Vapor Trails (saxophone quartet, drumset quartet, congas)

Composer's note from the performance by the PRISM Quartet and Talujon Percussion Quartet at Symphony Space, in New York, on April 27, 2004

The use of computers in the production and dissemination of music has become a commonplace unworthy of note. As Nicholas G. Carr wrote in a notorious essay published in the May, 2003, Harvard Business Review, information technology no longer matters. It's not that it's not important, but its very ubiquitousness and indispensability to postindustrial society have rendered it a basic commodity, an essential layer of plumbing comparable in some ways to the electricity grid. Vital, yes, but a distinguishing characteristic capable of giving someone a competitive edge? No longer. Carr was speaking of the use of computers in commerce and industry, of course, but a comparable evolution has occurred in the creative use of computers in the arts. What was in the 1960s and 1970s an open-ended, speculative, and often clumsy effort by basement-dwelling computer nerds and iconoclasts to explore radically new sounds and new ways of organizing sound has matured in the twenty-first century into low-risk, technically superficial tinkering with the combinatorial possibilities of infinitely reconfigurable networks of powerful synthesizers and samplers. The results of this tinkering are often acoustically stunning and often inhabit the type of multi-layered, irony-laden pastiche beloved of the more superficial cadre of postmodernists, but something important has definitely been lost. Something rough, arbitrary, counterintuitive, contrarian, and a little naïve, but also honest, humble, and willing to deal with the unknown as something more than a tourist attraction. Pardon my lapse into the rhetoric of the American Frontier, but there's probably a connection here to be explored, for better or worse.

Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s the universal paradigm for writing and using computers systems changed from so-called "structured programming" (verb and process-oriented task analysis) to so-called "object-oriented programming" (noun and thing-oriented context analysis). (All of you Marxists and post-Marxists, please hold your fire on the reification issue!) It was this evolution in computing theory, even more than the spectacular increase in processor speed and memory size during the 80s and 90s, which had a profound effect on the nature of our engagement with digital technology in the arts. In music this change in the programming and user paradigm was reflected in a shift away from information theory, with its emphasis on creating streams of implication, surprise, deferment, tension, release, and the artful semblance of order in a world prone to chaos, and toward semiology, with its emphasis on the manipulation of an inherited repertoire of signs and its lamentable aversion to messy questions of meaning, or, heaven forbid, politics.

Lekcja gry na fortepianie, akord Chopin
Piano Lesson, after Chopin

Composer's note from the performance by pianist Joseph Kubera at Roulette,
in New York, on April 15, 1994

Lekcja gry na fortepianie, akord Chopin was written in memory of my cousin, Anna Kowalska Bley, who had a long and distinguished career as a pianist and teacher in western New York State. It is also an homage to the mazurka, the Polish folk dance refined by Chopin in fifty-eight short salon pieces. Brief passages from twenty mazurkas are recombined in a manner based in equal measure upon my study of film editing technique and upon thirty years of performing the mazurkas for my own amusement. In Lekcja I tried to create a Janus-faced work which looks both forward and backward. Its hundreds of shards of musical phrases are indeed familiar, but ultimately inaccessible because they've been cast in a new format whose logic only obliquely acknowledges their original context and continuity. The adjoining room in which this mysterious piano lesson is occurring seems to be locked forever, but, as we all know, late twentieth-century walls are notoriously thin.

Gringo Blaster (percussion trio and keyboards)

Composer's note from the premiere performance by the Percussion Group Cincinnati at the University of Cincinnati on May 15, 1990

Gringo Blaster was written in Rio de Janeiro during the South American summer of 1988-89. It's my musical homage, writing as a conservatory-trained, white North American, to several musical traditions nominally not my own: Caribbean, North American urban Black, and South American. I should put "my own" in quotes since, in truth, I heard my father play tangos and I remember hearing sambas accompanying acrobats on 1950s television years before I encountered my supposedly native tradition of European art music. It's a truism that innumerable aesthetic boundaries have been breached since the Second World War and that electronic media and historical research have made the provenance of all types of music a point of controversy, if not considered debate.

All this notwithstanding, I acknowledge my status as a sort of poacher on the musical territory of Black rap and electro-funk artists, as well as Cuban, Dominican, Brazilian, and Argentine master of dance music. But the "gringo" in Gringo Blaster signifies even more. I believe that composers of erudite music (the Brazilian term, far less misleading than our "classical music") who grew up outside of Northern Europe remain outsiders vis-à-vis just about the entire world music culture, not just its overseas departments. I admit this without celebrating the idea of my isolation from you as audience or potential collaborator. I'd like to draw you into my hall of mirrors for half an hour, both to challenge and entertain. I wouldn't dare say which goal takes precedence. Suffice it to say that after ten years of dancing the merengue, tango, rhumba, samba, and funk with passion if not native expertise, I feel ready to offer some of my own fun-house insights into what happens when music comes face to face with the laws of gravity.

Rebus (choreographed percussion trio)

Composer's note from the performance by the Percussion Group Cincinnati at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on October 21, 1980

"They which lackt wit to express their conceit in speech, did use to depaint it out—as it were—in pictures, which they called Rebus." (William Camden, 1634)

Rebus may be seen as a visual composition and heard as an acoustic composition. For each movement, a visual pattern (left, right, up, down, across) was devised first. When translated into musical notation, these patterns were subjected to continual small variations in order to create an aural sense which is independent of, but analogous to, the visual sense. The mind organizes sensations from the eye and ear quite differently. I am relying heavily on that factor in this attempt to conjure up an engaging perceptual counterpoint. Above all else, Rebus is supposed to be a catchy multi-media tune. It might also be thought of as a puzzle—with no solution or many solutions, but certainly not with a single solution.