Elektroakustische Musik
aus New York City

Sylvia Pengilly

If You Could See My Soul

If You Could See My SoulWhat is the soul? Does it even exist, and if so, how might it appear if we were able to somehow perceive it? Surely most of us have had this and similar questions flash across our minds from time to time only to abandon them in frustration at the impossibility of ever finding an answer. In this piece I have chosen to represent my soul visually by silhouettes of my body, while musically much of the music is derived from samples of my voice, sometimes with the music forcing the silhouettes into shapes only available with the music controlling the visual parameters. Therefore, please consider this your glimpse into my tortured and highly
convoluted soul.

Apparitions

Apparitions, completed in February of 2016, is based upon 13,890 variations of an oil painting titled “Thunderstruck”, which was inspired by a road in southwest Virginia of the same name. Utilizing light, transparency, reflection and refraction, photographs of the oil painting were mapped onto transparent and/or reflective planes and cubes. These were inserted into mirrored, opaque or open environments and made to move in various related ways and choreographed to computer-generated music.

Triples

Triples (2016) develops four melodic strands, two of which consist of three-note chords. The others are often presented three at a time, as chords, so there is a predominance of overlapping threes. The strands are played at many speeds, timbres, and virtual transposition levels. The rhythms of all the melodic lines in the piece are shaped (by force of habit) by ratios that expand or reduce successive measures as well as the beats within these measures. The normal 12-tone square of 48 row forms has also been distorted by interpreting the numbers not as members of the chromatic scale, but as indices to three ascending diminished-seventh cycles.
Transposed rows have segments in common, but no two are the same. it is quite easy to ask the computer to overlap these melodic lines with different instrumental colors at different speeds.

Fred Szymanski

SCREE

SCREE is a multichannel composition inspired by the processes of weathering that, together with the forces of gravity, lead to the amassing of loose rocks and talus on the side of a mountain. The sounds used in the piece are the sounds of rocks tumbling, sliding, and crumbling. With the application of eruptive events and dissipative processes, singular gestures are set in a relation to the control of micro-time forms where strata and parallel movements are realized in multidimensional space.

Expansions

Expansions is so named because each note in the basic framework is “expanded” by another group of notes. Textures are presented so that the expanded notes both fade into a complex envelope or are attacked individually. All notes are tempered pitches. The process gives rise to complex harmonies, but no inharmonic components. The piece was composed in the summer of 2016 and synthesized by csound.