Instrumentation: 8+ Voices
Duration: ~10 minutes
Becoming Imperceptible is a choral piece for eight or more singers. Its text is taken from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a work of 20th century post-structuralist philosophy. In the selected text, writers Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari discuss their concept of “becoming imperceptible”. “Becoming”, for Deleuze & Guattari, is an important concept in itself. To them, we never truly arrive at any particular fixed relationship with our being. This relationship is always asymptotic — forever approaching a particular point, forgoing the oft-assumed necessity of arrival. Thus, one never “becomes” imperceptible, only approaches it in varying degrees. Deleuze & Guattari write that in the process of becoming imperceptible, we must “eliminate … everything that roots each of us in ourselves…all the objective determinations which fix us, put us into a grille, identify us and make us recognized.”
Instrumentation: Percussion Quartet
Duration: ~9 minutes
Nostalgia for Meteorology is a percussion quartet in three movements. It consists of a sort of “dialogue” between two characters: a nature spirit, spoken through a conga, and a collective human voice, spoken through a woodblock.
Instrumentation: 4 GameCube Controllers
Duration: ~5 1/2 minutes
GameCube controllers are some of the best controllers ever made. They feel secure to hold in your hands, and rarely break or drift even two decades after console release. They’re also really noisy. For this piece, I had the thought: what if they were even more noisy.
The first movement of this piece is a real-time match of the video-game Super Smash Brothers Melee, played with controllers amplified through contact microphones. It showcases the naturally occurring rhythms of the players' button inputs -- the way they contrast and connect with other players, and the natural arc of development as tension rises and falls. The second movement is a "typical" notated percussion quartet, except for the fact that the parts are mapped to distinct buttons: the A button is an A on the treble clef, left stick is an E, etc.
Instrumentation: String Quartet
Duration: ~8 minutes
This piece is a rhythmic string quartet that draws inspiration from both minimalism and electronic music. Using the concept of “loops” from electronic composition, parts will repeat, at times with slight variation, while new parts stack on top of the previous texture. At times, these parts may individually appear simple, but when combined, create a rich texture that no part on its own could achieve. This technique is often combined with a technique from minimalism, where music is made as an emergent phenomenon. Drawing from pieces such as Come Out by Steve Reich, repeating parts are often given unequal amounts of time to complete themselves. By slowly stacking these parts, they go in and out of phase with each other, forming emergent rhythms and harmonies that are not strictly planned — only determined by the conditions of their starting point.