Note: All program notes are available in other, more and less detailed formats. Please contact me if interested.
NOMADOLOGY (2006)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari once wrote that, “if philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it does not find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic State or in the cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection. We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (from What is Philosophy? (108). Nomadology, composed for the Prism Saxophone Quartet, respects the premise of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s line of thought even as it celebrates the present. It is a twisted, meandering line that convolves seemingly contradictory elements. The music follows various formal trajectories, often breaking with one in order to take up with another. Much of the material was gesturally conceived. Visceral and raw figures pile up until textural schisms prevent them from continuing.
TRIPLE THREAT (1994, 2006)
Triple Threat was begun in 1994 and revised and completed in 2006. It is a work for three maverick, virtuoso performers living and working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I composed Triple Threat to showcase clarinetist/ composer Paul Zonn, trumpeter Ray Sasaki, and violinist Dorothy Martirano. Shortly after completing the piece, Paul Zonn was diagnosed with a fatal illness that eventually took his life in 2000. At the time I could not imagine performing the piece without his participation. Hence, it has never been performed. Tonight, almost exactly twelve years later it will finally be premiered. I consider this piece to be one of my earliest pivotal works. It explores a musical terrain endowed with a series of opposed multiplicities, featuring eclectic, borderline materials and states in which the soloists and various ensemble constellations often compete for the listener’s attention. Some of the materials are deliberately obscured with masking techniques such as pitch and timbral overlapping, while others achieve similar results through sheer brute force. The work was inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s three fractured lines (break, crack, and rupture), which they conceived (in response to Pierre Boulez’s smooth and striated spaces) in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. According to Boulez “in a smooth space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one counts in order to occupy.” The combination of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s three fractures and Boulez’s smooth and striated spaces was a significant part of the conceptual background for Triple Threat.
The piece begins with several chords sharply attacked in an unpredictable manner. Each chord is comprised of specific textural densities and ensemble combinations that are reused and continually realigned throughout the piece. Other material trajectories that are initiated in the first section include the opposition of sustained chords against unstable constellations of marcato material, the layering and stratification of disparate textures, and rapid timbral shifts. The two percussionists (a trap set player, and an orchestral percussionist) begin to battle each other, while also mischievously collaborating in a combined effort to dominate the soloists at several important junctures. In the second section the texture thins out leaving the soloists by themselves. Eventually temporary alliances are formed that culminate in an all-out, string section barrage accompanied by soft sustains in the winds. The percussion and brass re-enter, providing additional layers of material that set-up a short time-warp section without strings, with the clarinet as soloist. The next section reuses introductory material but in a diffused and fragmented manner, the instability of which is followed by a spectrum of pulsed patterns from highly motoric to the most chaotic in a short span of time. This, in turn, is cut short in order to feature the three soloists in three simultaneous solos. The rest of the ensemble re-emerges first as background and then instigates a serious of kaleidoscopic layers that rapidly shift from one instrumental combination to the next by the beginning of the last section. Two-thirds of the ensemble becomes briefly fixated upon one pitch-class, which is passed around like a trophy. The percussionists clamor to have the last say in a short dueling barrage but are rapidly cut off by the last tutti chord, which is itself dispatched by one of the percussionists.
BYPASSING THE OGRE (2006)
Bypassing the Ogre was written especially for the New York City trumpeter Peter Evans. Many of the gestures employed in this piece are extensions of those developed by virtuoso trumpet improvisers such as Mr. Evans. In addition to standard approaches to pitch production the trumpet is used as a resonator for vocal and air stream sounds, some of which intentionally target various thresholds of expression. The piece is unencumbered with bar lines in order to gain maximum organic fluidity. Some decisions of pacing are left up to the player. The gestural materials oscillate between specific pitches and rhythms, and indeterminate materials that take place within given durations, or as ornamental figures.
DISJECTA (2006)
Disjecta is the term Samuel Beckett used to describe a collection of his miscellaneous, peripheral, and fragmentary works. My percussion quintet began life as an unfinished solo written for Chicago-based percussionist Steven Butters. Materials were extracted from this torso that ultimately became part of ten textural fields used in the quintet. I worked with the idea of material tracers that appear, or disappear, as they modify and/or mask resonance. This piece also seeks to explore the pathways created by independent rhythmic trajectories that evolve organically, even as they are harnessed by various large-scale concerns. The five parts are separated into collaborating and competing pairs, and a lone performer who occupies the spatial, if not the axial, center of the piece.
MICROMEGAS (2005)
“I am interested in the profound relation between the intuition of geometric structure as it manifests itself in a pre-objective sphere of experience and the possibility of formalisation which tries to overtake it in the objective realm. In fact, these seemingly exclusive attitudes polarize the movement of imagination and give an impression of discontinuity, when in reality they are but different and reciprocal moments – alternative viewpoints – of the same fundamental, ontological necessity.”
