This is the audio from the World Premiere of Quivering Filament of Incandescent Bulb at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn on May 10th, 2012. Quivering Filament of Incandescent Bulb began as a short melodic motive inspired by an image I witnessed while sitting at my piano: a filament in an old light bulb in my desk lamp seemingly feebly quivering. I built a brief piano sketch out of the motive and then decided, while thinking up ways to work with live sampled audio as material for performance, that I would add a new electronic layer to the work. I have always liked the idea of creating electronic music organically, as with musique concrete, as opposed to synthesizing sound via oscillators and computer software (which can still be fun). For this piece, I sampled the performance via a mic placed inside the piano and used looping software to divide it into snippets and process them in various ways to create a unique palette of sounds that I later performed in tandem with Tania through the use of a MIDI keyboard. Read here for a description of how I set everything up with Mobius and Mainstage.

Improvising at Galapagos Art Space with Tania Stavreva. I used the same set up as with my piece Quivering Filament of Incandescent bulb, using a combination of Mainstage and Mobius to sample and loop the sounds of Tania plucking and strumming the strings inside the piano, and stretch those sounds in various ways, live, playing off of Tania’s improvisation.

The whole project was extremely fun, Rhythmic Movement, and this was one of the highlights of the night for me.

Tania Stavreva and I performing Moon, Tides, Cycles at Waltz Astoria. Video by Chad Heird (www.chadheird.com). Stay tuned at the end for my rambling description of the piece. Or just check out the program notes here.

This is the recording of the piece as it was created for the dancer/choreographer for whom I wrote it. I will likely post the version from the concert on July 27th at the Metropolitan Room when we have it. Here are the new program notes:

“The moon’s gravity causes the tides on Earth as it orbits the planet, it’s silent forces pulling the great mass of ocean along with it as it circles. These tidal forces are simultaneously affecting the moon, pushing the moon gradually into an ever faster orbit which widens by an extra inch every year. Moon, Tides, Cycles is a piece about this constant back and forth tugging that will, inevitably, in time push the moon ever farther away from us and out of our gravity. In this piece, the piano is miked and processed, the resulting electronic sound swelling and fading as the tides do during the lunar cycle. The electronic sounds are dependent upon the original sound waves coming from the piano, just as the Earth’s tides are dependent upon the gravity of the moon. The improvisatory and free form nature of the piece, as the two elements, electronics and piano, operate on each other in tandem, is an analogue to the delicate dance of the moon and the Earth in space, a beautiful dependency that cannot last forever, just as a child must leave its mother, a bird must fly from the nest.”

The text for this piece comes from Ruth 1:16. I used a combination of different wordings from different translations of the Bible so as to get the lines that flowed best. The text is as follows:

“Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Don’t ask me to leave and to turn back from following.”

The piece consists of a simple refrain on the lines, “wherever you go…etc” that is answered by another melody on the line “Your people will be my people…etc.” After the full choir sings a harmony on the refrain and the answer, a transition occurs with full harmony and luscious suspensions that ultimately resolve into a haunting tone cluster. When the refrain lyrics return, the males sing the main melody while a fragmented version of the counter melody is laid over top of the original lines. For the answer to the refrain, the opposite occurs. The women sing the melody for the answer while the refrain’s melody is fragmented and sung by the men. The line “Don’t ask me to leave and to turn back from following,” is the climactic point of the piece, sung over a reharmonized version of the answer’s melody. This is originally the first line in the Bible verse, but I chose to put it at the end of the piece for greater emphasis. The refrain in full harmony is sung again to close the piece, with a thicker piano accompaniment and ultimately the song closes on another haunting and more dissonant tone cluster.

The score on Sibeliusmusic.com.

Le Destin Raté is a trio for three instruments with dissimilar timbres and in which each melodic line, though able to stand alone, is a part of a more intricate and complex whole. The original solo line by the bass clarinet is augmented by a syncopated line in the viola that is echoed and occasionally ornamented by the flute. As each line moves forward, contrapuntal complexity increases until eventually none of the instruments is playing in rhythmic unison. Then, abruptly, they all come together in a heterophonic texture for a brief climax. The ending is a fleeting restatement of the original motive with all three instruments playing a brief canon. Le Destin Raté is translated “Failed Destiny.”

This recording is from my recital in February 2008. The performers are James Miller, Flute, Christen Blanton, Viola and Annie Huston, bass clarinet in b flat.

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This piece explores the concept of taking a melody based on a tonic and deconstructing it until it is completely atonal, further from what is familiar and into the unknown.

The recording is from my recital in the fall of 2007. The piece was performed then by Sarah Evans.

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The first piece that I composed in graduate school, reminiscent of Debussy and the impressionistic period of music. It was to be the first of a series of piano sketches. My aim with this piece was to compose something that was simple counterpoint, almost fugal in the beginning, but that would slowly become more textured and chordal. Ultimately, when the texture is thickest, the piece becomes more fluid with an arpeggiated bassline and a more pronounced melody. The restatement of the opening idea is brief, as I generally like restatements to be, with flickers of the arpeggiated texture from the middle section.

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