PROGRAM

Moondog, arr. Thierauf: To A Sea Horse
James Tenney: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion
Natacha Diels: watermusic
James Diaz: total internal reflections
Adam Vidiksis: Orbital Mechanics
Jacob Druckman: Reflections on the Nature of Water
     I. Crystalline
     II. Fleet
     III. Tranquil
     IV. Gently Swelling
     V. Profound
     VI. Relentless

Andy Thierauf: Recency Bias


PROGRAM NOTES

To a Sea Horse, by Louis Hardin a.k.a. Moondog, is one of many piano works by the prolific yet relatively unknown composer. For 30 years, from the early 1940s to the early 1970s, Moondog lived in New York City, where he became a well-known street performer known, thanks to his Nordic garb, as "the Viking of Sixth Avenue." During this time he recorded several albums and won the respect of many important musicians, including Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Parker (for whom he wrote the piece "Bird's Lament"), and Philip Glass (with whom he briefly shared an apartment). From 1974 until his death in 1999, Moondog lived primarily in Germany, where he enjoyed the most stable and productive creative period of his life. Celebrated for his diverse body of work that combines-- among other influences-- the rhythmic energy of jazz, the ritualistic intensity of Native American tribal music, and classical principles of counterpoint, Moondog's music is at once uncategorizable and instantly identifiable. 

In the late ‘60s, James Tenney began writing what he called Postal Pieces, scores written on postcards which he sent to fellow composers and performers. The final postal piece was for percussionist John Bergamo titled Having Never Written a Note for Percussion. The score is simply a whole note with fermata with the instructions (very long) and a crescendo and decrescendo. Other works in the collection include Swell Piece, a text score for any instruments, Beast, written on graph paper for double bass, and A Rose is a Rose is a Round, a vocal piece written in two concentric circular staves.
In the spirit of these Postal Pieces, the Arcana New Music Ensemble commissioned nine postal pieces from Philadelphia-based composers. The result was a range of works from traditionally notated pieces to entirely graphic works, among these are Natacha Diels’s watermusic, James Diaz’s total internal reflections, and Adam Vidiksis’s Orbital Mechanics. 
Of the more traditionally notated works, total internal reflections for bowed vibraphone employs sticky tack to slightly detune several of the bars in conjunction with slight manipulations of the motor to create audible beating patterns that gradually change over the course of the piece. 
Diels’s watermusic asks the performer to create a device that drips water as a sort of metronome then find objects of sonorous, bell-like, and noisy qualities to accompany the dripping water. The score is a combination of graphic, text, and traditionally notated music.
Entirely graphic, Vidiksis’s Orbital Mechanics, requires the performer to realize hand-drawn orbital figures musically. In this performance, the idea of orbiting inspired a series of feedback loops using transducers, bass drums, pendulum-like microphones, and a prepared piano. 


Written for William Moersch in 1986, Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water is a pillar of marimba repertoire. The six movement work takes inspiration from water in its many states, the music of Debussy and Stravinsky, and a nod towards Japanese woodblock printing. Alternating between aleatoric and rhythmic, each movement paints a unique scene exploring the many facets of water from ice crystals and deep, still lakes to swift rivers and undulating oceans.

Recency Bias is an electroacoustic work that combines audio processing elements of Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room… and compositional elements of Marta Ptaszynska’s Space Model. Lucier’s work is a meta-composition in that the spoken part is a description of the audio process that ultimately creates the work: 
“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” 
Ptaszynska’s work employs three discrete percussion setups placed across the stage, the first played live, the second played live with a pre-recorded track of the first, and the third played with the recordings of the first and second. In Recency Bias, the performer moves from instrument to instrument, playing and simultaneously recording the sounds along with the previous iteration much like a looper pedal. However, instead of each playback sounding exactly the same, the microphones pick up the recorded audio as well as the room resonance, blurring the original recording.