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)

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)

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