Recording by JACK quartet from a live performance of Arrhythmia in New York on September 15, 2014.

Arrhythmia (JACK Quartet)

A beautiful and mysterious track for solo male voice with a chorus of male voices droning the accompaniment. The overall feeling of this track is calm and spiritual, with smooth melodic contours and intricate vocal work from the Arabian/Islamic singing tradition of the Middle East.

This track is in the world beat/ethnic music genre and may work well of a wide range of projects concerned with bringing a warm and emotional background with a clearly vocal and middle-eastern character.

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Voice Of Arabia

Lush was written in the Winter of 2016 for Wet Ink Ensemble. This piece was conceived as a hybrid between concert music and orchestral film music. As a composer of concert music, the attempt to draw out new ideas from mainstream film music may seem unusual, however, as I began exploring the possibilities provided by commercial sound libraries, sampler instruments, and synths, I was drawn to the idea of retuning these electronic instruments to create an electroacoustic part that fills out and expands the chamber ensemble into a bigger, richer sound.

The majority, if not entirety, of new film scores are produced using samples along with the occasional sprinkling in of a few live performers to heighten a sense of realism. By creating music in this way, the ideal realization of this score may be as a recording, where the precise level between live and sampler instruments can be completely controlled.

A second impetus for using an electronic part made from sampler instruments is to facilitate the performance of precise microtones through pitch matching. This method has allowed me include unusual harmonies and chord changes since the pitches of the live instrumental parts are almost always doubled in the electronics.

Recorded live on April 29th, 2016, at St Peters Church, New York,  by Wet Ink Ensemble with Alex Mincek, conductor. David Adamcyk, recording engineer. Mixed and mastered by Taylor Brook.

www.taylorbrookmusic.com

Lush - for 11 players and electronics (Wet Ink Ensemble)

Thrifty Pete is out of prison and back in business. He’s learned from his mistakes, and he won’t rest until YOU, the customer, get the best deals imaginable. 

Download this track and the entire album for free here: https://chiptuneswin.bandcamp.com/album/chiptunes-win-volume-5

thrifty Pete's dirt Cheap deals can't be Beat

Song for Solo Cello is dedicated to Anssi Karttunen. This score was written during the Summerof 2015 in Smithers, British Columbia, for a recital at the Scandinavia House in New York City, Fall 2015. This piece is part of a series of short solo cello compositions written for Mr. Karttunen by allumni of the Creative Dialogue program in Santa Fe and Helsinki.

This composition results from a collaboration with cellist Anssi Karttunen. The project began when I sent him an object that would serve as inspiration for a solo improvisation, an improvisation to form the basis for my score. From the improvisation, I drew out collections of pitches as well as some playing techniques and gestures that I
then incorporated into the music. This method of working creates a dialogue between theperformer and composer, encouraging a dimension of personalization. In this way, the piece represents a compositional duet.

The title, Song, alludes to the melodic and sung character of this composition. Mr. Karttunen’s improvisation contains a generally textural and gestural character, more concerned with sound worlds and global textures than melodies and musical phrases in the traditional sense. However, I heard a great deal of melodic potential in the improvisation,
which was only being hinted at, and took this as the challenge and focus of the work.

for more please visit: www.taylorbrookmusic.com

Song for Solo Cello(Anssi Karttunen @ScandanaviaHouseNYC 2016)

Amalgam, written by Taylor Brook, recorded by TAK ensemble.

from TAK ensemble's album, Ecstatic Music: TAK plays Brook, available on New Focus (FCR 169).

About Amalgam

Amalgam was written for TAK in the summer of 2015.

Amalgam focuses on orchestration, or more precisely, the mixture and unification of the instrumental forces into one unit. This idea of amalgamation through orchestration is approached in two ways. The first approach aims at fusion, building up a complex form of unison playing, matching frequencies, rhythms, and timbres to create a unified monophonic texture. This extended unison is developed throughout the first large section of the piece.

The second half of the piece explores heterophonic textures: a unison line created by the combination of different elements from by different instruments. Instead of true unison and monophony, fusion through connected and contrasting instrumental lines is the goal.

TAK - Amalgam - Taylor Brook

Live Recording of the second diagram (of five) by Talea Ensemble, 2016.

Exploded Views was written for Talea Ensemble in 2016.

Most people are familiar with exploded views from putting together Ikea furniture: they are the diagrams that display all the individual parts separated out, showing how they may be assembled, usually via dotted lines connecting the parts. A musical phrase may be understood as a set of connected parts and an exploded view diagram can easily take on a musical quality, as the construction of an object becomes a metaphor for the construction of a musical phrase or sound object. Time and space are splayed out and this deconstruction musical phrase shows the complex inner workings that make it whole.

The idea of basing a piece of music on exploded views came from a theatrical production of How to Get Into Buildings, a play written by Trish Harnetiaux and directed by my sister, Katherine Brook. In this play, the temporal ordering of the narrative was inspired by exploded views - individual moments were spaced out in such a way as a gradual understanding of the story and characters happens gradually, and the connections of the happenings onstage emerges over time.

In extending the exploded view idea to music, I selected five diagrams, one permovement, and decided upon a few approaches on interpreting these diagrams musically. The first approach follows the basic premise of an exploded view diagram: a set of interconnecting parts that show the complete combination as well as allows for the viewing of each individual part. In musical terms, this meant separating out a “complete” musical phrase into parts that could be used like building blocks, their bare forms revealed.

A second approach is similar to transcription, where short musical objects represent this and that screw or cog in a diagram and the exploded view is composed out as if reading the diagram from left to right. The interest in this approach lay in the desire to represent the same object at different sizes and suggest connections between musician gestures that aren’t explicit.
	 The final approach is more vague and freely interpretive: a translation of the affect of the diagram as something that evokes movement through the interconnecting parts and gears. To express this mechanical nature, certain referential performance techniques, harmonies, and rhythms were called upon.

Exploded Views (Excerpt: Diagram 2)

This violin concerto is dedicated to violinist, Mira Benjamin.

The title, Faith in Numbers, is taken from a popular science documentary by James Burke of the same name, which shows how technology emerges from seemingly unconnected events in history. This title doesn’t refer to faith in a religious sense, but to signify a complete trust in something or someone. I chose this title for my composition because of the utilization of the same basic proportions in all structural levels. By doing this, the reiteration of simple numbers and ratios, applied to different aspects of the composition, combine to form a complex whole.

The third and fourth strings of the violin are retuned: the G string is tuned down a sixth of a tone, and the D string is tuned up a quarter-tone. This microtonal scordatura transports the treatment of pitch in the music to the resonance of the instrument itself. In this way, my ideas about pitch inform how I want to tune the violin, then the retuned violin informs me about how I want to use pitch in the composition. The open strings define the important tonal centres of the work as well as the construction of the modes, which are drawn from the first seven harmonics of the opens strings.

The percussion quartet perform on a drum kit, two almglocken and a steel string guitar. The guitar is played primarily with mallets while secured on its back to a table. By using the guitar as a percussion instrument I am tipping my hat to Lou Harrison and the use of a double bass in his violin concerto, which uses a percussion quintet instead of an orchestra. Each of the guitars is tuned to a different open chord, corresponding to the pitch of one of the open violin strings.

Faith In Numbers: Concerto for Violin with Percussion Quartet (Mira Benjamin/Architek Percussion)

Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+)
Véronique Lacroix, direction
Marie-Hélène Breault, soliste flutiste et piccoliste
Concert Génération 2016 du 30 octobre, 2016
Music Gallery (Toronto), New Music Concerts

Tirant Lo Blanc was written for the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal for their Générations 2016 tour.

The title, Tirant Lo Blanc is taken from a chivalric romance of the same name, written by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell, or rather Martorell claims it’s simply a translation of an english text, which has never been found, into Valencian. The text was published posthumously in 1490 and was influential on author Miguel de Cervantes, especially pertaining to Don Quixote, as Tirant the Blanc lacks the platonic and contemplative brand of love, instead full of a more naturalistic, human, and sensual character.

The central reason for naming this musical score after the Martorell’s novel is that it is one of the earliest examples of alternate history in literature. In Tirant Lo Blanc, the European knights win the battle of Constinople and Byzantium does not fall into the hands of Sultan Mehmed II “the conqueror”. This score presents a kind of musical alternate history, where the music is conceptualized according to reorienting the idea of “normal” playing technique and demands that one reconsider form, musical expression, social purpose, tonal systems, etc, from a fresh perspective. Composing within the framework of imaginary tradition aims at questioning the norm and creating rules that bring out an evocative and unique sound world.

Composing within the framework of imaginary tradition aims at questioning the norm and creating rules that bring out an evocative and unique sound world. For instance, the harmony is built around a microtonal, just intonation, system that allows for references to traditional harmony, at times twisting them to give the impression of being at once familiar and strange. To realize the precisely-tuned harmonies, the string instruments have been re-tuned.

In this piece, the solo flute is the point of focus, and the ensemble reinforces the solo part in various ways. Similar to the referential nature of the harmony, the role of the soloist is closely related to a traditional solo and the form of the first movement of a classical concerto. The concerto form is toyed with and the expectations of the listener on the soloist was a key compositional element.

Tirant Lo Blanc - concerto for flute - Marie-Hélène Breault with the ECM+ (Live rec NMC Toronto)

Rhythms are fed into synthetic guitar improvisors that choose the pitches according to probabilities. It's in A!

Voice Of Arabia

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