computer music/multimedia – Page 3 – Thomas Clark

Angels of Bright Splendor

2013 . . . . computer music, optional solo treble instrument . . . . duration: 7 minutes

In Zuni origin mythology, according to Wikipedia, thunder sounded, and all The People climbed from darkness, emerging into the daylight world. Seeing the Sun (Awonawilona) and not used to such intense light, they cried. Where their tears fell, sunflowers sprang from the earth.

Angels of Bright Splendor is the second in a series of pieces about angels that began with The Fourth Angel, computer music also with optional instruments, portraying an image from the Biblical book, Revelation. The seven angels in chapter 16 inflict suffering upon humanity: “The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch people with fire.”

March 3, 2021

Nightscape

2021 . . . . digital sound sculpture . . . . 16 minutes

Abridged 9-minute version:

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, I explored images suggested by nocturnal titles (Night Songs, Dark Haven, Somniloquy) and landscape titles (Animated Landscape, Dreamscape, Icescape). Rather than depicting events in narrative form, Nightscape builds a quiet nocturnal soundscape of gentle shadows, silhouettes, and points of light, inviting simple observational or meditative listening.

February 17, 2021

By the Shining Water

2021 . . . . sound sculpture . . . . duration: 7:30

I have often gazed at beautiful bodies of water, especially Lake Michigan and, more recently, the river Vltava in Prague. This sonic sketch combines musical metaphors for several features common to these majestic waters: waves and currents; sun sparkling on the surface; deep hues of the colder water below; twinkling stars above.

Longfellow’s famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha, though it is about Lake Superior, in the first two stanzas vividly verbalizes some of these images:

“By the shining Big-Sea-Water”

“Bright above him shone the heavens, Level spread the lake before him”

“Sparkling, flashing in the sunshine”

“Motionless beneath the water.”

January 24, 2021

A Peaceful Place

Digital sound sculpture 2019 duration: 5:16

The title, from the poem “The Murder of Lidice” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, is an expression of the feeling evoked by the verdant valley below the Lidice Memorial. Though horrible tragedy struck this place on 10 June 1942, now the sloping lawn and babbling creek are a safe haven to peaceful spirits.

July 1, 2019

SUSPIRA

Canonic meditation on the Salve Regina chant 2017 computer music duration 5:30

June 21, 2019

Carte du Ciel

2019 digitally synthesized sound sculpture duration: 8 minutes

Carte du Ciel was an ambitious second phase of an international star-mapping project initiated in 1887 by Paris Observatory director Amédée Mouchez. A new photographic process revolutionizing the gathering of telescope images inspired the first phase, the Astrographic Catalogue of a dense, whole-sky array of star positions. Carte du Ciel, never completed after 70 years, used the Catalogue as a reference system for a complex survey of the vast field of even fainter images.

In the music, ghostly wisps of sound are punctuated by brighter bursts, clustered in a natural, not-quite randomly dispersed texture.

May 19, 2019