other pieces.
improv - 1312
I recorded this after reading a lot about the horrible racist, ableist, homophobic, classist, transphobic and corrupt things the police force in America have done in the past year, and throughout it's far too long existance. After scrolling through the news and getting more and more upset, I decided to vent my thoughts on my piano. I thought it would be interesting if I could do a piece of music based on 3 notes, and even more interesting if I used string tapping and pitch bending, which I had just learned about after Yitzhak Yedid came to composition workshop.
The notes played are A, B and C, played in the order A, C, A, B, which is a common acronym which stands for All Cops Are Bad/Bastards. Just a reminder that although not all cops are necessarily bad people, in fact I have a relative who is a cop and is wonderful, but they do all perpetrate a corrupt and broken system that was built of the back of racist ideolgies, which can still be felt all these years later, and them doing very little to rectify this prevalent problem makes them bad people.
The notes played are A, B and C, played in the order A, C, A, B, which is a common acronym which stands for All Cops Are Bad/Bastards. Just a reminder that although not all cops are necessarily bad people, in fact I have a relative who is a cop and is wonderful, but they do all perpetrate a corrupt and broken system that was built of the back of racist ideolgies, which can still be felt all these years later, and them doing very little to rectify this prevalent problem makes them bad people.
improv - winter waves
About two years ago, I got this Hammond Sounder organ off the curbside just around the corner from my house. It works pretty well, and I play with it from time to time. This was one of those times where I just so happened to record it.
Winter Waves uses three key features of the Hammond Sounder: the chord organ, the repeat function, and the swell/crescendo pedal. The low chord (which never changes) is just a button I pressed and held for the entire duration. The repeating notes are me actually playing the keys, but with the repeat function on at a high rate (fun fact: the knob fell off so it's kinda stuck at this rather fast pace). The swelling is fairly straight forward, as it's standard on most organs. There wasn't really an idea from this, I just wanted to do some stuff on organ.
Winter Waves uses three key features of the Hammond Sounder: the chord organ, the repeat function, and the swell/crescendo pedal. The low chord (which never changes) is just a button I pressed and held for the entire duration. The repeating notes are me actually playing the keys, but with the repeat function on at a high rate (fun fact: the knob fell off so it's kinda stuck at this rather fast pace). The swelling is fairly straight forward, as it's standard on most organs. There wasn't really an idea from this, I just wanted to do some stuff on organ.
improv/experiment - hall of ghosts
I had a thought around midnight in early November where I thought "hey! is there an intrinsic tonal centre for each individual person?" and instead of deep diving into a somewhat relavant Wikipedia page before slowly heading back to my comfort zone (Wikipedia diagrams of different dolphins and various other mammals under the sea), I decided to open up a new Audacity project and experiment on myself. The elevator pitch is that I give myself 5 mono channels, and two and a half minutes to sing sustained notes for as long as desired, but all are recorded while the other tracks are on mute. The goal was to end up with either a mess or something beautiful, and it ended up being... in the middle. After playing with some affects and panning, it felt like sitting in a room full of ghosts, hence the title.
text score collection - fairy bread! (and other exercises in nihlism)
I've been called weird all my life. I was the weird kid, the strange one. And I believed their words, and tried enforce this with my actions and eclectic taste in media. All my life I've been trying to do this, and I've never questioned why. After thinking about it for a while, I realised that I'm scared of being boring, and even worse, I think I am becoming boring. Sometimes I dull myself! In response to these thoughts, and to get some feelings on paper, I wrote down a couple pieces. It's called fairy bread because I feel it's a food that tries to be cool and quirky, but is bland and boring.
big band composition - sidewalk strut
Originally written as the collaboration piece for this semester, but due to bad scheduling, it couldn't be recorded on time. Heavily inspired by the Jacob Mann Big Band and that sort of modern big band funk. Thought of the name while strutting down the sidewalk while walking my dog.