One of the most frustrating aspects of video game music is its repetitive nature. Players must typically spend an extended amount of time in one area of the game before moving on, and each area has traditionally contained a single track that loops continuously. Listening to the same music over and over becomes irritating, especially if the player fails at the task necessary to continue and is further delayed in unlocking a new level and its music.
This piece for two pianos, called Fulcrum, is a small-scale example of a possible solution to this issue. It is divided into sixteen segments, each of which is linked to a frame in an Adobe Flash animation. A simple ActionScript 2.0 program determines which segment would follow which based on a system of guided randomness.
This is a chart demonstrating the architecture of the piece. At each point that a fork occurs in the path, the code randomly chooses one of the two segments to play. It will loop infinitely until the user chooses to stop.
For this project, I selected a segment of video from a BBC documentary called Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World, stripped the audio, and composed my own. It depicted sea turtles eating algae underwater, then swimming on the surface; by the end, it had zoomed out to an aerial view of the archipelago. Unfortunately, I don’t have the rights to distribute the video, but here’s the music to it.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Good texts for art songs are difficult to find. I was playing around with some Percy Shelley poems, but then, as I was looking through Brandon Bird’s website, I found the Letters to Walken. “An Acquaintance?” Year 2 caught my eye, and the rest, as they say, is awesome.
The studio recording features soprano Megan Radowick and pianist Anna Hakobyan. The live premiere, on April 27, 2009, was performed by Megan Radowick and Nicole Valadez. The November 16, 2009 performance was provided by Megan Radowick and Saul Iruegas. And special thanks, of course, to writer Ming Doyle for graciously allowing me to use her text.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This was a project for my Electronic Music course. We were required to write a soundtrack for any of several provided videos in the public domain. I selected footage of someone’s vacation to the Grand Canyon. The music consists of polychords and extended tertian chords in piano and strings, a solo cello, a subtle synth, and my voice, all slathered in reverb and/or delay. The sounds come from a Kurzweil K2000. The video? Who knows.
De Rerum Natura is an epic poem written by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99-55 BCE). We know little about Lucretius’s life beyond the fact that he was an adherent of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had lived two centuries before him. The poem, written for and dedicated to Lucretius’s friend Gaius Memmius, sets forth and expounds upon many of the ideas of Epicureanism – that the universe is governed by the motion of atoms, that we must conquer fear (particularly that of death), and that humanity must achieve its own salvation rather than petitioning it from the gods.
I have chosen one section from each of the six books, primarily dealing with these latter two themes, and written a setting for concert choir. A vast portion of vocal repertoire is sacred in nature, much of it endowed with great beauty, and I feel that this deeply moving medium can be employed to espouse ideals that are humanistic and avowedly secular.
In 2009, the first, second, and third movements of De Rerum Natura received the National Federation of Music Clubs Award for Choral Composition.
The first four movements were performed on Monday, November 16, 2009 by the following performers:
Kristin DeGroot, Jasmine Haghighatian, Megan Radowick, Bronwyn White, soprano
Heather Blount, Roxanna Tehrani, alto
Lorenzo Garcia, Emmanuel Medina, Rafael Moras, Darius Thomas, tenor
Anthony Garant, Christopher Garcia, Jeffery Hunter, Adrian Kirtley, bass
A special thank you to Andrea Cerda and Amanda Cullom, who helped prepare the piece but could not join us on the concert.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Animus is an experiment in rhythm. The beats are divided unevenly, a feature which is exploited to change the tempo with mathematical precision. The harmony, while comprised of simple chords, moves in unorthodox ways. Overall, however, the atmosphere or emotions evoked by the piece are of primary importance. The modernistic techniques described above are used to add an element of unpredictability to this atmosphere.
This piece was premiered on Monday, April 28, 2008 by the following people: Amanda Austin, flute; Veronica Gerhardt, clarinet; Ismael Borrego, violin; Joe Barrientos, cello; Jack McKown, piano; and Alysia Gist, conductor. This recording from November 16, 2009 features Stephanie Keys, flute; Ryan Hughes, clarinet; Ismael Borrego, violin; Megan Swisher, cello; and Anna Hakobyan, piano.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
“The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made. [...] It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that the LCD screen was a little larger than usual in order to accommodate the abridged judgments of King Wen on each of the sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of his son, the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of each hexagram. [...]
“The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4. 1 + 1 it could manage (2) and 1 + 2 (3) and 2 + 2 (4) or tan 74 (3.4874145), but anything above 4 it represented merely as ‘A Suffusion of Yellow.’ Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom.”
- Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), p. 104
For solo piano. This is something of a tribute piece for Douglas Adams, one of my favorite human beings. The harmonies I use are tertian block chords, but they move in non-functional ways, often to accompany octatonic passages. It was performed live on November 29, 2007 by Nicole Valadez and on November 16, 2009 by Saul Iruegas.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Catch-22, a piece for unaccompanied flute, was my first assignment for sophomore composition lessons. I was asked to write a solo piece in three movements, wherein each movement only used two melodic intervals and their inversions. Movement I uses the minor second, perfect fourth, major seventh, and perfect fifth; Movement II uses the major second, minor third, minor seventh, and major sixth; and Movement III uses the minor second, major third, major seventh, minor sixth, and the tritone. I somehow managed to make things sound surprisingly tonal. It was premiered on November 30, 2006 Natalie Duncan. This recording from November 16, 2009 features Jeremy Jimenez.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.