An excerpt from <i>Transfigurations</i> for Orchestra and Live Computer Processing
(Full Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra versions available.)

Performed by the Temple Composers Orchestra (Chamber version)
Adam Vidiksis conducting

For ages, the orchestra served as the most advanced tone generator available to the musical art. The history of the orchestra has been one of continual development toward a diversity of timbre, loudness, and register. The computer is the only musical instrument capable of making all sounds discernible by the human ear; it is logical then to bring the computer into the orchestral tradition. Transfigurations combines the vast musical forces provided by these two mediums. All the sounds one hears originate in the orchestra itself live during the performance, except for the last sound. The computer processes these sounds in real time – manipulating, augmenting, and reinventing the performance. As with human musicians, no two iterations of the computer realization are exactly alike. 

The piece comprises five sections. The first is a fast-paced interplay between the orchestra and the computer, filled with counterpoint and rising to a dark and threatening culmination. In the second part, the flute, clarinet, and computer intermingle and untangle again with interjections from the rest of the full ensemble. The third portion of the work is a hopeful adagio, expanded in color by the computer, which ends in a triumphant outburst. The fourth section is dominated by solo violin and percussion. Both are manipulated to create an dense, metallic texture with threatening interjections from the rest of the ensemble. In the final section, the orchestra takes off at brisk pace, as if trying to outpace the ever-increasing effect of the digital manipulation. It is finally overtaken in a moment of music controlled by the computer and completely transformed from the live performance. As this music fades away, the only sounds not manipulated directly from the orchestra are heard. These chime-like tones are determined stochastically by the computer from the notes of the opening chordal motive. As these play softly fading into the distance, the orchestra enters once again for a final weary statement.

Transfigurations

Interweaving sound, language and image, The Altering Shores is a four screen video performance with live music. Set in the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local Delaware River watershed and others worldwide, the experience presents a kaleidoscope of climate futures through fragmented language and multi-layered sounds and images. Participants are guided through this uncertain terrain by lead artist Roderick Coover, poet Nick Montfort, and composer Adam Vidiksis.

Altering Shores (Excerpt)

American chestnut trees once dominated the northeastern forests of North America. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a fatal fungal pathogen (cryphonectria parasitica) was introduced to the continent by the import of chestnut trees from blight-resistant areas of the world. While those species of chestnut had millennia to develop immune strategies to fight this pathogen, the American chestnut was obliterated by this blight; approximately 80% of the trees in the Appalachian Mountain chain were destroyed. The American chestnut has been considered functionally extinct for decades; however, new research offers a ray of hope. Efforts to restore the American chestnut include breeding programs to create blight-resistant hybrids and the discovery of naturally resistant trees. Despite challenges, ongoing research and collaboration aim to reintroduce these trees across their historical range, with promising results from trials and the identification of surviving pure American chestnuts.

The musical gestures in this piece are inspired by the textures of the American chestnut tree, including the bark and the patterns of the wood grain from the heartwood, such as straight, interlocked, and spiral grain patterns. The work is a reimagining of the state of the species over its history, from tragedy to an imagined future where this giant dominates the forests of North America once again.

https://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/apsnetfeatures/Pages/ChestnutBlightDisease.aspx
https://blog.ncagr.gov/2024/05/03/the-fight-for-a-fallen-giant-bringing-back-the-american-chestnut/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378112722007356?via%3Dihub


American Chestnut

Interweaving sound, language and image, The Altering Shores is a four-screen video performance with live music. Set in the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local Delaware River watershed and others worldwide, the experience presents a kaleidoscope of climate futures through fragmented language and multi-layered sounds and images. Participants are guided through this uncertain terrain by lead artist Roderick Coover, poet Nick Montfort, and composer Adam Vidiksis. 

Altering Shores - Headset Track 4C

The dragon who bites his tail

Composed by Richard Pressley
Performed by BEEP

Flattery of Fire

Binary Orbital Dynamics is a graphic score composition exploring gravitational interaction between two orbiting bodies. Inspired by the physics of orbital mechanics, the piece renders dynamic relationships—proximity, mass disparity, velocity, eccentricity—as abstract visual forms. These images guide the performers in creating sound through interpretation rather than conventional notation. The work may be performed by one or more musicians, with or without electronics. In this version, a fixed audio track—created specifically for this performance and never before heard—acts as a gravitational counterpart, shaping the musical field like a second celestial body. The performers respond to the sonic environment not as accompaniment, but as a force: pulling, resisting, drifting, or converging, depending on the evolving context. Rather than following a fixed tempo or score order, the players navigate the piece as a kind of sonic orbit—interpreting each graphic relationship as a moment of interaction. When performed by two musicians, they may represent distinct bodies (A and B), each with their own trajectory and influence. Binary Orbital Dynamics was commissioned by Bowerbird in Philadelphia for the Arcana New Music Ensemble. Like much of Vidiksis’s work, it explores systems of interaction—between performer and environment, between structure and interpretation—using sound to investigate complex, often invisible forces that shape our experience. 

