Vista Points (2009) - All materials used in Vista Points are derived from electric guitar sounds. Often the electric guitar sounds are left raw and layered with processed materials. When these sounds interact there are points of causality, conflict and turbulence. This work also explores the varying distances between soinc events and contrasts between pressured and coluntary behavours to achieve moments of activity and emptiness.
Thanks go to Carlos Charles Lopez for providing the electric guitar sounds for this project.


Vista Points (excerpt) for fixed media by Manuella Blackburn

In Thin Air – for violin, piano, and percussion (2012) Mvt 3

for 2 Bb clarinets and live electronics

Clarinets: Kevin Price and Liam Kinson

Anicca, Anicca

All sounds are from two computer-controlled flutes.

Percussion+Guitar, for two computer-controlled flutes

Mivos Quartet:
Josh Modney, violin
Olivia De Prato, violin
Victor Lowrie, viola
Mariel Roberts, cello

Bryan Jacobs and Eric Wubbels, electronics

live recording
Roulette (Brooklyn, NY)
11/2/2015



being-time, Panel V ("Presence") [2013-15]

Weston Olencki, trombone
Eric Wubbels, piano


contraposition [2015-16] (trombone and piano)- rehearsal excerpt

Performed/composed by Jane Rigler, on piccolo and pump organ (simultaneously) on August 26th, 2016, at the Civitella Ranieri chapel. Made in one track, no over-dubbing or other edits, besides minor mastering/mixing.
Gratitude to Composers Now and Civitella Ranieri for making this piece possible.

St. Christopher's shoulders (for piccoloist playing the pump organ), 2016

Microvariations for large ensemble was composed in 2016 for Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. I revised the piece in 2017 and this is the revised version performed by the ensemble of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec and conducted by Walter Boudreau.

In 1825, British conductor George Thomas Smart traveled across Europe and compared his A = 423.5hz tuning fork to the tuning of every musical group he could find. Some ensembles were perfectly in tune with his tuning fork, but others, especially around Vienna, were quite a bit higher and closer to today’s standard A = 440hz. Microvariations is a fast-forward and transcontinental sonic truncation and fantasy on Smart’s journey. Pieces that he probably heard, entire symphonies and sonatas of the common practice period, are distilled to their most skeletal, structural chord progressions and played at hyper speeds. Microvatiations begins with material similar to that in my string quartet Many Many Cadences: predictable tonal chord progressions recontextualized into fast cells that are constantly changing key. Microvariations situates the cadences in two different groups (“towns”) playing a quarter tone apart from one another, at first distinct and eventually congealing and blurring.

Microvariations (revised)

Teaser track for large-scale composition, Virtutes Occultae. 

https://taylorbrook.bandcamp.com/releases

Virtutues Occultae is an album in eighteen sections for six physically modeled virtual pianos, each with a unique tuning in an extended 11-limit just intonation.

In writing this music I used a mixture of traditional composition methods of structuring the music with various harmonies and progressions along with more free writing, collage techniques, and algorithmic composition.

The tuning of the virtual pianos extends Harry Partch’s conception of the over-tonality.

www.taylorbrookmusic.com

Virtutes Occultae

Virtutes Occultae - 1) Prelude

performers: Fanny Vicens § Jean-etienne sotty

Ateliers modulables: Atelier E (for 2microtonal Accordions, 2017)

The piece is an exploration of the concept of Muzak as a security tool. The usage of music as an enhancement of security alongside video surveillance and police invigilation is something I find strange and violent. Perhaps just as strange as the sensation of hearing some of your favorite pieces of classical music playing through low grade speakers or megaphones in the train stations to seemingly detest certain people from certain areas. The subway station I used to use for my commute seemed to have Handel's Water Music in their "standard repertoire".

Performance by HANATSU Miroir. 

https://tomaszarnold.com/?non-aggressive-music-deterrent,107

Non - Aggressive Music Deterrent

Please feel free to contact Sky Macklay via e-mail at sky.macklay@gmail.com.

The music of composer, oboist and installation artist Sky Macklay (b. 1988) explores bold contrasts, theatrical elements, audible processes, humor, and the physics of sound production and perception. Her works have been performed by ensembles such as ICE, Yarn/Wire, Wet Ink Ensemble, Spekral Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Dal Niente, The Da Capo Chamber Players, Firebird Ensemble, Hexnut, and PRIZM. Her piece Dissolving Bands, an abstract orchestral reflection on the American Revolutionary War, was commissioned and premiered by the Lexington (MA) Symphony. Dissolving Bands was the winner of the 2013 Leo Kaplan award, the top prize in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. In 2015 her sonic and kinetic installation of inflatable harmonica-playing robots, Harmonibots, received the Ruth Anderson Prize from The International Alliance for Women in Music. She has been commissioned by The New York Virtuoso Singers, Chamber Music America, and the Jerome Fund for New Music. Her string quartet Many Many Cadences, recorded on Spektral Quartet’s newest album, also received an ASCAP award. As an active new music oboist and improviser, Sky plays with Ghost Ensemble and has also appeared with Ensemble Pamplemousse, Counter)induction, and at the MATA Festival.
 
Originally from Minnesota, Sky is currently pursuing her DMA in composition at Columbia University in NYC where she studies with Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis, and Fred Lerdahl. She is also a 2015-17 Composers and the Voice Fellow with American Opera Projects. An enthusiastic practitioner of creative music education, Sky teaches at Columbia and at The Walden School Young Musicians Program in Dublin, New Hampshire, the country's largest summer school and festival for pre-college composers.

Microvariations (revised)

skymacklay