Well, it’s official. I’ve been appointed composer in residence for the Fall 2010 session at ART342 in Fort Collins, CO. While there, I’ll be working on my second piece for sax quartet and computer. Basically, Erebus part 2 – just without the infamous “waterboarding” movement.

In the meantime, I need to finish the computer programming for Songs of a Mute Voice. Everything’s pretty much there except for the interface. And the fact that the sampler keeps crashing. And the compressor is acting up. Chalk a couple up to modular design.

New piece under Audio – here’s the program notes.

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I watch way too much television. Unfortunately, in the course of my channel surfing, I have occasionally come across various idiots ranting about how the country has been changed and how they want to take it back – usually to an idealized version of how they believe the ‘50’s were. In other words, a time when women stayed at home, illegal immigrants were soviet defectors, and everyone voted republican because they were told to on Sunday morning in church. Basically an idiotic “precious moments” or Thomas Kinkade piece of emotional treacle meant to depict a just-post-agrarian Utopia.

Unfortunately, I also read books – including those damn history ones that people are always complaining about. As a result, I’m well aware of the fact that while Norman Rockwell was painting his covers for the Saturday Evening Post a few minor events were happening vis a vis civil rights era violence and oppression, assassinations, and several wars. With that in mind, I composed Pastorale Americanusa as a confrontation between the imagined nostalgia with the historical reality. So while light and soothing music and sounds of summer capitalism may be present, the menacing background leaves no doubt that the fantasy is in perpetual danger of collapsing under the weight of reality.

New piece posted under “Audio” today called Cumulus Refractions. It features a ton of programming, plus a little bit of that acoustic performing I occasionally do. Program notes follow.

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Cumulus Refractions is about speed – or rather, what happens when something is slowed down to incredible levels and contrasted with sounds recorded at their natural velocities. Sound samples were collected and slowed down before being granulated to create static clouds of millisecond long fragments, indistinguishable from their original source. Over these textures, instruments both live and processed are superimposed and arranged in a contrasting [gradually accelerating and decelerating] manner, occasionally synchronizing with the computer edited sounds. Eventually, these mergers give way to areas dominated by electronic materials and accelerating rates of events, before coming to rest in one final cloud of sound punctuated with a brief accelerando in the live instruments.

The relationship between the acoustic and electronic forces is not just based on speed and density though. The electronic segments are primarily composed of samples of the live instruments (and a few other things found lying around my studio), manipulated into new forms, and then controlled by the pitch and volume of other live instruments. The end result is a subtle and evolving look at the speed and contrast of materials from the acoustic and electronic realms.