This track is a live concert recording from the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, Rome, Italy, July 2, 2025. 

Binary Orbital Mechanics (Rome.2025.07.02)

Performed by the Splice Ensemble 
Keith Kirchoff, piano; Adam Vidiksis, percussion

Local Equilibrium Dynamics is a work for two musicians, working both within and around a single piano. These sounds are processed in real-time both algorithmically by the computer, and by a small chamber ensemble of electronic musicians. The duo performs a number of interactions throughout the piece, including collaboration, disruption, and dispersion of the sound each produces. The live processing complicates this relationship even further as the sound is transmitted to the audience. As these two musicians perform within such an intimate space, they variably help and hinder each other as the work progresses. This creates increased moments of tension in both the musical output and the performance dynamic between these two musicians. The title refers to a principle in thermodynamics, whereby the thermal state of a system can be determined if the variations within it happen slowly enough in space and time. This concept serves as a metaphor for the system formed by the interplay between the two performers and the live processing. 


Local Equilibrium Dynamics

Performed by Adam Vidiksis

Spinning, spinning, spinning… we greet the wondrous creatures that live within the whirligig. This piece explores textures created through spinning, or that evoke whirling. As the whirligig goes round and round, I imagine a menagerie of creatures great and small that reside within. This work is based on a poem composed by my mother when she carried me, and I dedicate it to my newborn daughter. Things That Live in the Whirligig is for solo multi-percussion and live processing, composed in Pure Data. “For things once seen are pulled within the whirligig of mind, where they are tamed and in the heart framed to be used over again in time…”

Things That Live In The Whirligig

Performed by the NYU Percussion Ensemble

This piece features a large percussion ensemble, consisting of glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, timpani, and three non-pitched percussionists playing a number of smaller percussion instruments, including snare, toms, cymbals, and a myriad of small percussive toys. The work portrays the effects of prejudice upon the mind. Unrelenting rage consumes this piece. It is found throughout the work, sometimes as a quiet simmering undertone, and elsewhere as an explosive outburst.

Mismeasure of a Man

new music || OLD CITY series debut 
2016.03.23

Skyler Hagner, baritone sax
Adam Vidiksis, electronics

Square One Coffee, JFK Blvd
Philadelphia, PA

Hagner/Vidiksis 2016.03.23

Performed by the Temple University Wind Symphony
Emily Threinen, conducting

Anticipation is a powerful thing. In the form of anxiety it can keep us awake at night, writhing in terror and despair; as excitement it can act as a fuel for our most profound achievements. Nightfall Hysteria focuses largely on the former: the self-inflicted wounds we suffer when contemplating some dreaded fate in the dark of night. It is often those events that we are powerless to change that cause us the most aggravation. This work explores these complex emotions in seven parts, correlating to the form of a classical  rondo. 

Nightfall Hysteria

For solo glockenspiel
Performed by Victor Garcia-Gaetán

Andrew Martin is a robot that seeks to become a part of humanity in Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Bicentennial Man”.  The glockenspiel is a common instrument in the percussion family, yet its voice is not often heard alone.  Here, the glockenspiel depicts Andrew’s isolation in his struggle to find his place as a robot among humans.  His longing for acceptance and creative nature is portrayed in the opening melody, yet so too are his mechanical limitations.  The rhythm and melodic gestures of the piece become freer as Andrew’s understanding of human nature expands.  In the violent middle section, Andrew copes with brutality and prejudice from humans.  He is commanded to dismember himself and imagines the full horror of this event before a passing friend fortunately saves him.  Finally, the work culminates with the return of the opening theme, now more liberated as Andrew has become fully organic.  He understands that all humans must perish, and much of what it means to be human is to live with this uncertainty.  The piece closes as Andrew dies, at last truly a man.

Song for Andrew Martin

What is the voice inside the machine?  While computers perform tasks that extend the abilities of our own minds, they increasingly act as independent entities.  Synapse_circuit serves not as a direct analogy between these two ideas, but rather as a symbol of human-machine interaction.  The computer augments the percussionist’s performance, and improvises sounds based on his or her playing using algorithmic processes in Pure Data.  The percussion performance consists of glasses, bottles, and a bowl, which the performer hits, scrapes, blows and sings into. All sounds produced by the computer are derived from the real time performance.  Both human and machine performers work from a score, but listen and respond to the performance of the other.  Synapses and circuits – human and computer – together find the music inside the machine.  This work honors the complexity both of the human mind and its digital counterpart, taking us from wonder, to discovery, to celebration.

synapse_circuit

Composer, conductor, percussionist, improviser, and technologist. I love sound, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. Come listen at www.vidiksis.com.

vidiksis

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