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September 2017 Salon previews

Cole Bratcher

Transit Maps, fixed media with projection

The series of pieces are called Transit Maps Basically I’m collecting transit maps from around the world and converting them into some form or another of parameters for the music, mostly form and instrumentation.

The two pieces presented on the salon will be “San Francisco BART” and “Copenhagen S-Train”.

soundcloud.com/colebratcher

Blake Degraw

Diler, for strings

One of my favorite ways to produce variation in live performance is through orchestrated failure: providing the musicians with a clearly-defined objective, and then making it as difficult as possible to reach that objective. The music that I personally want to hear lies in the struggle to find, even if the objective is never met. Diler is the latest in my exploration of this concept. A group of violinists and violists is fed a series of wide-ranging pitches through headphones. Each chooses a single string on their instrument and is tasked with matching the reference-pitches, as they hear them, using only that string. Thus all are chasing the same goal, but the odds that they will get there the same way (or at all) are stacked against them. In the process, however, a wide array of chords can be generated. The result is different every time.

soundcloud.com/blake-degraw

Patrick O’Keefe

Sonata for Piano

This is a piece for piano consisting of a recently written “Expression of 2nds and 4ths” followed by Bagatelles 4 & 5. As with my earlier Bagatelles, this is a somewhat tonal work relying on nonstandard harmonic techniques to establish and maintain a tonal coherency.

soundcloud.com/patrick-okeefe-353713672

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