Tomorrow's Ken: Portraits of Lives Affected by Incarceration
The Tomorrow's Ken project now has a separate website with information and videos here.
Electroacoustic and Video Pieces
***scroll down for acoustic stuff....
Spirit Unbound
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Spirit Unbound is a collaboration with author and peacemaker, Clifford Kindy. Cliff has worked for thirty years with Christian Peacemaker Teams in the conflict zones of the world, including Palestine, Gaza, Iraq, Nigeria, Colombia, Puerto Rico and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I recently read Cliff’s book, Resurrection Peacemaking: Plowsharing the Tools of War and felt inspired to work with him on a new piece.
I interviewed Cliff at his home on Joyfield Farm. We talked about the book, his work in Christian Peacemaker Teams, and the intentional life that he and his partner, Arlene, have built together. This piece contains a short excerpt from that conversation. In this excerpt, Cliff reflects on his experience meeting with a young Palestinian while in Rafah Camp in Gaza. This piece only scratches the surface of Cliff’s powerful book |
"...the land that happened inside us..."
Nocturne (for sopranino saxophone and electronics)
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When I was a teenager, I often snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, usually just to walk around, smoke cigarettes, sometimes to drive the car. While wandering around the streets in our neighborhood, I simultaneously felt the calm and peaceful clarity of night along with teenage feelings of exhilaration and freedom. This piece is a remembrance of those feelings.
Nocturne was written for, and premiered by, Dr. Farrell Vernon. Much of the sopranino part is improvised by Farrell, including an extended improvised solo in the middle of the piece. ......[for performance materials, just send me a message] |
Pelican Bay (for flute and fixed media)
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Pelican Bay is a "supermax" prison in California where approximately 1500 inmates are held in solitary confinement. "The occupants of the Security Housing Unit (SHU) and Administrative Housing Unit spend 22.5 hours a day alone in windowless cells measuring about 7 x 11 feet. The remaining 90 minutes are spent, also alone, in bare concrete exercise pens. With no phone calls allowed, and only the rare noncontact visit, these prisoners...can only access the world outside their cells via their feeding slots" (motherjones.com May 8, 2013).
This recording features flutist, Kelly Hornbarger. ......[for performance materials, just send me a message] |
Rafah Crossing (for cello and fixed media)
Electroacoustic Barn Dance Performance: Nick Photinos, cello
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Rafah Crossing, written for cellist, Robert Lynn, is a musical statement of my feelings when, as an American living a privileged and comfortable life far away, I read, hear and think about the suffering of Palestinians living under siege in Gaza.
......[for performance materials, just send me a message] |
...the irresistible will of heaven... (fixed media)
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In his Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, Matsuo Bashō comes upon a three-year-old boy who has been abandoned by his parents and is crying pitifully on the bank of a river. Bashō gives the boy something to eat, but then continues on his way, leaving the child to die. He says…
How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive – by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it so, child, you must raise your voice to the heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind. - Bashō -Thanks to Derrick Golden for use of his bowed spring recordings. |
None is Traveling (fixed media)
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None is Traveling is an electroacoustic work inspired by four haiku, each by a different Japanese poet. Each of the haiku reflects on travel and/or place, and in this piece, the listener is invited to wander through a series of real, unreal and musical spaces.
Click here for haiku text |
The Point (fixed media)
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Text:
What’s the point? I am so tired and I have been drinking a lot. I watched a movie a little while ago. Now I am trying to make some music, but I have no idea what I am doing. For some reason I thought that it would be a good idea to write something in a text editing program and then record it being spoken by a computer voice. Then, I thought that if I superimposed this recording on top of a background texture of some sort, the things that I typed into the text editing program would be elevated and would become meaningful and beautiful. But, as you are listening to the result of this idea right now, you must have concluded that my initial idea was completely misguided. But, something beautiful is taking place although it is not what I intended. This is the point. |
A Nonfunctional Teapot (fixed media)
100 Bones (fixed media)
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“In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.”
- Basho |
Roberto (fixed media)
Acoustic Works
Rocking (for sopranino saxophone and piano)
Four Miniatures (for violin and piano duo)
Five Misappropriations for Solo Piano
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Five Misappropriations for Solo Piano is a collection of five short piano pieces, each of which is an hommage to a different jazz pianist. Each piece extracts one or two elements of the pianist’s style and re-evaluates those elements in terms of my own compositional language. Some of the pieces are relatively faithful to the pianist’s style, while others distance (or misappropriate) the stylistic elements from their original context.
“Rarefactions” takes the characteristic quartal/quintal harmonies typical of McCoy Tyner’s playing and inserts them (awkwardly) into a simple process piece. “.1 Grams” is modeled after the Children’s Songs of Chick Corea, and “Someplace, Prior” is inspired by Keith Jarretts Köln Concert. “Waltz for Bill” is an hommage to Bill Evans and “Post-Modernistic Shout” is a take on James P. Johnson-style stride playing. |