This multichannel work, Sundog ii for eight loudspeakers, begins in slow-motion with solitary tones, but later on more voices join in – some with a rougher surface -, and the texture thickens. Like in an earlier composition, I found out that finally there were so many streams of sound that can be best heard – like independent musical instruments – from separate loudspeakers, because the spectra are rich. Therefore, instead of spatial movement, the experience of the sonorities and timbres of the music is more important. The computer music work Sundog ii is written with C++ and MAL-d synthesis software.

Composition of this piece was funded by an Allen Strange Award from the Washington (State) Composers Forum. As per a request from Shiau-Uen Ding, my goal was to combine my interests in musique concrète, electronica/techno, and live computer music as part of a large-scale solo piano work. I decided to work with a piano as sound material. The crappy piano has interesting kinds of indeterminacy associated with it. You know that some notes are going to be “out”, but you’re never sure which ones. The details of this composition, though always following the same basic dramatic and formal outline, are always different at each performance. Every crappy piano is different. The musique concrète sounds can be re-realized in different combinations at each performance. Because crappy pianos are unreliable in producing exact pitches, I notate much of the piano part in a “graphic” way, specifying only general contours. Thus, the piece is mostly a “percussion” piece, largely devoid of melody and harmony, but chock-filled with funky rhythms and general joyous chaos and cacophony.

Some of my 12 Djerassi Resident Artist fellows accused me this past July of “going morbid” with inErnest. Yes, author Hemingway [1899-1961] and Carl Djerassi painter daughter Pamela [1950-1978], I discovered, did kill themselves on similar, early July days, albeit years apart. But their death was not at all what was of interest to me; it was their life, their work, their habits. After a long time re-reading and contemplating Hemingway, then being “thrown into” Djerassi’s open ranch, right next to Neil Young’s, this Video Music Composition formed. Original video, sound and music play sandwiched between unexpected edits from Luis Buñuel’s La Chien Andalou.

John Cage collected mushrooms, spoke eloquently and inspired thought, chance and silence in many. I confess to liking him as a philosopher, conversationalist and investigator more than as a deep composer, but his contributions remain enormous. His poking of materials into turntable styluses revolutionized every approach I have ever made to an electronic instrument, be it a Synclavier, a Yamaha TX816 or a sampler; humanizing it all, even before it reaches our ears and brains. His short lecture on a Japanese mushroom Haiku is timeless. II share it here https://vimeo.com/111884909. And then there were the prepared pianos. Well, Not anymore, John.

The nature things that surround me always give me rich inspirations. I am living in a place where there are a lot of trees that turn out the colors in a wide spectrum, especially in the fall season. In this piece, I would like to capture the impression that I get from the natural beauty and interpret that in a musical language in terms of the sensitiveness of the natural pigments of leaves and the spectacular sight of the ground under the trees that is fully filled with fallen leaves. The piece, Yellow Forest was performed at the laptop Orchestra concert, which was held at Charlotte New Music Festival in June 2015. The festival included the one-week long MAX/MSP workshop. The piece is approximately ten minutes in length.

Ventriloquy centers on the vococentrism of aural perception and how the presence of voice, in its natural and digitally mediated states, structures the sonic space it lies in. The physical characteristics of the human voice, in terms of its register, spectrum, and prosody, form a reference point from which all other sounds are comprehended, often bending the boundaries of what is voice and what is not.

“Homoousios,” literally translated in English as “of the same substance, or essence,” is the Greek word used at the Council of Nicea to describe the nature of Christ; that he was “of the same substance” as God. This council was called in 325 CE to develop clarity in relation to the views of the Arians, which thought of Christ as “like [as opposed to ‘same’] in substance” with God. This controversy – and the doctrine realized out of it, of which the word “Homoousios” represents – is best summed up in the idea that Christ was both fully God and fully human in nature. This piece explores this hypostasis of the Divine and the human – the “otherness” of two distinctly different natures becoming one (yet at the same time upholding the distinctiveness of divinity and humanity) – through multiple expressions.

The words taken from the first epistle of John in the New Testament: “[This is] He-who-came-by-water-and-blood,” (speaking of Christ) are spoken by a two-year old in the electronics. Water and blood speak of the duality of Christ’s nature; water representing His Divinity, and blood representing His humanity. Thus the rest of the electronics in their entirety are taken only from sounds generated by water flowing or striking objects and sounds generated by a tree (representing blood due to its associations with a cross). So through the dual nature of sounds in the electronics, each instrument’s timbre, form, and the play of key motivic figures between two instruments, Homoousios unifies contrast, reflecting the hypostatization of the Divine and the human.

From Bach to Stockhausen, improvisation and composition have been inextricably linked. One of the most important current advocates of improvisation in composition is the clarinetist, Esther Lamneck, who has recently integrated improvisation with fixed medium electronic music compositions, including my works Mappaemundi and Doctrine of Chances. In her initial improvisations that formed the basis of Musicometry I, I found that her playing reflected the measure of such important qualities of my musical language as timbral texture, rhythmic gesture, pitch contour, and harmonic structure. Using these improvisations as the compositional basis of Musicometry I, I similarly sought to represent the measure of these qualities that I found in her own playing. The result is a truly collaborative work, in which the performer and composer adopt the essential aspects of the musical language of the other, as expressed in the dedication: “To, from, and for Esther Lamneck.”

Video: Katherine Liberovskaya (2015)
Music: Phill Niblock (2011)

A 30 minute extreme close-up long take of the flow of sand trickling from the upper to the lower glass chamber of and hourglass to Niblock’s composition “FeedCorn Ear” (2011), featuring Belgian cellist Arne Deforce (available on “Touch Five” TO:91, Touch Records).