November Mist (Respirando Una Fitta Nebbia...)

Demo of Image du Village, for violin, cello, and piano. My contribution to "The Village & Phil Ochs: Composers Interpret Phil Ochs," part of The Village Trip 2022.

Image Du Village

This is the first run of MicroSixteen. Its tuning is 16 tones per semitone or 192 per octave. The tuning is achieved by freezing the pitch bend controllers of 16 channels of a Yamaha DGX 660 keyboard synthesizer. Unlike convention MIDI, the note numbers have fractional parts. The fractional part is scaled and directed to the 16 detuned midi channels. The orchestration in this case uses the “spacy” voices of the DGX. Textures and gestures are composed to evolve continuously in an ethereal sort of way. The Max patch is rather complicated but versions of a piece can be repeated precisely in every detail using seeded random number software of my own design.  Here is a YouTube video that discusses that software:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNrfyQ7zSdc

MicroSixteen an adventure in micro tuning

A collaboration between :
Shane Beck, The Last American Poet (Words)
progettosonoro (Music)

Accusations of the unhealing wound & the eternal wait
A voice from the light once told me with true love it is never too late
In this down pour of emotions that flood from the eyes that hide away
Bury My Heart & Forget Me, said the gullible poet who wanted you to stay

Is it true that this haunted heart is delving too deep for anyone to ever save
Opened my life to you & granted you secret wishes upon everything I gave
If you are here to Bury My Heart & Forget Me, then tell me love is just a lie
Confront the poet you called King & release me so I can finally die....

Shane Beck & progettosonoro - Bury My Heart & Forget Me

Trying to remember - Sul filo aggrovigliato della memoria

One last dream before dawn

Variations 5, 8, and 9 on a Theme by Stefan Wolpe.

Koeun Grace Lee, Piano

Three Wolpe Variations

Composed for the Locrian Chamber Players.

Performed by members of the Locrian Chamber Players: Erin Lesser, flute, Gregory Hesselink, cello, Blair McMillen, piano, and Anna Reinersman, harp.

Live premiere performance from August of 2008, Riverside Church, NYC

Published by APNM (Association for the Promotion of New Music).

Sultry Air, Balmy Breezes was composed in 2008 for The Locrian Chamber Players at the request of its director, my Manhattan School of Music colleague David Macdonald. The excellent players were Erin Lesser, flute, Gregory Hesselink, cello, Blair McMillen, piano, and Anna Reinersman, harp. It bears a dedication to Nils Vigeland, former Chair of the Composition Department at MSM.

In its atmospheric quality and emphasis on color, both harmonic and timbral, Sultry Air, Balmy Breezes strikes me as having been influenced by many characteristics I admire in twentieth century French music by composers such as Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen. While I could not find an appropriate French title that wouldn’t come across as pretentious, I nonetheless allowed a bit of affectation to creep in by way of using French tempo indications and expressive markings as my homage to the tradition that inspired me. The work begins with an ascending, sweeping, and rather metallic sounding gesture that combines the piano with a harp glissando that features clashing strings. Over an accompaniment of isolated harp harmonics and other discrete sounds, the flute begins a solo that eventually will climb from its sultry lowest register to the first climax of the piece, where it is supported by lush chords in the harp, piano and pizzicato cello. (The unison doubling of chords in piano and harp is one of my favorite sonorities, one that I first came to appreciate in Britten’s Cantata misericordium.) After another upward flourish in the piano and harp and a brief reminiscence of the opening material, a faster, breezier section begins, gradually acquiring its own groove, mostly in 5/8 meter. After a couple more passionate climactic passages, this section gradually begins to dissipate, and slower music (marked Modéré) takes over, initiated by a flute trill before that instrument disappears, ceding the spotlight to the solo cello, accompanied once more by the chordal cushioning of the unison piano and harp. Just before the end, the flute — marked nonchalant — returns for its final say.

