Cracks 2019
for alto sax and percussion
score
on the street
This piece exhi
there are cracks between
bits the spaces
the
between
lines
and the sound and
and in the hall
the action-reaction
the dynamics
of two (or more) which
are different
Mount of Olives, looking into the Old City, East Jerusalem
Triangles 2012, 2018 rev
for flute, violin, and piano
revised score (2018)
Washington Square Contemporary Music Society
Alice Teyssier (fl), Renee Jolles (vln), Margaret Kampmeier (pno)
Premiere at Skirball Center, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble)
Eric Lamb (fl), Erik Carlson (vln), Jacob Greenberg (pno)
original score (2012)
Like any form of social organization, musical ensembles embody complicated processes of negotiation and compromise between participants in the pursuit of communal expression. In this composition I consider the related facts of coexistence and encounter that play out between the violinist, pianist and flutist, under the metaphorical call of a distant tinning-ringing of triangles.
Appeals of Distance 2018
for horn + 7 channel fixed audio
score
Jason Eklund (horn), premiere at Kennesaw State University, 2018
This composition, for live performer and multichannel surround audio, elaborates the gestural rhetorics of ‘horn calls’ as a series of echo-reflections, transformations and distortions. This progression of encounters probes the curious appeal of the horn call and situates it within the contemporary context of modern electronic musical production. The horn call—a device, variously, of the hunt, the military, and the court—orients attention to an impending or ongoing event. The horn greets, signals, announces, encourages, threatens, activates, mourns and warns.
This composition was composed in several stages over a 6-month period, which including several workshops and recording sessions with Jason. All of the electronic sounds in the composition were derived from those recording sessions. The piece is dedicated to Jason in appreciation of his effort and curiosity.
Space Phrase 2018
stereo fixed audio
from “Rule of Thumb” dance work by Lori Teague and Christine Suarez
(original audio w/ reverb mixed with camera audio to capture live performance sounds)
Space Phrase was written for “Rule of Thumb,” a dance piece created by choreographers Lori Teague and Christine Suarez. In Lori’s words, this new production “examines how feminist perspectives have changed and are more awakened by the intersectionality of gender, age and race.”
In Space Phrase, a quartet of women explore spaces and configurations. I created my composition, a kind of sound collage, over several weeks while visiting the dance rehearsals. Each day I would bring in new sound materials to try to fit into the various dance “phrases” as they were being developed.
I used field recordings from outdoor environments (including an Anti-Trump rally in NYC from 2016), recorded loudspeaker feedback, synthesized material processed in Max/MSP, and samples of broken instruments (originally recorded for the Remix Contest of the Broken Orchestra Project). By restaging these sounds–all ‘broken’ in some form–I hoped to sustain new bodies and spaces, in ways that were complementary to the dance piece created by Lori and Christine.
The stereo file can be performed with or without dance.
Inside Out 2015
quad fixed audio
This composition is an audio poem on “microphonic” listening. The title is a response to the question, how do we listen when we listen through recorded media? I juxtapose a sequence of microphonic situations produced by different recording techniques and spatialization. These include close-miking of “concrète” sounds, off-axis recordings of physical movements around a space, B-roll, overheard audio (with permission!), and recorded artifacts (a lecture by Michel Foucault and Obama’s 2015 State of the Union speech) processed and spatialized using MaxMSP.
The piece has very soft sounds and should be listened to in a silent environment on a square, four channel setup. For 4 channel performance/listening please download the 4 individual channels here.
Its a Secret 2014
for six performers and live
“It’s a Secret” is an experimental music theater production, co-composed and directed by Jue Wang and Adam Mirza, staged by Kryssy Wright. The work is an hour-long composition for 2 singers (soprano and baritone), 4 instrumentalists (flute, violin, trombone and bass clarinet), and live electronics.
The project deals with our increasing confusion over the relationship between public and private identities. At what point should the private become public? And to what or whose end? This dilemma is presented through a series of encounters within an immersive theater space.Two narratives run through the show. One witnesses the Alice James, real-life sister to William and Henry, of Susan Sontag’s last play: Alice in Bed, in her painful, mute rejection of her famous family’s public life. Here, enframed, Alice appears and stands forth, casting her gaze like that of a portrait out upon the viewer. Alice fades in and out. As she withdraws, the 19th century bourgeois public sphere begins to crackle with energy of digital technology. The second narrative traces the imprint of technology upon our thoughts and utterances. Private thought now dances along electric circuits like the digital effervescence of memory.
