Below is information and some recordings for some "concert pieces." Not included here are fiddle tunes for Trollstilt and QQQ, electronic improvisations with interface, see those sites separately....

--Silicon/Carbon: an anti-Concerto Grosso, for orchestra and laptop anti-concertino. Info coming soon, review here. See some videos made by Jeremy Robins about the piece.
--The Telephone Game: Oil/Water/Ether, for PLOrk.
--Lasso and Corral: Variations on an Ill-Formed Meter, for violin, hardanger fiddle, bass clarinet, piano, and audiovisual clicktrack.
--Triptick for piano trio
--Scales and Metronomes for solo cello
--Five (and-a-half) Gardens for So Percussion, Trollstilt, spoken word, and animated paintings
--Pieces for PLOrk, works in progress for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra
--Traps Relaxed, for strings, percussion and electronics
--Transparent Body, for the Terrain Dance Company, electric violin/laptop
--BoSSA Music, music with the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array
--efiddle tunes (tunes i've written for 6-string electric violin)
--A Cappella, for eight cellos
--Traps, for string quartet and electric violin/laptop
--Counterfeit Curio, for flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, electric violin/laptop, cello, piano, percussion
--Three Pieces (Ricercar, Fire Song, and Jack's Polka) for Hardanger Fiddle and Orchestra
--Still; for violin, electric violin/laptop, and cello
--Roulette; for orchestra
--Machine Language; for violin, electric violin, cello, and percussion
--Study II: In Grain and Shadow; for electric violin/laptop
--Spring Rhythm; for string quartet
--Waltz; a sonic scene

all recordings and scores ©2008 by Many Arrows Music

Lasso and Corral: Variations on an Ill-Formed Meter

for violin, hardanger fiddle, bass clarinet, piano, and audio-visual click-track

~13 minutes

In the study of musical scales and meters, the notion of well-formedness usually manifests itself as a set of specific constraints. For instance, one common constraint is maximal evenness; in the case of a well-formed diatonic scale, the seven notes will be distributed as evenly as possible across the twelve half-steps that divide the octave. Similarly, the beats that define a meter will be spread out as evenly as possible across the smallest pulse that evenly divides the measure. Scales and meters that satisfy these constraints are deemed "well-formed" (see Justin London's work for further information about this concept with regards to meter)

In this context, there were several starting points for this piece. The first is the Norwegian telespringar, a dance that has a decidedly unusual meter; each of the three beats are of significantly different lengths and it is impossible to evenly subdivide the meter—it feels as if time has been warped. Another starting point is the North Indian dhamar tala (5+2+3+4), and while the metric theory has a way for explaining such uneven divisions, its asymmetries are still somewhat unsettling.

Two particular experiences with metronomes also provided some initial inspiration for this piece. The first came years ago while I was practicing rapid spiccato with a metronome, gradually increasing the tempo of the metronome while endeavoring to keep the bow strokes even. I was struck by how my sense of time changed whenever I stopped bowing — the metronome seemed to speed up! It was as if time slowed while I was paying such close attention to playing rapidly, and then resumed its normal rate when I stopped. This experience was clear as day and reproducible; if somehow we could quantify our cognitive sense of time’s speed, I am sure this would be measurable.

The second experience came during rehearsals of another piece of mine (“Matisse’s Garden Lesson,” from Five (and-a-half) Gardens) which features an old-style mechanical metronome tick-tocking away on top of a toy-piano. During the rehearsal, it became clear that the metronome was malfunctional and a bit asymmetrical; one beat (with the ticker moving from left to right) was a bit longer than the other. Remarkably, we adjusted to this asymmetry and became accustomed to this lopsided quality.

