The Archipelago nourishes the process of creative association, orienting through movement, visual gestures, and poetic intention. The 27 “islands” in the score welcome participants from multiple artistic modalities to gather together, embracing states of fluidity, openness and uncertainty in order to find connection and resonance. The piece is inspired by Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s writings about the world as an archipelago— a necessary antidote to the territorial and expansionist legacies of the continental imagination. What emerges when we explore the profound fluidity of the spaces within, between, and around us?
Los Pájaros Hablan: The Birds Speak is a collaborative composition developed in individual and collaborative explorations, ultimately inspired by the natural settings that the performance will inhabit; the sounds of bird calls, water, wind; symbiosis in nature, organisms; and musical structures. In this composition, performers play and respond to the nature around them, and towards the end of the performance, audience members are invited by the performers to join them by whistling, humming, or singing. Los Pájaros Hablan: The Birds Speak is our attempt to celebrate the unceasing song of life.
An invitation addressed to “My dearly beloveds” seeds a first-time collaborative composition. An offering to choose your own adventure, touch your traces, notice your presence, find each other, hear each other be found amidst chaos, beauty, distance.
Elemental is rooted in the four ancient Elements – Earth, Water, Wind and Fire. Each musician assumes the role of an Element. Water players provide flowing melody, Earth players produce solid harmony, Fire players give us flickering rhythms, and Wind players shape the whole by whipping up or calming down tempo and dynamics. Each composer realized these ideas with a different biome in mind – desert (Begay), chaparral (Paul), or forest (Wiprud). The three biomes can be played in any order.
In normal times, we navigate the distances between ourselves and the other through the daily rituals of the life-world. What can start first as a gulf of understanding between oneself and the other becomes bridged through custom and reflexive feedback.
Inspired by a card from a certain ubiquitous fantasy card game, Terramorphic Expanse is a modular open-score roadmap through diverging and gathering sonic ideas. Music cells represent the five elemental biomes – plains, islands, swamp, mountain, and forest – and performers choose their own paths and pacing through the expanse, resulting in a continuously evolving texture, different every time, that evokes a vast fantasy biome in a state of magical flux.
We believe playing music with others is a ritual where the perception of time works differently, sometimes going faster, sometimes slower or even stopping. A ritual in which the sounds of the environment we’re in keep on going, free, unsynchronized and chaotic.
In this piece, players communicate with each other and with the environment through body gestures, movement, and breathing, gradually transforming that into a fragmented, unsynchronized, overlapping texture that increasingly turns into noise. Always listening, like looking with the ears, perceiving and bringing all senses as part of the piece, suddenly getting to a climax, after which we get back to a point where we get to simply listen to the sounds around us, letting them speak.
Modules is an ensemble work for 4 or more non-specific instruments. Conceived by Mike Ladouceur and co-written with Elissar Hanna and Alessandro Apolloni, the work consists of different cells of music ranging from single measure fragments to 8 measure melodies representing the core musical content of the piece. These ideas, originally written in different meters, were then placed in a musical matrix and transformed to work in a single 4/4 meter.
Ten musical questions, ten musical answers, and the silence of mystery among them. Ask a question, and you will receive one of the answers. But which one? The musical fatum will decide, depending on which answer your soul needs at the time.
Luckless invites players of different backgrounds to bring their experience and engage with the piece in a way that feels true to them. Improvisers, interpreters, experimentalists, songwriters, and the like, all have an equal footing on this compositional playground.
Crystal and Cloud was composed during the early weeks of the 2021 Walden School Young Musicians Program when the work’s composers found themselves immersed in Walden’s creative community following the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The composers worked together to integrate their ideas into a cohesive sonic environment that was unified around themes of listening, guided improvisation, and eco-acoustics. The title refers to the union of real and imagined soundscapes, mirroring the composers’ intention of complimenting organic sound in the environment around them in Dublin, New Hampshire, as well as the emergent soundscape of the music being created in real time by an ensemble.
METABUSKING imagines four buskers and their repertoires colliding upon their return to public music- making. The performers begin as individuals emerging from pandemic isolation into competition for a prime space, but gradually become an ensemble by collaboratively recombining their materials.
The piece depicts and also creates the messiness of busking, from the cacophony of a busy summer day in Prospect Park to the shifting power dynamics of musicians working with each other for the first time.
The repertoires consist of crowd favorites from our own busking experiences and the 2020 hits stuck in our heads, whose street and park premieres were cancelled by COVID. Text and game pieces combined with notation and memory guide the musicians to work with and against each other in different ways, creating improvised and aleatoric mashups that embrace the frustrations and then joys of being together again.
“The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.”
- Hayao Miyazaki
A recipe for when you are happy to be alive.
Open Practice takes the musician’s solitary and grueling effort in the relentless task of mastering audition repertory and shifts the intention toward shamelessly trying, failing, and listening in a communal musical experience.
LINEAGE(S) asks artists to be vulnerable with each other by acknowledging and then sharing the music that lives in their own bodies. We created a map which involves improvising and listening deeply to overlapping LINEAGE(S) gestures*. The piece also includes an evolving lineage folder where ensembles are invited to upload audio or visual documentation of their LINEAGE(S) gestures* to inspire future performers of the piece.
ent- is most immediately a reference to a german inseparable prefix that indicates beginning, movement away, separation, or reversion. but it’s also the beginning of the (etymologically distinct) word “entropy,” which denotes both the degree of disorder within a system and the gradual decline into this disorder. either sense works to evoke the process I envision for the piece. after beginning with slow, stable repetition, performers are encouraged to take inspiration from their surroundings as they diverge from the score and inject unpredictability into their playing.
Like the rivers after which the piece is named, 'Tributary' moves through divergent figures that carve independent paths en route to a serene arrival. Their coalescence begets a haunting pulsation, an oasis under a cloud of uncertainty.
Homologous explores the multifold ways sounds can be heard and manipulated. Inspired by jazz, electronic music, and movement, the piece asks the performers to relate to one another as a sound source, commentator, live processor, and a movement listener, creating a listening practice based on these roles.
Will Groove for Pizza was written collaboratively for Metropolis Ensemble’s Biophony project and is dedicated to all of the teachers who taught us the joy of play. It’s also a reminder to pay artists for the work they do, because one cannot live on pizza alone in this neoliberal capitalist system.
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