Awakes Etude

This piece was written for the Disquiet Junto Project 0286.

The idea here was to translate, transliterate, and interpret a piece of music, so I selected Awakes, a piece I wrote last year that described my granddaughter when she wakes up.

The piece is in four sections. The first part is the initial sequence of what I wrote.

The second part has been translated. In this regard I thought of myself as a child, with more energy than one has a right to own, which offered its own set of problems.

The third part has been transliterated. I ensured that the soundings of the original piece were intact and interspersed a mockery of the interpretation.

The final part is the interpretation. The original section is hidden within the notes that have been squeezed in between, offering order and chaos.

The four sections work in a circle of fifths, moving from D to A, to E, to B with a G natural.

The piece is scored for piano.

Awakes Etude
Score

Pavane For A Broken Wubby

This piece was written in response to Disquiet Junto #285. The idea was to select three barcodes and write music based on their contents.

I selected barcodes from the three ingredients of my typical breakfast – Shredded Wheat (big biscuit), milk and sugar. From the barcodes I extracted the numbers, which I had represent notes (I did end up changing two of the 36 notes so that it would make more sense). Each barcode is a voice in this string trio, with the barcode for the Shredded Wheat earning the theme.

I wrote this in response to the demise of my granddaughter’s pacifier, which was a sad but necessary experience in her evolution.

This piece is written for violin, viola and cello.

Pavane For A Broken Wubby
Score

I Come To Bury

Musical decorations include passing tones, neighboring tones, and other ornamental additions to the primary structure of the line. The task here was to make a clear distinction between these decorations and the structurally significant portion of the lines at the beginning and end, but make these ambiguous between these endpoints. In this piece I have buried the ornaments into the body so that they become as significant as the other notes.

This piece is scored for piano.

I Come To Bury
Score

Decisive Notice

This is one of those ideas that came in fits and starts, where each attempt resulted in things quickly turning to mush. I finally realized that it needed to be a single line to allow one to follow what was going on. This piece is a bit longer than my other works but that length is necessary to allow things to play out.

The initial palindrome progressively has notes added to the row until it is filled, then notes are continuously removed by lengthening others, eventually returning to the original row.

The piece is scored for piano, though if brave performers can be found then it could be adapted for pretty much any instrumental duo.

Decisive Notice
Score

Lost In Red

The idea of the Disquiet Junto Project 0280 was to use a new musical thing to recreate an old musical thing. Fortunately, the definitions of the terms “old” and “new” were not defined so I made up my own. I decided that something new would be an occurrence within the past 1% of my life (this would include anything in the past 239 days) and something old would be an idea before my lifetime.

For the old idea I decided upon something that would appear new to pretty much anyone on the street but is actually almost one hundred years old – twelve-tone music. I wrote more than my share of this very long ago, and while enjoying the freedom of the lack of a key, never quite got the claim of each tone being given equal importance. In this piece a tone row is used, which is played in inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion, but the restrictions of the system are otherwise ignored.

The new musical thing was to use as the basis of the piece a previously written piece within the past 239 days. I decided to employ not only the feeling and intention of Lost In Crimson, but also to retain the instrumentation and build the tone row from the presented notes in that piece.

Lost In Red is scored for Clarinet, two Violas, two Cellos, String Bass and Chorus.

Lost In Red
Score

This

This was written in response to Disquiet Junto Project 0279: Word Interiorities.

The word selected through a random number generator was “this”, which did not initially appear to be very interesting, given that the idea was to take apart a single spoken word. I grabbed a recording of its pronunciation and played it over and over, trying to figure out how to deconstruct a single syllable, which finally offered a jumping off point. I selected wind instruments through the sounding of the pronunciation and synced them to a repeated recording of the word.

Warning: Do not try to perform this piece at home, after all, I paired it with my image, Bad Decisions.

The work is scored for Flute, Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, Bassoon and Horn.

This
Score

Patterns And Decorations

This piece was written for Disquiet Junto Project 0278: MacConnel’s Jingle.

Kim MacConnel was a primary in the Pattern and Decoration art movement of the mid-1970s, which had an interest promoting trivialities as seen by Western culture, such as patterning. I wanted to offer this musically and while working on ideas it did not take long to get to a concept inspired by the work of Steve Reich.

The work is scored for percussion instruments, namely xylophone, vibraphone and harp.

Patterns and Decorations
Score