Variations on an Ill-Formed Meter uses an audio-visual laptop-based click-track to explore one particular metric structure. The click-track, which is audible to the audience (no headphones), reveals different aspects of the meter to each player independently and changes over the course of the piece, sometimes from bar to bar (each player follows their own laptop’s click, and the four laptops are networked synchronized). It begins in a somewhat simple 7, and remains in 7 throughout, but the nature of the 7 changes dramatically, even while the overall tempo remains constant. The players can see their click-track via an on-screen rotating phasor which helps coordinate the players the way a conductor might, keeping the orientation of the meter transparent. Naturally (or unnaturally), this click-track is no ordinary click-track, and at times the underlying pulses speed up and slow down, but in highly consistent, programmed and learnable ways. It also is a pitched click-track, providing a changing harmonic backdrop for each variation.

Of course, there are many other aspects to this work and in particular I am inspired by the awesome and wonderful Scandinavian fiddle bands JPP, Frigg, Våsen, and others; in a way, I think of the click-track as a lasso used in a valiant attempt to corral an out-of-control fiddle band. I am also naturally inspired by the mechanical rhythmic explorations of Nancarrow. Finally, the harmonic material for this piece is largely driven by the possibilities of an unusual tuning (AEAC#), itself asymmetrical and seemingly ill-formed, for the Hardanger fiddle.

Variations was composed for Todd Reynolds, Ken Thompson, Kathy Supove and me for the New Interfaces for Musical Expression festival in NYC 2007. Subsequent performances at Banglewood Mass-Moca and ICMC in Copenhagen with the Finnish group Uusinta.

Score
mp3 (coming later...)
click-track software (using the Cyclotron)

Triptick:

for piano trio
(composed for the Society for New Music)
~22 minutes

in three parts, to be performed in any order, combination, or individually.

"verbing weirds language." Calvin.

In my very first composition class when I was 22 (I got a late start), one of my peers argued passionately that a good piece will have all its materials in the opening moments and that its trajectory will be predetermined from this moment on. Beginner that I was, I was impressed if not convinced, and today I find it hilarious. The three “variations on a piece” that make up Triptick all begin identically and then diverge, introducing new material as needed. Another motivation for this design are words that have multiple seemingly unrelated meanings: Foil, Clock, Stretch, Keen, Hide, Trip, Tick, etc.... (try thinking of these when falling asleep). Is it possible for music to function analogously? (yes). In each of these pieces, I had a pair of such words in mind and allowed their meanings to inspire my compositional process, sometimes directly, as with “stretch,” which directly motivated both the warped meters and stretched chord progressions (where a stack of minor-9ths is gradually stretched to a stack of major-9ths, for instance). A third inspiration for composing a “variation in pieces” is the work of many painters (my mother included) who will paint a series based on a single subject; why choose one? Finally, I have an abstract feeling that somehow this piece is indebted to Schubert’s Piano Sonata in Bb; not sure why.

Against my better judgement, i am putting up mockups that i've made of these piece with me playing all the parts. sloppy, out of tune, etc..., but what the heck:

—Left (Foil/Clock): mp3-mockup/score
—Center (Stretch/Steel): mp3-mockup/score
—Right (Keen/Hide): mp3-mockup/score

premiered in Syracuse on 11/17/2007; i don't have the recording yet.

Scales and Metronomes:

for solo cello
(composed for Florent Renard-Payen)
~18 minutes

Etudes can be merciless, driving the lonely student into unstable psychological states. There is a wonderfully ugly painting by Matisse of a boy practicing piano; a metronome lurks behind the music stand and a statuesque, didactic figure looms behind the boy. Between a rock and a hard place. While these four pieces are not literally etudes, they do obsess at times on scales, particular textures and techniques, and the relationship a hard-working student might have with a metronome (in this case, the sometimes-possessed metronome inhabits the cellist's feet). But, unlike a set of etudes, the intent here is not to provide a weight for a student to lift in an effort to build their technical muscles. Rather, my interest is in the extreme psychological states. This is not to say that I hope to put Florent or any other cellist between a rock and a hard place, but I do hope that these pieces invite a kind of practice where one, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, can be lost from the world for a while and not sure of returning quite the same.

music: score; parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 (can be printed on 11x17, cut and fit back-to-back on three pages). mp3s coming eventually.