– Daniel Libeskind
This work, dedicated to Tim Weiss and the Oberlin Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble, was inspired by a series of ten drawings entitled, Micromegas: The Architecture of End Space by the architect Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946). Libeskind is well known for introducing, through a multidisciplinary approach, a new critical discourse into architecture, grounded in dispersionist (post-structuralist) philosophy such as found in the work of Jacques Derrida. The breadth of his work extends from museums (e.g. the Jewish Museum in Berlin) and concert halls to urban projects, stage design, and art installations. Libeskind’s latest project is the construction of a memorial space where the World Trade Center buildings once stood. Before embarking on his career in architecture he studied music in Israel and in New York City, and was by all accounts a virtuoso player on his instrument of choice: the accordion.
My interest in his work goes back about ten years when I first came into contact with it. I was, and continue to be, fascinated with the rigorous, uncompromising, yet approachable nature of his work. It is worth noting that Libeskind has constructed only a small number of buildings and monuments, though his career spans almost three decades. Thus, most of his work exists in two-dimensional forms and three-dimensional scaled models. It is a utopian project that suggests that our spatial awareness is largely determined by architecture.
Libeskind’s drawings, especially the Chamber Music and Micromegas series, bear remarkable resemblance to the musical notation commonly found in scores by Sylvano Bussotti, Anestis Logothetis, and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati. The Micromegas series contain meticulously hand rendered, hard-edged geometric forms casting lines in numerous directions, while stretching to the edge of each page. Upon viewing them one is immediately disoriented by the proliferation of lines and shapes. Any sense of a stable, conventional perspective is shattered. Instead the viewer must wrestle with provisional respites from the dizzying array of material. There is also an essential conflict between the overabundance of lines and shapes and the fact that they reside within conventional spaces (square or rectangle sheets of paper). Overall the drawings suggest urban, labyrinthine landscapes wherein the viewer must come to grips with the fact that her/his visual focus simultaneously collides with the material from above, underneath, beside, and up-close at the subatomic level.
Unlike the visual “conundrums” in E. C. Escher’s work, one can (and does) provisionally resolve Libeskind’s visual contradictions. In a sense this work is essentially about the journey from one provisional resolution to the next. The music I’ve composed in response to Libeskind’s Micromegas is characterized by extreme contrasts of material and purpose, collisions of density, and concrete spatialization. The meters, durational subdivisions, and macro divisions and tempi are all related to the same geometrically-derived event sequence, which is employed in order to engage the values of continual friction, disembodiment, and an ever-shifting perspective. Intentional masking occurs as gestures, resonances, and sonorities collide, punctuated by short-lived tutti sections. Some of these materials result from my attempts to “accordionize” the chamber ensemble through the use of restricted chordal movement and redundant doublings.
There are ten sections (one per drawing) which, for the most part, are performed without pauses between them. Ratios were derived by taking the listed order of the drawings and contrasting it with the actual order found in Libeskind’s monograph entitled, Countersign in which Micromegas was first published. The ratios influenced interval choice, phrasing, subdivisions, and textures. They were also employed to govern the exchange/ switching of parts. Lastly, there are a number of glissando passages that pay homage to another musical architect – Iannis Xenakis.
GLOSSOLALIA (2002)
Glossolalia was commissioned by Alabama cellist Craig Hultgren for his fall 2002 guest residency at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville.
The gift of ecstatic tongues
offered up as a piece of music.
Edification through gibberish utterances.
The ancient Israelites did it.
The Greeks did it.
So too the Quakers, Shakers, Jansenists, and the Methodists.
RESIDUAL AIR (1996)
Residual Air was written for the baritone saxophonist Taimur Sullivan, of the Prism Saxophone Quartet. He premiered this piece at the 1998 ThreeTwo Festival of Recent Music at the Renee Weiler Concert Hall in New York City. Residual Air continues a two-decade long effort to expand the technical and sonic capabilities of various solo instruments. It was one of my first compositions to extensively integrate the performer’s head and torso movements, and is based upon a palimpsest over-writing of Thomas Campian’s air “All Lookes Be Pale.” The process of residual derivation went something like this: First, various musical parameters were extracted from Campian’s air and assigned numerical descriptions. Second, the results from stage one were filtered whereby each material ‘chunk’ was attached to a non-traditional saxophone technique. Third, upper body movements were derived in such a way as to iconically match (or mismatch) the results from stage two. The performer also attempts to trace shapes with his/her saxophone. The material from these three initial stages was then further developed through ornamentation and repetition.
Copyright © 2008-2016 Ross Feller. All rights reserved. Last updated on 6/29/20.