Program Notes:
Listen for the subtle,  short, interrupted sine waves within electronics that cause the speakers themselves to emit ‘pops’ and
crackles, interrupting the acoustic instruments and tape playback. We’re not hearing the sine wave but rather the effect of the sine wave on the speaker’s mechanics turning the speaker itself into an acoustic element; thus giving these objects an active role rather than accepting them as a passive (playback) tool. Usually this treatment is avoided and seen as a mistake but in this piece it functions to address the physical mechanics of the speaker, of its own body, and demanding it to become more. To add to this, the percussionists are playing custom made “speaker-instruments:” subwoofer speaker cones transformed into an open air (and in a sense, large contact) microphone. This configuration allows the percussionist to physically perform low resonant tones and high washes of live filtered noise not possible outside this setup, with the hope to merge electronic and acoustic instruments into one composite organism, dependent on this merging to become more than just an extension of itself. The live processing portion of the work is that of rapid panning of the live acoustic instruments between two stereo speakers. This panning reaches audio rates and thus from this rapid oscillation causes its own square wave-like tone: the electronics sounds blooming from the acoustic in a symbiotic, intertwined creature like lichen.
This piece engulfs two prior pieces of mine that I’ve been working on for the past few years, “Harbinger” and “Speaker Spit.”

Instrumentation: Amplified vln, vc, piccolo, trumpet, e. gtr, midikeys, b-flat clarinet and live processing

Premiered and Performed by Nadar Ensemble
Mastered by Murat Colak
Mixed by Kelley Sheehan

Creature Like Lichen (2022)for chamber ensemble

Premiered on 2/22/18 by the Lydian String Quartet

Fractal Tracing for String Quartet

Premiered at the Ann E. Pitzer Center in Davis, California on 4/12/17
Harp - Jennifer Ellis
Electronic patch built by Derek Kwan in Pure Data

Parallax Oblivion for Harp and Live Electronics

Aperture Perpetuum

PANGKUR. Composed 2016-2017 for the Continuum Contemporary Music.
Scored either for piano+percussion duo, for mixed quartet, or for a full sextet (split into two groups and dispersed throughout the performance space).

Performed as a quartet at the Nief-Norf Summer Festival 2018, Knoxville, TN, United States. Selected as a winner in Nief-Norf's Call for Scores for its New Asia Research Summit.

Performers:
Phoebe Bognár (piccolo, alto flute)
Alexandra Hecker (clarinet, bass clarinet)
Jonathan Tang (violin)
Ashlee Booth (cello)

Special thanks to Jay Sorce for serving as the Performance Coach in this presentation.

Video screenshot from Four/Ten Media.

Pangkur (for mixed quartet) [2017]

Chatori Shimizu - Fiddle for String Quartet

Performed by Sinfonia Salt Lake:
Alison Olsen - flute
Henry Caceres - clarinet
Autumn England - cello
Stephen Hughes - percussion
Andrew Staupe - piano
Robert Baldwin conducting

Gramarye for chamber ensemble explores the interstices between music and language. Grammar is regarded today as an ubiquitous study instilled in us from a young age in school. In the Middle Ages, however, knowledge of grammar was scarce enough to be considered a form of sorcery by the layman. Along with logic and rhetoric, grammar formed the core of the seven liberal arts known as the trivium. The term “gramarye” now has connotations of occult learning, magic, and necromancy. This new work springs from this mystical view of grammar and learning in general. Gramarye presents many variations of its opening harmonic material in textures that are each controlled by unique, sound grammars. Excerpts from preexistent texts are woven into the formal, rhythmic, and harmonic structures of the piece. These include references to gramarye in the Towneley plays and Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. I do not intend these processes to be recognized and carefully followed by the listener, but rather I aim for them to lend the music an underpinning structure and personal meaning, which allows a metaphorical resonance with the source materials to blossom. Gramarye was commissioned by the Utah Arts Festival for Sinfonia Salt Lake and was premiered on July 22, 2019, in Salt Lake City. This work was made possible in part with the support of Crosstown Arts in Memphis.

Gramarye

El Puente (2015)

- for bassoon and piano

Lia Uribe, bassoon
Miroslava Panayotova, piano

www.sasakimusic.com

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Miho Sasaki : El Puente

### is an 8 channel work premiered on a 12.2 system. All sounds recorded from several analogue synths.  Please keep in mind that this is the stereo version.

