Lullaby

Harmonious Blacksmith

Reprise

I Kissed a Girl

VSQ Performs BTS

Save Me

A polycyclic piece with 5 looping cyclic parts not in a neat order, but not polytempic nor polymetric, either. Formerly a string quartet, but with added synth, is essentially a quintet. 2025

String Quintet in standard tuning with synth pad

In 1974, Robert Morris and Daniel Starr famously enumerated every all-interval twelve-tone row. 

Inspired by their work, and in around 1979 in unpublished works, I generated an analogous catalog of what one might call the all-trichord rows, meaning rows, which together with two of their untransposed rotations, and in "first-species counterpoint," produce a sequence of all twelve distinct trichord classes.  By the standards of the day, this 
involved very substantial computational search.  But lately I have vastly expanded that calculation, now allowing transposition, retrograde and inversion of the rotations. Some of these new rows provide the basis of my recent pieces.   

The catalog of all-trichord rows runs to about 300 more or less, depending upon the accounting for symmetries.  That makes these rows quite rare among all the twelve-tone rows.  This rarity suggests my original compositional conception but unrealized at the time: a museum-like installation where a listener might walk in a large space from sonic exhibit to sonic exhibit, and experience the different ways these rows fit together and do their thing.  

So here are just three typical exhibits, realized now as works for chamber orchestra.  In each, the basic row first gets a plain but lapidary statement, and then the rotated forms fade in, statistically speaking, and eventually the rows likewise fade out in the order in which they entered, leaving finally a statement of the basic row.  By design, this treatment could loop seamlessly as one "display," as per my original conception.

0    1    9    4   10    5    2    8    7    6    3   11

VSQ Performs Music from Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1

A Thousand Years

VSQ Performs Imagine Dragons

Radioactive

VSQ Performs the Hits of 2013, Vol. 1

Lego House

Los Angeles, California serves as home base for the concept group called Vitamin String Quartet. The group is made up of studio musicians who are brought together to interpret and record orchestra style covers of music from all types of genres ranging metal, techno, country, pop, rock and hip-hop dance music. While the quartet uses a wide assortment of artists and instruments, one fairly constant member of the group is violinist Tom Tally. Tally has been intimately involved in the composing, arranging and conduction of many songs on approximately 50 of the albums that have been recorded by the group. While the group is referred to as a string quartet, the reality is that more individuals are usually involved, using instruments such as violins, cellos, percussion, brass and woodwinds. The group was originally brought together in 1999 as an experimental project. They wanted to determine the effects of using classical style instruments to create new and different sounds on popular recordings. Early on, the FM broadcast station WWHK in Concord, NH would play the group's music 24 hours a day, every day, for a period of time. The popularity of the group's music has led to the music being featured on TV and in the movies. Credits include So You Think You Can Dance (2008), TV show The Vampire Diaries (2010), the 100th episode of Gossip Girl and the fifth season finale of Modern Family (2014). Throughout the years, the group has been involved in the recording of over 200 different albums. In 2009, the group stepped out of the box a bit and recorded some original material provided by some of the various musicians on the album Per_Versions.

A Thousand Years

Vitamin String Quartet

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