Commissioned by Guarneri Hall NFP and NEXUS Chamber Music

«Di.ver.ti.men.to» (2022) allegro remix for string trio [premiere recording]

Ulysses ensemble
Felicita Brusoni, voice
Sandro Gorli, conductor

Milan, June 2023

Lyrics by Andrea Agostini

Black Rain

Skiagrafies IV: AIAS
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

Composed by Stratis Minakakis
Performed by VICE at the VIPA Festival in Auditorium Ateneo Musical del Puerto, Valencia, Spain on July 8, 2023.

Performed by VICE -- Valencia International Contemporary Ensemble
Gregor Schulenburg, flute
Luis Fernandez Castelló, clarinet
Georgia Privitera, violin
Mariel Roberts, cello
Anna D’Errico, piano
Stratis MInakakis, conductor

Skiagrafies IV (VICE Performance)

Monteverdi Responsories (2008/rev.2014) for saxophone quartet and choir
Performed by The Crossing Choir; directed by Donald Nally and PRISM Quartet

Program Notes
The idea for creating Monteverdi Responsories was conceived in response to Claudio Monteverdi’s Piagn’e Sospira from the Fourth Book of Madrigals. Monteverdi’s text comes from an excerpt of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and describes a lover who ‘cries and sighs’ (piagn’e sospira) as she carves on the bark of a tree a beloved name ‘in a thousand fashions’ (segno l’amato nome in mille guise). Monteverdi’s setting of piagn’e sospira is one of the most captivating moments in madrigal literature. It consists of two gestures, forming a metaphorical musical sigh: an ascending chromatic line on ‘cried’ (piagn’e), balanced by a descending leap on ‘sighed’ (sospira). The outer tones of the second gesture engulf the tones of the first gesture, while the latter fill in every chromatic step in-between the outer tones of the second gesture. This extraordinarily powerful yet disarmingly simple musical material is recast ‘in a thousand fashions’ in Monteverdi Responsories, which is to be performed immediately after ‘Piagn’e Sospira’ without pause. Monteverdi’s original material is decontextualized and its pertinent qualities become malleable: the distorted sospiro gesture that initiates the piece is a characteristic example of such recasting.. The text of Monteverdi Responsories is a poem by 20th century Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos from the collection Mikre Suita se Kokkino Meizon (Little Suite in Red Major).

Monteverdi Responsories

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG3XXq8_01w

The immediate inspiration for my 'Fragment 16 (Xenogothic Triple Canon)' was a piece by the composer Matt Barber (https://soundcloud.com/brbrofsvl ) titled 'Prelude and Canon for Wind Quintet' ( which you can listen to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhKDdcFm8l0 ). The title belies his piece's compositional virtuosity: the canon is in five different superimposed speeds, and uses late romantic tonal language. It caused quite a stir at Eastman when it was first played there, despite its short length. Matt's musicianship has been inspirational to me since I was 18 years old, and in some ways I feel like I am always several steps behind him. So I also wanted to write a polytempic canon in a historical contrapuntal style, and Avignon around 1370 was my target.

I failed, quickly: my piece is not strictly in three different consistent speeds (much too difficult), but the melodies in each voice, otherwise all direct copies of one another, do get pervasively pushed and pulled like taffy into and out of shifting speeds. I partly attribute my failure to my beloved teacher, Jean-François Charles, who suggested “Why not write a canon at the [melodic distance of a] 7th? ”, suggesting that canons at the 5th and octave were rather passé. I took him up on this, but it made life harder. For example, for technical reasons, descending scales were now basically off limits, and descending sixths become sort-of necessary as an escape hatch, both features which were uncommon in the melodic style of the medieval period. Nevertheless, it was great fun getting the piece to sound as 'medieval' as possible given these constraints. I can't take credit for the coinage 'Xenogothic'; that honor belongs to microtonal theorist and composer Margo Schulter (https://www.bestii.com/~mschulter/QuickTour.html). Please look up her and Matt's music if you get the chance.

Thanks to the JACK Quartet  for this wonderful performance.

Fragment 16 (Xenogothic Triple Canon)

Tonalities: No. 2

The most basic rhythmic transformation consists in subdividing a single unit of time into two equal halves.  Repeating this operation produces an infinitude of patterns of which this piece might be considered a partial catalog.  The tempo is chosen so that the beginning sounds like some sort of virtuoso drumming (but these are my own computer generated sounds, and no sampling was involved), yet gradually, as the patterns grow more complex, execution would require superhuman ability and the result verges on the biological.  The catalog has its own emergent shape, so there is rhythmic interest too on larger time scales.

