BLACK SWANS (FOR TY) (2021)
Few men I know can grill their name in sausage, but my friend Ty is one of them. Only five links are needed to spell it out. I thought of this when sampling a set of 5 Black Swan Percussion woodblocks, which were recorded in a TY configuration. When designing the composition, I imagined the 2 blocks for the letter "T" being played by the left hand, and the 3 blocks for the letter "Y" being played by the right. The work is a system in which number series generated by either elementary cellular automata or a linear congruential generator guide various dimensions of the composition. While it is a complex system, there is no randomness in it.
In the past, I spent many weeks with Ty, an ethnomusicologist, in Bali, supporting a cultural program on the music of Indonesia that he runs for students. The piece doesn't attempt to replicate the music of Bali, but the sound of that island's bamboo instruments (Jegog and Tingklik) as well as the music written for them was in the back of my mind as I composed.
SCORE
Score is forthcoming