On a concert of new text and graphic scores, Southland Ensemble will be presenting a revised version of my piece “Something About My Punctuation” for four writers and sounds, consisting of text fragments from Søren Kierkegaard’s diary.
Saturday, February 9
Automata
504 Chung King Ct.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Tickets here
A small cohort from Dog Star Orchestra will be performing at the GAS Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden on September 28 and 29. At the latter of the two shows a new piece of mine titled still life: North Puyallup River Bridge will be premiered for quartet (bass flute, horn, viola, guitar) alongside work by Erika Bell, Laura Steenberge, Michael Pisaro, and Yoko Ono. The piece is an arrangement of harmonies found near the origin of the North Puyallup River on Mt. Rainier.
More information about the festival and performances here.
short video from the performance on June 3, 2018. the piece consists of 9-tone ‘chains’ which must be arranged in a harmonic lattice structure (this performance uses the (2,3), (3,5), and (5,7) planes—an x,y graph where each axis represents a harmonic ratio).
video by Ian Byers-Gamber
The 14th season of Dog Star Orchestra begins Saturday June 2. On Sunday June 3 at Human Resources in Chinatown, I will present a new piece lattice chains for an 8 channel modular sound system designed with Janie Geiser, Eric Heep, and Cassia Streb. Eric Heep, Sepand Shahab, Stephanie Smith, and Cassia Streb will also be presenting pieces.
Info on all concerts can be found at dogstarorchestra.com
SOUND HOUSE is a work-in-progress excerpt of a new work conceived and created by John Eagle, Janie Geiser and Cassia Streb. Sound House is a performance/installation centered on a series of tasks that shape the sound in the room. The tasks, based on a set of instructions, are enacted by a group of 8 artist/performers manipulating objects, controllers, microphones, speakers, walls, and wooden puppets. Their actions are specific and interdependent and emerge from several areas: the history of the Minuteman Missile project, bricklaying/construction, sound generation, time and its measurement, and object/task performance (the performance of the real).
In June, I performed Tom Johnson’s Nine Bells, a nine movement piece which uses various patterns for the performer to walk through a 3×3 grid. The tuning system I employed placed the bells on a plane of harmonic space with one axis in fifths (3/2) and the other in pure major thirds (5/4). The image below shows my tuning scheme overlaid with Johnson’s hand drawing (first movement). This video shows the ninth movement, which has a triangular pattern that approximates a 45-45-90 triangle, which when reduced has sides of 1, 1, and √2. Using steps as the unit of measurement, Johnson represents this with a triangle of 5, 5, 7 (just short of 5√2). This movement uses only the 4 outer bells forming a square. As the triangle’s orientation changes, the exact dimensions remain intact while the resultant chord changes each time (a total of 4 possibilities).
Thanks to Janie Geiser and Automata for filming and hosting.
Paul Muller with a nice writeup on one of the Dog Star concerts this past June.
Two new events planned as part of this year’s Dog Star Orchestra festival. June 4, I’ll be playing Tom Johnson’s Nine Bells on a specially-tuned set of bells I’ve built. June 14, Isaura String Quartet will perform ‘rhythm color #3’ alongside the Southland String Quartet performing works by James Tenney and Tom Johnson.
Check out the shows section for more info.
Isaura String Quartet will be premiering my piece “parallel lines (do not intersect)” on their final concert of their summer series. For the concert they asked 7 different LA composers to reimagine Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”. My piece, which borrows its name from Blondie’s album title, begins with a chorale, of sorts, in two separate 3-limit harmonic spaces (4ths, 5ths, and octaves)—a kind of harmonic parallelism. The concert will be followed by pie and drinks to celebrate the final concert.
Click here for more info and email isaurastringquartet@gmail.com to RSVP and receive directions to the location in Eagle Rock.
Todd Lerew is an artist whose work has interested me due to its focus on objects. This can mean the treatment of a traditional instrument as such (an object), or the pedestrian one (smoke alarms, road flares, megaphones, etc.). There is a utilitarian quality present throughout his work in which one can see anything and everything as potentially useful.
I approached Todd about releasing an album with FWD: rcrds and he came back with the idea of a piece where two recordings are played against each other. Besides appreciating the obvious potential for a recording in which a repeat-performance is almost impossible and the rejection of the idea of the recording as a “perfect version”, I grew more excited about the idea as I thought about the strict treatment of the recording as an object which would force the listener out of a passive role and into an active one. With the final product of two compact discs, the listener must decide on playback mechanisms, location, and timing (offset of recordings). All of these decisions are present in the usual playback experience, but are typically based on habit and convenience. In this case each element must be considered. And then, of course, the material must be considered as well. In the words of the composer: “The material on each disc – a recording of a clock ticking followed by a long tone – is apparently identical to that of the other disc when they are played individually or in succession; the contour of their divergence becomes evident only when they are played simultaneously.”
The piece is simply titled “σ”, which in statistics, represents a variable’s standard deviation. It is available for purchase directly from FWD: rcrds.