Florent has performed the work several times (and survived!). I am greatly indebted to Florent for inspiring this piece and also for his careful attention to it; most of the bowings and articulations are due to his suggestions.

Five (and-a-half) Gardens:

... is an hour-long performance piece combining animated paintings, spoken word, and electronic chamber music performed by the groups Trollstilt and So Percussion.

The animated paintings, by Judy Trueman, are framed by a whimsical creative filter where older works of art (pieces by Matisse, Agnes Martin, and others) are re-imagined as gardens, and then abstractly painted and animated.

Music by Dan Trueman is performed with a "garden of instruments," including amplified tubes (the eToobs, reaching 10 feet in length!), terracotta pots, buckets of water, toy pianos, and a big blue wheelbarrow. A laptop is used to process these instruments and "paint" unusual sonic textures on a set of hemispherical speakers distributed throughout the ensemble.

Poems by Jennifer Trueman, inspired by the writings and quotations of these same artists, emerge from the "garden" as well, performed by J. Trueman and Rinde Eckert.

Finally, in some performances, the gardens are explored by Tara, the performance weaver created by Tomie Hahn and Curtis Bahn.

A CD/DVD (with iPod_video and WM files) of Five (and-a-half) Gardens will be released by Shhh Productions in March 2008.

here's the score.

Pieces for PLOrk

I've been composing a bunch of pieces for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. These are all works in progress, as PLOrk itself is a work in progress:

--The PLOrk Drones
This piece is a quasi-improvisation based on Risset drones. The plorkestra improvises elements within a group texture, based on test suggestions and parameter shifts from the conductor. I have since reworked this piece to use the builtin accelerometer on the new mac laptops (the SMS system) so the laptop itself can be used to control the drones, by tilting in various ways; works well in small numbers as well as large.
listen: download | stream

--The PLOrk Tree
This piece is a quasi-improvisation based on a network tree. Locked to a common pulse, the plork members control a group texture by inheriting information from a network neighbor, and then making slight modifications to that information, which includes pitches, timbres, and text messages, which are then all sent on to another network neighbor, eventually feeding back through the tree. Ripples of data are sent through the network by the conductor, who defines the basic structure of the texture, but only has marginal control, given the subversive nature of most plorkers.
listen: download | stream

Traps Relaxed:

for strings, percussion, and electronics
(composed for the American Composers Orchestra)

Traps Relaxed is an expanded version of Traps, which I composed for string quartet and electric violin/laptop in March 2003, as the 2nd Gulf War began. Traps Relaxed, composed during the run-up to the elections of 2004, follows a similar process as did Traps, so I’ll begin by including some notes from the original Traps:

“ While I don’t usually get technical in program notes, but here goes… Traps is a delicate exploration of a simple process I call “traps.” A trap is a way of forcing whatever note I play to be transposed to a single pitch (or set of pitches); while I play, the computer remembers that last couple seconds of what I have played and then, depending on the note that I play, transposes it’s memory to the “trap” pitch. So, for instance, when the trap is a high F, if I play an A below that, the “trap” will, some short time later, transpose my remembered A up a minor-sixth, so it sounds a high-F. The only “problem” is that sometimes the trap’s memory might be long enough to remember other pitches I had played prior to the A, say, a low open D-string, so that D will also get transposed up a minor-sixth, to B-flat, yielding a not-quite-simultaneous sonority D–B-flat–A–F. This is precisely how Traps begins, and it continues slowly through a series of ascending traps, some of which are single notes, others two-note traps.”

Transparent Body:

Transparent Body was composed for and with the Terrain Dance Company (a duo for Christopher Williams and Rebecca Lazier) and premiered at Danspace in New York City in September 2004. Transparent Body was featured at the International Computer Music Conference in the Fall of 2006 in New Orleans.

Composition of Transparent Body was supported in part by a grant from the New Jersey Council on the Arts.

