Track 2 from In lake'ch or "I am another yourself"

The Hole Gazed Back

In a noisy world, filled with busy technology, pure tones ring out. Can you hear them? Once you hear them, it's possible to create them yourself and filter all that noise out. At the heart of this track are clear vibrations from a vanadium crystal singing bowl that harmonizes ancient Egyptian healing energies with technology. Learning to hear these signals is the best way to begin creating our own clear vibration to ring out into the world!

Harmonize with technology

Harmonizing With Technology (Meditation)

Track 1, CD 1 of Acquarian Stories. My imagination of the what The Pangaea Splitting sounded like.

Prologue: The Pangaea

A singing escalator, and a short tune baked of thyme in Italy sing a melancholy song of between worlds across the veil of death's thin melody. Composed while a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. 

Composed for WE! Kansas City (Jane Gotch and Mark Southerland)

Death's Thin Melody (Up/Down)

Remix with Corey Loog Brennan and Paul Rudy

Lovey Track 11 (Polly Noonan) Remix

Commissioned by the Curators of the University of Missouri for JoDee Davis

Published by Alias Press, a Theodore Presser Affiliate

The Voices of Air

Voices of Air

Albany Records

Awaken!

I started composing this for the Soundtrack of your Galaxy Soundcloud contest and missed the deadline. It was composed around my Father's last weeks on this Earth, so it is for him that I realized I made this. I don't think he danced much in his nearly 95 year epic life, at least not that I know about. I am certain he is out dancing among the stars now though! This is my dance celebration of his life! Here's to you dad!

Song for my Father

Song For My Father

Erika Eckert, viola and Paul Rudy melodica, percussion and toys
 
In September, 2010, I arrived starry-eyed at the American Academy in Rome for a year that promised wide open potential. Among the first things I learned was that my studio sits on the site of Galileo’s telescope demonstration to the Lyncean Society of April 14, 1611. I began contemplating the stars in a different way: through a lens of others’ contemplation. On Christmas Eve, 1968, the first images of Earth came to us from space through the Apollo 8 crew. A few years later, Galileo the space probe, was designed to continue to gather and send data even as it’s eyes and ears disintegrated during its plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere: information comes at a cost. Further out yet, Voyager’s image of Earth shows our home as a small blue dot from 3.7 billion miles away, and for the first time we can actually see our own smallness. Galileo, the man, invited a new scientific gaze outward, while Apollo 8 and Voyager invite us to take a look at how we see ourselves. Telescopes are wormholes outward and ideas, the rabbit hole inward. Galileo, among other things, discovered the moons of Jupiter, hence the title of this work. One of his moons, Io, is a beautiful handmaiden, is the lover of Zeus, is a white cow, or companion to Prometheus, who was chained, as She is chained around Jupiter, just where Galileo left her 400 years ago for us to re-gaze upon. In contemplating Galileo’s political and religious challenges, we began to focus compositional energies around the problem of dogma. Dogma, no matter how it is expressed, enforced or perpetuated (whether in religion or science), easily becomes stuck energy, and is a force that tends to limit human potential. Perhaps Leto II in Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune says it most concisely when he reflects that “knowing is a barrier to learning.” Learning outward begs a balancing inward and an openness to changing notions of how our universe works and why we are here.
 
At Rome Around Jovan Moons was created during a week-long intensive collaboration with Erika Eckert at the American Academy in Rome. It uses sound samples from the Cassini, Voyager and Galileo Space Probes courtesy of NASA and the University of Iowa; recordings of my brother Jon’s Ham radio contacts from around the globe; sounds from Rome and the Academy, and in specific, those recorded on New Years Eve 2011 as Rome exploded in fireworks. At Rome Around Jovan Moons was commissioned by the American Academy in Rome for the 400th Anniversary Celebration of Galileo’s Telescope Demonstration, April 14, 2011 with generous supported by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

At Rome Around Jovan Moons

Fixed Media mp3, for rehearsal only, NOT FOR PERFORMANCE! To order a full bandwidth file and a copy of the score for performance contact me here!

