making these trips, there is a sense that I am somehow part of the mythical American tradition of “going west” and becoming enraptured in the grandness of it all. I feel as though I am seeing the California landscape through the (sometimes romantic) lenses of John Muir, Walt Whitman, Ansel Adams, Joni Mitchell, and Jack Kerouac.  

	Far West is a sort of musical mediation on the beauty, stillness, and aesthetics of experiencing the natural wonders of the west.

        The piece is dedicated to Ellie Schwartzman and Josh Coleman, in gratitude

more info: http://www.robertrankinmusic.com/farwest

Far West: for string quartet

Timestretched to the length of the longest recording. Now available for download / vinyl: https://heyexit.bandcamp.com/album/every-recording-of-gymnopedie-1

buy the vinyl

Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1

Pears

Lemon

Magnolia

"We should take comfort 
that while we may have more still to endure, 
better days will return. 
We will be with our friends again.
We will be with our families again.
We will meet again."
—Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

We Will Meet Again

The City Moves

Making Tellus - A Ritual Opera for the Anthropocene
(Demo Reel of excerpts from scene workshops in 2016-18).

***I am desperately hoping to reinvigorate this project-in-progress and give it a substantial future life. I am looking for opportunities to produce workshops, scenes, the entire thing!***

This reel is made in collaboration with the generosity of the following artists:
Andrew Munn (voice, libretto), Benjamin Grow (conductor), Charlotte Mundy (voice), Sharon Harms (voice), Kate Maroney (voice), Rami Sarieddine (piano), and the Nouveau Classical Project led by Sugar Vendil.

About Making Tellus:

Imagine collecting an ice-core sample from a glacier. This cross-section contains millennia of information – a map that depicts the history of Earth. With this information, scientists become chroniclers as they discover and tell the story of our planet.

In multimedia, ritual opera "Making Tellus" the creative team harvests a metaphorical sample of human time that tells of our species’ experience in sculpting the Earth, pointing to the many human-initiated processes that led to our new geologic epoch – the Anthropocene. A record of the human written word (Sumerian Farmers’ tablets, the Bible, Antonio Stoppani's "Corso di Geologia", Verazano's texts, #Anthropocene tweets, etc) serves as an index and narrative plot. 

The opera begins far in the future: a sunrise ritual performed by a cult of trash worshipping hermits. Gathered around a hearth they tell their creation "myth." Each scene/story focuses on a major pivotal moment that sheds light onto humanity’s complex role in changing Earth’s ecological and geological systems.  In chronological order these include: the acquisition of language, terraforming, colonialism, the industrial revolution, the atom bomb, the great acceleration, the "cloud" and network society.  The narrative travels through time and draws parallels between the past, present, and future. Juxtaposed ideas ask viewers to consider difficult questions that debate economies, technology, myth and reality, scientific thinking vs human agency and experience, the (un)natural, and patriarchal vs other hierarchies.  The opera closes back around the hearth, in the near or distant future, in a geoengineered landscape, leaving all those gathered to draw their own lines between reality and fiction.

We invite audiences to meditate on their potential role in writing Earth’s story. Our goal is to deepen the public understanding of the Anthropocene, humanity's ultimate "Gesamtkunstwerk" and its implication through our take on opera - a marriage of history, arts, technology, and environment.

Making Tellus - Demo Reel (Ritual Opera)

for soprano, double bass, and electronics

Anika Kildegaard - soprano
Will Yager - double bass

The City Moves

Matthew Schultheis

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