So, this semester is coming to its zenith while all the students run around trying to finish everything on time while the professors stare on with disappointed faces when everything shows up a few days late. It is a very busy week, this week, filled with students movies and works and pieces. Most importantly, my piece. There is a premiere of a piece of mine tomorrow night entitled “For Tesla”. The piece is composed for violin, cello, and laptop, and explores our connection with electronics and their importance in our lives. The piece is dedicated to Tesla, a man who made more of our current situation possible more than anyone else. He even had a plan in the works for a sort of wireless worldwide Internet in the early 1900’s. Anyway, if you’re around come check it out.
In terms of pieces I’m working on, I’m still waiting for a friend to create an opera script for me (her writing is worth waiting for). So, in the meantime, I’m starting on my most ambitious project yet. I’m calling it “Music for Five Quartets”. It’s inspired by Radiohead and Ives oddly enough. If you know the two artists, I’m sure you’ve already made the connection: layering. I get bored with pieces with a single layer. This was the idea behind polyphonic music, but that quickly consolidates to a single layer once you study it enough, just a layer that moves in a way to seem like multiple layers. So, I’m going to attempt poly-textural music; music that exists in many different layers and consists of multiple ideas coming together to form a multi-layered idea.
