Creative Work
Extended portfolio here.
Personal website here.
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
Voices and Apparitions (2016) 7 min. for soprano and electronics
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”).
Voices and Apparitions (2016) — 7 min.
Soprano and electronics.
A poem-song for soprano and fixed multichannel playback. Written for Rosie K.
This piece was written for the New Jersey Composers Guild's Milton Babbitt Centenary concert. Babbitt's "Vision and Prayer" is a soprano-and-electronics setting of Dylan Thomas's shape-poem. I was intrigued by the way a concrete poem—determined by the diamond-and-hourglass shaped stanzas—could be translated into sound. I wrote my own diamond-and-hourglass-shaped poem in response, thinking about how Babbitt's music idealizes the quantification of sonic experience, but the phenomenon of listening to it highlights all that can't be quantified, like an irrational number overspilling with decimals.
I sampled Rosie’s speak-singing voice, then created a fixed media track that explodes the consonants of the text over a ribbon of continuous vowels. Rosie's performance, which moves from speech to song and back again, is timed to loosely coincide these electronic versions of herself.
"Voices and Apparitions" can be presented as a live voice-and-electronics performance or as a multichannel fixed media piece. It has been presented at the Underwolf Festival (Los Angeles), National Sawdust (New York), and the SEAMUS 2020 conference (Charlottesville, VA and online).
Voices and Apparitions
text by Christopher Douthitt
No
Omened
Or neume-pierced
Veil, no fossils
Scattered thin across
Sunken fields, nor pitchblende-
Hidden ore, nor greenish glow
In foggy glass; no secret scrawl.
To know would be — weighted terms — to know
Past proving grounds, past atoms split,
But the sure pull of numbers
On the thing, which is there
And not, clear as air,
Unencumbered:
A closed all
Opened
On.
Apparitions in the optic nerve,
Like wreckage on sunlit waters,
Elude the earnest plotters
Of spasmed event: surge
Buckshot through blancmange!
Starlings, converge!
That such traps
Don’t snap,
See
Unfixed
Erratic
Beast-things springing
From any nested whole.
So, sudden data singing:
The floor of frozen faces
Concatenates - no, imbricates! -
Inert input - splash! - a dozen vases.