Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

  • Water images

    Gallery of digital art images of waves, waterfalls, ice

  • Fire images

    Gallery of digital art images of sun, moon, flames
    Solar radiation over the Pacific from Coronado Island

  • Air images

    Gallery of digital art images of sky, clouds, fog

  • Earth images

    Gallery of digital art images of rocks, mountains, canyons

  • A New Geography

    four sketches for marimba – for Kari Klier

    2021 . . . . duration: 6:30

    Excerpts from II and IV:

    The title echoes my 1975 piece for piano fancifully titled Geography of the Chronosphere.

    The world is changing, rapidly evolving geopolitically and, from climate change, physically. The tone of the music contemplates these complex changes. To figure out where we’re going as a civilization, we need to rebuild and re-understand our changing “map.” 

    To request performance materials and permission, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

  • Looking for the Rainbow

    2021 . . . . cello quartet or cello choir . . . . duration: 9 minutes

    Written during the COVID pandemic for Karla Hamelin and her Texas State cello students, Looking for the Rainbow expresses both the uncertainty and hopefulness in our collective struggle to survive the storms of disease and violence.

    A prequel to Rainbow Rising (2016), an earlier canonic piece for cellos, Looking for the Rainbow explores a more complex rhythmic counterpoint of darker sonorities, evoking a restless spirit of searching, anticipating.

    (Canon is an ancient compositional technique, a melodic line that while in progress is closely echoed in one or more other “voices” to weave an entire contrapuntal texture out of matching threads.)

    To request performance materials and permission, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

  • Webern Elegy

    Vienna, 15 September 1945 – five miniatures

    2021 . . . . for the Pleasant Street Players — Ian Davidson (oboe), Vanguel Tangarov (clarinet), Ames Asbell (viola) . . . . duration: 5 minutes

    Clarinet shows transposed (not concert) pitches

    I have long admired and been influenced by the music of early 20th-century Austrian composer Anton Webern. Known historically as a member of the Second Viennese School with Alban Berg and mentor Arnold Schoenberg, the three were pioneers of so-called atonal music and 12-tone-row serial harmonic organization. I find the term “atonal” misleading and negative, as their 12-tone processes achieved a new “12-tone tonality” — not simply a rejection of traditional tonal harmony but also striving to create new and more complex tonalities.

    What I admire most about Webern’s mostly-quiet instrumental miniatures (even his Symphonie has only two sparsely-scored movements) is the delicate, crystalline quality of his pitch constellations; and their gently lyric, precious setting into transparent textures, pearl-strings of delicate sound colors ( called Klangfarbenmelodie).

    Webern’s mentor, Schoenberg, as a Jew was compelled to emigrate to the U.S. in 1933 before it was too late. Webern, not Jewish, stayed in Vienna and survived World War II, only to be fatally shot by a U.S. Army soldier during the Allied occupation of Austria.

    Synthetic rendering of sample excerpt from movement II:

    Synthetic rendering of sample excerpt from movement V:

  • Nocturne

    2021 . . . . chamber winds and percussion . . . duration: 11 minutes

    To request performance materials and permission, email the composer, tc24@txstate.edu.

  • LIGHTFORMS 2: Star Spectra

    1993, Borik Press (Raleigh, NC) . . . computer music . . . duration: 7:30

    Three excerpts:

  • PENINSULA

    1984 . . . piano and recorded computer music . . . duration: 8:30 . . . . . . . . . . published by Borik Press (NC)

    Glacially-etched shorelines inspired sonic imagery for a series of pieces culminating in PENINSULA. Mappings of the natural contours of the Leelanau Peninsula provided richly varied patterns as basic coordinate numbers for sculpting sound patterns. The piano explores some of the endless possibilities for articulating a spectrum of sonorities. A surrounding environment of synthetic sounds was made by digitally analyzing timbral qualities of acoustic instruments, mostly with percussive articulations (metaphorically the rocky shore). The timbres were modified and resynthesized into a pointillistic sound texture. The density of the sound events rises and falls in waves according to changing values derived from the basic mappings. Larger confluences of waves are located in time by map points of special significance on the graph.

    The coexistence of piano sonorities and synthetic sounds is a metaphorical meeting of seascape and landscape, both animated in time.

    performance by Clifton Matthews, Winston-Salem NC, February 2007

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