2026 . . . multimedia sound painting . . . 5 minutes
Ave Regina Caelorum (Latin for “Heaven”) — one of the most beautiful 13th-century Gregorian chants classified as Marian antiphons. In this 21st-century setting, isolated phrases of the chant represent recollection of distant memories, each leaving a contemplative sonic residue.
2022 . . . wind sextet . . . 6 minutes
On fall Saturdays driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, an hour from our Lewisville NC home, autumn’s golden colors were spectacular. Stopping at an overlook around sunset in 2007, I took a set of 12 photos of distant ridges as they faded into dusk. Fifteen years later, in 2022, the visual and sonic impressions of serene majesty still reverberated in my memory. I composed this sextet, inspired by the sloping shapes and cool colors of those distant views atop the Blue Ridge Mountains.
View a YouTube podcast of the music and images together.
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2026 . . . abstract serial music and surreal digital images . . . 13 minutes
While the Belgian Magritte began making surrealist art in 1920s Paris, the Russian Kandinsky was at the Bauhaus in Weimar making abstract art. In 1923 Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg unveiled his newly developed “method of composing with twelve tones related only with one another.” This serial 12-tone row technique became a prevalent compositional method through the middle of the 20th century.
A hundred years later, IMAGINED WORLDS synthesizes music from VIENNESE SKETCHES, which draws on material from my earliest 12-tone work in 1975 through 2023.
The five rows generating each of the tableaux are distinct but subtle variants of each other.
Standard Pitch Class numbers (C=0) are identified.
Like light, music can radiate in intensity, change color, evolve.
Each YouTube episode presents a 21st-century composition in synthesized sound exploring a luminous possibility — reflection, refraction, diffusion, sunlight, starlight, color spectrum . . . even light disappearing into a black hole.
A thousand years ago, monks sang plainchant melodies in stone monasteries. Today, composers are still weaving these ancient songs into the lyrical fabric of their art.
Each piece by composer Thomas Clark in this YouTube podcast weaves a 21st-century fabric from one ancient plainchant thread.
Musical explorations of the cosmos — a series of multimedia compositions, each portraying one intriguing aspect of astronomy. Complex patterns of experimental harmony are synthesized in electronic sound and juxtaposed with imagined images.
YouTube podcast by composer/professor Thomas Clark
This YouTube podcast by composer/professor Thomas Clark brings them to time-life with many eclectic compositional styles of contemporary art music. Interesting number patterns are realized as intriguing sound colors, chords, melodic lines, even as the ancient musical technique of canons, over a kinetic visual background of my semi-abstract art images.
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 