During my masters degree, I spent part of my time during the first year studying electronic music. We worked with Ableton Live and Max. I want to share these pieces with all of you who attend my recital because they’re a big part of what I studied during my masters degree.
A Prandial Triptych
Working in Ableton Live, I recorded the first movement using my iPhone as my in class assignment to make a sound walk around the NIU music building. Being hungry and thinking of lunch without possessing the food to satiate my hunger, I persevered with the assignment and let the sounds feed my soul instead.
As I was finding my way at the start of my Masters program, I became keenly interested in the music of my lived-in life. You see, I had only learned that I’m autistic the year before I started this program, and I was becoming aware of how many self-regulation patterns I had actually honed over the years. It was curious to find that music-making is equally an artistic expression and a self-regulation technique for me.
Wanting to share these cool observations about myself with people, I decided to expand this idea of a Preprandial Stroll to include the meal, itself, and what follows. The last two movements were recorded in my apartment (with a comically high sample rate before I learned that I could save storage space on my computer without any audible sound loss at a lower sample rate!), and I created a kitchen sounds keyboard to share with anyone interested as well as these 2 movements. These are highly abstract collages that peek into the world that I inhabit, one saturated with curious sounds and flavors and aromas to savor.
Some day, I hope to figure out how to use Max well enough to sync up this series of 4 photographs to the beat of the music, randomly switching from picture to picture. If you are reading this, and know how to do that, would you teach me? Short of that, would you like to collaborate with me? Perhaps, you know more people than I do who might be interested in this sort of music.
Why?
Why? Is another piece made to experiment with the use of the kitchen sounds keyboard patch I assembled for A Prandial Triptych. Dr. Maki (my private composition teacher at NIU) and I discussed at length how I might incorporate the keyboard patch into compositions. Since the patch is made of electronically modified samples of different lengths, the samples tend to overlap with one another. Dr. Maki suggested I explore how the samples might combine to create unique timbres and rhythmic interplay. I chose to explore these aspects through improvisation.
This piece is constructed from layers of improvised music, focusing in on the rhythmic aspects of the samples in the patch. I use my voice (distorted beyond verbal recognition except for the one word that gives the piece its title) and a bell-like electronic sound to give the piece its form and interact with the kitchen sounds keyboard. In this way, the improvisation was designed as a teaching tool (tailor-made to my needs as a student) using one of my favorite teaching devices, juxtaposition. By juxtaposing a less familiar thing with a more familiar thing, we can more easily expand our knowledge and skill because the brain gets to put the new information it receives into a familiar context. (N.B. I do this quite frequently when I practice percussion music. The easiest example is trying to expand the skills of my non-dominant hand/foot by using my dominant hand to demonstrate, playing both hands simultaneously.)
The form of Why? is loose, not consisting of sections of fixed length. Rather than focusing my improvisatory awareness on a fixed form (like 12-bar blues or something), I focused on the rhythms of the kitchen sounds keyboard and followed a preplanned alternation between highly peaceful sections and creepy sections. Creepy music is my default music-making mode, so I decided to tap into that automation of mine in order to have more mental space to focus on the rhythmic content of the kitchen sounds. That is, by using my default music-making mode, I’m able to juxtapose the kitchen sounds with the familiar harmonic/melodic language of tritones and semitones.
I postulate that part of the reason improvising works so well to ingrain skills is the connection between memory and emotion. When I’m improvising, I turn down the volume of my analytical brain, trusting in my musical training to react to the sounds I hear in a logical way. In this way, I might be improvising with a particular skill or musical parameter as my focus, but my brain mode is one that allows me to experience emotions. This places the technique in a human context. We make music for many reasons, but I often make music to work through questions or problems. When I improvise with a new technique, I’m putting that new technique to use right away, integrating it into my musical toolbox.
Drums n’ Drones
For a long time, I’ve given preference to the opinions others have shared about what makes music interesting. In the Summer of 2024, I committed to trusting my own experiences more (without negating the thoughts of others. Playing against drones has long been a favorite musical experience of mine, and I wanted to focus on incorporating drones into my music throughout the second year of masters degree. So, I thought I’d use one of my tried and true teaching techniques, juxtaposition, with myself.
By juxtaposing a familiar skill (drumming) with a skill I want to build (intuitive awareness of the melodic pull of pitches), my brain applies the lessons mastered with the familiar skill to the context of the desired skill. I decided to build a hybrid drum set with my midi keyboard incorporated into the kit. I figured a video would show this better, so I did a time lapse recording of my process making these 3 movements.
As you can see, life goes on in the background as I work. Laundry dries. My wife awakens and wants to hug me. She leaves to go work and returns. My work spans the length of several hours and anchors me to a physical location in much the same way that the drone note anchors me to its tonal center. Wanting to connect my music with the beauty inherent in everyday life, this multimodal polyphony tickles my artistic aesthetic.
Will the shades rise up to praise you?
From the time I was small, I have been keenly aware of death. Since 2 of my grandparents were the youngest of large families, there were many funerals for me to attend throughout my early childhood. I have pondered my own death nearly every day, and I sometimes shock my wife with nonchalant mentions of death in casual conversation.
There is a curious line from Psalm 87 (88) that reads (in the new Grail translation), “Will the shades rise up to praise you?” The psalm is a lament in the face of death. I have, at many times throughout my life, experienced a quasi-death that led me to join my own words to those of the psalmist imploring help from God. This layered improvisation was made in such a moment.
Death is an intricate part of life. In my Catholic tradition, death is thought of as the door through which all people enter fully into life. Our lives are thought of as pilgrimages, wherein we hope for a completely good future without the suffering we experience on a near-daily basis. We see images of heaven here on earth, sometimes described as heaven piercing through our fleshly vail. While it seems to be most expedient for me to draw my attention back to those reasons for hope, I have also deepened my understanding of life through periodic meditation on death.
I hope this music will inspire you to artistically engage with the limits between life and death. Please share your creations with me. I’d love to start an artistic dialogue with you!