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Schizo Psycho

Schizo Psycho is based entirely on material from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. A 40-second clip of the movie plays repeatedly, with the ensemble providing different “personalities” on each repetition. All material is taken from the original

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Halo Ballet (Bipolar Disorder NOS)

Credit for the idea of a Halo ballet goes to Gregory Oh, who commissioned the piece and arranged for me to work with choreographer Julia Aplin. To complement the unusual dance environment of the piece, I chose an unusual musical

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Kiss Around the World

Kiss Around the World was commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts for Ensemble Resonance. It is the second Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case kiss—and presenting

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Culture no.2 (or, Shoot Like a Film Star)

This is the middle piece in my Cul­ture series, which is an explo­ration of the effects that today’s cul­tural con­text has on making our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail mes­sage—cer­tainly

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Recycled 80s Live

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas­ingly being abused

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Community-Normed

Only a small part of music is actually about sound. The majority of music-making has to do with social interactions more than anything else. Music fulfills certain functions (usually pre-determined) within certain social situations, or serves as a replacement for

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Jackhammer Lullaby

Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby is an arrange­ment of Community-Normed, which was com­mis­sioned by the Con­tin­uum Ensem­ble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increas­ingly inter­ested in pre­sent­ing pieces in mul­ti­ple ver­sions and com­bi­na­tions. Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby, with a few changes, is also the middle

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Four Stills on Evaporation in Thirty-One Fragments

This piece reflects my ongo­ing inter­ests in sec­tional forms, doing away with tran­si­tional mate­r­ial, and the chal­leng­ing of aes­thetic assump­tions. There is no attempt to relate any of the mate­ri­als of the piece over the large scale. Instead, I have

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Five Reflective Fragments

Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments is based on a sequence of very brief text frag­ments extracted from a much longer poetic work, enti­tled I Lost Every­thing by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and with­out

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Short/Long

Two years’ dis­tance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, orginally called Quar­tet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two move­ments and reflect the kinds of artic­u­la­tions and phras­ing that I employed.

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