Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reap­pro­pri­a­tion. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if any­thing, to our sources of inspi­ra­tion? His­tor­i­cally, com­posers have stolen ideas from each other reg­u­larly, rework­ing these into their music and tak­ing all the credit (and the money, if they could). The inven­tion of copy­right was the first attempt at giv­ing credit to the orig­i­na­tors of ideas, but this has evolved over time into a corporate-controlled sys­tem of prop­erty that pro­motes the fic­tion that new ideas some­how spon­ta­neously appear out of nothingness.

Com­posers have always taken each oth­ers’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no com­pos­ing. But now the big music com­pa­nies would want us to believe that this is some­how wrong. It is, cer­tainly, wrong to profit from the work of oth­ers with­out mak­ing any con­tri­bu­tion one­self, but there are many uses of exist­ing music that do make new, mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions. For this rea­son, I’ve taken an inter­est in quo­ta­tion, col­lage, and related tech­niques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influ­enced me while at the same time expos­ing the false idea that cre­ativ­ity comes out of noth­ing­ness. So here I am, cards on the table, show­ing every­one the music I was think­ing of when work­ing on this piece—by quot­ing that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Oth­ers. I wanted to write a piece that was reflec­tive and som­bre, and I wanted to make it a col­lage of the work of oth­ers. This was a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge, because I have found col­lage bet­ter suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and som­bre; quo­ta­tions tend to lose their char­ac­ter when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this rea­son, I had to approach this piece dif­fer­ently than in my pre­vi­ous work, trans­form­ing the mate­r­ial in more extreme ways for the sake of musi­cal expres­sion. In Elegy of Oth­ers, there­fore, the quo­ta­tions are not always imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able, though they do come to the sur­face peri­od­i­cally. Nev­er­the­less, almost every note in Elegy of Oth­ers is quoted, with few excep­tions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

1. The Four Sea­sons, “Drunk­ards Asleep”, Anto­nio Vivaldi, 1723
2. “The Girl from Ipanema”, Anto­nio Car­los Jobim, 1962
3. “Every­body Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
4. “Dazed and Con­fused”, Led Zep­pelin, 1968
5. Die schöne Mül­lerin, “Des Müllers Blu­men”, Franz Schu­bert, 1823

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…

Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity is a col­lage. In fact, even the title is a col­lage: I took the title of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and com­bined it with a ref­er­ence to the cul­ture of Inter­net file shar­ing. I have been inter­ested in col­lage and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of mate­r­ial for some time, because as the say­ing goes, good artists bor­row but great artists steal. Col­lage is the most hon­est way to hon­our that prin­ci­ple, and I spent most of 2008 work­ing in this direction.

Col­lage, as well as related ideas such as sam­pling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few uni­fy­ing forces dri­ving artis­tic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMix­ter, these ideas have been respon­si­ble for renew­ing ama­teur art on a mass scale, for chal­leng­ing the stan­dards of cre­ativ­ity, for expand­ing musi­cal taste, and even for influ­enc­ing legal precedent.

For the first time in his­tory, we are drown­ing in art. There is too much music of the high­est artis­tic qual­ity for any­one to ever hope to expe­ri­ence. So how can artists con­tribute to cul­ture in a sit­u­a­tion like this? I think col­lage is an impor­tant part of the answer, and the proof is in the atti­tudes of those who grew up with the Inter­net. For many of them, art is not some­thing sim­ply to be expe­ri­enced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While com­pos­ing Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, I gave myself some restric­tions in order to inspire cre­ativ­ity. For exam­ple, I decided to try to present all quo­ta­tions in as rec­og­niz­able a form as pos­si­ble. I did not allow myself to trans­pose frag­ments from their orig­i­nal tonal­i­ties, and I did not allow myself to com­pose my own new mate­r­ial to bridge together the quo­ta­tions—every note is bor­rowed. I also made tempo an inte­gral part of the musi­cal devel­op­ment, and I tried to make gram­mat­i­cal sense of all the text frag­ments I com­bined. Finally, every quote relates to the oth­ers in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obvi­ously) musi­cal sounds.

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.

I wrote this cham­ber opera for three singers and six instru­men­tal­ists in con­junc­tion with Colleen Mur­phy for Tapestry’s Opera To Go series. It tells the story of a young East­ern Euro­pean woman (Oksana) who has found her­self in the safe­house of an Ital­ian priest (Alessan­dro). She has escaped from a pimp (Kon­stan­tin), who tricked her into pros­ti­tu­tion, and now finds that she is falling in love with Alessan­dro. He in turn, despite his priestly call­ing, finds him­self tempted by Oksana. Dur­ing this scene, they dance around the com­pli­ca­tions of their sit­u­a­tion, each one afraid to reveal him– or her– self to the other. In addi­tion, another prob­lem presents itself at the end of the scene.

Cul­ture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that mod­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture can inform West­ern art music. More specif­i­cally, Cul­ture no.3 is involved in explor­ing the inter­re­la­tion between the vis­ceral ele­ments of pop­u­lar music and tim­bre. By vis­ceral ele­ments, I mean, for exam­ple, the sense of motion, the force­ful­ness of the artic­u­la­tions, or the char­ac­ter of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The tra­di­tional pitch resources of the pop­u­lar sphere have required that vis­cer­al­ity and tim­bre play a greater role in defin­ing pop­u­lar gen­res (and sub­se­quently in deter­min­ing what we find inter­est­ing within them) than is seen in the major­ity of West­ern art music. Cul­ture no.3, with a greater empha­sis on tim­bre and vis­cer­al­ity and a sub­se­quently lesser empha­sis on other aspects of the musi­cal whole, uses the resources of the West­ern ensem­ble to fea­ture this aspect of pop­u­lar music.