Dance Attack! (orchestra)
Death to the Butterfly Dictator!
(soprano and chamber ensemble)
Eight Poems of Dennis Lee
(soprano and string quartet)
Lyre (SATB choir with divisi, optional piano)
People are not cars
(phonetic suite) (electroacoustic)
robert, clara, johannes
(the piano remembers) (MIDI-controlled acoustic piano)
Scintillator (solo soprano)
So Joab blew a trumpet (solo
trumpet)
Three Conjoined Trifles (bassoon and piano)
[CMC sc] - score available from the Canadian Music Centre (click to borrow or purchase)
[CMC sc/pts] - score and parts available from the Canadian Music Centre (click to borrow, rent or purchase)
Other scores and parts are available from the composer
Dance Attack! (orchestra) [2004]
Dance Attack! is intended to be performed as a companion piece to Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, preceding and anticipating that longer work. Like the Rachmaninoff, it is essentially a throwback to the loosely formatted dance suite of earlier times, but viewed through modern formal considerations and seen as a chance to play with extremes of orchestral texture and colour. Almost all of the material in Dance Attack! is derived from, inspired by or shadowing themes in Rachmaninoff’s piece, often having taken on the feel of folk music, “found” excerpts from complete and self-strong (and unidentifiable) regional traditions only glimpsed here. There is also somewhat more “processed” music of a western tradition: some sneaky swing, some spooky ballet, and fragments of a Classical flute concerto – remember that Classical forms were dance suites, once. The ponderous introduction sets the scene as a city street, bordered by dark gray skyscrapers, where the initial visual concept for the work can be explored: what would happen if, as we begin the dreary commute home, briefcase in hand (walking – in this city everyone walks), what would happen if, suddenly, he was seized by the necessity to dance, in the street, and she, seeing him, couldn’t help but dance also, and I found myself joining in as well, and the contagion spread until we were all dancing, down the street, inspired by each other but each dancing in our own way, informed by our own traditions. Of course the formal considerations of the piece take over at times, and in deference to the Symphonic Dances it attempts to cadence in C Major for approximately three minutes, never quite succeeding and leaving Rachmaninoff to finally establish the tonality.Death to the Butterfly Dictator! is the most substantial musical byproduct of a year of work and travel in Europe. Conceived in the darkening months of 2002, the work was officially begun on January 1st, 2003 in the brooding quiet of the Anjou region of France (often called “France Profonde”) and written in an intense six-week period that took me through Birmingham to Liverpool (via Cambridge), where a kind family took me in, fed me and provided me with the time and stability and desk I needed to write such an ambitious piece of music. I spent a month of days composing and walking through John Lennon’s neighborhood, and a month of nights watching movies and drinking cider mixed with Guinness (the poor man’s Black Velvet), and all of it wearing a fleecy vest and toque. It was a surreal and productive period of my life. Without the immense generosity of the Liverpool family and the dearth of daylight and properly insulated houses, I suspect this piece would not have turned out quite as it did.
Butterfly is truly a monodrama: its reason for being is to tell the complete story of one character, played by one singer. The ensemble is almost always subordinate to this aim in that they listen to the singer/actor, and respond with music that is usually not precisely notated. The result is music that floats forward at its own pace, eight musicians trailing the soprano like butterflies chasing a wandering flower. But an exploration of dichotomy is also at play: notational looseness is held up against rhythmic precision; musical homage against musical parody; past memory against present action; abstraction against blunt reality; concert music against theatre piece; liberty against servitude; beauty against anger; life against death. This is a garden with many scents and colours.If you grew up reading Dennis Lee’s poetry, as I did, then you’ll probably understand the incredible admiration that I feel toward his work. Perhaps, like me, you experience a wave of childhood nostalgia whenever someone mentions “Willoughby Wallaby Woo” that sends you to your bookshelf, compelled to leaf through Alligator Pie for the umpteenth time. Mr. Lee’s poems are infectious, addictive and, furthermore, inherently musical, as though each one has associated dance steps that only a child (and that shadow-child deep within even the most “mature”) can remember.
And if the preceding paragraph rings true for you, then you probably also understand how difficult it was to choose eight poems out of so many. I couldn’t take all my favorites, and I couldn’t use only the most famous ones. In fact, I don’t remember what my criteria were. I just took the eight that seemed right at the time, and I think the child in me was delighted by the fact that these eight didn’t really go together, and that my challenge was to pull them together into something cohesive. Think of this cycle as a loosely unified variety show put on by eight different children, or one child with a particularly active, even spastic, imagination and a hamper-full of grown-up clothes. After all, mood swings and near-hallucinatory imaginings – things that we as adults label as improper, or even insane, and try our hardest to suppress – are an everyday part of the life of a child.Lyre (SATB choir with divisi, optional piano) [2005, revised 2007] {text by Alex Eddington} [CMC sc/pts]
Lyre was commissioned by David Fallis and the Toronto
Chamber Choir for their concert in the Metamorphosis Festival in Toronto
in May 2005. The theme of the festival
was Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the TCC chose to put together a concert of music
inspired by the myth of Orpheus.
