New LA Ensemble to launch in August!

Trevor Berens (www.poortommusic.com) has founded a new performance ensemble in the greater Los Angeles area. Bravo! The performers are an excellent mix of CalArts alumni. It will be exciting to see LA enlivened by a new group beginning in the footsteps of the EAR Unit, who are still doing their finest.

What is exciting about this particular group is that they are looking at filling a specific gap - when LACMA closed its doors on the Monday Evening Concerts (and Dorrance Stalvey, an LA mainstay in New Music, passed away shortly thereafter), a massive gap was left in LA's music scene. Some argued that LA didn't need the 'Old European Stick-up-the-butt Composers Set;' I argued that, in order to contrast what is 'new and cutting edge [in LA]' against what is 'stick-up-the-butt' that stick-up-the-butt needs to be present! Besides which, what was truly lost were not the Elliot Carters of Europe, but the Scodanibbios and Arditti Quartets - the people who are carrying forward with Experimentalism in music/composition. In my estimation, much of what is considered 'cutting edge' these days isn't much but status quo. Composer/performers such as Scodanibbio are really carrying on in the footsteps of Luigi Nono, Gyorgi Ligetti and others. I could name a few Americans too, but I'll save that for another time.

So - Trevor has asked me for a piece of music to premiere in January on a concert of works by the late James Tenney and Lucky Mosko. I had the privilege of knowing both men personally, studying with each of them and drinking with them too. I was very close to Lucky and to be recognized as having a connection to either one of these composers, let alone both, in this context, is a notable honor.

I'm composing the work now, as it will go into rehearsal late in October. This is a feat for me: my most recent compositions have taken me a year or more to complete. But I seem to be off to a running start (having made a dramatic geographic change and as a result, seemingly having cleared the cobwebs from my brain) and I have a good amount of pre-comp (that is, pre-composition: the outlining of structure and compositional concepts not excluding what notes to use when and why) already complete and I drafted a program note today that pretty-well explains the piece. Here it is:
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Considering Light
As it turns out, light has properties that we are only just discovering - properties that make it far more enigmatic than previously considered. For instance, being comprised of both electric and magnetic energy/waves, light comes to us in a kind of entwined wave-on-wave form; this complex wave could be described to resemble the double helix of the DNA strand, only with each strand constructed of a different set of unique properties and existing at different wave lengths from one another.

Furthermore, light's resilient behavior is uncommon to any other waveform; light can exist in a vacuum for instance. A trait that is most notable and important to this sonic portraiture of light is the existence of the precursor of light in water: when light is flashed through water, or other matter with refractive qualities, light sends out a series of mini-pulses prior to reaching its destination. These mini-pulses, the precursors, do not resemble the light source, but take on not only the varied individual aspects of the spectrum (i.e., colors) but change color and intensity independently as they travel. In fact, these precursors live longer and travel farther than the light source itself. Unfortunately for us, most precursors are not visible to the naked eye, although they have been proven and seen in carefully controlled laboratory situations.

This is the subject of this work entitled Considering Light, which I dedicate to my close friend Dorothy Stone. For those of you who are familiar with my past work, you might be surprised at the seeming tonal emphasis of this piece. In fact, I have almost strictly utilized the mathematic structure of light to generate rows, pitch groups and serial materials and rhythms you are hearing. I have isolated the numeric structures of each color of the spectrum - you will hear iterations of these; notice how each one shifts, indicating the constant change and adaptation of the light precursor as described above. The light 'source' are the pitches Do and Sol (C and G), or DS standing for Dorothy Stone; numerically I have adopted the interval of the 5th (from C to G) as the numeric basis of the 'source.'

I am an avid science and math fanatic and have always incorporated systems and complex mathematic equations into my work. Considering Light is a further exploration of the possibilities of those number systems. In the tradition of James Tenney, I used math to generate specific scales. In the tradition of Lucky Mosko, I ignored all of my own rules and attempted to create a piece of work that simply 'is.'

Welcome!

I am not assuming that what I do is of such importance to the world that anyone may be interested in it. However, there has been considerable volume of questions about my process as an artist, my feelings about specific events and/or concepts ubiquitous in art and music as well as a general curiosity about where I am, what I am doing and with whom I am doing it.

I also have to stand by my own maxims. I recently wrote a lengthy letter-to-the-editor of the Eugene Weekly, a fine publication by which I was once employed, ranting against the mythology behind the 'Artiste' and the 'Composeur' - fact is, we work, it's a job like any other, but as with any other job, a specialized set of skills. I think it's important that the world-at-large come to realize that composers aren't like unicorns or sprites: the idea that composers, or any artist, belongs to a different class, a different echelon or niveau of human evolution - well, that's preposterous and adds to the mis-belief that we work hard to learn our skills, master them and to put our best efforts into our field.

So, in the spirit of sharing information and in the spirit of debunking fairy-tales - I open this blog!