Category: computer music/multimedia

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • SUSPIRA

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

  • Carte du Ciel

    sky map

    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.

  • DARK HAVEN

    1981     recorded Synclavier-generated sounds       duration: 5:15

  • Lunar Litany

    2018      digital synthesis      duration 6:40

  • Rainbow Rising

    Rainbow Rising

    computer music      2016      duration: 4:38      San Marcos, Texas

    Live performance February 6, 2018, at Texas State University Performing Arts Center:

    Texas State cello students Boris Chalakov, Joshua Adams, Terri Boutte, Simon Reid, Anna Trevino, Gabriel Vazquez

  • Falling Water

    Falling Water

    computer music      2016      duration: 6:30      San Marcos, Texas

    generated from recordings of North Carolina waterfalls

  • Dark Haven

    Dark Haven

    Synclavier-generated sounds     duration: 5:15      1981      Denton, TX

  • CELESTIAL CEREMONIES

    electronic music      total duration: 12 minutes      1976 rev. 2017      Ann Arbor, MI and San Marcos, TX

    I. Dark Energy

    II. Black Hole

    III. Gravitation

    IV. Luminescence