7 Spiritual Laws

Premier Performance by
Emlyn Johnson, Flute
Molly Morkoski, Piano
UMKC Conservatory, November 15, 2023
Grant Recital Hall

Published by Alias Press, a Theodore Presser Affiliate

Rudy The 39th City

Performed by Factory Seconds Brass Trio: Jack Sutte, Jessie McCormick and Richard Stout. 
Assembly line Suite
in nine movements
1) Daily grind 1’55”
2) Paper jam 1’50”
3) Cutting room floor 2’20”
4) Squeaky wheel 2’40”
5) Interchangeable parts 2’25” (may be interchanged to #8)
6) Lunch break 4’33”
7) Quality control 2’40”
8) Power outage 2’30” (may be switched to #5)
9) Cranking it out 2’50”
Total time 23’ (including Lunch Break)
Program Notes:
Assembly line was written for a trio of first-rate seconds: Jack Sutte, Jesse McCormick and Richard Stout! Playing in the Cleveland Orchestra is one thing, and this is something entirely different…

1-Daily Grind : the task remains mind numbingly regular. Time
warps…ceases to exist, and then lasts forever. The mind wanders into oblivion even as the body continues to carry out tasks!

2-Paper jam : the hurridier I go, the behinder I get. Only at the copy
machine is it possible to have started 10 minutes ago, and already be 30 minutes behind…

3-Cutting room floor : Assembling raw footage shot on the set, clarity is laboriously edited out of 10 takes. The floor accumulates piles, while the final reel tightens. Bit by bit the scene clarifies and emerges whole.

4-Squeaky wheel : like every well-oiled machine, time, repetition, and friction, cause even the best maintained equipment to cry out. I wonder if machinery likes it even less than over-worked disgruntled humans. You think you’ve got it bad…?

5-Interchangeable parts : out of small, identical little parts, more and
more complicated things can be made. While evidence existed from two thousand years ago in the Carthage war machine, Eli Whitney
standardized the modern interchangeable part for an order of 12,000 muskets by President Washington in 1798, which initiated the slow march towards the homogeneity of Western society, despite attempts to thwart it…

6-Lunch break : everyone needs a break, even on the daily grind of making music. Ever wonder what happens back stage at half time of a concert?

7-Quality control : Products slowly grind by on the conveyor belt of
consumerism, needing to be checked for quality. Attention to detail
languishes in mind-numbing sameness. Worker bees dozing off…don’t buy it if it came off the floor on a Monday morning!

8-Power outage : Just like machines squeal and break down, so do the power systems that drive them. Whether a fire running out of wood for steam to drive conveyor belts, or electricity shorting out, systems that run hour-upon-hour are not sustainable forever.

9-Cranking it out : Despite all that can go wrong with 90 musicians on stage, or thousands of moving parts on an assembly line, work gets done. Sound and merchandise are cranked out in the never-ending cycle of modern-day consumption of both art and tangible goods.

Performance notes:
Individual movements may be played separate from the suite, or in smaller sets of suites ordered out of varying combinations of movements.
#6 Lunch break may be “performed” as the start and end of intermission.
#5 and #8 may be interchanged in order (thanks to Eli Whitney!)
Trills in the horn and trumpet parts are to the next natural note up, unlessotherwise specified with an accidental.

Assembly Line Suite

Part 1 Fountain

Objective: 
To create a public gathering around a “water fountain” sound sculpture.


Implementation:
Create a circular (facing out from a center point and vertical in shape) speaker array, in the center of a public space, to project the sound from the fountain audio included in this score. The size and shape of the sculpture may vary depending on location, but the characteristics of the specific space of the installation, and the intentions of the presenters should be taken into consideration. 

Ideas for implementation can include (but are not limited to) stacking boom boxes or any size/type of speakers on top of each other in a circle, and extending up as high as needed. You may also wish to build a sound sculpture such as a pole with speakers (i.e inexpensive computer speakers), attached in a spiraling direction up to the top (as in the photograph attached). All speakers may be fed by a single device, or a multichannel computer system with delay lines or varying equalization for speakers. A low power stereo broadcast FM radio transmitter (in compliance with local communication regulations), wifi transmitter site or internet web stream onto computer, cell phones/hand held devices or wireless headphones (infrared, Bluetooth, etc.) may be used to distribute the audio to the fountain and to personal devices locally or remotely so that those not physically present may participate also. Any method of sound projection may be devised based on the resources of the venue, and to maximize the experience for the community.

Performance:
The public audience should gather around the fountain, enjoying the sound of the water, drinking it in with their ears. Near the end the gathered audience is invited to follow the conductor into the launch of Part 2: River. Part 1: Fountain can also be looped for a permanent installation, with or without Parts 2 or 3.

