Category: Concert Music

music written for concert hall performance

Plane of Slight Elevation

Posted on by Sean
chamber ensemble + fixed media electronics
8'29"
Louisville, CO, 2020/21
The electronic portion of the piece alternates between algorithmically generated canons of sampled instrumental, pitched sound materials and soundscape recordings of interior airport spaces from across the world. Written during a time of isolation, where travel feels both nostalgic and also more privileged than ever— the piece confronts the minimal difference between the imagined and the real. The acoustic ensemble is positioned to mediate such a gap from a position of incomplete knowledge—of locality, pitch alignment, and performative expression. The incompleteness of the fixed materials draws upon the musical sensibilities, intuitions, and feelings of each instrumentalist that may arise at the intersection of performative listening (to the electronic part and each other) and reflective voicing (instrumentally, through microtonal pitch-matching and open articulation and dynamics).

The title of the work is taken from Eleanor Kaufman’s description of a unique verticality associated with Middle America, what we too often refer to as “fly-over” country. As she states:

This space has its own verticality, which is the verticality of vast flatness, occasionally set off by a small yet pivotal elevation. This space is marked by what I’d like to call a plane of slight elevation, which could range anywhere from the space of about a story high to the space of not being yet six feet under — or to the space of thought itself.*
 
In a time of physical confinement, this piece was written within the space of a second story walk-up on the edge of that vast flatness, caught between memories of movement and the presence of place.
 
*Eleanor Kaufman, Deleuze: The Dark Precursor (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 146.

Performance: SEAMUS 2021 National Conference, Barely There: A concert of quiet music.

Organized by Georgia Southern University

  • Diane Kessel, flute
  • Francisco Corthey, violin
  • Russell Brown, Bass Clarinet
  • John Thompson, Guitar

Audio: Fixed media electronics

Score:

On the transparency of seeing through

Posted on by Sean
fixed media immersive sound
5'17"
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, FL, 2018
R. Murray Schafer pointed out in 1977 that our soundscape is increasingly lo-fi, often the sound of traffic or, especially at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where this piece was composed, planes. While quiet is harder to come by, there are wonderful new sounds too, like the spray-paint can clicking of a hard-disk failure or powering on a belt sander. And yet, we increasingly fetishize a return to not just natural soundscapes, but the natural. Once we frame nature as being different (as a thing to return to), reality becomes an appearance of itself— obfuscating the naturalism of architecture, pharmaceutics, and software engineering under a guise of transparency. Are we ourselves not the nature to which we desire to return? In the “broken” appearance of this composition’s soundscape, perhaps we can hear ourselves in relation to the natural world as, echoing William Carlos Williams, “touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.”

Leave No Trace

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, stereo
13'18"
Denver, CO, 2017
I often think about Thierry de Duve's claim that contemporary sculpture "is an attempt to reconstruct the notion of site from the standpoint of having acknowledged its disappearance"- an insight that echoes and reinforces Robert Smithson's observation that the site of all in situ art is a 'non-site'. We are currently undergoing such drastic ecological change that the disappearance of site is no longer conceptual or speculative, but rather phenomenological. As someone who lives in a city and travels into the wilderness to hike, camp, and fish on most weekends, my repetitious behavior cultivates a sensitivity to the fuzzy boundary between environmental stewardship and the signifiers of the unnatural. Following that idea so central to Deleuze's thought, "repetition can always be 'represented' as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind." None of the sounds used in this piece come from environmental recordings; a fact that doesn't prevent the piece from being listened to as if all the sounds were.

I.

II.

III.

What Rough Beast Slouches?

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, 8-channel
11'36"
Ormond Beach, FL, 2014-

Denver, CO, 2016

Across its entirety, What Rough Beast... 'slouches' toward the musical culmination of various sonic trajectories. Pitch deviation, reverberant space, and tempo, are some of the most significant sound parameters that appear to shift across the duration of the piece. What first appear to be nuanced, intentional, and well-timed sonic events begin to appear as more a matter of happenstance. As more voices are introduced, each follows its own logic - complicating the composite sonic image that we continue to try and listen into. Some sounds appear to gradually speed up; others appear to slow down. Nuanced juxtapositions turn into complicated, irregular configurations. Nevertheless, there may emerge a growing sense of directionality. Toward what end do these sounds reach? At what point in time and space might they arrive? As we listen in an attempt to resolve the whole, relative to each of the pieces, we perhaps slowly encounter the non-existence of the whole. And yet, the whole (the composite sound mass) retains an ability to both structure and direct our attention toward the regularities that emerge across each of the sounds. What Rough Beast Slouches? is simply the playing out of algorithmically defined, globally convergent sonic trajectories; the consequence of which ultimately forces us to confront our own irruptive, discontinuous, and divergent aural attentions. 

Fleeting Conversations

Posted on by Sean
fixed media, stereo
5'12"
Denver, CO, 2016

Fleeting Conversations took shape as a series of intuitive responses to three recordings of a generative musical system. I developed the system as a wave-shaping and subtractive synthesis instrument with parametric control through multiple and hierarchical convergent functions. After generating several output streams, I selected three recordings that seemed different to each other while still individually reinforcing a sense of intrinsic directionality. I then treated each recording as a short movement, a foundation upon which (and against which) I could begin to make increasingly intuitive decisions. Most decisions concerned the emergence of continuity. I sought continuity not through a commitment to drone, but rather through deference to perceptual linkage when faced with interruption. So the bulk of my post-algorithmic compositional work focused on causing problems (on interrupting myself) by choosing how and when to interject divergent materials (including silence).

