kimberlyyeo010198

In one way or another, I've always composed under some set of constraints. I do so because the musical results have reliably both surprised and satisfied me, and have taken me through both comfort zones and previously unimagined places.  Many of these are tricks of the trade, widely shared in the community of composers; others may be uniquely mine.  Some are open and obvious, others are under the surface, some secrets, some puzzles, some cast away and irretrievably lost.  Working with a pre-compositional gamut of tones (sometimes a tuning) or noises is pretty common, as are using drones, ground basses (I'm very fond of ostinato basses but not so fond of repeated harmonic sequences), and hockets.  I like to take both random, constrained, and freely composed walks on pitch lattices, a practice related to an early, deep study of musical intonation.  I've used Hauer's harmonic band technique, through which any sequence of tones can be wrestled into a sequence of har...

I've written a new set of pieces for solo clarinet, 100,000,000,000,000 of them, to be exact. It's an homage to Raymond Queneau and his Cent mille milliards de poèmes, with which my set of character pieces shares the same combinatorial flip-book structure , although Queneau's poems are French sonnets ( abab abab cce dde in alexandrines) and mine are English sonnets (abab cdcd efef gg in a pentameter.)  The provisional score (provisional meaning I reserve the right to make changes) is available online and it's free to download, here .  The music is diverse — from ambiguously modal to not-quite-tonal to the ornithologically a-tonal to none-of-the-above — yet should have enough connecting features to render a useful percentage of the combinations sensibly unified, another useful percentage with satisfyingly broken continuities and the remaining pieces everywhere in-between.  While these pieces are intended for concert performance, either en-bloc or scattered through a prog...

Just a note: I curated the CD accompanying the current issue of the Leonardo Music Journal , with the theme "Acoustics."   To be honest, when editor Nicolas Collins corralled me into this project, I had major reservations (which shouldn't be surprising, given my personal differences with sound recording as a medium for transmitting music), but in this instance these were overcome by a wide ranging suite of strong exploratory pieces by the composers Judy Dunaway, Miguel Frasconi, Hauke Harder, Chris Molla, Kiyomitsu Odai, and Ann Warde, all of whom I thank profusely for their music.  Leonardo Music Journal's web site is here . 

ONE MORE THING about this fluid dynamic between identity and difference and the whole space of resemblance in-between those poles:  This can often depend upon a confusion of identities and I'm not altogether certain it's usually an honest confusion, instead it is often a voluntary entry into a contract to agree to mistake A for B .  One the one hand, this is just playing the game, agreeing, in musical terms, to hear a little more or a little less into the music so that two stretches of music fit into the same memory cache. On the other hand, this could be a little more ethically suspect, nefarious even, a suspension of honest estimation and judgment in favor of bending the evidence to suit the purpose of musical continuity or even unity, an act of some misplaced generosity, or even worse when a confusion of the kind is simply due to not listening and/or not remembering, which certainly happens much more than composers or performers ought be comfortable. And this, too: Isn'...

One of the qualities I value most in music is that it works for us as wholes which are marked by continuities and contrasts, and this despite the fact that we have such a weak and fluid notion of identity and difference in musical materials. The "same" audible stuff can be heard completely differently in alternative contexts; even fa plain & simple vanilla repetition, made by just shoving a bit of music a little further along in time, creates contrast by both the experience of that time shift and through the formation of a connection to the original statement.  At the same time, musical coherence depends upon being able to connect or hear relatedness between stretches of music although they many vary in detail or in substance. (All of this depends upon the related faculties of memory and forgetting, but that's a topic for another day, another day.) I've been finishing up two pieces in which everything depends upon this fluidity between the musically same and diffe...