Place-Based Environmental Music and Installations

Program notes: This excerpt is from a piece titled Cries of the Earth at Solstice first performed at the exact moment of sundown on the day of the summer solstice, June 21, 2019. The music represents the cries of the many species of the Earth, simultaneously celebrating and mourning the ending of the days getting longer and the beginning of the long march toward the next winter solstice six months later. Originally performed in an open field, the daylight was still rather bright and the video was not viewable. This video shows the same piece, but presented simultaneously inside (video on a screen visible through the window) and outside (small Bluetooth audio speakers) and at a time of day where the video is visible.

Program notes: This excerpt is from a longer pop-up sound installation that briefly appeared inside the Athletic Center at Luther College in the summer of 2019. The music was created from manipulated field recordings of nature, here presented inside a large reverberating space of concrete. One major goal of this project was to bring the manipulated sounds of nature inside human spaces to make others more aware of their growing absence from our everyday lives.

Electroacoustic (live performer with electronics)

Score for The night is empty… (for clarinet and fixed media, 2018)

Program notes: The night is empty… was written for Emily Mehigh and her Miniature Month of May project in 2018. The title and the text refer to the deaths of bats in North America as they succumb to white-nose syndrome, a deadly disease that is spreading outward from the state of New York. The music evokes the atmosphere of a cave of bats, in their place of safety and hibernation, while the fungus, represented by crackling noise, is unfortunately spreading. Emily's entire Miniature Month of May project is available here.

Score for Urban Sky Glow (for marimba and live electronics, 2016)

Program notes: Urban Sky Glow explores how missing starlight returns to our lives as we reduce city lights. It acts as an interpretation of the levels of the starlight magnitude of one particular area of the night sky. The marimba musically represents the stars that are visible in the different magnitudes. After the first minute of the piece, four stars have been revealed: Sirius, Rigel, Betelgeuse, and the Hyades star cluster. As we move through the levels of magnitude, city light is reduced, more stars are revealed, and previously visible stars become brighter. The fixed media creates both a contrasting artificial light as well as extensions of the marimba’s starlight. As we travel through the magnitudes we also engage in two Dreams which are variations on the starlight materials.

Acoustic Works

Score for Lilliputian Arctic Deviation (for small symphony orchestra, 2018)

Program notes: Lilliputian Arctic Deviation is a work for sinfonietta inspired by average snow and ice extent in the Northern Hemisphere. The Rutgers University Global Snow Lab records weekly snow extent averages for the Northern Hemisphere from 1967 until the present day. This work focuses on the summer months and uses musical materials to reflect two characteristics of the data collection: a significant decline in average snow extent from 1967 to 2015, and a transition from drastic yearly differences in the late 1960s through the early 1990s, to more consistent and predictable values in the late 1990s to 2015. Similar yearly average data values are reflected through shared musical materials. Data regions are grouped into eight regions, and data points falling within the same region share motivic, melodic, harmonic, and timbral materials.

Fixed Media (electronics alone)

Program notes: Ambalangoda was created for the Cities and Memory Global Collaborative Sound Project. The source recording was gathered by Stephane Marin of Espaces Sonores. The source recording features sounds from a busy roadway in Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka. These source sounds are reimagined into a kind of daydream, one that quickly focuses on particular sounds, changes the perception of the passage of time, and remixes foreground and background materials at the slightest whim.

Program notes: It Means ‘Light’ was inspired by the location where the original sound recording took place; the Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park in London. People have been speaking and protesting there since the middle of the 1800s, and the source recording, to me, represents a tiny snapshot of the total collection of exchanged ideas at that specific location. This hyper-object, something that we cannot experience within our short lifetimes, is represented by crowd noise rapidly speeding up and slowing down through the piece.