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 it in a wide vari­ety of languages.

The idea of kiss­ing takes on very dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, and I wanted to find a con­no­ta­tion that was as uni­ver­sal as pos­si­ble. There­fore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nur­tur­ing kiss, the kiss a par­ent would give a child. This was the most uni­ver­sal use of kiss­ing I came across. Roman­tic kiss­ing, which is what I ini­tially thought would make the best focus, is not uni­ver­sal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Euro­peans; Kore­ans and Japan­ese actu­ally use a mod­i­fied form of the Eng­lish word for roman­tic kissing.

Musi­cally, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usu­ally one per word, that are arranged and devel­oped into a lyri­cal, flow­ing tex­ture. Being a com­poser obsessed with frag­men­ta­tion and con­trast, this was a novel and stim­u­lat­ing chal­lenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musi­cal mate­ri­als at hand. The result is a sooth­ing, gen­tle piece that has cer­tain aspects of a lul­laby, all the while employ­ing the collage/mosaic tech­niques that are the hall­marks of my style. There is even a lit­tle col­lage sur­prise at the end of the piece…

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 among the more recent of lit­er­ary gen­res. It attracted me because it is com­posed entirely of mono­syl­labic words, with no rep­e­ti­tion; a kind of het­ero­ge­neous stream that strikes me as contemporary.

The mid­dle sec­tion of the piece is inde­ter­mi­nate or open: the per­form­ers decide how the musi­cal mate­ri­als will be pre­sented. This is also some­thing that I take from the Cul­ture theme, because the mul­ti­plic­ity of pos­si­bil­i­ties, end­less var­ie­ga­tion, and the impos­si­bil­ity of find­ing “right” answers seem to me impor­tant cul­tural prob­lems today.

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 to pre­vent bor­row­ing. This sit­u­a­tion is a threat to cul­ture and cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral and it deserves to receive atten­tion. Addi­tional infor­ma­tion, sound clips, a promo video, and other details are avail­able on the project web­site.

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 var­i­ous social func­tions when we use it in pri­vate. There­fore, music can be said to be a community-normed phe­nom­e­non: what makes music music are the peo­ple who find a use for it, usu­ally by listening.

On top of that, the most use­ful (or best) pieces of music are gen­er­ally those for which there is the most con­sen­sus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth sym­phony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of peo­ple agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of peo­ple have found those two pieces of music use­ful for cer­tain social functions.

Any­way, these were some of the thoughts run­ning through my head while writ­ing this piece, and they influ­enced my choice and usage of musi­cal materials.

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 move­ment of Community-Normed. I’ve also writ­ten a third ver­sion, for a cham­ber music con­fer­ence in Ver­mont in July 2009, with dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tion and adapted for ama­teur performers.

Why mul­ti­ple ver­sions? Because music today is mul­ti­ple. Every­one is exposed to music from mul­ti­ple cul­tures all the time, from mul­ti­ple time peri­ods, and in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. DJs remix pop songs, which are avail­able in numer­ous ver­sions, and do mash-ups that inter­twine mul­ti­ple tracks in the space of a few sec­onds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in his­tory, drown­ing in more music than any­one knows what to do with. For this rea­son, cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions is an impor­tant project of mine.

Musi­cally, Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby presents a humor­ous musi­cal set­ting of try­ing to fall asleep with con­struc­tion going on out­side the window.

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 focused on a broad ges­ture—that of a long dimin­u­endo—that goes from begin­ning to end. Within that ges­ture are a series of thirty-one frag­ments, some with local rela­tion­ships to adjoin­ing frag­ments, some with­out. No struc­tures or orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples have been used that are not imme­di­ately appar­ent to the ear, and each sec­tion is com­posed intu­itively with regard to pitch, rhythm, tone colour, and phras­ing. The piece also includes sev­eral the­atri­cal ele­ments, and is there­fore best appre­ci­ated in a live performance.

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 over­lap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the begin­ning of a musi­cal ges­ture, and always by the per­former who is play­ing the ges­ture. Each unit is also repeated mul­ti­ple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to cre­ate or not cre­ate his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic man­ner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to cre­ate hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.

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.

Four Pieces for Accor­dion and String Quar­tet was writ­ten between the sum­mer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Cana­dian poet Sarah Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a woman watch­ing her lover die of can­cer. Four Pieces is ded­i­cated to my grand­mother, Antoinette Schulte, who was an accor­dion­ist and died of can­cer when I was a child.

What inter­ested me about Swerve was the sen­sa­tion of the pas­sage of time con­veyed by the narrator’s emo­tions. I felt this had strong cor­re­la­tions with musi­cal form, and I wanted to try to trans­late the emo­tional form of Lang’s series into an instru­men­tal piece. There­fore, each poem in the set cor­re­sponds to a move­ment in Four Pieces, and each move­ment closely fol­lows the con­tent of the cor­re­spond­ing poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first suc­cess­ful attempt at the pur­pose­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of dis­parate har­monic sys­tems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of func­tional and non-functional sonori­ties rang­ing from pop­u­lar music and jazz, to medieval, clas­si­cal, and twentieth-century West­ern music. I achieved this goal by plac­ing har­monic and melodic ideas in new local con­texts or by using the func­tion of one har­monic sys­tem with the mate­r­ial from another. Exam­ples include the osti­nato 6/3 chord in the first move­ment, trans­posed up a quar­ter­tone, and the func­tional cadence that ends the piece, dis­guised by dense pitch clus­ters and non-triadic sonorities.

lis­ten to Viñes Pass­ing Through

A mash-up by Steve Lay­ton that uses Four Pieces.

Other sources: Ricardo Viñes – Menuet Spec­tral & En Ver­laine Mineur, Christ­opher DeLau­renti – Tiger, Sara Pee­bles – Music for Incan­descent Events Joseph Drew – He Was a Poet