Duration:
33’22.11” (or looped for as long as necessary)


La Chiena Campagna Fountain Audio (mp3)

Mountains Rising Everywhere is an homage of sorts to Joseph Schwantner’s and the mountains rising nowhere which rocked my world when I heard it at age 26 in my first composition class. I had played in band all the way through college, but had never heard anything like Schwantner’s work before. “If this is what music can be,” I said to myself, then, I want to make it! I wrote my first composition in that class, and the rest, they say is history. When I was younger, I climbed all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000 ft. peaks and loved being on the tundra. My favorite days were those spent on a mountain where I didn’t see anyone all day long, and Schwanter’s music really captured some of those favorite experiences. Being on the tundra, and alone is, to this day, one of my favorite places to be. So when I had the chance to go to Alaska, my second to last state, I jumped at it! I knew I would see mountains rising everywhere, especially going on an adventure with Composing in the Wilderness, and I was not disappointed. The bush plane flight into Port Alsworth and Lake Clark National Park was through one of the most striking glaciered mountain passes imaginable. There was something new, and wonderful about being in a place that can only be arrived at in a plane! And then, a float plane took us deeper into Lake Clark National Park for a six-day adventure with hiking and kayaking. As the plane flew away, the feeling of being at a place few others had ever been on Lower Tazimina Lake was wonderful and exhilarating. I got that pit in my stomach I used to get when heading off at a trail-head to summit a mountain. There was no camping where they dropped us, so we inflated the kayaks and paddled for an hour and a half until our guide found a suitable place to camp. I was expecting the grand views of mountains and glaciers, and Alaska did not disappoint, but the miniature landscape of lichens and tundra plants at our first camp site were took me by complete surprise. With each step, I felt like I was trampling upon a miniature Pandora-esque civilization. It was one of the most intricate, delicate, and yet resilient landscapes I have ever seen. Each morning when I opened my tent, I was surprised to see that it had snowed, only to realize that “snow” is the natural color of Caribou Lichen, a primary occupant of the tundra carpet of Alaska. So, on a trip where I expected my gaze to constantly be upward and summit-focused, I was pleasantly surprised to be constantly enthralled with what was under my feet. And so, with mountains rising everywhere, I enjoyed mostly, the intimacy of the miniature plant life underfoot. If adventure is encountering the unexpected, well, this experience with Composing in the Wilderness came through in a most the most novel and magical way.

Mountains Rising Everywhere

Why have we not had any direct encounters with aliens? One theory that stirs my imagination is the “Zoo Hypotheses” that more advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are just observing us (to learn, or for entertainment?), and we are being given the freedom to develop on our own without outside influences. Are we so benevolent with the life around us on this planet? We observe a lot in our voyeuristic social media culture, but what do we learn? How does that observation change us? Are the aliens observing us also learning from us? I wonder how many layers of observation are going on above and below us. Are we just a plaything for beings more intelligent than us or are we being experimented on like we experiment on those creatures we perceive as less intelligent than us? I wonder what Schrodinger’s cat observed in its box…

Zoo Hypotheses

Track 9 from my forthcoming CD "Chanes" (First Children of the Sun). With Rebecca Sherburn, soprano.

Where Illumination Lives

Try to hear this pure tone (in the range of women's voices) by humming and closing your ears with the palms of your hands.

Sine Tone 432Hz

Harmony Farm is located on 70 acres in NE Kansas. The aeolian harp gives a particular musical voice to the wind and is used in sound healing and meditation. Please take a few minutes to meditate with its. Follow your thoughts, images and intuitions as if you are in conversation with it! Or simply enjoy the sounds as they flow in and out, listening with your whole body, mind and spirit. Recorded on the Spring Equinox, 2016, early afternoon.

Harmony Harp Spring Equanox - 2016

Drooling cows, and slobbery dogs? Thema began with a 1' 45" vocal improvisation recorded in the studio.  This recording served as the basis for a composition in which I explored improvisational methods in the studio.  The work results from recorded performance mixes of processed material.  The result is a balance of improvisational instincts with compositional craft in an attempt to preserve the human presence and energy often lost in fixed works.  Like Berio's work, variations stem from this theme but in a recursive rather than a linear manner. Thema: Omaggio was awarded the 2002 EMS Prize, Stockholm, Sweden.

