new music

so, I uploaded a lot of new tracks yesterday, only one of which is actually new. its working title is, creatively, "newsong." let me know if you come up with anything better. it uses a guitar - mandolin - cello trio (which may well become my signature outfit this year) as well as the sounds of surf rolling into thunder hole at acadia national park in maine and of passing traffic coming down off frankonia notch in new hampshire. there are two themes, one of which is in 4/4, the other in 7/8. the 4/4 one is divided into 3/3/2, and the 7/8 is divided into 3/2/2, so rhythmically speaking, much of the song is a power struggle between the threes from the west and the twos from the east. now here's the trick; in the parts where either theme really settles into a rhythm, the noises also settle into their own rhythm, but in a pattern opposite to the instruments. For example, when strings start pounding out that 4/4, the surf undermines its regularity by crashing in 7/8. this way, the texture is always on the move, and the sound never really settles to a rest. not that it particularly wants to; this is the most simply exuberant music I've written in years. It's inspired mainly by the pure joy I find in living in the van, and in moving about. The sung words that appear briefly at the beginning and the end are from the american folk song Shenandoah, a homesick western settler's ode to his homeland. in my excerpt, however, he discusses being "bound away across the wide Missouri," and for me, that's a happy trip. america is vivified again and again by its tradition as a young frontier country, and it has beckoned generation after generation of young people to new frontiers, be they rivers, oceans, prairies or highways. on the frontier one can learn things hard to get anywhere else, but today, frontiers are fast disappearing. to a large degree, one has to seek them out and create them for oneself, and living in a van is a great place to start.

I also loaded a piece for voices called srebrenica. In 1995, the village of srebrenica, a UN-designated "safe area" fell to advancing serb forces. the defending UN troops, who had disarmed the villagers, continued retreating and retreating, afraid to fire the first shot and afraid of contravening international protocol, until they had nothing left to protect. men, women and children were rounded into buses and taken to football stadiums where they were shot, or locked shoulder-to-shoulder in warehouses with a bomb. it became the worst massacre of civilians in europe since world war II, and an enormous challenge not only to international humanitarian policy but to the very ideas of humanitarianism and even humanism. in studying the incident, it quickly becomes difficult to assign blame. from a distance, the inhumanity of general mladic, the ineptitude of the UN, and the demonic power-games of milosevic serve as effective targets. however, after closer study, one is ultimately struck by the manner in which violence and hatred seem like independent actors operating almost on their own physics. it becomes less a case of evil people employing violence than violence and evil employing people. and nobody is safe; even by following all the rules with the best intentions, we find ourselves in the midst of massacre. the text of my piece is the UN security council resolution that reaffirmed srebrenica's status as a safe area in the face of mounting hostilities, passed shortly before its fall. one voice simply reads the document, but other voices join with seemingly random nonsense syllables. however, they actually appear following a strict method. each time the first voice passes to a new clause, another takes the next odd syllable from the new clause and adds it to a regular rhythmic pattern. in other words, the first voice takes the the first syllable of the first clause, then the third syllable of the second clause, then the fifth of the third, and so on. each additional voice has an individual pattern of greater density than the voice before; the first introduces a quarter-note beat in 4/4, the second layers eighth note triplets upon that pattern, the third thickens to regular eighth notes, and the fourth introduces sixteenth note triplets. every time one voice completes its pattern, it simply repeats as a new voices begins its own. by the end, the resulting rhythms and syllables simply create a cacophony that drowns out the recitation of the original document.

the first movement of lost calls also appears here. lost calls is a piece for cello and answering machine that I wrote as part of my senior thesis at princeton. in this first movement, I dissect greetings in answering machine messages and examine their melodic qualities, eventually building a very short tonal trio for two cellos and voices.

finally, I included a short excerpt from my blue mountain suite, another of my senior thesis pieces. the recording is live, so its pretty rough, but its a fun piece. it's sort of a homage to the hills of central pennsylvania and the people with whom I grew up. the piece transverses 24 hours, and each movement follows a time of the day; this excerpt is from the "workday" movement. the pieces uses a lot of references to american folk music, as well as a lot of extended technique and general weird shit.

enjoy!