--Watch a video of a revised version of Transparent Body. Video quality is poor, but you get the idea.
--Watch a video of the premiere of Transparent Body. Much better video quality, but a bit long winded....

see the main BoSSA site for more information about this instrument.

solo pieces:
--watch Quicktime video of the Lobster Quadrille, in a recent performance.
--Vocalise, a tune for BoSSA, where my own voice gets processed through BoSSA.

duos and more:
here are several versions of Tetha, where i process another musician with BoSSA:
--with shakuhachi'ist Tomie Hahn (small, large).
--with the accordianist Alan Bern (mp3)
--with the cellist Vic Rawlings (mov)
--with Cor Fuhler and Alan Tormey (mp3)
--with the saxophonist John Butcher, Scott Smallwood, and Alan Tormey (mp3)

A Cappella:

for eight cellos

A Cappella is a short, intimate piece, probably best heard from within the ensemble, where the subtle details of each instrument are transparent, summing up to a meditative, immersive whole. Inspired both by the sheer beauty of the sound of a cappella vocal ensembles (which is surely exceeded by the sheer beauty of eight cellos!) and by the abstract textures of some electronic music, A Cappella begins where an earlier piece of mine, Counterfeit Curio, finishes, belaboring possibilities that were at first inaccessible. A Cappella was composed for the Tarab Cello Ensemble in January 2003.

On the Bridge Records release, Machine Language. Clips are at iTunes and elsewhere.

Traps:

for string quartet and electric violin/laptop

I don’t usually get technical in program notes, but here goes… Traps is a delicate exploration of a simple process I call “traps.” A trap is a way of forcing whatever note I play to be transposed to a single pitch (or set of pitches); while I play, the computer remembers that last couple seconds of what I have played and then, depending on the note that I play, transposes it’s memory to the “trap” pitch. So, for instance, when the trap is a high F, if I play an A below that, the “trap” will, some short time later, transpose my remembered A up a minor-sixth, so it sounds a high-F. The only “problem” is that sometimes the trap’s memory might be long enough to remember other pitches I had played prior to the A, say, a low open D-string, so that D will also get transposed up a minor-sixth, to B-flat, yielding a not-quite-simultaneous sonority D–B-flat–A–F. This is precisely how Traps begins, and it continues slowly through a series of ascending traps, some of which are single notes, others two-note traps.

Traps was written in the opening days of the 2nd Gulf War; March 2003. Shocked and awed, indeed. Traps was premiered in the Fall of 2003 with the Brentano String Quartet and recorded with the Daedalus String Quartet.

On the Bridge Records release, Machine Language. Clips are at iTunes and elsewhere.

for flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, cello, electric violin/laptop, piano, percussion

We discover a very old, noisy recording of an unfamiliar tune, a tune that seems archaic, belonging to a distant culture. We listen, analyze, dissect. We use it, appropriate it, and create a new piece that is meant to exhalt it. Our new piece begins with the old recording, and then abstracts it, taking it elsewhere, until we discover our own music in the noise of the old recording.

Well, the story of Counterfeit Curio is quite the opposite. The “old, noisy recording,” which ends the piece, is in fact a fake, created in the waning months of 2002, and the tune it holds is in fact original, new, and grows out of the music that precedes it. Rather than serving as a model, a trove of material to be used as a starting point, the tune is a postlude, an incomplete summary of its inspiration. The story of Counterfeit Curio is then not in discovering the history of the original tune, attempting to verify its authenticity, but in discovering the tune itself.

Counterfeit Curio, composed in the Fall of 2002, was commissioned by the Society for New Music with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

On the Bridge Records release, Machine Language. Clips are at iTunes and elsewhere.

Tunes for 6-string Electric Fiddle

mp3s of a growing set of tunes for my 6-string efiddle, using varying scordatura:

--Sprung (transcription)
--Wallflower (transcription)
--Dervish (transcription)
--Duncan (transcription)
--Battooota (transcription)
--Four (transcription)

(transcriptions coming sorta soon, maybe....)

