Creative Work
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We Move Through Sinking (2022) 7 min. for voice and multichannel electronics
Glyptic Channels (2019) 36 min. for two trombones, organ, laptop ensemble, electronics, and installation space
We Move Through Sinking (2022)
Voice and multichannel electronics.
View score here.
“We Move Through Sinking” is an art song intended for immersive multichannel playback. The images in the lyrics come from my experience of early spring in the mountains of Western Massachusetts, when young ferns peek through mud and frost. The world swallows us even as we break free.
The song follows a slowly ascending chord progression that grows dissonant as it unfurls. The melody is framed by two new digital instruments that transform the voice-and-piano paradigm of the traditional art song, Snyderphonics’s Vocodec and Many Arrows Music’s bitKlavier. Elements of each instrument are broken across the multichannel space, so listeners can move to the sounds that draw them in.
We Move Through Sinking
text by Christopher Douthitt
Feathers graze the lips
Antlers choke the tongue
We punched a hole through ice crystal fog
Sponge crystals spike the lung
The sun slacks
The moon zigs and zags
In bent light
We move we move we move
Moth split your iris
Fling mirrors to the sky
The flash of ultraviolet wings
Splash halo flares off the punctured lens
The air coils, the torso tangles and yet
We move we move and yet
We move through sinking
We move we move and yet
We move as though sinking
We move we move and yet
We move as though through sinking
As though we move though through sinking
We move even as though through sinking
We move
Glyptic Channels (2019) — 36 min.
Two trombones, organ, laptop ensemble, fixed media.
A composition-installation for two trombones, organ, laptop ensemble, fixed media, and cathedral. Designed for and installed in the Princeton University Chapel through a collaboration with Facilities, the Music Department, and the Office of Religious Life. Written for and performed by a fourteen-person mixed ensemble: RAGE Thormbones, Eric Plutz, and the Princeton University Laptop Orchestra.
The audience moves freely about the space. First-person field recordings of walking through the woods are punctuated by time-warped trombone samples, close recordings of fingers on a bass drum, and phonemes arranged in semi-sung gestures. The live instruments articulate a long process of harmonic clarification from free-frequency microtonality to the vertical extension of a single fundamental F. The trombones move from the balcony to the rafters, coaxing “non-musical” elements out fo the soundscape and into the musical present.
Each member of the laptop ensemble plays a Metall’Ocean. “Glyptic Channels” has been reimagined and restaged at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX (as “Glyptic Channels II” with the Mood Illusion) and as an interactive installation at the Outhaus in Los Angeles (as “Glyptic Gardens”).