Premiered at Paine Hall, Harvard on 12/5/2019

### (2019) 8 channel

The title of this work, The Stone Cries When I Sing, is a reference to a story in which Baiju Bawra, a character of Indian legend, sings in despair to a stone statue of the god Shiva, and the stone begins to cry in response. The cello part in this piece is the first 30 seconds of the song Baiju sings to the Shiva statue stretched over the course of 12-15 minutes. Because the excerpt is stretched to over twenty-five times its original length, each slide, inflection, and nuance in the original song is carefully ornamented, modified, and eventually distorted to produce a unique transformation. While contemplating how the three brass instruments should interact with the cello, I came upon a different combination of stone and water myself, this time a statue of a Sitting Buddha. A fountain, this Buddha statue produced three courses of water, two from a pot in his lap and one from his head. The Buddha statue serves as the framework for the interactions between the four instruments. The cello remains steadfast and constant, like a stone, while the three brass instruments react like streams of water emanating from it. 

The notation of this work is mostly prescriptive as opposed to descriptive. In other words, the notation represents physical actions that the performers must undertake rather than the resulting sounds of their actions. This basis for producing sound results in an indeterminate compositional setting, particularly in the brass part; multiple iterations of the same notation could possibly produce distinctive aural results, an appropriate framework for representing the constantly changing formations of flowing water. The cello part, on the other hand, while also containing prescriptive notation, is less indeterminate than the brass parts. While a stone statue may slowly erode with time or transform physically because a changing environment, it remains more steadfast and constant than flowing water. Accordingly, the cello sound is more constant and present throughout the work.

The Stone Cries When I Sing

When Yael Weiss commissioned me to write a work in response to one of the Beethoven sonatas as part of her project “32 Bright Clouds,” I knew immediately which specific sonata I would choose: Op. 10, No. 3. As an undergraduate, this was one of the works that I analyzed, studied, and learned. In particular, I was drawn to the second movement’s overwhelming pathos that opened to the joy of the third movement. Unheard Voices dwells on the emotional content of this second movement while looking forward to the hope suggested by the third. In this new work, I ask Yael to perform the my composition while at the same time listening privately to a recording of the Beethoven movement with headphones. (This is a technique that I learned about from composer/pianist Jocelyn Ho.) As a result, two separate yet joint experiences occur simultaneously: the audience hears my piece being performed by the pianist whose interpretation of the music is in turn mediated, circumscribed, and informed by something that the audience can’t hear. 

Unheard Voices also uses another technique, which I heard about from composer Felippo Perocco, who devised a creative process that involves “carving away” notes from a pre-existing work. For Unheard Voices, using the second movement of Op. 10, No. 3 as the canvas upon which I created my piece, I “carved away” many of the notes, keeping a certain few and echoing others (like ghostly whispers) in the piano gestures. Embedded toward the end of Unheard Voices is a quote from the “Agnus Dei” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis on the text dona nobis pacem: a plea for peace that is the underpinning of Yael’s commissioning project. 

Unheard Voices is dedicated to the victims of vigilante violence and extra-judicial killings that have happened in the Philippines, whose voices remain tragically unheard.

"Unheard Voices" (for solo piano; Yael Weiss, Live Performance; 2018)

Sidney Marquez Boquiren grew up in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, spending most of his adult life in the United States. He collaborates with artists on various projects including Biblical illumination; multimedia and multi-sensory art experience; chamber opera; and dance. He has received commissions from the German vocal quintet, amarcord; harpist, Tasha Smith Godinez; the contemporary ensemble, counter)induction; and Parhelion Trio. He is one of 32 artists in the international roster commissioned to compose new solo piano works for Yael Weiss’ “32 Bright Clouds”. His compositions are often informed, influenced, and shaped by contemporary social justice issues; his Catholic faith; and his Philippine identity.

A MacDowell Fellow, Sidney is Professor of Music at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. He sings with the Ignatian Schola as well as the choir of The Church of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, New York.

"Unheard Voices" (for solo piano; Yael Weiss, Live Performance; 2018)

Sidney Marquez Boquiren

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