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May 2017 Salon previews

Patrick O’Keefe

Morning Stroll, a mostly tonal almost-rondo for saxophone quartet

There is an emphasis on quartal intervals and harmonies, some indeterminate and/or poly-tonality, etc., but common practice has not been left very far behind. All in all, it’s pretty typical of my music.

It’s not really programmatic, but you can picture someone with a very short attention span going for a walk—being distracted by anything and everything seen on the walk.

The work will be performed by the Emerald City Saxophone Quartet: Barbara Hubers-Drake, soprano; Molly Pond, alto; Harold Rosenkrans, tenor; Jim Glass, baritone

A computer generated version of this piece, along with other pieces of mine, are on Soundcloud.

Jeremiah Lawson

Guitar Sonata in A major

In 2015 I composed a set of guitar duets I called the Zombie Sonata Rags, where I transformed my favorite themes from the guitar sonatas of Carulli, Diabelli, Giuliani, Matiegka and Sor into the core of rags. Naturally if sonata themes can be transformed into ragtime why shouldn’t ragtime translate into sonata forms? So I’ve been exploring how ragtime can be explored in terms of the developmental procedures and syntax of sonata forms. My recently finished Guitar Sonata in A major is a tribute to the great ragtime composer Scott Joplin.

John Kammerer and Rebekah Ko

new music for marimba + electronics

The piece has at this point evolved to include some percussion elements as well as marimba. The electronics used are sourced largely from vocal samples that are then chopped, pitched and stretched. It is percussive in nature, emphasizing a back and forth hocket-like relationship between the marimba and the electronics, with each part filling in gaps and creating pointillistic gestures that run throughout. Extended techniques on the marimba imitate and compliment the electronic sounds.

John Teske

ad;sr (vectorscores)

I’ll be presenting ad;sr, a work originally for string quartet that was algorithmically generated and captured as a static score. I’ve recreated the score as a “vectorscore”, intended to be a full realization of the work—a generated score for any ensemble and any number of instruments.

vectorscores is a series of new works to be viewed and performed via a lightweight website. The works are algorithmically generated so that each score and performance is unique and customized while still being shaped by the composition’s parameters.

View ad;sr on vectorscores.org

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