New Piece Coming!

16 Mar

I’m working on a new piece to play with Geoff Deibel in Florida at the end of April! The tentative title is “Man was proud” and is for Tenor Saxophone, voice and electronics. I’m exploring a couple things with it:

I’ve been thinking about creation myths lately (with the help of my friend Corrina) and have been trying to marry it with some other ideas I’ve been wanting to use for a while. There will be some pop-style sampling, lots of indeterminacy in electronics, and live processing of voice and sax, making them sound like recordings from different ages. More coming soon!

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Thea Musgrave’s Narcissus

5 Oct

A couple years ago, I put together a Pure Data patch for playing Thea Musgrave’s Narcissus with my friend Margaret Rowley, a great flute player and ethnomusicologist. This was one of my first times making a software solution for some piece of hardware that was either too hard to get a hold of, or didn’t exist anymore. Narcissus calls for a delay unit that has some pitch modulation too, with very specific instructions for delay time and feedback, so making a Pd patch to emulate it wasn’t so bad.

I went the route of programming the patch to be played by a separate performer, playing a separate computer part (every time I say that, it reminds me how my parents would make me stop playing the computer all the time growing up). I’ll probably post my part soon, but I guess I have to track it down first. :) Anyhow, here is the patch:

NarcissusDelay.pd

All the controls can be controlled from the computer keyboard (no MIDI controller or other interface). I’ll post more detailed instructions later, with the computer part.

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Missing Partner

9 Sep

I made this piece to complete an animation assignment for a live theater projection class at MSU with Alison Dobbins. The piece is pretty straightforward, and the animation demonstrates my simple abilities with Adobe After Effects (CS 4). Here it is!

Missing Partner Score

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Back To New York

8 Sep

Back to New York

This started as an old viola quartet with piano that I wrote years ago as a recording project about a friend.  This adaptation includes text about a person I met a couple of times in different dreams in a strange period of my dreaming life.  I kept meeting people, having completely regular interactions, small talk, learning their names and where they were from.  The character I describe in the text is one of those people – one that reminds me of the friend the quartet was originally about.

I ran into the dream character a number of times:  commiserating on a bus on the way to a conference in New York, painting in a cave offshoot of a basement of an abandoned dormitory cafeteria, at a punk show in Detroit…. After a music conference she presented at in New York, she showed me the beautiful ruins of an old pool in the main student union.  I recognized the pool as the one that used to be the end of a gauntlet in a recurring dream I had as a child, and she revealed to me that she used to be the monster at the bottom of the then-murky pool.  Strange stuff.

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Hold it! Nobody Said Anything About Three Books!

8 Sep

“Hold it, nobody said anything about three books!”

Playing salsa is one of my favorite things to do these days.  So, what is this strange title and how is this instrumental salsa-styled tune dream influenced?  well…

One night, I was the character in the Duke Nukem video game, and I was all pixilated and 2D sideways, like in the game.  As I went around, shooting up monsters, there was some excellent videogame music going on, and I liked it enough to remember it and write it down in the morning after I woke up.  It had a pretty cheezy bassline, but I liked the harmony behind it.  I wrote some stuff over it back then, but nothing really came of it, until now!

So, the title:  Duke Nukem 3D uses audio samples from the movie Army of Darkness for its main character’s voice acting:  phrases like “Gimme some sugar,” and “Groovy.” I’m using a bit of music from the dream version of what that game’s music is like, sort of like how the makers of the game took a tiny bit of what the movie is like for their game.  For fun, I looked for other things Bruce Campbell (the one that acts in Army of Darkness) says, and decided on this one.  If you want, you can call it “Hold it” for short.

Download The Score!

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Work in progress

27 Aug

I’m updating this website thing slowly but surely, and maybe a little out of order too, publishing the skeleton and incomplete/old pages, with the plan of fixing it all later. Pardon all the broken links!

New home, new hosts

16 Aug

I just moved to a new town in Michigan, and it is all quite exciting! Meeting new people, setting up a new house with my friend Dave, and getting to see this great new city! Right now, I am adding information about all my old pieces as blog posts, trying out generating content in this very different wordpress format. Hope it works nicely!

Finally started with WordPress…

3 Jul

So, I’ve given in to peer pressure (or finally gotten on board with a good idea) and am trying out this WordPress thing.  Hopefully this will be a good move. ;)

Over the next two weeks (while my free trial lasts) this should change in look as frequently as I can manage.  Let me know what you think!

 

-Nate

a to b equals c

25 Jul

I wrote this for my good friends Shawn Teichmer and Jamie Lewis.  They were very patient with me, and premiered it at the College where they teach, Spring Arbor University in Michigan, and at NASA in the Spring of 2010.

This piece explores three different relationships that can occur between musicians, those that are humans and those that are computers.

The first movement is acoustic, with the piano and saxophone developing some material.  All the while, the computer listens and remembers.

In the second movement, the computer drives.  It starts with a footswitch trigger, and goes.  The computer is making lots of sound, and continues to listen to the humans, and comments a little, but mostly doesn’t pay attention.

In the third movement, the computer and humans are supposed to play together, but the computer stops listening completely, like a crappy person in your chamber group.  It’s hard to play a 3/2 clave together when the rhythm section isn’t listening…

a->b=c mvt. 1 score

a->b=c mvt. 3 score

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Focus

8 Sep

“But in real life, I never had a focus.”
“Steh (like stay, but a little different in German) while I try to drive you home.”

These are the two lines I used to sing in the shower, to the two main melodies in this string quartet. Two characters speak. One has no motivation to get out of their rut, so inebriated with the idea they have failed that they give up and lament the times when they had a chance. The other character is trying to convince the other that they are just stuck in a dream and are being silly, trying to help them get back to a more reasonable perspective. I find myself often fluctuating between these two poles of detachment: going within so far that I fail to recognize how I was ever attached to anyone, and reaching out so far that I focus on others without ever sharing myself.

So, I wanted to make a recording project about this, including more text and a post-rock band arrangement, but I dumped it into a string quartet I did with my friends in the spring of 2005. I changed the end after the premiere in 2005, using audio-filters and speed effects to generate changes in timbre. In this updated version, we try to reproduce acoustically the modifications I previously made electronically.

focusv2c – score

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