Amplified Silence @ Ithaca Porchfest


. . . preparing a performance of Cartridge Music (John Cage, 1960)
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Music, Animal Sounds, Perception

Animal Voices in Three Compositions:
– Olivier Messiaen, VI. L’alouette lulu (Excerpt With WoodLark) (1956_58)
– Dawn’s Chorus (2008)
– Imagined Environments (2016)
Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY
Composition Seminar
25 April 2017
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VCCA 2017


At the Virginia Center for the Contemporary Arts, along with field recording in the Blue Mountains, an overnight autonomous recording I made through an open window unexpectedly captured coyote voices. And during preparation for a performance, I realized there were just-audible links between John Cage’s Sonatas 14 & 15 and the sounds of metal that might be heard by gently strumming Richard Lippold’s Gemini.
25 February 2017
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Toward a Critical Musical Practice

Seminar: Sound Work – Composition as Critical Technical Practice
Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium
23 November 2016
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Scientific Listening

DisPerSion Lab
York University, Toronto, Canada
10 November 2016
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Beautiful Sounds . . .

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in Ithaca NY at the 2016 Porchfest
. . . John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, for prepared piano, composed in 1948, create unexpectedly inviting, gentle buzzes, bells, resonant gongs, and extended piano sonorities. In-between the piano’s strings are pieces of rubber and plastic, small, medium, large bolts, furniture bolts, screws, hardware nuts, an eraser . . . . . . and out of the piano come . . . delicate bells . . . expansive gongs . . . hi-hat cymbals . . . drums  . . .
as if suspended  in  t  i  m  e   &    s    p    a    c    e
18 September 2016
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Spectromorphology, Human Affinities, Animal Voices

MuSA Conference
Karlsruhe, Germany
1 July 2016
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The Spaces of Animal Voices

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During 2015-16 I worked at the Contemporary Music Research Centre, at the University of York, investigating ways to listen to spatial interactions among animal sounds, and to how sound changes as it travels through air and water. How might music composition facilitate an exploration of our perception of animal voices and our connections to them? Starting from the composition Dawn’s Chorus we made Imagined Environments.
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Patrick Wood


Four Hands Vier Hände
Pomfret School, Connecticut
November 2015
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“My God! What has sound got to do with music?”

Fireplace
Gesture and relationship as compositional materials in two pieces by Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff Study Days
Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium
This event explored Wolff’s music via paper presentations, performances of solo and chamber works, and an interview with the composer. I’ve been exploring and comparing the use of musical structure in Dark as a Dungeon and Edges.
28 September 2015
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