piece for ten players ~ 4" & 7"
During my Master's at BU, I was working on the skills of being able to mold structural ideas of sound with computer assistance in Max/MSP (frequently with the Bach library and with tools from CNMAT) and with the manipulation of SDIF files. The Boston-based ensemble Sound Icon came to BU twice to do student readings so I wrote a short piece for that in 2016 and then revised some of the ideas into a new piece for them in 2017.
Ultimately, I was interested in dots, lines, shapes, imperfect repetition, and using models from the human voice and language/speech to create materials. I was very inspired by other process-based works of music and especially techniques in the visual arts such as those used by Peter Ablinger, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, etc.
I kind of forgot about these pieces and let them sit for a few years because being just two reading sessions there wasn't much time at all to work on shaping the creation of the music. I am incredibly grateful to Jeffrey Means (conductor of Sound Icon) and all the musicians (I'm so sorry, I don't have a list of the individual musicians involved), but I was kind of disheartened by the quickness with which we had to work together for the readings. I think I didn't want to share it publicly because we didn't get to shape the piece closely together after the fact. Years later, I still think there are some interesting sounds and interesting ideas that I'd of course like to explore more in the future; I just think about both of the pieces as a sort of a research project/a study as opposed to a finished work.
vocalis is a textural exploration using analyses of vowel sounds as an impetus for harmonic and gestural ideas. Topics and techniques I was thinking about while writing include density, self-similarity, repetition, and multiplicity. I also employ the stretching of materials throughout the piece, which produces large-scale structures out of much smaller materials.
The basic idea of the process unfolding in mm. 20-57 is to move from a sonority with zero spaces (rests), or in other words a long, sustained sonority to a texture which includes many gaps in that sonority, while the sonority itself is broken among instruments and is also only played in short jabs. In order to visualize it, one may think of drawing some horizontal lines and gradually erasing more and more portions of those lines until the horizontal lines become disparate dots where the lines once were found. To achieve this I calculated the lengths of the silences (rests) and the lengths of the notes. I performed this calculation eight individual times so that the eight instruments performing this process would be slightly different from one another, although their process is the same. Since I used a random number generator that distributes numbers using a pre-determined statistical distribution, in this case Gaussian, each instrument’s part would be slightly different. Again, the main idea is that the length of the rests will get longer while the length of the notes will get progressively shorter, over two minutes.
