Metagestos

Rewind (for violin, cello, piano, and percussion)

8-channel surround piece (stereo reduction)

Cisterna II was composed from recordings I made in the small town of Guanacaste, located high in the mountains of southern Honduras. When I visited in 2013, I was amazed by a giant cistern that sits on the mountain just outside of the village. Despite this, the residents of Guanacaste had infrequent access to clean water because the pipes had deteriorated and the town is very remote and difficult to access. Fortunately, a volunteer project rebuilt the pipe system and reconnected the community to the cistern in the years following my visit.

Many of the sounds in this piece – including interviews with residents about their relationship to water, local livestock, and the constant bachata music on the local radio – are convolved with the sound of the cistern's interior, its resonance captured by dropping a microphone in the open pipe that was eventually reconnected to the village.

A live performance version of this piece was premiered in Paris in 2014 as part of the IRCAM Manifeste festival, and recomposed for premiere at the DIFFUSION festival in Baltimore in 2021.

Cisterna II

Textures Arc The Points is dedicated to my late teacher Mark Chambers, who was a great composer that often introspect about music. Thank you for introducing me to the world of “Spectra and Pixies” and the world of electronics

Textures Arc The Points was commissioned by the Debris Project; utilizing sound solely from their database.

Engulfed by the many points, as these materials conglomerate within the plane 
Matter as figurative and external

Conglomerates veil the arcs

Meandering through the flow, at times with extreme exaggeration Flow that is never the same
As flow is made up of impermanent elements

Cyclic material that occurs “once”; an ephemeral quality 
Often unfair

Endure with an inner rhythm of
Textures of a phantom-like movement
Veiled by the engulfment of the points

We endure through perception of, not form, but rather

Yielding the flow
And respond to the “through” material

Textures Arc The Points

Vox Inhumana (Latin: inhuman voice) combines soprano, instrumental ensemble, and electronics to portray one important and universal aspect of humanity to be found in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  In this seminal work of the Italian 13th century vernacular, the concept of desire arises frequently in all three sections of the poem: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  Though one might expect to find strong references to desire in the Inferno, where it is the desires for earthly things that both condemn and torment the souls of those unlucky enough to be consigned there, Dante tells us that Divine Justice actually goads souls into wanting to arrive there.  The damned actually want to be in Hell, where the fear of damnation is turned into desire for torment.  Similarly, the more fortunate souls whose sins are less grievous and who arrive in Purgatory also are strongly desirous of the torment they endure, but in this realm torment is the hallmark of the cleansing process that leads the soul ultimately to Paradise.  The language used to describe each of these types of desire is strikingly similar.  Torment as punishment and torment as cleansing are both, in Dante’s world-view, just and desirable conditions.  In Paradise, though desire is less strongly associated with torment, it shares one element with the desires of the lower two realms:  the aim of the desire is toward a loss of self.  In Purgatory, the desire for torment is a desire for self-negation, for ridding the soul of its past, making it ready for the ascent.  Once in Paradise, desire is expressed as an ecstatic longing for the ultimate absorption into the light and ineffable mind of God.  Again, the language in which this desire is expressed is remarkably similar to that of the previous sections:  ecstatically emotional and profoundly human, it nevertheless attempts to express the inexpressible – the dissolution of all things that make us individual into the undying and constant love of the Creator.  In all stages of Dante’s journey, the souls are deeply pulled, both from within and from outside of themselves, by the inevitable yearning of desire, whether for the oblivion and inhumanity of Hell or the oblivion and ‘non-humanity’ of Heaven. 

My profoundest thanks to Rebecca Sherburn and newEar, who have joined me in this journey of expression toward the inexpressible.  My thanks also to the Koussevitzky and Barlow Foundations for their support of this project, and to the UMKC Conservatory of Music – and all my friends and colleagues there – which has provided me a safe haven for all my compositional journeys for over 20 years. 





Vox Inhumana

An exceptional studio recording, by STELLAR violinist Yu-Fang Chen, of a piece written in Rome in 1989, as the Berlin wall was falling and Eastern Europe was experiencing a newfound freedom.  The opening and closing sections reflect the folk sound of these countries, while the scherzo-like middle section reflects the energy and optimism of a new era.

Soggiorno (for Violin And Fixed Media)

and the surrounding area combines recordings of idyllic scenes of suburban life with analog synthesis. Recorded and combined using ambisonics, the two worlds interrupt, augment, and ultimately melt into one another. Thus, the ‘surrounding area’ is both a literal description of the source material as well as a metaphor for how the two sound worlds are combined.

and the surrounding area (stereo version)

Live performance by Birds on a Wire
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
April 12, 2019

Sarah Bortz, flutes
Eric Dalmau, violin
Andrew Gagiu, cello
Spencer Gravel, percussion

Chatterbox explores the repetition and nearly constant presence of a single musical idea to the point of obsession. The title is a term used by sufferers of anxiety to refer to an unrelenting bombardment of worries and negative thoughts.

This piece is dedicated to my teachers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City: James Mobberley, Paul Rudy, and Chen Yi.

Chatterbox (2016) — Birds on a Wire Ensemble

Excellent recording by Griffin Campbell, saxophone (Baton Rouge, LA). Originally written for saxophonist John Sampen, with an equally fine  recording on AMP records, released in in 2015.

Once Again To The Light - Griffin Campbell, Saxophone

For four-hands, one piano.  Commissioned by Benjamin Krause for the Four Hands Project.  Benjamin Krause and Linda Angkasa, piano.  

in medias res

TIMOTHY ROY (b. 1987, Nederland, Texas) composes music steeped in imagery and allusion, which seeks to elicit a sense of time, place, and feeling. With an output that encompasses works for acoustic instruments, electronic sound, and the intersection of these two realms, Roy endeavors to explore a broad range of mediums and contexts in which his work might be experienced.
 
Engagement with other disciplines of study is the lifeblood of Roy's creative practice. Recent projects have involved cooperation with practitioners in fields as varied as medieval and religious studies, ecology, dance, and film. His current slate of projects includes an ambisonic fixed media work, commissioned by ASCAP/SEAMUS and an orchestral work for the Shepherd Symphony Orchestra at Rice University.  
 
Roy’s music has been heard in concerts across the United States and twenty countries abroad, with performances by Ensemble Signal, Illinois Modern Ensemble, the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra, the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus, Loop38, violinist Sayako Kusaka, and pianists Keith Kirchoff, Adam Marks, Stacey Barelos, and Xenia Pestova. His music has been presented at such venues and events as the National Theater of Taipei, Music Biennale Zagreb, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST), Sonosfera Theatre (Pesaro, Italy), the DiMenna Center (NYC), San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Florida State University Festival of New Music, Bowling Green New Music Festival, June in Buffalo, Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium, Sonorities Festival Belfast, International Computer Music Festival (ICMC), Center of Cypriot Composers, Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) National Conference, Electronic Music Midwest, and the International Electroacoustic Music Festival of Chile, “Ai-maako.”
 
In 2024, Roy received an Honorable Mention in the McKnight Composer Fellowship awards from American Composers Forum. He has also received awards and recognition from the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award (First Prize, 2022), ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Award (First Prize, 2023; Finalist, 2018), Robert Avalon International Competition for Composers (First Prize in Professional Division, 2023), Giga-Hertz Production Prize (Honorable Mention, 2022), Prix CIME from the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music (Distinction, 2023), Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest (Second Prize, 2023), New Music on the Bayou (2021 Black Bayou Composition Award), Sigma Alpha Iota Inter-American Music Awards (Winner, 2015), the International Competition of Electroacoustic Composition “Prix Destellos” (First Prize, 2013; Honorary Mention, 2019), Musicacoustica-Beijing Composition Competition (First Prize, student mixed media category, 2012), the First International Jean Sibelius Composition Competition (Finalist, 2015), the International Composition Competition “Città di Udine” (Finalist, 2012), and the I-Park Foundation (Resident Artist, 2018).
 
His work "Behind the Back" for pipa and electronics appears on Crossings: Contemporary Music for Chinese Instruments, The Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra’s debut album with Albany Records. His "Salve Regina" for chorus is published by Edition Peters.

He frequently collaborates with musicians to present works for instruments and electronics. In July 2021, he worked closely with Steven Takasugi to produce two portrait concerts of his works for amplified instruments and electronics during the Twin Cities New Music Festival. Other notable collaborations include performance of electronics for Kate Soper's Voices from the Killing Jar and for the North American premiere of Unsuk Chin's "Double Bind?" for violin and 8-channel audio, using proprietary motion-tracking sensors and software from Ircam.

He was a visiting faculty member at Western Michigan University during the 2018–2019 academic year, where he taught private composition lessons, undergraduate theory, and graduate seminars in musical form and the aesthetics of electroacoustic music. He previously taught at MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas.
 
Roy and his wife currently reside in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is choirmaster and organist at the Church of Saint Peter Roman Catholic Community. He is completing a doctorate at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music; there, he taught electronic music, theory, and composition, and served for three years as the Teaching Fellow for the Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs (REMLABS). His teachers have been Kurt Stallmann, Pierre Jalbert, Karim Al-Zand, James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Paul Rudy, Kevin Hanlon, Simon Sargon, and Martin Sweidel.

Chatterbox (2016) — Birds on a Wire Ensemble

Timothy Roy