I hear the finished piece as an internal monologue of sorts-- a monologue about nothing, really, beyond the fetishization of a failure to speak. Such failure does not simply reaffirm that music is not-yet-language, but rather points toward the reflexivity inherent in talking to myself and being my first listener. As listener to myself, a perspectival change often places me in opposition to myself— the self I recognize being spoken through the sounds I hear. I imagine undergoing an fMIR brain scan while listening to my own music, and already objecting to what I believe the results of the scan will be before the scan is complete. "Yes, I did that, but that's not me now!" So I hear this music as quite claustrophobic. But for other listeners, there's perhaps a sense of lightness to it; fleeting conversations about a subject always in the process of being rewritten, always up in the air.

Improvisations with Varying Degrees of Restraint

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
7'10"
Gainesville, FL, 2012

Faced with the question of "what's this piece about?," my answer was to throw more material at it, and see (hear) what stuck, and then show it sticking. Initially, I developed a software instrument and recorded ten iteratively-layered improvisations, which then served as a backdrop or canvas for the piece. Shorter passages were then added to the mix, generated using a wide variety of techniques ranging from musical feature analysis to improvised electronic guitar. The process of working on the piece became a bit less haphazard in the striping away of material; by carving out silence and space, distinctions between the materials became possible, and ultimately, meaningful. To draw a connection with the visual arts, I often liken this way of composing to Gerhard Richter's method of painting large abstracts: "changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until its done."* Accordingly, in regards to the ever imminent destruction or transformation of the musical materials, issues of timing, pacing, and the articulation of form were some of the last things to be considered. I think of it as music in search of an idea, rather than music composed in response to one (what I normally do).

* Gerhard Richter, Panorama: A Retrospective (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 17. 



Windows Left Open

Posted on by Sean
for microtonal chamber ensemble and fixed media
Gainesville, FL, 2010
Musical performance marks a point of tangency between how we hear the world and how we engage with it, reflective of a deep reciprocity between listening and voicing. Windows Left Open presents such a tangency directly, allowing the reciprocity inherent in our aural engagement with the world to come to the fore. In this piece, performers’ musical decisions become contextualized as a larger exploration of "natural" phenomena. By leaving performers to engage with the piece's sound world on their own accord through microtonal pitch matching and aural feedback, the nuance of performance itself highlights a reasonableness for juxtaposing soundscape and algorithm in the fixed electronics. Through our awareness and sensitivity to performative provision, response, and imprecision, us listeners begin to take a few tentative steps towards situating ourselves somewhere between the two.

UnBalanced Connection #48, Gainesville, FL (Oct 28, 2011)

Performers: Laura Maule (cello), Michael Polo (bass), Michael Smith (classical guitar), and Ben O'Brien (electric guitar)

Sometimes on the Same Page

Posted on by Sean
for chamber ensemble and fixed media
Gainesville, FL, 2010

Sometimes on the Same Page explores the systematic manipulation of material, realized on the fly by performers who navigate a common musical space through different paths.

UF Chapter of the Society of Composers, Inc., Gainesville, FL (November 19, 2010)

Performers: Evan Kassof (cello), Yunkyung Hong (piano), Ben O'Brien (guitar), and Adam Ambrose (vibraphone)

88 Attempts to Linger

Posted on by Sean
fixed media sound
11'24"
Gainesville, FL, 2010
The piece is a presentation of 88 harmonic sets. The size of each set decreases by one with each iteration, such that the initial set comprised of 88 harmonics, is followed by a sequence of 87, then 86.. and so on, down to 0. For each subsequent set, the fundamental is determined by dividing the highest harmonic of the previous set by the new (n-1) set size. This process maps the frequency of the highest harmonic to the highest harmonic of the n-1 set, thereby maintaining this particular frequency as a point of tangency between iterations, and across the piece. Other points of tangency emerge as a result of process as well. Frequencies within a given set match frequencies of the initial set comprised of 88 harmonics according to the greatest common factor between the number of harmonics in both sets. For example, the set comprised of 66 harmonics will match 22 of the frequencies contained within the initial set of 88 harmonics. Sets with a prime number of harmonics, or sets that do not share a common factor, will only contain one matching frequency (at the highest harmonic of each set). Throughout the piece, these matching frequencies are articulated by piano samples, played at both the matching frequency and the fundamental frequency of the initial set (32.703... hz). The 32.703... hz notes are band-passed with a high Q at the matching frequency. Non-matching frequencies are articulated using pitched percussion sounds. The percussion samples being used change according to the GCF of the current set. All non-matched frequencies start off as grains, and by the end of the piece, are given time to resonate. This trajectory is reversed for matched frequencies. Within a set, the temporal position of each frequency relative to other frequencies (independent of matching) is determined by a formant map of a low C (32.703... hz) piano sample. A frequency's mapped amplitude is correlated with a delay time relative to the initial onset of the set, such that stronger frequencies occur later in time.

Follow Me Around (until we all fall down)

Posted on by Sean
for large ensemble
Gainesville, FL, 2010

Follow Me Around... is a reworking of Douglas Repetto's ideas from his audio sculpture titled Crash and Bloom from 2002. Repetto constructs a network of microcontrollers to form a physical system that aims to model biological populations in terms of their growth and decline (crash and bloom). I simply adapted some of the rules he used to program his microcontrollers in order to write an open form score for a large instrumental ensemble (in this case the University of Florida Wind Ensemble). Of course using humans rather than microcontrollers required other various constraints since humans fail where computers succeed, and vice versa. Ultimately, Repetto's interest in constructing a physical system to model a biological system sparked my curiosity in what would result musically from using a socio-cultural system to model a biological system.

University of Florida Wind Ensemble, April 2010: