I wrote Hockey Story for Brazilian-Canadian pianist, Luciane Car­dassi. Luciane had immi­grated to Canada a cou­ple of years before­hand and was inter­ested in explor­ing the hockey cul­ture of Canada. She was also look­ing for a piece that involved elec­tron­ics and speak­ing or singing, which was a good fit for my com­po­si­tional inter­ests. A hockey theme is some­what out­side of my usual work, but I decided it would be a good chal­lenge and pro­vide me with some fresh perspectives.

The text is taken entirely from hockey ter­mi­nol­ogy. I weave together short word-units in order to cre­ate a nar­ra­tive that ref­er­ences what I see as aspects of the spirit of hockey, play­ing with both the mean­ing and sound of the words. Through­out the piece, there is a coun­ter­point between the voice, elec­tron­ics (con­trolled by the pianist), and piano, cre­at­ing a three-way dialogue.

Cul­ture no.1 is the first in a series of three pieces that deal with the chang­ing role of music in cul­ture, and I wrote it while work­ing on my Master’s degree at UC San Diego. The impe­tus for the piece was a series of four unre­lated sam­ples (and one deriv­a­tive sam­ple) that I found on my hard drive, left over from other projects. The sam­ples play at var­i­ous points in the music, and in one way or another, the instru­men­tal parts derive their mate­r­ial from them.

In Cul­ture no.1, I wanted to focus on sev­eral issues that I saw as par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to our rapidly chang­ing cul­ture milieu. These include an imme­di­ate and sim­ple pre­sen­ta­tion of mate­r­ial, clar­ity of pur­pose, the high­est pos­si­ble degree of sim­plic­ity in the orga­ni­za­tion of mate­r­ial, and musi­cal ideas that can live “in the moment”, with­out the need to ref­er­ence large sec­tions of the piece on mul­ti­ple lev­els. These are themes that have remained impor­tant to me since and have also fig­ured promi­nently in the sub­se­quent two pieces in the Cul­ture series.

When I first wrote Cul­ture no.1, I thought of it in terms of a dichotomy between pop­u­lar music and the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. How­ever, in the sub­se­quent years I’ve tem­pered my inter­pre­ta­tion. I no longer see a con­flict between tra­di­tions, only a reflec­tion on the rit­u­als of music-making. It is also, to a point, a test­ing of cul­tural con­ven­tions par­tic­u­lar to the concert-music rit­ual. This focus on rit­ual and cul­tural con­ven­tion is what I think makes the piece suc­cess­ful in the end. I’ve got­ten a lot of strong reac­tions to Cul­ture no.1, from “incom­pre­hen­si­ble” to “mas­ter­piece”. For me, that kind of polar­iza­tion always speaks to the cul­tural res­o­nance of a work of art, and cul­tural res­o­nance is cer­tainly appro­pri­ate to the theme I wanted to explore.

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.

An inter­ac­tive sound game for audi­ence volunteers.