Commissioned by the San Francisco Tape Music Collective for the San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2009.

Sonatina was composed with the same approach i take in my solo clarinet improvisations: i start with some motives and an idea of how to develop them but as i progress, i let the piece take charge with the direction to go in next. The source material is unprocessed acoustic recordings, with the addition of an FM synthesis instrument i designed in Csound.

The work was originally realized as stereo (to be diffused) with two extra stationary (rear) channels. The recording here is a stereo mix-down, which unfortunately loses a lot of its dramatic impact. Of all the mp3s on this page, this one suffers the most when listening over stereo (or mono!) computer speakers. It is highly recommended that you listen to this file over a high-quality sound system at a reasonably loud level - or try headphones!

Original Program Note:
In much of my recent work [both electroacoustic and acoustic, composed and improvised] i have been increasingly losing interest in making 'cool sounds' and focusing instead on RHYTHM. This short piece is an experiment trying to show how a certain kind of highly syncopated rhythm exists in many musical and non-musical contexts. Some of the non-cool sounds used were recorded by, or with the assistance of, or with equipment borrowed from Joseph Anderson.

Primary source material: a self-designed Csound opcode that played the computer's entire RAM as audio, a conversation with Scott Rosenberg, and sfSound performing my composition, fences.

Fingerlingette is part of a series of short works that focus on rhythm. In these works, i have tried to use fast "jump-cuts" to reproduce the syncopated energy often found in my improvised music activities. The material used in these collage works is often recycled from older pieces and recordings, even including some tapes my mother made of my early childhood.

This piece uses lots of old recordings, including one from when i was eight, learning to play the clarinet. Seems like too many artists have at least one piece that uses artifacts from their childhood, no? (and i have TWO!!!)

Original Program Note:
I'm not really interested in making 'cool sounds' anymore.. Fingerling is the 3rd in a series of tape pieces in which i have decidedly focused my attention away from timbre and toward form, gesture. and pseudo-narrative elements. Although i have personal attachments to most of the sounds in this piece, it is not required that you know what these are. Hopefully they will conjure up at least some kind of memory or feeling.

Commissioned by Scott Rosenberg for: lectures, oratorios, conjecture and invective - vol 1 a zine plus CD on barely auditable records. (also includes works by Bob Falesch, Matthew Sperry, Gino Robair, Sean Meehan, and Morgan Guberman) The image to left is part of the text i made for the zine portion.

Commissioned by SEAMUS as part of by the ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Recording Prize. Appears on Music From SEAMUS, Volume 7 CD.

Interesting story behind this piece. At the premiere (1997 SEAMUS Conference, Kansas City), my SF Tape Music Collective colleage, Cliff Caruthers, was a student working on the festival! (if we met then, i don't remember it) The performance was louder than i intended, but i couldn't do anything as the mixing board was up in the lighting booth. I guess a bunch of people got upset, apprently interpreting the piece as one of those angry-young-man's malicious "middle finger" piece. A high-ranking SEAMUS member told me that the performance was "criminal". Supposedly members of the board tried to keep the piece off of the society's annual CD (a requirement of the commission). Then my stream-of-conciousness-ish CD liner notes were rejected, i can't remember all the reasons, but i do remember there was some C code fragments, gibberish, and curse words. I took out most of the gibberish and replaced the curse words with "CENSORED BY THE BOARD" text. Apparently a few years later it achieved some notoriety as other undergraduate electronic music students who were only exposed to the SEAMUS aesthetic (and searching for something different?) came across the piece on the CD.

Granular synthesis realized on a NeXT running a C program to generate Csound scores. Mixed with RT.
Choreography by Trina Eby-Frederick.

Samples of coughs manipulated in Csound.

By all definitions, this is a "student piece", but i include it here as it somehow won the Deuxiéme Prix (Catégorie Humour - Puy 1994) in the Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges and appears on Cultures Electroniques 12 CD.

an attempt to improvise an acousmatic piece triggering samples and diffusing in real-time.

    

This is a recording of an "easter egg" i covertly inserted into the Encore music notation software when i was lead programmer at Gvox. Encore uses a general MIDI synthesizer by default, and i thought it would be interesting to try to make something (on my own time!) tape-music-ish with general MIDI. The algorithm runs continuously until the user cancels. As far as i am aware, it has only been discovered by one user during the beta testing phase, after which i made it even harder to discover!

Plans to port the code to a standalone application, web applet, or orchestra(!!) are in the works..

