I am very interested in collaboration and participation as a composer. I believe that the roles that collaborators (whether they be performers, or co-composers) and participants (usually audiences) take on have a real depth and that creating music with either offers interesting power structures to explore–both for their aesthetics and for their social and cultural significance.
This work was commissioned by the Danish fesitival, New Music for Strings, as part of a triptych of collaborative compositions that are linked by the theme “remote connections.”’ As composers, Anne Sophie and I were challenged by the pandemic to think of new ways of collaborating remotely. From the beginning of this collaborative process, we wished to explore themes related to communication, including how communication evolves within the structure and mediation of society, as well as how it breaks down due to polarization and conflict. Inspired by writings on systems theory and telematics, we sought to generate a microcosmic space: a simulacrum that is reified by the sonic elements and their development of life-like agency. These elements then amalgamate into representations of individuals and collectives where communication between them is realized autopoietically. The piece is a result of this imaginarium and a means of artistic creation that reflects the rule set, which governs its process of creation and performance.
The score cards and concept were developed by Anne Sophie and I together in the winter of 2020-2021. The score GUI, that reflects both the rule set and serves the score to the performers was built by myself in Python. All electronics were developed by myself in SuperCollider. This performance is from concert at Kunstraum Walcheturm that was on December 11, 2021 in Zürich as part of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Zürich’s Fast Forward Festival.
This networked piece, written for new media ensemble Ensemble Decipher and titled toy_5, seeks to explore aspects of improvisational and generative algorithmic computer music. The work is designed to be immediately accessible to non-musicians through a participatory setting, if so desired, according to principles developed by Tina Blaine and Sidney Fels, while also providing the opportunity for more rehearsed performances like the one presented in the work sample above. The work’s visuals and sound are controlled by mouse cursor position, mouse clicks, and keystrokes through OSC. They are then shared, in this case through the consumer-grade teleconferencing software Zoom. The code for audio generation was written in SuperCollider, while the visuals were coded in hydra. The work is easily appropriated into live settings or with better music networking software like JackTrip.
I also write more traditional, score based works when I feel I have something worth saying in this format.
Meditations for Himalayan Singing Bowls is a work in three movements for three different sized singing bowls and two percussionists. This particular movement takes numerical references from Buddhist liturgy (like the eight-fold path) and applies them iteratively to the duration between different types of sounds that the singing bowls can produce. This layering of the numerology, and the iteration over the durational distances of different sounds generates the work’s texture and also provides a means for increasing and decreasing the density of the texture. The work is a broader reflection on questions of appropriation and the complicated history of singing bowls as musical objects. Performers are John Ling and Chris Hadley.
No Future Without Forgiveness is a musical translation of an essay (and book!) of the same name by Desmond Tutu. This translation is part of The Impossible Will Take a Little While—an hour long oratorio that celebrates the change that legions of unknown, regular people can effect on their societies.
Sup, B is cheekily named for Bach—as the composition is based on the harmonic scaffolding of his Prelude No. 1 from WTC Book 1. Here I extend each of the block chords (arpeggiated in the original), with my own, original take on the materials. Yarn|Wire performed the work.