SCORES and RECORDINGS

Excerpts and full recordings of several works are available on several different pages in this site.

The A is for Azimuth and Arnica page presents varied excerpts of new performances of this unusual and challenging score for found objects and found texts, commissioned by percussionist Chris Froh. No two versions of the work are alike, and this year Albany Records will feature a disk with five different interpretations, including extraordinary work by percussionists Ian Antonio, Russell Greenberg, and Aiyun Huang.

Take a look at Ashley Craig’s extraordinary video recordings of Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg playing Tenors/Mediations, and Jacob Rhodebeck playing Coda: “You Are Not I” and ”Fors Seulement…” fors seulement condition.

On March 26th, 2009, the Music Performance Program at Columbia University presented a full concert of my music in an dynamic and innovative concert at Philosophy Hall. New York piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire led the evening with several works, including Anahistoric, with CORE Ensemble’s Katie Schlaikjer as cello soloist. Guests included Dr. Rhonda Taylor of New Mexico State University, trumpeter Glen Whitehead of University of Colorado, Boulder, and American/Spanish contrabassist/critic Christopher Williams. 

I’m very pleased to announce that Centaur Records will be releasing Pieces, Threaded: Piano Music 1999-2009, a retrospective collection of my piano music, as part of its distinguished catalog of new music for piano. I perform the title tracks in the “Pieces, Threaded” triptych, joined by Jacob Rhodebeck and John Mark Harris on four other works.

[An experiment: try reading only one of the passages below, and then listening, on pages in the “Music: Scores and Recordings” menu to the left. Or if you like, just listen, without reading.]

This music is an attempt to be abundant, to have an abundance of small coherences, with spaces between them. These spaces are, for me, an abundance of openings in which some kind of meaning has a chance to enter. The music is muralistic. I mean that in the sense that small passages bring an easy sense of togetherness, but meanwhile, one small coherence and another one often seem estranged, or incompatible. If this music has some expression beyond the sounds themselves, it will be because of the way small coherences are estranged from each other, in a process that opens and reopens constantly. To my ear, it is the relationship between the spaces and the openings (and not so much the sounds or the spaces themselves), that connect these pieces happily.

OR

What are the heard relationships between one timespan and the next, when pulse and meter are uncertain? How do those relationships change when pulse is ever-present? What is possible when time’s role in music is radically re-figured? It’s possible that musical time—even in its most traditional instances—could suggest freer differences, or broader qualities of rhythm, when durations come and go in some pure sense, evoking disruptive curves instead of straight lines … lacking the direct transfers of forward energy that rhythm normally aspires to. Some of this music is an experiment in that possibility.

OR

It’s my hope that some of these floating rhythms will create the feeling of turning your attention one way instead of another, and then turning it back again, or resisting. This ambivalence might be an opportunity for a private simulation of some other experience. But the ambivalence in this music should not be mistaken for ambiguity: the wandering is wandering in precise ways, meant to amplify and multiply. Hopefully more than once, you will find yourself wandering between one orientation and another, a feeling of a certain coherence followed by a different, contradictory one…and hopefully there will be a loss of attachment to one or the other.

OR

This is a music which is not, in the traditional sense, declarative, or fully “voiced”; I certainly do not intend for anyone to find “the composer’s voice” at some core position in the music. This music is intentionally personal, but I am speaking that sense of the personal, only sotto voce, only half-way, because (I think) there is no “all the way”, no completion, in music’s revelations. Behind the painting or the sonata, critics have often found a creative “voice,” but it has rarely been personal. It would of course be better to be impersonal and abstract, than to be archetypal and tropological, if the goal were to express something real. The voice has always been archetypal—perhaps heroic or divine—standing in for, and replacing, the mere fiction of a person … and meanwhile standing as far as possible from the everyday-ness of a personal life.

The expression of a consciousness, a desiring subject, in art, is not unimaginable. But when I imagine it, I listen and look for the referent of the expression, and find that it is only a world, or an ecology…some system belonging to an unfortunate teacher that the artist unsteadily ignored. A batch of memory, the sensations we were born unto, that we must once again cull, for hints at how to survive the threats and misdirections surrounding us.

The empirical musicologist Ian Cross echoes Adorno when he views music as “those temporally patterned human activites…that involve the production and perception of sound and have no evident and immediate efficacy or fixed consensual reference”^1… art is, in that view, whatever capitalism refuses to value, or tries in vain to subsume, whatever the patriarch finds unsuitable for the service of his “official culture”^2. If that definition serves us in any way, then I have an obligation to express myself uselessly, spinning forth sounds that resist any grasp toward their use-value, resist any tethers to the false unity of allegiance to an ideal. This is a fighting music, then, in a way, but a music which nevertheless speaks in a conceptually quiet way. Speaking sotto voce, or speaking not-quite fully, is a way of reminding us that, for the time being, for the time of this music, no one needs to survive, or search for safety. It might be a reminder of a kind of listening in which no identity needs to be negotiated.