What does musical activism mean to me?
In the middle of August of this summer I quickly completed a 30 minute album titled “smallstep”. The work is accompanied by a booklet designed by myself that explains the concepts behind each of the tracks and their source material (what recordings, pieces of music, and software I used to create the tracks).
You can listen here, and download for free here.
This week I’m staying in New York City for the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF). My piece Ring | Axle | Gear was broken into three parts (as I suggested) and programmed on 3 concerts (Tuesday afternoon, Friday afternoon, and Sunday evening). The quality of pieces in yesterday’s concerts was quite good, so hope that that trend continues. Also hoping to catch concerts and events outside of the NYCEMF while I’m here. Here is Ring | Axle | Gear in its entirety:
This week I’m in Oberlin for the Sonic Arts Workshop (SAW), a week-long, intensive electronic music workshop for high school students. The high school students this year have come from all over the US, including both coasts and Hawaii, and there is also one student who came from China. This is my third time teaching the workshop. I’m teaching a variety of classes ranging from microphone techniques, spectral processing, and audio programming. It’s a joy to work with such a variety of students in a nurturing and open environment.
Computer Music is an audio-visual installation that visualizes and sonifies computer processes.
The sonic component of the work is a mapping of the amount of memory used by and running time of the 100 most recent system processes onto the range of human hearing.
The visual component of the work takes the same data and displays it horizontally as a sequence of bars (with most recent processes on the left). Older and larger processes are displayed as brighter colors.
The installation is “performed” by the opening and closing of programs on the computer, with or without the intervention of a human user.
The goal of this work is two-fold: first, to bring the usually “silent”, backgrounded, computer processes people interact with everyday into a very perceptible, foregrounded, domain, and secondly, to do this in a way that reveals the beauty of these processes and how computer systems handle them.
Over this summer I composed a trombone quartet titled “Acceptance” for the 2015 Third Coast Trombone Retreat. Here’s a video including a computer-generated recording and the score for the piece:
Update: Here’s the performance at the Trombone Retreat, quite well-played:
Niklas Roy is a self-proclaimed “inventor of useless things” from Berlin, but also an installation artist, robotics builder, and multimedia artist. The “inventor of useless things” description highlights the fact that a great deal of Roy’s work takes the engineering prowess and abilities needed for “useful” things and places them within the domain of art.
Roy’s work explores or redefines the boundaries between the real world (the world within which installation participants exist), the mechanical world (the physical materials of the installation), and the virtual, frequently digital world (the procedures and code that make the installation function). Roy’s installations often have an activist or humorous bent: exploring ideas of human’s relationships to virtual spaces, video games, art, privacy, energy usage, and more. Roy is also very open about his work, more often than not including source code or detailed descriptions of how things function in his projects.
The first work of Roy’s that I came across was My Little Piece of Privacy. This work involves a small curtain on a storefront window that moves left and right, in sync with people walking by on the street, actively blocking their gaze into the storefront.
A contrasting work of Roy’s is Lumenoise, a fabricated “light pen which turns your old CRT-TV into an audiovisual synthesizer”. The result is a strange and wonderful instrument, with notably interesting visual patterns.
A work that I feel really epitomizes the tripartite exploration of participatory, mechanical, and digital space (this time only alluded to) is Pongmechanik, an electromechanical version of the early video game Pong.
Lastly, much of Roy’s recent work has focused on the use of multitudes of small balls in tubes, including the Pneumatic Sponge Ball Accelerator, a nod to the Large Hadron Collider, and an installation at the Goethe-Institut Krakau:
Roy’s creative fluidity within the fields of engineering, robotics, and visual and sonic arts is very inspiring.
This past year I was commissioned by Ben Roidl-Ward and Tim Daniels, fantastic bassoonist and oboist, respectively, to create a piece for oboe, bassoon, percussion and live electronics. After many rewrites I ended up with a short, five section piece that includes a variety of textures and instrumental roles.
The first movement begins with chaos: each of the performers quickly playing improvised notes covering their entire range while the electronics sample and randomly repeat segments of this texture. Over a minute, the range of the notes is collapsed to the middle and the notes get longer (with the percussion “lengthening” notes through trills).
The next movement begins in unison, with long tones in the middle range accented by the percussion. The notes speed up and the percussion starts filling in the space within and in between the notes, leading to the third section, a percussion solo that reiterates and develops some of the gestures heard previously in the piece.
The percussion solo loses steam and leads to a repeated ostinato pattern. The winds enter on improvised, soloistic material over the percussion ostinato, which is developed and ornamented. Finally, the winds reach the peak and trough of their ranges, respectively, and the percussion is cued to play a final, highly ornamented gesture.
The last section opens with a loop in the percussion, to which is added a loop in the oboe, and then one in bassoon. The loops are harmonically ambiguous and of different lengths. The loops circulate for around 20 seconds and are then abruptly cut off, ending the work.
As part of the Revel at IX event used to raise money for The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative I created a 15 minute video art loop (no sound) that was played all night during the after party.
To create the video I spent several weeks shooting footage at a variety of locations in Charlottesville at different times of the day. I then compiled the footage so that they made the following transitions during the duration of the piece:
Nature -> Architecture -> Urban
Morning -> Night
Intimate -> Public
Next, I matted all of the videos using a 5x5 grid of squares with a rising and falling “echo effect” that changes the number of visible squares on the screen from one to twenty and back again. The patterns vary from left to right, up to down, and a variety of different diagonal configurations.
This project was both my first foray into video art without sound and I also learned a great deal about Charlottesville: its nature and urban landscape.
Last year I made this blog post about my work Peak for solo percussion. As part of the Meehan/Perkins Duo coming to University of Virginia I rewrote the piece for duo percussion, which I think made it much more effective. Analysis of the piece can be found in the first blog post.
This year I worked with dancer and choreographer Juliana Garber on music for 2 dance works she choreographed. The first was a solo piece titled Impulse that was premiered at the 2nd Biomorphic Dance Festival at The Secret Theater in New York City.
This work blends processed acapella samples, foley recordings, and sounds of New York City into a variety of frequently rhythmic, driving textures. The climax of the piece introduces instrumental sounds and unprocessed vocals.
The second piece extended both dance ideas and sonic material from the first, and was titled Impetus+. This work is for 6 dancers and is longer, at 12 minutes.
With more dancers I felt that I had more ability to utilize dramatic gestures, and because of the more substantial length of the work more transformational processes on the musical material occur. This piece was performed at The Greene Space in Queens, in the 3rd Biomorphic Dance Festival at the Hudson Guild Theater, and at Movement Research in Manhattan.