Live Recording from the Rock & Roll Hotel in Washington, D.C.

These Quiet Colours: "Savior"

Unformed Lament is an atmospheric work for string orchestra that utilizes microtonal inflections and scordatura. The title refers to how one can mourn for the loss of something one does not yet have—be it a possibility, built up in one’s mind, or a cultivated hope that grows ever distant. Symbolically, the musical material never develops into recognizable motives or themes. Harmonies form but dissipate before they create motion. In the final gesture, even pitch itself looses focus and dissolves.

Unformed Lament (2015) for string orchestra

Recording of Ecco Chamber Ensemble in rehearsal (2017)

This piece encourages performers to examine what it means to support or oppose a pattern when it arises. Is the motivation to effect positive change or just to be contrary? Obviously, this piece has political overtones, but it also speaks to the most basic of motivations in artistic improvisation and collaboration as well as day-to-day interpersonal communication.

Shifting Power

Shifting Power (2017) for a diverse ensemble

Performed at the 38th Annual Bowling Green New Music Festival by Jonathan Britt, trumpet

The score for Mazed is constructed in the image of a labyrinth—a labyrinth constructed to favor contrast (pitch, duration, and dynamic level). To solve the puzzle, the performer must weave together coherent musical phrases and reach the edge without setting foot in any part of the maze more than once. This is a deceptively simple task for the improviser, who must keep in mind his/her musical past and future as well as the rules of the game. Hence, the title of piece, where the verb-form of maze is used, denoting a very disorienting state of mind.

Mazed

Mazed (2016) for solo performer

Written for and performed by the Ecco Chamber Ensemble.

As the crystalline structure of the ice breaks down, drop by drop, so does the ensemble slowly deconstruct the harmonic series of their lowest note—the open E produced by the guitar’s sixth and lowest string. However, this process is viewed as if through a microscope by the slow pacing of the piece, controlled and coordinated by the dripping of ice-melt. Thus, we are much more likely to focus on each individual event as it occurs rather than hear any overall relationship or trend, much in the same way a significant portion of the population cannot see beyond the current weather in their own backyard to the alarming trend threatening their very existence.

Melt III (2018) for soprano, flute, and guitar

Written for and performed by How Things Are Made.

Collecting dialog from novels, phrase books, and collections of quotations, the performers attempt to weave what they’ve found into a coherent conversation, punctuating at will with sounds generated by the books themselves. The resulting piece should hover between abstract and linear, between familiar and original, between performance and eavesdropping.

Bookbinding (2017) for a small group of improvisers

Lena Seikaly, vocals
Kevin Pace, bass
Rodney Richardson, guitar

music by Jimmy McHugh
lyrics by Dorothy Fields

Lena Seikaly: "Exactly Like You"

Written for and performed by Stephen Leffue.

Edgeplay is a guided improvisation for saxophone and live signal processing (Max).  As the title implies, the piece explores boundaries, thresholds, and extremes.  The saxophonist is instructed to push technique beyond the limits of control and investigate timbre as a delineator of sound:  differentiating registers, distinguishing tone from breath and focused pitch from bands of noise.   The score is a hybrid of text and graphics, left intentionally vague to suggest rather than dictate the performer’s investigation.  The electronics (primarily spectral manipulations of the live saxophone) react to extremes, dynamic and durational, and adjust to the performer over the course of the piece.  The sonic result is a mapping, albeit partial, of the sonic transformations idiomatic to the saxophone when in the capable hands of a trained performer.

Edgeplay (2010) for saxophone and live electronics

DC-based Composer, Audio Engineer, Sound Artist, Educator

Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Stephen ventured east to study composition at the University of Maryland and stayed.

Theatricality, language, and abstraction are themes that continually resurface in his creative work, the majority of which is scored for chamber ensembles, incorporating signal processing and computer generated sounds.  

Stephen has written works for CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) Britsol, the DMC (Devil May Care) Duo, pianist Hayk Arsenyan, saxophonist Steven Leffue, and soprano Stacey Mastrian and has worked closely with a collective of composer-performers he helped found, the Bay Players Experimental Music Collective. His writings on contemporary experimental music have been published in Organised Sound, Performance Research, Perspectives of New Music, and Computer Music Journal. Recordings he has engineered have been released on Navona and Albany Records.

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