The Beginning Of Weight

And a much earlier take on the idea from the last post – "harmonizing" alien musical/graphic elements...

This trio is in three very short movements with a sort of programmatic element that is actually focused on my own and the perfomers’ reactions to a few instances of superimposed notation - the performers’ role is a dramatic one, whereas mine is behind the scenes trying to “harmonize” these jumbles of music.

This is the one of the first pieces I used that sort of notation in and it is based on music from my solo piano piece Wilderness and Self-Sufficiency (Book takes the idea further but is not based on Wilderness). In The Beginning of Weight the pianist is asked to interpret this superimposed notation in relation to the meter, but is not instructed to perform the pitch material in any particular way. My hope is that different pianists will have different reactions to the illegibility.

Movses Pogosian (vln), Jean Kopperud (bass clar), Jacob Greenberg (pno). This is a recording of an informal reading, but I still think they played the hell out of the piece! MP3 and JPGs of the score below...

And away we go

Been deliberating about starting a blog. Finally decided to. It is mostly a repository for my compositions and recordings on the web. Here it is: 

One of my new year's resolutions was to get back to composing notated scores. I've been doing a lot of computer composition (Max/MSP, Logic Pro) for the last couple years and only a little bit of composing on paper. One of the main projects that involves both computer and paper compositions is Microkingdom – myself and Marc Miller, usually John Dierker and sometimes other people. We record improvisations and some of my compositions and I sample and edit them into something that sometimes gets referred to as unjazz or spazzjazz or nojazz. I think of it as pop music, but really is most definitely not. More on that group later. 

I've really been interested in regenerative composition. The Microkingdom music is one type of regeneration and my paper scores tend toward another type. So, I finally composed and actually finished a new score for the first time in a while.

The Current Bones Cannot Accommodate for violin, cello, piano and percussion. I extracted fragments from Book and recontextualized them. I like to think of it as forced harmonization of alien events. A formal limit is the page. I like to compose on letter size paper because it challenges my conception of musical time. In this piece there are very short sections only as long as a system or maybe a page, but there are also methods of thwarting the imposed or imagined boundaries. There are questions left unanswered and some passages that seem impossible to read and/or perform. The performers will shape the final interpretation immensely. And yes, the word accommodate is spelled incorrectly on the score...maybe I'll fix it. The first page is below, click here for PDF of the whole thing (about 5MB).