Thema Omaggio

Larger than home
Commissioned by Steven Davis and the UMKC Wind Symphony

Larger than home is a line from the poetry of Nathan Bartel and the music here is a transliteration of the last two movements of my epic 13 movement electroacoustic suite, In lake’ch (or: “I am another yourself” in Mayan). This simple line, and the act of composing out the imagery that it inspired was perhaps one of the single most important moments in my life: it was a time of synthesizing the physical with the spiritual with the emotional and the intellectual: many things came together in this music. Home is the biggest place I know. It is where we are from, even if not in a literal sense, but it is a place (geographic, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, psychological...) where perhaps we feel the most comfort. It is the place we are constantly drawn back too. It is where we want to be, and where wounds heal, hearts grow and nothing is as important as just being. It is where spirit, mind and body come together in a tranquility that connects all parts of ourselves and we become aware. So what could possibly be larger than this? Well, the general answer is...everything. More specifically, there is energy around us that connects us with the past and the future, and expands our notion of home far beyond ourselves. When our inner world becomes one with our outer world and all our parts come together in openness, we expand to a place, indeed, much Larger than home .

Larger than home (Wind Ensemble Version)

Shapes of Wind is based on “I Will Sing of My Redeemer,”  a simple hymn which I remember singing in church as a child.  The hymn, as raw material, takes on many shapes, changing direction and speed much like the wind in the natural environment.  The treatment of material metaphorically represents physical and spiritual changes one experiences throughout life, and seeks to synthesize all of my past and present musical experiences.  Shapes of Wind is in two large sections and begins with fragments of the tune as if remembered through the hazy distance of time.  In the first half, these fragments are treated as individual building blocks for contrasting textural and rhythmic constructions which focus on the development of timbre.  These textural and timbral abstractions of the tune coalesce into the hymn, set in the original harmonization at the middle of the work.  The second half focuses on transforming the hymn from a naive simple musical object into a more informed contemporary musical fabric related to the abstract material of the first half.

Shapes of Wind

April new moon and equinox sound meditation without words.

Equinox Deep Vision Sound Meditation

Equinox Deep Vision Excerpt (from April New Moon/Equinox Meditation)

20 minute meditation for each moon from December through May.

Moon Meditations December through May

Music from the opening ceremony at Rootwire Transformational Festival, Ohio, July, 2017.

Rootwire Opening Ceremony Music 2017

2/28/18 
Give beauty, send love.
Animation by Lisa Marie Evans
Music by Paul Rudy

Reach

Created in a day by forging a mutual "field" between artists to connect in non-local time and space. "Getting rid of old stuff clears out space for allowing the new to effortlessly flow in," Paul Rudy.
"Sometimes we must go back and reclaim the pieces of ourselves we lost along the way. Sometimes we don’t," Lisa Marie Evans

Allowing and reclaiming self

For Large or Medium Wind Ensemble Fixed Media, Horn Solo and Melodica (or Accordion), and guided improvisation

Dedicated to all those who have lost a loved one without a chance to say goodbye.

Death’s thin melody too…is a set of variations that began with the sound of a squeaky
escalator in Arezzo, Italy. The sound itself seemed to be reminiscing about the days when a lone monk wandered the hillside dreaming of a way to help people remember melodies. There is a hidden simple chord progression in this squeak, and yet, there are tones that rise beyond that simple progression into a harmonious other world: they belong, even if they do not fit. Death’s thin melody too…returns to Arezzo, in the footsteps of Guido of Monaco, and invites musicians to let go of notation and return to using their ears as a primary instrument for music-making. This work asks something different of the musicians: that they make music in community using all of the skills they have developed on their instruments, but guided by their unique sensitivities of each person as a listener.

Death’s thin melody first appeared as “Up/Down” in a Kansas City multi-media dance production called WE! (Jane Gotch and Mark Southerland, Spring, 2012), and as part of my epic series called 2012 Stories in live performance and appearing in forthcoming CD No. 7, Chanes. This version invites other instrumentalists to perform along with the haunting, simple tune that I originally improvised along with Arezzo’s escalators. Death’s thin melody too… was commissioned by Joseph Parisi for the UMKC Wind Ensemble.

Death's thin melody too...

Nathan Davis, Cactus (1999)

Homage to John Cage

The idea for a cactus and tape work came about when I heard a performance of John Cage’s Child of Tree.  I was immediately smitten by the sound of the cactus in particular.  Taken from its natural environment and placed in the confined and groomed existence of a pot, amplified with a contact microphone, the cactus took on a completely new and interesting character, however paradoxical.   Without the amplification its subtle and poignant resonance goes largely unnoticed.  The relationship between natural objects and their unnatural extension is the metaphor which inspired Grandchild of Tree.  I am deeply indebted to Nathan Davis for his amazing cactus technique and samples! 