Rather than using an existing text, ancient or otherwise, my
approach to this piece was to create a world of closely related phonic
sounds. I began by deriving a list of
“rhymes” (some of which are rather stretched) to the word for Orpheus’
instrument, the lyre. I found that some
of these words fell quite naturally together, creating images and stories that
are sometimes mythological, and sometimes mundane. I don’t expect the audience to hear the words, however: they are
subtext rather than text, a private storyline for the choir to sing about when
really, what the audience hears is a stream of related syllables. For this reason, I request in the score that
the text not be printed in the program.
People are not cars is a suite of five short pieces composed for “The Parking Lot Project”, a site-specific performance presented by Mile Zero Dance at The Works Art and Design Festival in Edmonton in July 2006. They were mixed in as part of a half-hour collaborative electroacoustic score that was broadcast live by the University of Alberta campus radio station (CJSR), and filled the parking lot through the car radios of our spectators.
Responding to the intended site of the dance, I found myself musing on the nature of the parking lot as a sort of temple where one – whether car or human – can contemplate the complex interrelationships between people and their machines. I wanted to create music that made engines out of the most human of sounds – the voice.
All five pieces use the same small set of samples. I recorded three actors (including myself) speaking all phonemes of the English language. I recorded each phoneme spoken neutrally, then asked the actors to play around with the phonetic material – resulting in them bringing a good deal of colour and character to such short vocal samples. The pieces are constructed entirely through cut-and-paste techniques and dynamic shaping, and the samples are never pitch-shifted or processed in any other way. The goal was to create a variety of music out of a very limited palette of easily recognizable material.robert, clara, johannes (the piano remembers) (MIDI-controlled acoustic piano) [2007]
The text is not mine – nor anyone’s; it was delivered as a spam email, with the subject heading "Scintillator". Spammers use software that strings together sentence fragments of online Public Domain texts, as a way of getting past email spam filters. This software is sort of like an computerized John Cage, strolling on an e-beach, picking up seashells without any interest in order or context. And sometimes, the result is striking.
My approach as a composer was first to make my own guesses as to what text-strings come from the same material (bhishma, bahlika, vena etc. made it clear that this is the case), and where the material changes. I treated some words as pivots between sources, whereas other changes are instantaneous. Then worked instinctively, treating each text fragment with full compositional seriousness, only consciously connecting my musical material when I had decided that two texts shared an origin. The shifts between material are frequently as though a radio station has been suddenly switched – although this is a radio that only plays solo vocal music (perhaps with imagined accompaniments).
My setting contains some humour, certainly, but ultimately Scintillator is a mystical piece. The text is the voice of The Internet: sublimely random, beautifully infinite. The singer is a medium for all music, and this is what she channels in these few minutes.
Scintillator is dedicated to Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, who gave the premiere on her tour concert as winner of the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté competition...and who also received the spam email.The trumpet has a long history behind it. Many cultures worldwide have for millennia had forms of the instrument, from the conch to the shofar to the long Roman tuba. And like the bell of a church or temple or town hall, the trumpet’s history is defined by its ability to be heard over long distances. A trumpet defines a territory, establishes dominance, reinforces power. A trumpet warns of intrusion, and rallies a people. A trumpet starts a war. Trumpets could be used to send coded musical messages. Trumpets announce a young man’s readiness to marry. Trumpets call out, and wait for a response.
As I mused on these things I wondered: who is the trumpeter calling to? What is the message? And will there ever be a response? The first section of So Joab blew a trumpet is an oppressive fanfare that sounds like a rhythm-coded message – but the message is remains undecoded, and receives no answer. The second, slower section seethes with unrequited passion as a young man somewhere on a mountain calls his love to any and all young women, and waits for a response.
As these two different narratives oddly come together to become each other’s answer, a third voice emerges: a fragment of Biblical text spoken by the soloist. I don’t know who Joab is, only that by blowing a trumpet, he stops a group of people in their tracks. I don’t know the details of the story, and I’d rather imagine them for myself. This text will remain a rich fragment for me. Perhaps this text is the message encoded in the fanfare – and perhaps this story fuels the yearning heart of that young trumpeter on the mountainside.
Commissioned and premiered by Jeremy Maitland, Montreal QC, April 2007.
The score for So Joab blew a trumpet is available through the Canadian Music Centre library.
notes: April 26, 2008