Written for the Quatuor Bozzini, the title of this piece can be loosely translated as “To go around oneself, to conform oneself”. Those concepts play a role in the musical material on several different levels: harmonic material, rhythmic structure, form, the push and pull of musical tradition, the choices the performers have to make, and so forth. My goal was to work in the space on the edge of comfort, where there is enough familiarity for both performers and audience to get into the piece, but also a strong musical challenge that pushes us to the “transcendence” experience that I seek in music.

In this piece, I return to predominantly quartertonal harmonies for the first time in a few years. However, the harmonic framework also fits loosely into G-sharp minor/B major. The intent, like in much of my microtonal work, is that the quartertones go largely unnoticed by the casual listener. I build up a type of pseudo-Renaissance structure, transparent and smooth, using quartertones not to approximate just intonation, but rather to create a sort of “what-if”, alternate-reality harmonic system.

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…

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.

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.

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