Commissioned and Performed by The Living Earth Show In Collaboration with Composers: Sharmi Basu Ava Mendoza Raven Chacon Morgan Craft Zachary James Watkins

Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Tashi Wada, a Los Angeles-based composer and performer. Wada presents Table of Visions, a composition for a “high-resolution player piano” commissioned by Triple Canopy, and asks how we discern between human expression and technical perfection, how we listen to virtuosos and machines. With Gale and Provan, Wada discusses the pandemic-era vogue for liveness at home, technologies that claim to capture the souls of performers, and music that prompts listeners to discern between the sounds of machines and humans. They listen to Conlon Nancarrow, Glenn Gould, Perry Como, advertisements for hi-fi systems, the ...

In Peter Ablinger’s work, the listener is often asked to cross the distance between sounds. These types of comparative actions fall into at least three categories. One of these categories is a comparison between two sound sources: a recording and a reproduction. The term Ablinger uses for these reproductions is “phonorealism.” Another type of comparison is between a sonic memory and the sound that is present. I’ll play two examples later that activate specifically musical memories through a process called “verticalization.” We’ll start, though, with yet another type of distance that is to be traveled, this time in the sonic imagination, ...

Voice, drums, recordings here and there. Composed July – August, 2015 I started this piece walking down by the Limmat on a cold, windy day. Whitecaps chopped the water and I was a bit out of breath from fighting the wind and trying to keep warm by moving at a brisk pace. Under the Hardbrücke the deep resonance there swallowed me up. A long rowboat chained to the concrete pilings of the bridge whipped to and fro in the strong current. I headed up the stairs to my studio. Schulhaussingen happens twice a year at my kids’ school. I usually go and I ...

Audio Excerpts, Movements 1.5, 2 March 21, 2014, EMPAC, Troy, NY The notion that underlies this piece is levitation, both literally and metaphorically. When composing I imagined the possibility of the sonic elements existing in a parallel dimension, the aural aspect holding matter suspended as if it were an apparition in an interstitial space. In the presentation of the work, a literal manifestation or demonstration of low-end frequency levitation takes place using hand-crafted subwoofers with materials hovering in the windows of the boxes. The piece evolved out of studies accompanied by drawings and texts as investigations of threshold states. It is comprised ...

The Pitch “A framework of understanding.” The pitch is a playing field. Four players trying to pitch something, an idea, a sound. A tone of definite frequency. The Pitch is a co-sharing of musical space, of certain parameters, limitations and an instrumental awkwardness collectively carried into brightness. Working out simple ideas to see how far we can take them. How long we can play them. How often we can handle them. Modes of interaction, rules of engagement, aesthetic agreements, instrumental limitations. Reducing material until we’ve reached the core. Initiative, shared intuition, collective composition, instrumentation. Bass harmonics doubling the clarinet, vibraphone rounding out the harmona, sine tones combining instrumental forces. The harmona is missing pitches. Playing such an archaic, flawed ...

“To understand the trajectories of the stars through a galaxy, Michel Hénon computed the intersections of an orbit with a plane. The resulting patterns depended on the system’s total energy. The points from a stable orbit gradually produced a continuous, connected curve. Other energy levels, however, produced complicated mixtures of stability and chaos, represented by regions of scattered points. […] The nested detail, lines within lines, can be seen in final form in a series of pictures with progressively greater magnification. But the eerie effect of the strange attractor can be appreciated another way when the shape emerges in time, point ...