Once again, it’s the end of summer, and I’m gearing up for another year of teaching college students all about the joy of composing and doing crazy things with computers. But since I had a little time after finishing the lectures and course prep stuff, I decided to go on a bit of a bender. Not my normal caffeine induced grading insanity, but something a bit more creating. A composing bender!

To that end, I asked if anyone wanted a piece, and then wrote them in a first come/first served manner. Each piece had to be done and in the hands of the commissioning party before I moved on, completely edited and any/all code complete. Basically, I worked like a madman for ten days straight (dangerous amounts of coffee were involved, as per my usual workflow), sketching ideas, writing texts, emailing or video chatting with performers, and in one case, fighting with layouts and layers in GIMP for several hours…

But the results turned out pretty well. I tend to overthink things when I write, so doing four pieces as fast as possible was a good way to force myself to commit to ideas and fully develop or reject them (although the Oblique Strategies were occasionally used). And writing for four very different performers, with VERY different styles in a short span of time is a really interesting proposition that stretched me away from my comfort zone of experimental music.

Anyway, rather than continuing to wax poetic, here are the results:

Lattice Work for Unspecified Ensemble

Rust and Blue (After Mark Rothko) for Violin and Computer

Promethean Elegies for Tenor and Computer

Quietus for Solo Clarinet in Bb

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