Tuesday Night New Music

Kyle Quarles | Synthetic Piece 2 (quadres 31) (2020) for fixed media

This piece is the second in a series based on quadratic residues of a number. If a perfect square of some integer is congruent to some number n mod p, then we say n is a quadratic residue of p. I first read about these in Richard Courant's "What is Mathematics?", the most engrossing mathematical text I've yet found.

In this piece, the frequencies of the pitches, as well as their envelopes, and significant structural boundaries, are all based on the quadratic residues of 31, and permutations thereof.

The title is somewhat of a misnomer; the piece began as exclusively synthetic, but evolved to include various field recordings and granular synthesis techniques. I imagine this (along with some other things I've written like my harp pieces based on Ockeghem chansons) as serving as an enveloping backdrop to meditation, reading, or exercise.                                               

—Kyle Quarles

Brooks Clarke | The Very Hungry Caterpillar: A Literal Tone Poem with Music (2020)

This is a piece intended to be performed for children using elements of new music, and the text of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", by Eric Carle.

Often when I have been to masterclasses on new music and the choice of text, there is a disdain sometimes for the esoteric and vulgarity that vocalists must sometimes go through.

I wanted to create a piece of music that used the innocence of children’s literature in tandem with the techniques of new music, to enhance the experience of the audience, and bring new music to children in an accessible way.

—Brooks Clarke

Marie Carroll | air chrysalis (2020) for fixed media

Robin Meeker-Cummings | Selvage (2020)

“This process of musicalizing sound allows us to apprehend the pleasure of the matter, forms and temporal progression of the universe of sound. Such a process, however, is hardly natural, and goes against our relationship to the world. For in reality the act of listening tends to contextualize sound. It looks for a cause and an origin.”

—Makis Solomos