(Catalog)

The Modular Music Project combines live performance, formal modularity, and the audience’s mobile devices to create music along the deterministic–improvisational–aleatoric continuum. The movements, their components, and video animations are modular: the musicians can play the movements and their sections/parts thereof in different  arrangements;  the video  projections  can  be broadcast at different times; and  the audience can  navigate  and  playback  related  media  they  retrieve from  my website. With  this  piece others in the series, I seek to create ‘living’ multimedia works through communicative flexibility  between  myself, the  performers  and  the audience to address socio-political challenges of our contemporary moment. 

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The first video represents is the world premiere of the newest piece in the series, NorCal Water Music. On Sunday November 10, 2019 at 3pm, Citywater gave the premiere of  NorCal... at the Crocker Art Museum on the last day of the 42nd Annual Festival of New American Music.  NorCal dives into issues concerning one of California’s most important resources - water - and celebrates the beauty, complexity, and fragility of the Sacramento River Watershed. The ensemble realizes music derived from computer-animated maps of the watershed, overlaid by musical notation. The ensemble determines an order of the movements and their respective components. As video-jockey, I cue that order with the animations projected on a screen in the concert hall. Each video features a different geographical area of the watershed. (I also created all the visual aspects of the of the project). 

Between movements, there are short video interludes featuring the ecological sound found at a particular waterway. At these moments, the audience is invited to view on their mobile devices a short video with its own soundtrack accessible from my website, thus creating streams of motivic echoes across the hall. At this performance and future ones, Citywater, myself and the audience sustain a multidimensional, and sometimes fragile aqua-sonorous musical space.  (For a movement-by- movement set of time-points, please visit this video of the piece on my youtube page.)

Later in the playlist, Colin McAlllister and myself perform The End Times Are a'Changin': fantasia on a theme by Dylan (2018) for solo guitar and socio-multimedia at SoundOn 2019, in January of this year (program notes).  I have included some of the short vignettes that the audience retrieves and plays back on their mobile devices.