First string quartet that explores microtonality, subtones, and the unique properties of string instruments.

String Quartet No. 1

Christina Stanley - violin
Daniel Steffey - percussion

Chloros II For Amplified Violin And Percussion

A recording of Louis Armstrong's version of "The Yellow Dog Blues" by W.C. Handy that has been mashed up and manipulated.  I wrote this for the Studio 360 contest to submit your own covers of the tune.  Nothing substantial, but it sounded like a fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon, and it was.  The title is an homage to James Tenney and his Collage #1 [Blue Suede].  No, my piece doesn't come close to the mastery of Tenney's, I'm aware of that. 

Collage #2 [Yellow Dog]

These are my arrangements of the 'Three Rags for Pianoforte' written by James Tenney c. 1969. In three movements, arranged for xylophone solo with 2 marimba/4 player accompaniment.

I. Raggedy Ann
II. Milk and Honey (Mielle's Rag)
III. Tangled Rag

Premiered and performed here by the William Winant Percussion Group, April 2016.

Three Rags - III. Tangled Rag (James Tenney, arr. Daniel Steffey)

Three Rags - II. Milk And Honey (Mielle's Rag) (James Tenney, arr. Daniel Steffey)

Three Rags -  I. Raggedy Ann (James Tenney, arr. Daniel Steffey)

A piece for two violins performed by Christina Stanley and Tammie Dyer.  Live at The Luggage Store Gallery; San Francisco, CA 2/23/12.

Surf Designs explores different tactics of writing for two identical instruments in varied fashion, but also having them function on the same plane.  The pacing of the piece is determined with bracketed areas, in seconds, and a 60 BPM pulse.  The micro of each violin part functions in numerous ways, such as: responding to the other player’s gesture(s), having one perform quasi-improvised material on top of the other’s fixed material, and each performer reacting to the sonic qualities of the other’s instrument; as with navigating the partial/harmonic relationships with the open strings of the instrument(s), respectively.

Surf Designs for Two Violins

The audio from a modular synthesizer is routed through a machine listening patch in SuperCollider that tries to match and emulate the fundamental and choice partials of the incoming audio.  This software is not always accurate in its job, therefore causing a back and forth of chaos and stability.  The goal of the performer, is to play the synthesizer without causing too much disruption to the listening electronics (ie. play smooth gestures, etc.); however since the patch is automatically adjusting to new parameters every 15 seconds, the performer cannot just sit, but rather adapt as the electronics change...  

This same concept and software was used to write the other "Meditations" in the series, all for solo instruments and electronics.

Meditation No. 6 For Synthesizer And Electronics

Feedback Study No 3

Cosmos Anticosmos For Four Glockenspiels

I was going through some old music for some new music and found this one.  This is the first piece I wrote in graduate school in 2009.  The assignment was to write a piece of process music.  This is taking a clip of Britney Spears' "3", uploaded, recorded, and re-uploaded to YouTube 69 times.  So you hear the degradation of the audio due to YouTube's compression algorithm.  I manually did this process and didn't script anything, and given the internet speed and setup I had to do this, it took a few days of fairly long sessions.  In the end, I am really happy with the manual process because the process, while a process, isn't perfect.  There are weird audio spikes, volume changes, the loop kind of gets cut off on either end from recording errors.  There is something nice about it.

The back story is that I read a survey of a range of people, asking them to indicate what audio playing device/platform offered the best listening experience.  The choices were something like CD, cassette, MP3, high definition, and YouTube (streaming services hadn't really caught on/launched yet).  The teenage demographic overwhelmingly felt that iTunes and YouTube were the best quality.  So I went onto iTunes and picked the number 1 downloaded song of that week, which was this Britney tune.  Given the lyrical content of the song, I figured 69 times through YouTube was an appropriate number of times.  I wonder how the audio degradation would differ if this process were to be repeated today.

I have since changed the title of the piece too, which I caught a lot of flack for at the time (after thoughtful explanation, people understood why I titled it what I did), but if your politically charged "artistic" statement requires further explanation, then it's a poor statement to begin with.  So I find it fair to ditch the original title for a more timely one that still holds the same sentiment.

PS. I am very much a Britney Spears fan. #freebritney

#FreeBritney (2009)

"Cosmos/Anticosmos" exposes two different approaches of composition and listening.  The first is an exploration of the mechanisms of the glockenspiels, more specifically the tunings of each instrument compared to the other three.  The opening pulses state this phenomenon, and as the passage continues, the players suddenly begin to shift the speeds of their individual pulses.  As it develops, lines weave as they are traded among the players, showcasing the differences in sound that each instrument possesses.  In this performance, the effect is maximized by having the performance in the lobby of Littlefield Hall, exposing the second approach: a simple tonal mixture of music written in g-minor.  It is encouraged that the audience wander the space if they so choose as the piece can vary widely depending on your position in the room.

Cosmos/Anticosmos for four glockenspiels

Daniel McKemie (né Steffey) is a web developer and multimedia artist based in New York City. Currently, he is focusing on technology that seeks to utilize the internet and browser technology to realize a more accessible platform for multimedia art. He is also researching on the interfacing of custom software with hardware systems (such as modular synthesizers and handmade circuitry), to create performance environments that influence each other.

Daniel McKemie

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