*see also the Trollstilt page for other efiddle tunes with guitar

**see also also In Grain and Shadow, for electric violin and laptop

***see also also also Nancy Zeltsman's arrangment of Wallflower for marimba in her new book.

for hardanger fiddle and orchestra

I have always loved the sound of the Hardanger fiddle. With its resonating strings and sparkling timbre, the instrument grabbed my ears when I first heard it some 10 years ago and never let go. The traditional music for Hardanger fiddle (or hardingfele) is tuneful, yet hard to whistle; rhythmic, yet hard to dance to; complex, yet seemingly transparent. These three pieces aspire to be the same, and to celebrate the beauty of the hardingfele. While inspired by (and indebted to) the traditional music of Norway, this music is its own, and reflects my personal experiences with a wide range of music.

Ricercar, like some of the Renaissance ricercare, begins as a kind of “searching out,” with the improvisatory sense of a prelude, and later features layers of rich counterpoint, with many lines moving against one another; the hardingfele pilots throughout, never having a moment of rest, and is even in control when the full orchestra is at work, overwhelming the fiddle. I first composed Ricercar with Monica Mugan, of my duo “Trollstilt,” and I am indebted to her for its spirit.

Fire Song is a simple tune that reaches upwards, gently, and repeats itself in various combinations and harmonizations. This short song began as a piece for solo violin, was later expanded for string quartet, and finds itself now using the full string sections of the orchestra—in the past, I have been asked to make the piece bigger, longer, more ambitious, but to me its magic lies in its restraint; making it bigger only makes it weaker. Perhaps in the future another version of the tune will reveal itself.

For much of its history, the hardingfele was unwelcome in the church, in large part due to associations with the Devil. In Jack’s Polka, the devilish side of the instrument comes forth, associated with an Irish myth—the Jack-‘o-Lantern, and the story of Jack, who nearly succeeded in evading the devil—and the Polish-American Polka, twisted beyond recognition. Lawrence Welk, beware!

Three Pieces, composed for Andrea Een and the St. Olaf Orchestra, was commissioned and underwritten by the American Composers Forum, with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.

scores for: Ricercar, Fire Song, Jack's Polka

1. Ricercar
2. Fire Song
3. Jack's Polka

--Dan Trueman, hardanger fiddle
--Princeton University Orchestra, conducted by Michael Pratt

for violin, electric violin/laptop/spherical speakers, and cello

Still was composed for the American Composers Orchestra OrchestraTech Festival in 2001. Still (which originally had the awkward and irritating title, dis-(re)locations) was completed on September 11, 2001—I was holding the score in my hands as the news of that day came in—and premiered just a dozen blocks north of the WTC site the following month; I went as close to the site as I could that evening and watched the empty trucks move in and the overloaded trucks move out. While not normally prone to paranormal or metaphysical thinking, I found it disconcertingly eerie that the kinds of musical ideas I was working with in the piece—continuity vs. discontinuity; slowly descending, vanishing gestures; recollection; disintegration; senses of place—were so powerfully—indeed overwhelmingly—at work during that day, and yet the piece had been completed earlier, without any knowledge of what was to come.

On the Bridge Records release, Machine Language. Clips are at iTunes and elsewhere.

Webcast of the premiere at the Knitting Factory beginning on 11/21 at newmusicbox.org

From the premiere at the Knitting Factory, 10/13/01:

for orchestra

Roulette began as a duo of the same name for Hardanger fiddle and guitar (my duo Trollstilt, with guitarist Monica Mugan). Much of the piece is inspired by both the music and design of the hardingfele (Hardanger fiddle), an old traditional instrument from Norway. The hardingfele has a flat bridge which encourages a forceful playing style of primarily double-stops (two notes at a time). Running through this bridge and underneath the fingerboard are a set of five resonating strings that sing along with the double-stops, providing a continuous harmonic glow that shifts gently with the tonality of the tunes. In a general sense, this design served as a metaphor for the construction of Roulette; gentle counterpoint in the winds is echoed quietly in the strings, and vigorous "fiddle" tunes are in turn reinforced by the winds. Unlike the hardingfele, however, the "understrings" (resonating strings) in Roulette can take the leading role, driving the music forward.

