Guidonianhand- Darmstadt Overview August 6, 2010
- The Brazen Drum
- The Brazen Drum - Episode 4In this episode, I talk to Dave... February 2, 2010
- Music of the Fourth World
- Hawaii May 8, 2010
- MSU Music Composition
- Steal my music. September 1, 2010
Guidonianhand The Brazen Drum Music of the Fourth World MSU Music Composition
current projects
trying it at home
This is a quartet for amplified tenor saxophones written in memory of Michael Brecker. I’ve had this piece in the back of my mind since Brecker passed away in January of 2007. Rather than try to make the piece sound heavily jazz influenced, I decided to focus on the things that made Brecker so captivating for me as a young player – technical innovation and amplification. At 16, a good friend and fellow sax geek invited me over to see a video he had of Brecker playing at the Newport Jazz Festival. I was hooked. After Brecker’s death, I found the same performance that had inspired me so much on Youtube.
Much of the material for the piece is derived from the cadenza that opens this performance.
Through a combination of gadgetry, technical mastery and a sound that could only be achieved through a hot microphone, I became hooked on Brecker, following his work since that time. I’ve tried to create a work that, through the use of amplification and microphone proximity effects, creates innovative modes of interaction among the performers and honors both the musician and his influence on me. The work will be premiered at the biennial NASA conference in March of 2010. The name of the piece is a take on Brecker’s 1996 album Don’t Try This at Home.
mashup no.2
While taking a class from the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at MSU, I built an interactive kinetic sculpture entitled Mashup No.1. You can learn more about that here. Much of the work for the piece involved refinishing an old Yamaha marching bass drum. After the class, the piece was accepted to an exhibit at (Scene) Metrospace entitled Robots/Labor/Future Worlds. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of that beautiful bass drum that I had worked so hard to refinish after the exhibit ended- so I decided to do a remix (of sorts) of it.
As a part my fellowship at the RCAH, I had worked during the 2008/09 school year training a group of students as technical support staff for the RCAH theatre. This training centered on live audio mixing and theatrical lighting. Since I always try to keep things creative and engaging for the theatre crew, I suggested that we use the drum as a part of a creative audio/lighting project in. We’re still working through the project, but the idea is to have the crew make contact mics out of transducer piezos and then mount them in different locations throughout the drum. These will be used for amplification and (by using Pure Data) to control lights in the theatre, as the lighting control board can receive and respond to midi data.
web series
In the summer of 2009, the indie band/artist collective group I take part in - folio – had planned on entering the 48 Hour Film Festival in Detroit. We eventually had to pull out due to a family crisis; however, we all agreed that after so much preparation we wanted to do a film project of some sort. To this end, we began planning a serial web project with original music composed by the members of the group. Thus far, we have two actors and a screenwriter signed on. We hope to begin organizational meetings soon.