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 score, but it is transformed in some way to create very different musical textures. Thus, I use some of the characteristic symptoms of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders as guiding principles in the arrangement of the musical material, creating both a play on words and a musical structure for the composition.

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 environment that is equally a hybrid of instrumental traditions, both classical and rock. The material of the piece develops a single harmonic and melodic progression, which moves from extremely slow and legato to extremely fast and frenetic. Through this diverse vocabulary, I hope to give the choreographer a range of expressions to work with, allowing her to demonstrate the full potential of the robotic Halo characters to function as dancers.

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.

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.

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.

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 is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It trav­els from west to east geo­graph­i­cally across the world. The lan­guages were chosen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that lan­guage to teach me how to say shit. I did, how­ever, attempt to keep a some­what even spac­ing between geo­graph­i­cal areas, although a com­pletely even dis­tri­b­u­tion would have been, of course, impos­si­ble to realize.

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.