Who's up for hearing something a bit more complex??

[Wain]

Hello all,

  I've thrown one of my more recent pieces up on a myspace page, and would love to get some feedback on it if anyone's interested.  I should warn you though, this is not video-game fare, it's two movements (about 11 minutes total time) and the second movement is very different from the first.  Essentially it's a science-fiction influenced tone poem called The City, with some accompanying texts I've written as well. 

Anyway, here's the link:

http://www.myspace.com/68295883

This is a live recording with chamber orchestra at a small concert, so please forgive the occasional cough and audience-type sounds.  Also there are a lot of extreme dynamics, the softs are incredibly soft, the louds get pretty loud, so just be aware...lol

here's the accompanying texts as well...

I.  32° Fahrenheit

As the sun rises on the enclosed city
As the machinery that marks our lives
Continues to run its ritual
And the tendrils of night begin to fall
Lashing out at whatever remnant of sky remains
To be futilely grasped at

It is so cold here…
The sun is blinding…
And the ice hasn’t thawed for years…


II.  The Dregs of Passion

Anxiety…Decadence…Passion
The lust of the lost runs deep
The streets transact business like art
30 pieces of silver is a deal for a pound of flesh

But then again…
Whose flesh are we talking about?

Love…Loss…Passion
The sound almost drowns the storm outside

Is being extinguished like being born?

[Jisho]

Wow, I'm really impressed. It reminds me of a lot of serial music (almost like Edgard Varèse but not as weird)... I don't know if that was the point but I mean it in a good way.

Where was this preformed? I'm really interested.

[Wain]

thanks so much for your kind words!

This was recorded in the concert hall of Columbia College Chicago, it was performed by a group called ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble), who are artists in residence at NYU and Columbia college.  This was my final piece for my BM at school.  The neatest thing about it to me is just that I largely had no conception of what most of it was going to sound like (obviously this is more true for the first movement than the second).  I initially was thinking about for and process music (Ligeti and Penderecki) but I wanted something consonant, I got the idea for the strings using an elongated gliss at differing speeds to their various open strings as a chord and the rest of the piece just sort of wrote itself.

I'm working on some more traditional fare at the moment for a local theatre company...eventually hoping to write some game-type tunes as well, but we'll see how long it takes for me to get the time.

[Jisho]

I've only heard on piece by Penderecki (The St. Luke Passion, which is probably one of his most famous I'd assume) and I've actually never heard of Ligeti.

[Wain]

Penderecki's most famous piece is called "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima"...He and Gyorgy Ligeti both wrote a type of music referred to as "form and process" music, also called texture music although neither of them sound similar at all, at least from what I've heard.  One of the primary concepts (particularly under Ligeti) is the idea of a constantly moving wall of sound out of which come various musical ideas and shapes and move around (very much like a moving, living sort of texture made out of music).  It's pretty advanced stuff.

Threnody is an utterly bizarre, and somewhat scary piece, that had it's own musical notation in order to describe various "effects" that the 52 string instruments were to perform.  It's rather amazing to listen to for many reasons, but one of my favorite points in it is that you will hear all sorts of sounds that are exactly like air raid sirens, and helicopters, but it turns out they're actually all coming from stringed instruments.  Pretty amazing stuff.

Penderecki was at the forefront of modern, experimental composition for decades before he started composing romantic music that nobody liked...lol