An interactive computer program i wrote in MacCsound that "improvises" with me. Intended as "CLAIRE 2.0" (see below) of sorts, the program listens to my clarinet playing via a microphone and analyzes the input to determine what/where/when to sound its sample-based output. There are no explicit controls - the only way i can influence the computer's output is through my own playing. This performance was recorded November 13, 2006 on the sfSoundSeries @ ODC Theater, San Francisco. In the middle of the performance, I donned a hipster hat and sunglasses, bobbing my head to the beat of the music. Jonathan Russell wrote a review in the San Francisco Classical Voice. I performed a revised version of this work at The Stone (2006) and The University of Wisconsin, Wilwaukee (2009).

A tiny MacOS-classic application that started as a test of the Quicktime Synthesizer and ended up being a virtual improviser. There are no controls to the program, you just launch it and it starts playing until you quit. I hope to eventually add MIDI output to external sampler or Disklavier.

A performance instrument written in C++ on BeOS. The program loads large sound files (the original idea was to include live sampling but never got there) and analyses them to find all the transient attacks. During the performance, i trigger the attacks and some manipulations from the computer keyboard. I can only tell the program what files to consider, then the code continuously swaps out what exact attack will be triggered. The idea was to create a more natural sound and avoid the dreaded "sampler"-like repetitiveness. Some of the samples used are from Gino Robair's solo percussion CD, Singular Pleasures. I performed a number of improv shows with this program, sometimes adding turntable, violin, some MacCsound real-time instruments, and playing a keyboard (computer and MIDI) with my feet! The last recording in the list, above is an example - a mix from a live performance on KZSU, Stanford that i made for a 12" vinyl release for a start-up record label that never came through. The ending, which ends with turntable sounds anyway, was supposed to finish into a 'lock groove'. The image, top-left, is from my performance on the 2nd annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. The video, bottom-left, (advance to 3:33) is an excerpt of the premiere (still in development!) on 9/9/99 produced by Dan Joseph.

Interactive music (from a time when such a term was in vogue) using a pitch-to-MIDI box, HMSL, and MIDI output. This piece was heavily inspired by George Lewis's Voyager System, who i was studying with at the time. The program functions as a (mediocre) virtual improviser. It listens to my clarinet input along with its own output, and tries to make "intuitive" choices based on what it hears. I performed this piece a number of times with various samplers and Disklaviers. It has been cited as an example of interactive improvised music in academic courses and papers. According to Phil Burk, one of the creators of HMSL, my performance with CLAIRE at Mills College in 2002 was most likely the last performance to ever use HMSL. Original Program Note: CLAIRE is a virtual improviser written in HMSL. It has been over a year since our last gig together. Like most mediocre musicians perfoming free improvisation, she takes a while to "lock in", sometimes "goes off" without listening to others, occasionally makes really dumb "choices", and often resorts to the easiest trick in the book: direct immitation. Having said this, she is a better improviser than more than a few musicians i have played with in the past, and i do enjoy trying to make music with her.

Variants of Microsoft BASIC code i wrote on a Macintosh 128k. Inpired by something presented in my college intro to electronic music class, it uses Markov Chains, although i don't think i knew that's what they were called at the time. It uses the MacOS's wavetable synth (accessible through BASIC calls). The computer and program still run (!) and in 2009 i re-recorded the various programs (along with a bonus track) and released a CD-R - cover image to the left. You can listen to individual tracks below: 1 voice lessTime rand0m serial '91

Original Program Note:
One of my compositional goals (especially when working with sfSound) is to try to merge the individuality of improvised music with the structured world of composition. When composed instrumental music is based mostly on sound (what might pejoratively be called “extended technique” music), i start to question the necessity of a composer. However, when listening to free improvisation i often miss the organization and formal structures of composed music. False Awakening is an attempt to allow the players to play their OWN sounds (in this instance amplified soft ones) placed inside a formal structure. The result is best described as something in between a “structured improvisation” and a “composition”.

The original version of this work was realized collaborating with Kyle Bruckmann, oboe, and Monica Scott, cello. Subsequent performances included other members of sfSoundGroup.

When performing this work, the audience should not be aware that it includes a tape part.

my Master's thesis composition (more info coming soon...)

a "concerto" of sorts i wrote for myself with the tape functioning as a "poor person's orchestra". this piece won me the ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Recording Prize (see story above). it has held up fairly well and i still perform it from time to time. the score includes a lot of improvisation, but plans are in the works to create a more traditional version to make it more accessible for other clarinetists.

Original Program Note:
CrusT, for clarinet and computer generated tape, was realized in Studio 4 at the University of Texas at Austin and the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. The tape part is derived from my own clarinet samples manipulated by Csound scores I generated with algorithms written in C.