2025 . . . video art . . . 7 minutes
Video art, quilting together geometric slices of colorful abstract images, kaleidoscopically morphing them into each other over a continuously evolving soundscape adapted and synthesized from the composition, RAINBOW RISING.
2025 . . . piano and electronic music . . . 6:45
The constellation Cassiopeia in the northern sky is named after the vain queen Cassiopeia, mother of Andromeda in Greek mythology. One of 48 constellations listed by the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, its distinctive ‘W‘ shape is formed by five bright stars. Cassiopeia contains some of the most luminous stars known, including three hypergiants. Its brightest star, Cassiopeia A (“Schedar”), is a supernova remnant and bright radio source.
The music arose from tracing a map of its brightest points of light. The coordinates of these points on a two-dimensional graph were converted into time and pitch patterns articulating a grand sonority. The graph can be rotated, kaleidoscopically transforming the pattern into similar sonorities.
The same treatment applied to Cassiopeia’s constellation neighbors Perseus and Cepheus builds a denser field of sounds, metaphorically echoing the brilliant star-studded dark sky as seen through a powerful telescope.
2025 . . . synthesized sound montage . . . 7 minutes
Electronic sounds from previous ANGELS pieces (The Fourth Angel, Angels of Bright Splendor) make layered counterpoint for a dark, unearthly montage. Music from another piece, String Theory, originally imagining spinning subatomic energy, provides an ironically human voice, both frantic, engulfed in the threatening sound environment, and soaring hopefully above it.
Global warming is already devastating the earth and all life on it. The Bible’s Revelation 16 tells of seven frightening angels:
“The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire; they were scorched by the fierce heat.”
The other six angels and their bowls wrought plagues of painful sores, bloody seas, bloody rivers, darkness.
“Finally, the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice of doom came out of heaven, saying, ‘IT IS DONE!’ There were noises and thunderings and lightnings; a great earthquake. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.”
Watch a YouTube video with abstract images:
2025 . . . multimedia sound, image, text (12:00)
Musical impressions of dusk, with text and images by the composer. Quoting one mellifluous phrase (boldface below) from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913), the VESPERS text is like a Haiku:
2025 . . . multimedia, computer music and digital images (6:45)
Original music and visual images are assembled in a manner inspired by quilts, layers of fabric in small swatches pieced together. The Amish of Lancaster County Pennsylvania were known especially for quilts of contrasting colors of repeating geometric shapes.
In MONTAGE, layering is applied to both synthesized musical textures and to digitally enhanced images from my Nikon Z50 (NIKKOR 16-50 lens). Three musical textures — flutters, swelling chords, and an ancient-style canon — are quilted onto an unchanging broad harmonic background. They overlay each other in four different combinations.
2025 . . . musical impressions of dusk (12:00)
The video version of VESPERS reveals a Haiku-like text, quoting one melliflous phrase from Robert Frost’s “Waiting Afield at Dusk” (1913).
View the video on YouTube in
2025 . . . computer music (7:00)
Measuring supernovae, cosmologist Vera Rubin hypothesized that 80% of what’s out there in the universe is invisible or otherwise undetectable, mysterious matter and energy of undiscovered nature. Imagined in sound and color, dark-energy music is amorphous in form and time flow. Canonic lines float and interweave, building an evolving fabric of complex, ethereal sonorities.
2025 — digital sound painting (11:00)
Revisiting my 1988 improvisation sketch for the New Music Performance Lab at University of North Texas became a prequel to a recent composition. FARBEN (2025), variations on the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, isolates instrumental colors as “prickly-pear” points of sound separated in time-and-pitch space.
The recomposed 1988 music beginning SPECTRAL LIGHT takes another approach to sound color, layering canonic textures of thicker sonority in a gentle Impressionistic blur, like the brush-blended blur of a Monet painting.
Timbres emerge, echo, and fade in a floating, slow-moving distant landscape of color.
2025 — serene computer music (6:00)
Sonic exploration of cosmic harmony in a quiet, almost timeless star-gazing mood.
The LIGHTFORMS series includes
2025 . . . sound sculpture . . . 10 minutes
This musical material goes all the way back to a solo trombone piece I started writing in 1969. Night Songs, which I premiered in Ann Arbor on bass trombone, exemplifies the dark atonal pitch language I was beginning to explore as a composition student of George Balch Wilson at Michigan.
Its first movement, “Elegy,” is somber in expression and amorphous in rhythm, a feature I use as an example of rhythm “beyond meter” in current writing and talks about Time. The line’s sonorous darkness now becomes a fertile theme for exploratory variations, suggesting the liquid life of mysterious creatures in ocean depths.
As the musical line ascends to a high-register bubbly surface level, it eventually sheds its atonal sharps and flats to become a lighter, diatonic pitch pattern. (Listen carefully at 2:27 and again at 3:40.)
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 