Halve and Whole

TEXT is at: #philosophy A new set of miniatures…

pdf [60Kb] http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/simple-complex_13-miniatures.pdf

PIANO background is from my StarCYCLE DUO, alpha Pyxis for two grandpianos, on Soundloud at https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sets/starcycle-duo-project-alpha

IMAGE: August at 2500m KRAG PEAK Basin, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OREGON

On Simplicity, Complexity and Human Design, a set of 13 metaphysical miniatures

In this episode you’ll hear from Professor Vasili Byros from Northwestern University about his experience as a period composer. Vasili talks about his 18th century musical diet and how the compositional process of composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven was related to jazz and pop music of today more than you may think!

Music for this episode was from Vasili's compositions:

"Fuga in B Minor" vimeo.com/85967917

"Prelude in D Minor" www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.…xamples.php?id=32

You can find Vasili's complete bio and more at his website: www.vasilibyros.com

———
Vasili Byros is chair of the department of music studies and coordinator, advanced music theory curriculum (undergraduate) at Northwestern University. Professor Byros researches the compositional and listening practices of the long 18th century as linguistic and cultural pursuits, drawing on frameworks in music theory, history, and cognitive and social psychology, in order to reconstruct “insider” perspectives on music of the period. Byros’ research has dealt with issues of key perception and tonality, interactions between local and large-scale musical grammars, intersections between syntax and semantics, and musical communication (musical wit and humor in Mozart, and spiritual abnegation in Beethoven). 
His work takes a holistic view of the musical languages of the long 18th century, combining viewpoints from schema theory, Formenlehre, topic theory, and historical pedagogies. Along these lines, Professor Byros is currently working on a book project that examines musical creativity in the long eighteenth century from theoretical, analytic, and artistic/practical vantage points. In recent years, Byros has been developing period (or historically informed) approaches to composition, with period compositions of his own, as extensions of his work in historically informed listening, while drawing parallels with historically informed performance. 
He is also coordinator and course-designer of the advanced music theory curriculum at Northwestern, which is based on 18th-century period composition. Additional recent teaching includes upper-level and graduate courses on subjects ranging from classical form and advanced tonal analysis, to seminars on schema theory and historical informed musicking.

Episode 2: Creating Music in Old Styles with Vasili Byros

In a sense, this piece comprises just a single statement of one 12-tone row: 6  7  4 10  1 11  0  8  3  5  9  2.   Understanding these numbers as pitches (not pitch classes), they form a kind of all-interval row as 11 different intervals sound (ignoring here whether they rise or fall!).

But the intervals don't manifest in this piece as juxtapositions of steady tones.  Rather the pitches modulate one into the next, by means of the virtual washboard of the title.  Think of a bumpy two-dimension surface.  An object making contact with the surface and moving horizontally and sinusoidally will sound a pitch.  I let this horizontal motion morph into a vertical motion, on the way passing through Lissajous figures (where one frequency controls the vertical and another controls the horizontal).   The Lissajous sounds suggest common undertones, but with equal temperament tuning no definite fundamental emerges.

The same process, but eight octaves down creates the envelops that one hears as rhythm.  Thus the same quasi-all-interval row controls a sequence of metric modulations.  

The two channels realize the same process, but with different virtual washboards - which means somewhat different resonances and quite independent rhythm.

A personal note.  When I start to go on a bit about feeling old, I dwell on how young experimental composers seem to have lost interest in "notes" altogether.   Well, Cage liberated noise, sure.   But it's hard to develop a music theory of noise, and old fashioned pitches still lend themselves better than anything else to projecting structure.   I feel happy letting virtually any sound into my music universe, but I feel like I'd have nothing to say without pitch and the structure it affords.   

Well, in this piece I try to have to have it both ways.  So, on one hand, I deal with protean sound and I avoid the sort of discrete pure tone events one normally associates with "note."   On the other hand though, pitch logic, both 12-tone (for the overall structure), and harmonic (emergent from the logic of the Lissajous figures described above) still haunts the whole sonic profile.

The graphic image displayed visualizes the morphing of Lissajous  figures.

In the future I'll post some significant variations.   But please understand even this post as a single realization of an open form piece.  I've classified all 1328 quasi-all-interval rows and any of them would serve.  And one can swap in alternative virtual washboards for similar but still distinct timbres and rhythms.

Virtual Washboards (Not Your Grandparents' 12-Tone Music V-a)

Performed by Jared Redmond, piano.

For piano and real-time electronics.

Fragment 16 (Xenogothic Triple Canon)

Quarles

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