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.

Copy­right has always had two roles, to pro­tect the rights of the cre­ator, but more broadly, to encour­age cre­ativ­ity. With­out copy­right, artists would never be prop­erly rewarded for their work and art would not get made. But with­out fair deal­ing pro­vi­sions (or fair use in the U.S.), copy­right law stran­gles cre­ativ­ity by making art­works inaccessible.

Over the past 100 years, cor­po­rate inter­ests have increas­ingly tried to restrict or remove fair deal­ing from copy­right. Copy­right in 1900 was only 14 years long and had to be offi­cially requested. This meant that artists at the time could draw on a huge store of rel­a­tively fresh mate­r­ial in their work, lead­ing to the explo­sion of cre­ativ­ity that marked the birth of Hol­ly­wood, the avant-garde, jazz, and more. Now copy­right is auto­matic, can last over 150 years, and legit­i­mate works that use fair deal­ing are fre­quently attacked in court by cor­po­rate inter­ests. This trend has only accel­er­ated with the rise of dig­i­tal music tech­nol­ogy and file sharing.

For this reason, Recy­cled 80s Live draws entirely from mate­r­ial still under copy­right, with­out per­mis­sion. This can be done under fair deal­ing as long as the new work cre­ates new artis­tic value and does not take away from the market for the orig­i­nals. I designed Recy­cled 80s Live to respect these bound­aries, work­ing within the tra­di­tion of mash-up artists such as John Oswald or Girl Talk, but with live musi­cians. My mes­sage, to adapt an old adage, is that your right to swing your copy­right ends where my music begins.

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