The real recording of Tear of Ambiguity is being released on an event page of the Facebook site on Thursday, November 15. Invite some friends to the event and come listen to this special release of one of my first compositions.
Along with this new recording, I will be releasing the revised score to Tear of Ambiguity as well. I’ve been meaning to do this for a very long time and have finally gotten around to it. It will also be available on the 15th.
Special thanks to Cornerstone University for allowing me to use their 6 foot Yamaha grand player piano. The recording (while being a real piano) was actually still made by a machine. A few years ago I was at Cornerstone, and I had an opportunity to program some of my work into the player function of a grand piano. Using 5 carefully place microphones to capture the sound, I let the piano execute the programming and I had a recording. Technology really is amazing…and this is old technology too!
A big thank you as well to my teachers and peers who helped me to polish and revise the score to this work. The people surrounding me at that point in my life were the ones who helped get this whole thing started.
Wind and light are two things which we know are there not because they bring attention to themselves, but because they bring attention to everything else. Wind creates motion and makes the world come to life by causing things to catch light differently so that we can see objects in various ways. Wind and light make the world dance. They enhance whatever they affect. And yet no matter how intense they both are, they never get in each other’s way. They seem to act in complete independence and yet they work together so skillfully. They even pass through one another while acting upon the same object. Wind enhances beauty by causing motion while light makes this motion visible along with the rest of the object. They are a wonderful pair.
These thoughts may seem like arbitrary musings because they are. This is exactly what the piece is about. Some may ask, “Why did you bother?” Because beauty was made to be observed. So I do observe; this is me pointing at it.
I had been playing with the guitar riff at the beginning of this piece for well over a year, and I finally decided to turn it into a composition. To do this, I simply performed the guitar part I had in mind and slowly expanded the work until I came up with Wind and Light. This is very similar to the way I constructed Conviction; I recorded a couple of friends improvising and slowly turned it into a piece of music.
Generally, when composers create music, they start with a melody or a fragment of melody and develop it into more material by introducing the same material in multiple different ways. This is what gives music flow and continuity. Both this piece and Convictionwere constructed differently from the traditional method by developing unique and interesting sounds from existing sounds, and then generating more interesting sounds that seemed to compliment the original material. Writing melodies actually came last; the melodic material in both pieces came from listening to what I had and simply writing out the melody which I heard pop out of the textures. I used to assume that everyone heard these melodies, but I recently realized that the melodies aren’t actually in the texture; I’m just very vividly imagining them. So I wrote the melodies in for everyone to enjoy.
I didn’t originally have it in mind to perform a lengthy drum solo in the middle of the piece. I needed a way to get to the climax of the work and couldn’t figure out a good way to do it. I had already used my snare drum, hi-hats, and ride cymbal with a pair of bunch sticks to accompany much of the piece up until that point, but the sound had not been thoroughly explored yet. So I improvised the drum solo and put the rest of the material over the top of it to punctuate the direction of the solo to make it more understandable. This is one of those cases where “it seemed like the thing to do at the time.” I’m very glad it came together like this because it is the portion of the piece where the listener can almost hear wind and light acting upon the drum.
When I do these electroacoustic pieces, I try to frequently post musical material on the Facebook Page for people to comment and share their thoughts with me. If you’d like to get in on this, simply connect with the page by clicking “like” and you’ll be able to help me write better music. Every little bit of feedback makes the music better, so please share your thoughts.
I know that at least a few people have been anxiously waiting for me to finish the piano reduction for my alto saxophone concerto, Transition. This is an officially announcement to say that I have now officially included the piano reduction in both versions of the Transition download. For more details, please visit the Transition page for more details.
This piece began when two of my friends (Zach and Eva) and I were improvising on drums, guitar, and violin. It sounded too cool to not record, so I got some samples from them and used their samples to help create what you’re about to listen to.
Also, throughout the past two weeks I’ve been posting frequent updates and getting feedback on this work. I used the composite feedback from fans to guide the way I shaped and polished the piece. Even the title was thought up by my friend/fan, Jon. It has turned out to be a challenging and interesting experience for all of us and has yielded good music. So we’re going to do it again soon!
If you’d like to be a part of the creative process in the next piece, feel free to “like” Always in Transition on Facebook so that you can get the samples in your newsfeed and participate! See you there!
