A contemplative and difficult piece for quartet. If the microtonal chorales don’t get you, the hocketing at the end might!
https://on.soundcloud.com/TN6SIS71BXPO7KudzG
This piece is meant to place a listener in a grain silo and be surrounded by the reverberations of the internal while an optional peripheral audience observes the stillness and superposition of the external. In writing this piece, I was reading a collection of poems In the Night Field, by Cameron McGill. One in particular (“46.7234° N, 117.0002° W”) found a special place in my mind and heart. Not only were these coordinates the near-exact location of an apartment I previously lived in, but the final stanza reached from across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. The Palouse kindly called into my resonant and subterranean Chicago garden unit:
The night is numbered
in a forest of sharps & flats
in a register climbing wet mirrors Inside me
a silo fills with rain
I sing into it
https://on.soundcloud.com/M1b1taBxsInqwwsQXX
This piece navigates through 8 different melodic contours (what I have called threads) through 5 distinct sound spaces. Players should pay special attention to their role inside of the texture shifting from polyphony to heterophony and into homophony. The “Jagged and frayed” section of the work should be played with extreme rhythmic precision, emphasizing accuracy of note placement over expression.
The threads of these contours are pinned at specific notes throughout the composition. Each thread’s unfolding functions on parameters of intervallic expansion.
Written for Ensemble 20+ at DePaul University for my Master’s in Music Composition degree.
Dedicated to my brother, who has found the most precise ways of pinning the threads of my life.
For
Piccolo/Flute, Clarinet in B-flat, Trumpet in C, Trombone (with F trigger attachment), 2 Percussionists (2 Kick drums, 1 concert bass drum, temple blocks, ratchet, suspended cymbal, low and medium toms, 2 bongos, china cymbal, splash cymbal, triangle, crotales, 4 gongs), Piano/Celeste, Violin, Viola, Cello, Contrabass
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