Untiteld for ensemble

Abstract

Looking back on my compositional output through my academic journey, I've noticed how many different stylistic shifts I have gone through, as well as how common of an occurrence this is for many composition students. In this process, many styles that were at one point of great interest will later be avoided, possibly viewed in embarrassment or as juvenilia. In Untiteld, you will hear tonality, noise, technical complexity, drone, repetition and free improv, often all at once. Some of the musical material used is sampled from two previous compositions of mine: a more tonal, minimalist inspired work from 2015 and a more avant-garde, timbral-focused work from 2018. Initially, the different aesthetic influences are presented individually, but as the work progresses the material begins to overlap, leading to both the phenomenon of new hybrid aesthetics and the changing hierarchies of audibility between material from different aesthetics. In addition to the saturation of material and aesthetics, there are multiple ways repetition and notation are employed in this piece. In addition to traditional metered notation, there are senza misura sections where the performers have agency to improvise with proportionally notated material. Often in these sections, multiple instruments will have instructions to repeat figures of different lengths with micro-level variations over time. As the piece progresses, sections with exact repeats are added to the metered sections, often using the same material that was repeated with variations in senza misura sections. The overall formal tension of the work is created by the interplay of these constant shifts in aesthetic and repetition behaviors.