Composer | Pianist
Piece 1: Foreign Bodies (2023)
With Foreign Bodies, my hope was to bring to life an imaginary political space. In each of the piece's four sections, the relations between pianist/percussionist and writer/performer are reconfigured in different combinations—percussionists at the piano, improvisation concurrent with written-out passages, etc—as a metaphor for the overcoming of alienated labor. The final section culminates in a vocal incorporation of a quote on the same subject from Marx's The German Ideology. Not X or Y, but one thing today and another tomorrow.
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This recording was only able to come together at the very last minute, but I think this piece is the best representation of where I'm at musically right now and I'm proud to include it. When listening, please keep the following in mind:
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The "Duets 2" movement had to be omitted due to restrictions on piano preparation.
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An technical error in the recording setup rendered this in mono—the compression makes the pianos unreasonably hard to hear in some spots, as are the vocal passages in the last third of the piece.
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Due to some last-minute personnel changes, this was the second time we were all playing together.
If time is a concern, one good representative excerpt begins at 4:10 in the video ("Quartet 1" in the score on page 13). If there are issues using the PDF reader below, the score can be downloaded here.
Piano 1: myself Percussion 1: jc clancy
Piano 2: Ricardo Ferro Percussion 2: Will Hopkins
please set this to "page width" in
order to fully view pages 5-7