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Last updated Tue May 6 10:19:56 2008.
All content © 1996-2008 Christopher Ariza. All Rights Reserved.
Experimental music includes compositions and music for live performance (concert-music), acousto-electric compositions (for live performers and digital audio), and composition for spatialized (surround) and stereo digital audio.
metalloidesque electronico-clankered: for two percussionists and real-time signal processing
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This work is an exploration in four-part polyphony. Independent lines shift between foreground and background through contour, hocket, and mixture. Synthetic sound sources are generated and transformed with athenaCL, Csound, Max/MSP, and various other software and hardware. The title of this work is taken from Allen Ginsberg's 1977 poem "Haunting Poe's Baltimore."
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This work is an exploration in textural hocketing and extended temporal design. The eight-channel digital audio explores three superimposed layers of dynamic signal assignments of source material to both output and channel-specific time-based processors. Tools used in this composition include the algorithmic composition system athenaCL, synthesis systems Csound and Max/MSP, and various other software and hardware. The title of this work is taken from Allen Ginsberg's 1960 poem "Aether." Written for, and premiered by, KIOKU.
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Reciprocal reaction between background and foreground motivates both movement and stasis in this composition. The title of this work, relating to the poetic evocation of image, is taken form Allen Ginsberg's 1961 poem "Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber." Source material, excluding both natural and artificial noise, is drawn from studio recordings of the steelpan performed by Darren Dyke. Tools used in this composition include the algorithmic composition system athenaCL, synthesis systems Csound and Max/MSP, and various other software and hardware. This composition is made available as part of the 2007 CD release RESONANCE: Steel Pan in the 21st Century.
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This work explores a mixture and a juxtaposition of metric, semi-metric, and ametric materials, from both acoustic and digital sources. The score for this work employs an indeterminate, bi-temporal representation. Five equal-duration segments are given for each player in each of ten sections. Although the number of segments within each section is specified, each player may independently and freely choose segments. In addition, a large-scale dynamic contour is specified for each section. The real-time signal processing system, based on the amplitude and density of acoustic events, produces up to eight polyphonic textures or gestures. The title of this work is taken from Allen Ginsberg's 1961 poem "Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber." This recording was realized with performances by Payton MacDonald and Jason Treuting.
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This work explores merged discontinuities and scattered continuities. The title is taken from Allen Ginsberg's 1969 poem "Northwest Passage." The form of the work seeks a balance between forward propulsion and frictional resistance. The algorithmic composition system athenaCL is used to deploy polyphonic textures made of sound shards, short samples larger than grains. Repertories consisting of hundreds of these short samples, algorithmically extracted from sound files of recordings done in Tokyo and elsewhere, are recomposed into horizontal and vertical textures. The sieve theory of Iannis Xenakis, also implemented in athenaCL, is used to create pitch groups and polyphonic rhythmic canons. Additional processing and synthesis is done with Csound, Max/MSP, SoundHack, and various other software and hardware.
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This work is an exploration of heterophony and ornamentation, employing specialized algorithms created for the algorithmic composition system athenaCL. Additional processing and synthesis is done with Csound, Max/MSP, SoundHack, and various other software and hardware. The title refers to the swarm-like cultural instinct to follow.
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This work takes its title from section II of Allen Ginsberg's 1956 "Howl", in which the author asks, "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!" Ginsberg uses Moloch, an ancient deity whose worship required the sacrifice of children, as an icon for the sickness of the modern mind.
This work opposes the Molochian hegemony through the development of polyrhythm and cyclical form. The odaiko (big drum), shime-daiko, and chappa (hand cymbals) are combined with digital sounds produced from other instruments of the taiko ensemble. These sounds are composed, processed, and synthesized through various tools including the algorithmic composition system athenaCL. Additional processing and synthesis is done with Csound, Max/MSP, SoundHack, and various other software and hardware.
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This work is an interactive composition: the live performers play composed music, while a computer system, monitoring the performance with microphones, creates new music in response. The real-time computer music system produces musical accompaniment with various synthesis methods, as well as processed micro-samples captured from the microphones. Rhythms and melodies generated by the computer system are, at times, pre-composed, and other times, generated algorithmically in response to the performers.
The title of this work is taken from Allen Ginsberg, a poet whose observations of the last century have a growing relevance in the beginning of this century.