The traditional dance music of the hardingfele features repetitions and variations of short pseudo-melodic loops. Because of the double-stopped texture, the tunes that the fiddlers play (often inspired by cow calls and hollers) become obscured, providing a "sense" of tunefulness while frustrating efforts to isolate and sing the tunes. These "pseudo-tunes" are further obfuscated with lopsided rhythms and ornamentation, which makes it all the more frustrating to the outsider when they see the fiddler tapping along with an even beat that is seemingly unrelated to the tune. Similarly, in Roulette, tunes of various lengths are repeated and varied, all over a continuous complex of "footstomps" in the percussion. Ultimately, Roulette is about a kind of dance music and Roulette's orchestra a hardingfele on steroids.

score

for violin, electric violin, cello and percussion

In the study of genetic algorithms, computer scientists create virtual species with virtual genetic codes and allow for spontaneous mutations within some kind of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" context. These species reproduce and evolve, doing in minutes what has taken many millions of years for "real" creatures to do, often resulting in an unexpected beast who survives alone, victorious. In one particular case, the test for survival was a wrestling match; generation after generation, virtual wrestlers would tangle, mutate, and (if they survived) reproduce, their bodies evolving into highly optimized wrestling machines. One notably successful (and amusing) species that emerged was an enormously tall, wide and skinny creature that simply fell flat on top of its opponent, smothering it.

On the Bridge Records release, Machine Language. Clips are at iTunes and elsewhere.

for electric violin and granulizer

Study II: "in grain and shadow" is from a series of pieces I have been composing that explore various potentials of my instruments, including the Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array and the electric violin. Using a simple granulizing delay-line algorithm (the munger~, which I wrote in C as an external for MAX/MSP, released as part of the PeRColate toolkit), "in grain and shadow" makes a lot from little, taking soft sustained notes and building fluctuating, harmonic textures. In addition to the familiar expressive dimensions of the violin, a foot-pedal is used to "play" the density and character of the clouds of grains that shadow the violin's sound, drawing them in tight around the violin, and then releasing them, obscuring the source completely; it is a song of slow inhales and slower exhales.

"in grain and shadow" is included on a CD, titled "./swank," by my duo interface (with Curtis Bahn). "./swank" has eight tracks of improvised electro-acoustic music recorded live at Mobius Art Space in Boston (Perry Cook joins us on his sensor-digeridoo, the DigitalDoo, for one track) and was released by c74 Records (owned by Cycling74, makers of Max/MSP) in 2000.

mp3 and score

for string quartet

Spring Rhythm was inspired by two disparate sources: the Medieval Motet and the famous "spatter" paintings of Jackson Pollock. The textures of Pollock's paintings seem highly musical to me; it is not hard to imagine the beautiful musical textures we might create if we were to treat his paintings as "scores." I am impressed by the physicality of his paintings; they convey a sense of gravity and effort. In constructing the textures of Spring Rhythm, I imagined how Pollock must have felt working on, for instance, Autumn Rhythm (after which my piece is named). After "spattering" an initial texture, I iterated it, and with each iteration, I would subtract one or more of the parts, replacing them with new parts and attempting to do alone what generations of Medieval composers might have done with a single motet. Over the course of many iterations, the original texture (or Motet) gradually changed into something entirely different--the sense of the original, however, always remained, if becoming ever more distant...

On the Bridge Records release, Machine Language. Clips are at iTunes and elsewhere.

a sonic scene

I had a scene in mind when putting together Waltz, a scene involving a one-sided conversation, an open window, music from afar, and a listener drifting between the day and day-dreams. I find it fascinating how we can listen through recordings to create virtual worlds and extreme psychological spaces. Waltz features real-world sounds, a 1917 recording of a Brahms Waltz (so noisy that it is remarkable that we can listen through it and hear anything at all), Monica Mugan's voice, and layer upon layer of hyper-processed electric violin. 

Listen (ca. 12 minutes): mp3