October 5th

Written in 2016 for solo crotales (5 minutes)

This piece is more of an essay and an experiment in form. Before writing the piece, I was interested in how painters can create motion with radiating lines centered around a focal-point. Investigating these properties in classics like Delacriox’s La Liberté guidant le peuple and modern works like Michelle Grabner’s Untitled (2010)- pictured in the thumbnail.

October 5th is composed with a bright focal-point at the center of the piece with radiating material coming from the peripheries. The piece begins quickly and highly energetic with muffled, mole-skin wrapped clothes hangers. Gradually slowing down while becoming brighter as the player switches to brass mallets. Keeping with the unifying technique in painting, all of the pitches are related to each other by set relationships with the ‘prime’ being the focal-point.

I don't really remember the writing process for this piece- other than coming up with sets and developing them out so they all relate back into each other within the individual subsections of the piece. The first iteration of this piece was extremely “complex” in it's rhythmic notation- I’m pretty sure I was reading Lois Fitch’s book on Brian Ferneyhough at the time, and I was interested in at least superficially replicating some of the aesthetic ideas from his work, Evan Johnson's work, and a little bit of Bryn Harrison’s. I remember for sure that the first edition of this piece was nearly impossible to read, and after a really informative and engaging conversation with Nick Fox, I rewrote the whole thing into the score that you see now. To be completely honest, I’m not clever enough to come up with “complex” rhythms, and I wasn’t mature enough to get what Ferneyhough and Johnson were/are doing in their work, but I do quite like my piece and think that the end results work well- regardless of the (rather loose) way I got to them.

This was one the pieces on the 2017 New Music Gathering with the fantastic Mr. Nick Fox performing. Image: Michelle Grabner, Untitled (2010).

As I said in my notes for November 12, 2014, because I get asked a whole bunch: the date doesn’t mean anything. It is neither the start date nor the completion date of the piece. Rather, it is the date that I decided it was time to pick a title for the piece. I don’t feel like I have a particular talent for picking titles, so I went through a phase of titles that are just dates- a few of them have stuck around: this one, November, and March 8th for solo piano (2018). The number of “date pieces” used to be rather substantial but I have withdrawn most of them, and a number of other pieces that began with a dated title but were completed with something better.