Degrees of Separation, Grandchild of Tree

As a doctoral student at UT, Austin, Stephen Montague came to teach for a few semesters, and left a great impression on all those with whom he came into contact. Every so often unique personalities come along and do that. They stick out because they play by a different rule book, and dance to their own drummer. While the village is not totally burned down, it is left changed forever. And that was my big take-away: to authentically follow my vision with dogged persistence, no matter where the mob wants me to go! So happy birthday Stephen Montague! Life is full of wondrous glitches, hiccups and side roads, and somehow just keeps on tickin’.

University of Houston Aura Ensemble, Directed by Rob Smith
Claire Neiderberger, violin
Hernan Campa, cello

At the phrygid edge of whiteness

In December of 2003, a friend sent me a Christmas Card with a photograph called November Sycamore Leaf by Missouri Photographer John Hess.  The moment I slid the card out of the envelope sound literally exploded in my head.  The bright orange leaf leapt off the card and into my sonic imagination, and as my eyes dug into the details of the image, the music made itself heard before my very eyes.  Two years later, in a small cabin high in the Rocky Mountains with no running water but a fantastic view and quietness, the concentration of the photograph bore itself out in the composition of the music, and November Sycamore Leaf came to life over a three day period. I composed a video based on the single photograph of Hess in December of 2006. The video, like the music, explores the intricate structure of the leaf, and my perception of the leaf as it unfolded on first seeing. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  (Thoreau) November Sycamore Leaf won 1st Prize in the Sounds Electric ’07, Dublin, Ireland.

November Sycamore Leaf

In lake'ch (I am another yourself) Track 12 and 13

In lake’ch (Mayan for “i am another yourself”) is a 13 track work about the environment...it is about human evolution from a base existence of materialism toward a higher horizon of spiritualism nurtured by resonant light. It is about peace and optimism... It asks each of us to look inward...to evaluate our relationships with the earth...ourselves...each other...while gazing out to a far beyond...a creation story: not the ones gone by, but rather the one of our bright and potent future...an unfolding of an intelligence far beyond our known...an ancient cosmology. It is music about the coming-of-age of our planet and a growing consciousness that resonates inward to our own individual alignment with enlightenment and outwards toward a universe where all connects...bathed in higher energy...nourished by harmonic convergence. It is a personal oscillation through omniscient reverberation...

The track titles are from the poetry of Nathan Bartel and a manuscript called The Pangaea, where my inspiration first began. Nine poems titled “The Interior” (or perhaps one in 9 segments), knitted by Mayan numerology, provoked my imagination to roam and race: hearing words, and seeing sounds. These sounds, analogous to the texts, traverse a distance from recognized and obvious to eclipsed: engaged for their beauty or emotional content, or for their cellular sonic imprint...their spatial, spiritual resonance. Transformation of sounds encourages an excursion into the hinterlands of each individual imagination that chooses to travel here. There is no attempt to fuse a narrative, but rather to create a space where each listener can trek at will and pursue the pathways of their own instinct perhaps even bumping into another yourself along the way.

Special thanks to Nathan Bartel for beautiful, immense poetry; to Francis Dhomont, Bernard Parmegiani and Michele Chion for their profound and poetic music (given homage here), to Gary Dibenedetto for source material from his sound sculpture and to Marjorie Sa’adda for helping breath life into the first and last movements. Very special thanks to Michael Knight and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation without whose generosity and vision this work would never have been born!

for JM, CY & ZL
 


Larger than home & Terminus of blue

My musical Odyssey continues to grow, with 6 CD's of 2012 Stories on transformation, sound healing and meditation practice and improvisation performance and facilitation. At the center of my journey is music for the higher purpose of peace and healing between people and Mother Earth. I am grateful to have received so much recognition for this music including Rome Prize (2010), Guggenheim (2008), Fulbright (1997), and Wurlitzer Foundation (2007 and 2009) Fellowships; 2 Global Music Awards (Innovation in Sound and Mixing and Editing); Sounds Electric ’07 Competition (Dublin), EMS Prize (Sweden), Citta di Udine (Prize ex aequo, Italy) international prizes, and performances all over the world. I perform internationally and am available for booking small and large groups and venues.  I teach at the University of Missouri at Kansas City where I received the 2008 Kauffman Award for Artistic Excellence. In 1994 I completed the Colorado Grand Slam after climbing all 54 of Colorado's 14,000 ft peaks. I now enjoy surfing the unknown and catching all the things I missed getting to all those summits…

Paul Rudy

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks