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In late 2008 I was invited to compose music for Brooklyn College's Biannual International Electroacoustic Music Festival. The theme for this concert was burlesque. Invited composers were offered the choice of composing music for vintage burlesque films or for live performers. I chose to compose for a the films, and selected two that I liked. The music ended up being quite silly.
In the End, The Soprano Always Wins is an opera for soprano with video playback and a non-singing dramatic role. The story is a game show for musicians who have to repeat a pattern of notes that is played for them. The idea originated in a conversation with Monica Harte (for whom this opera was composed) when she said that she always wanted to have a piece written based on the old electronic Simon game. She thought that the patterns could get faster and faster until craziness ensued.
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Shortcuts are a kind of experimentation, often with unpredictable results.
Commissioned by Dr. Susan Fisher at OSU for her biology course, this piece used Max/MSP to generate music based on DNA segments. The music does not have a one-to-one correspondence with segments of the DNA code, instead it will use the process of DNA translation as a metaphor for the compositional process.
Another electro-acoustic collage from my time at Western Michigan University. Even though I'm not posting the audio, it's worth noting this piece (which is built from samples of Spike Jone's and His City Slickers) was a half-hearted effort at electronic music. For whatever reason, I resisted working in this medium for a long time. It's funny to me now since most of what I compose is electronic music.
My first ever electro-acoustic composition. I recorded some friends reading texts relating to the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Then I manipulated the voices to create a sound collage. Looking back on it, the whole piece was pretty basic, and is full of the usual things that students do in their early electronic compositions ('wow, playing voices backwards is so cool...')
No, you can't hear it.
This is an electronic score to accompany dance by choreographer/video artist Ashley A. Friend. The score is played back through Max/MSP so that it can move from section to section with the dancers in real time. The dance was created as a way for Ashley to deal with her own experiences with epilepsy. Visually she draws inspiration from many sources, including many classic horror movie motifs. The sounds and music used in the score are taken from a variety of sources, cut apart, mutated, and carefully sewn together à la Frankenstein’s monster.
The last project I worked on with Seen Performance was to be a series of series of short works created through round-robin style collaboration that join in the social mingling at local house parties, challenging where we see performance.
Radio Shills is a track from my uncle's Jacquerie album for which I created some audio collage. I sampled voices of various talk radio pundits and the filtered and layered them to create effects appropriate for the song's subject and style. Find it here.