This work-in-progress performance of “It’s A Secret” was presented on Oct 12, 2014 at New York University.
Jue Wang (composer and voice), Adam Mirza (composer and electronic music), Kryssy Wright (staging and lighting), Alysse Padilla (guide), Thomas Buckner (baritone), Margaret Lancaster (flutes), Mark Dover (bass clarinet), William Lang (trombone), Marina Kifferstein (violin)
Reading: (A Mish-Mash) / For a Man / I will never 2013
for voice, trumpet, trombone, and bass clarinet
score
loadbang: Jeffrey Gavett (baritone), Will Lang (tbn), Andy Kozar (tpt), Carlos Cordeiro (BCl)
The physical act of typing with only thumb and index finger translates reading (thought) to writing (action) one letter at a time. For Laurence (“Larry”) Joel Eigner (1927-1996), handicapped by cerebral palsy from birth, the typewriter was another wheelchair in the machinery of life: a tool whose limitations could be reappropriated and mobilized as productive conditions for acts of creation. Eigner’s poetry is performative, carefully situated by its setting on the page. It exhibits a kind of embodied phenomenological awareness that is frequently compared to Charles Olson’s concept of projective verse. And yet, Eigner’s texts, which certainly induce poetic form as an emergent property of the activity of reading, nonetheless bear a problematic relationship to the paradigm of spoken utterances enthused for in Olson’s manifesto. Poetry must be read, all agree. But must it be read aloud? What constitutes its projection, its embodiment, its sensuality, its history — its performance? Here, the problematic performance of reading is taken for a different tack: a musical mish-mash of poems, phrases, and prosodies — objects, instances and interactions gratefully borrowed from a body of work, from Mr. Larry Eigner.
Prose and poetry selections from Larry Eigner’s works with permission of the Estate of Larry Eigner: areas / lights / heights: Writings 1954-1989 (1990, ed. Benjamin Friedlander); Windows / Walls / Yard / Ways (1994, ed. Robert Grenier) and readiness / enough / everything / depends on (2000, ed. Robert Grenier).
Safe Words 2012
for five vocalists
score
There are no safe words. To save words words-in-a-safe open saving worlds world-safe. Whirl-words: are public. Passwords and play words, key words, after-words and bywords for the political-personal games which require humor to be taken seriously. Plink-Plank-Plunk! Four words: back-words (crosswords). Words and deadly deeds, watch words reward. Safe words are dangerous.
Text excerpts from Frederick Douglass, John Heminge and Henrie Condell, IMSLP, Marxists.org, Gertrude Stein, UbuWeb, Plato, WikiLeaks, and Wikipedia.
Strike 2011
for three percussionists
(… complicit memories of a troubled youth/
the physical life of power)
in light of unfortunate events 2003 to 2010 we must
machine guns and marching bands
kids at play play play (boys with toys
— toys for teenage tots)
march the madness
(march for madness)
aRagaDagaDagaTEAR THAT statue down
down
down
down
down drown down
drone drone drone droning drone
ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing
A-bombs and F-bombs
shock and awe
the fastest fascist nation of power
lies
in between the dream and the desire
the fascination power
power is its expression
slogans of the world unite, rocket the vote
musicalonomatopoeticpickpocketmeup
boom tch-tch, BOOM tch-tch, boom tch-tch, BOOM tch-tch,
Ing. fuck
QXTR 2010
for string quartet
violin1, violin2, viola, cello, instructions
Consonants without consonance. What grounds the fore-back if it isn’t the gexture/testure inversion? Reciprocation (comm-unity). Communify! Eternal elision… impending immanence. And silence. (listening)
Partial Knowledge (Situational Ethics) 2010
for chamber ensemble
score
Line Noise 2007-
for electric guitar and effects
score
Die Knospe Verschwindet in Dem Hervorbrechen Der Blüte 2004-6
for alto saxophone
score
Time Patterns 2005-6
for violin, viola or cello
score
if then there 2001
for chamber ensemble
score
Spiral Passages 2000
for two violins
score