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This work, through diverse textural settings, explores polyrhythm and polytexture. The progression of the work is towards greater compartmentalization and polyrhythmic distinction between sound sources. This progression, on some levels, functions as a metaphor of the power relations suggested by both textual quotations (from protests and politics), and the works title (from Max Ernst's 1923 painting of the same name). This title, in turn, is a play on the title of Alfred Jarry's 1896 political and social satire, Ubu Roi.
At the same time, this work is a portrait of New York City. Samples of streets in the Lower East Side, of Grand Central Station, of the 6 train in Union Square, of World Economic Forum protests in Central Park, and of the media chatter of post 11 September politicians all capture a view of the city.
Sounds are composed, processed, and synthesized through various tools including the algorithmic composition system athenaCL. Additional processing and synthesis is done with Csound, Max/MSP, SoundHack, and various other software and hardware.
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This work is an exploration of rhythmic speech-sounds, combining constantly changing rhythmic streams into a polyphonic network. The composition employs sounds created and composed with a variety of software tools, including Csound, Max/MSP, SoundHack, and athenaCL. Much use is made of an extension to the athenaCL system employing genetic algorithms in the production of rhythmic variants, as well athenaCL's quadraphonic panning capabilities. Sounds sampled and synthesized with these tools are then composed, mixed, and further processed in a digital audio workstation.
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The importance of the finger-nail in classical guitar performance cannot be under-estimated. A guitarist must take great care to shape the nail appropriately, the resulting interaction with the string being the main determinant of articulation and tone. When I was young I discovered that numerous coats of a nylon-fortified nail-polish did great things for my tone. Often guitarists will go to elaborate measures to repair their nails if damaged before a gig, occasionally resulting in grotesque hybrids of nail and acrylic bonded with cyanoacrylate. I imagine this interaction of the synthetic with the organic as parallel to the interaction of creative-intent with six strings, four fingers, and four finger-nails.
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This work aspires to anti-development and anti-lyric, to textural and formal circumvolution. The title is transliterated from Lao Tzu.
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This composition attempts to develop an idiomatic language for the concert hall based on rhythm, texture, and design. I turned to Allan Ginsberg's 1955 "Notes on Howl" for the title; the beats and bebop, like hip-hop, provide inspiring examples of triumphant idiomatic languages.
No notes available.
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Or this is a work composed for five trios, a sort-of cubed pierrot ensemble. The instrumentation inspires the form: the work moves without pause between five sections, each morphing one into the other, yet each an isolated textural manifesto. A culmination of previous experiments in harmony, this work demonstrates a very free use of aggregate completing ordered content groups, a marriage of the textural freedom of functional harmony and the harmonic diversity of post-tonal and non-western theory. Or this is a new minimalism, a maximalist minimalism, a synthesis of the rhythmic and textural vocabulary of minimalism (along with a sympathy for the audience and popular musics) with the complexity, at all levels, so admired by the mid-century avant-garde. Or this is a work exploring the comma, the gap, either in the circle of fifths, in the caesura of a phrase, in the cycling of a polyrhythm or in the instrumental isolation of poly-texture. Or this is a work of tension, the tension of linearity, the tension of expectation. The tension between foreground and background, content and form. So-called melody dissolves into so-called harmony, as the music flips between so-called gesture and so-called process. Or this is a work offering more than a singular relationship with the listener.
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The text for this work was compiled from Samuel Beckett's short novel, Worstward Ho, written in english in 1983. The form of the work draws heavily from the discongrous and irregular form of the text itself, shifting rapidly between disparate textural extremes. The voice follows/creates these extremes, employing extended falsetto passages and rhythmic spoken word, in addition to the regular baritone voice.
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This is a work of polyphony and texture: rhythmic polyphony, melodic polyphony, looking both backward and forward at polyphony itself; polyphony generating texture, polyphony creating, within three contrasting textures, an intricate weave.
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This piece, in the broadest sense, a set of six variations on a theme. Yet the theme, rather then functioning as a mold for each subsequent variation, is abstracted to a minimum set of components. Each variation reconstructs these components freely, with little regard to their origin. Premiered by David Horne at the annual Thelma E. Goldberg concert, Paine Hall, Harvard University.
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This work, in a freer atonality, explores the contrast between metric and ametric time. Each instrument employs diverse sonorities, the bass with double stops and the oboe with microphonics and glissandi. The title, tempio, is the italian for temple, relating to the idea of music as an architecture and as an art: essentially useless. This piece was premiered in Siena Italy by Peter Apps and William Torres.
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