—Hayes Biggs, 2019

Sultry Air, Balmy Breezes (2008)

O MAGNUM MYSTERIUM (1990)
Motet for Christmas
Mixed Chorus unaccompanied
Text: Liturgical, in Latin
Publisher: C. F. Peters Corporation, Edition Peters 67488

Recording: 
Pro Organo CD 2224 The Rhodes College Singers, Tony Lee Garner, conductor

This piece was premiered by the late Tony Lee Garner and the Rhodes College Singers, Memphis, Tennessee, in December of 1991, and is dedicated to those performers.

—Hayes Biggs

Text and translation:

O magnum mysterium et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum jacentem in praesepio. O beata Virgo, cuius viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Jesum Christum. Alleluia.

O great mystery and wondrous sacrament, that animals should behold the Lord lying in a manger. O blessed Virgin Mary, whose womb was deemed worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia.

Performed by The Rhodes College Singers, Tony Lee Garner, conductor.


O magnum mysterium (1990)

Open World is the 12th track from NetWorks 6: Music From a Farther Room. The entire album can be heard on Spotify, iTunes, Youtube, Deezer, etc., or purchased on Bandcamp: shawnbell.bandcamp.com/album/network…-farther-room

NetWorks is a music-generating system, and a body of work, based on artificial-life, complex systems research and the Honing Theory of creativity (Gabora 2010). NetWorks uses a hierarchical, scale-free network to generate music that can range from orderly to chaotic. At the ‘edge of chaos’ it generates patterns that exhibit emergent complexity through coherent musical development at low, mid and high levels of musical organization, and often suggests a sense of direction through goal seeking behaviours.

Emergence, in the NetWorks program, is achieved, not through Darwinian evolutionary processes, but through a far older form of evolution called communal exchange. “There is extensive evidence that for the first several million years of its existence life on earth evolved through communal exchange of components amongst self-organizing autocatalytic protocells, prior to establishment of a genetic code, and only once a RNA-based self-assembly code was in place did life evolve through natural selection. … the last century’s emphasis on natural selection in evolutionary theory is not warranted by current research; even today, variation-selection is, quantitatively at least, not the dominant evolutionary process.” (Gabora 2006).

There are no selective processes (fitness functions) within NetWorks, so if an output stream is perceived to “evolve” it can then be said to originate solely through communal exchange. Selective processes occur only between the interaction of the musician-programmer and the NetWorks program, when the musician-programmer (1) generates and evaluates network architectures, rule-sets and mappings, (2) orchestrates, mixes, and masters the most aesthetically pleasing instances of these outputs and (3) tweaks and expands the program itself.

In general, the sounds chosen to manifest the musical patterns discovered by a network attempt to reflect the mystery and wonder that virtually unlimited diversity can come from such simple models of complexity. When mapping patterns to sound, an effort is made to preserve the integrity of the patterns rather than obfuscate them with complex synthetic textures or other effects that are readily available during mixing.

Since the MIDI data of NetWorks is computer-generated, sampled acoustic instruments are often used to give the music a “human feel”, and to allow the listener to relate and compare the self-organizing patterns to known genres.

Headphone listening is recommended.

NetWorks 6: Music from a Farther Room

Open World

Gymnopédie No.1

Composer, educator and interactive media artist and professional dedicated to creativity and multidisciplinary collaboration. Interested in constructionist approaches to new media education and how interactive technologies and complexity theory enhance and expand the creative process in the traditional arts, new media and game design.

Developed NetWorks, a body of musical work as well as an interactive music-generating algorithm based on scale-free networks. Developer of ~zomes, a sound synthesizer based on a-life models. 

Interest in metacreation dates back to Voices From The Edge of Chaos (1998), a CD of emergent, self–organizing computer music. Received a FACTOR international distribution grant and was subsequently awarded a residency at Lovebytes Labs in Sheffield, England (1999), to produce a piece for Digital Space CD and CD ROM of “innovative new work using digital sound and multimedia”.

Open World

Zomes

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