gravity express for standard orchestra (3222-4231-Hp-Timp-2-Strings):
On my website, it says that the piece is already done. I call it: extrinsic motivation. At any rate, I haven't composed an orchestral piece in eight years, and I've never composed a good one.1 I figured it was time. It's a train piece, alright, with some requisite effects and train-y sounds, but it veers a little more closely into tonal-reference category and is more likely than not to be seen as a "crowd-pleaser" type of piece. (I don't have many of those, either.) I estimate the finished product will probably be around 11 to 12 minutes long, which should be safe territory for a lot of contests and hopefully a few performances. To wit: I'm writing it in a less-challenging style and leaving out some of my rhythmic idiosyncrasies that seem to damn a lot of my pieces to a one-performance-and-done existence. I project that the work should be done within two weeks.
deep cover for pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds
Some time back, I posted here about a fixed-media piece I wanted to write based on the numbers station phenomena, and it actually came to fruition. I'm in the last stages of work on that piece and it ended up taking quite a different path (duh) from what I originally anticipated. It became, in the words of a colleague and friend, a "musical short story" with a number of narratives threading through the work. The piece is currently 14 minutes long - which makes it quite iffy when it comes to unsolicited performances and conferences - and while I'm typically fine about writing long pieces, this one actually feels somewhat long for what I want in the piece. I imagine there will be some editing, some remixing, and some fussing with Vegas to make it glitch-free before 2033.2 I also expect it to be done within two weeks or so since it, more than anything else, is in the final stages of birth.
resemblematics for wind quintet
"But, Tom!" you cry, "You've already written this!" I can explain.
Back in 2004, I, a little bassoonist-composer, decided I needed to write a wind quintet. I did. It has sat on a shelf. Deemed too hard by a lot of undergrad performers, I decided that I wouldn't revise the existing movements but, by fiat of necessity, instead add two more. I laid out sketches for movements 4 and 5 some years ago but never finished them. I could never figure out if the piece was strong enough as a three-movement work, and I finally decided: no. I'm balancing out the long-scale form of the work, extending some idioms I was toying with while composing it initially, and wrapping up what I see as thematic loose ends. I don't have a firm end date on this, but I'll try to get this done by the middle of October. I don't realistically have much to add to the sketches, other than decide among the material.
seven selected points of reference for a lingering spectre for violin and piano
I dug out an old sketch, from 2006, of a violin-piano piece I wanted to write. Multi-movement, short movements, reduced materials and rather simple approaches. I had one movement written already: for some reason, I called it the 5th movement, and in its previous form, it clocked in at just around 22 seconds long. I plan to add about 8 seconds of music to it and I finally got around to sketching some things for the other six (!) movements. It follows an arch form (cf: Brahms Requiem) and has a rather minimal approach to pitch material. The vicissitude of the lone written movement is a guiding principle for the rest of the work - none of them can be more than a minute long, except for the 4th movement (the keystone), all must have very simple forms, and use the same kinds of pitch material. I get around this by excising certain pitch classes for certain movements and toying with my interval sequence structure.3 I want to get this one done by the end of October; seems like it could be a strong festival entry, or at least feasibly performable by good performers - and by that, I mean, if a seven-movement piece is only 9 or 10 minutes long, it stands a much better performance chance. It's also been years since my last piano-and-instrument work -- I'm guessing around seven or eight.
Oh! Before I forget, the violin/piano work (should it get performed) will be curiouser in that the movement titles are the program notes. Observe!
i. she appeared at my door wrapped in snakes
ii. a capricious spirit she seemed to have
iii. i could barely hear her whisper
iv. she held her glass up to my visage
v. and then the ghost descended lengthwise
vi. and proceeded to flash a tender iris
vii. before it shuttered and hissed away
On deck:
violin/clarinet/piano (mid-late Novemeber 2010)
wind ensemble (mid-late November 2010)
saxophone orchestra/sextet (no, really, it can be both) (mid-late December 2010)
solo piano work (finally) (mid-late December 2010)
I've also been tempted to dig out some of my older, underperformed chamber pieces and arrange them for wind ensemble and/or orchestra. I see potential in at least a few of them.
***
1. I don't count the viola concerto in this. The viola concerto, while an orchestra piece, is totally soloist-driven. It's also 40 minutes long. It's a good piece, but, damn, I retrospectively got a little too Mahler - or Feldman - on that ass.
2. I run Win7 on my primary soundmaking machine, and for years my multitracker of choice has been Cubase. Steinberg, Cubase's parent company, has been extremely, painfully slow about releasing Win7 compatible upgrades; I fear Steinberg will, if they haven't already, just dump their old platforms, scrap upgrades, and make a new, expensive version of Cubase for Win7. So, I've been stuck running Vegas - a good program for what it is - in compatibility mode, and I get inexplicable glitches here and there in complex renders. No fun. It leads to lots of swearing and panic and surgery.
3. Don't make me explain it. It's a homegrown algorithm based on fairly simple probabilistic math.
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