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Reblogged from meg's new music blog:

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I always applaud music organizations that program concerts full of fresh pieces by young composers. Thus, though they may have overshot the mark a bit by programming no less than eleven pieces on Friday, I give due credit to NYC-based Quiet City for an ambitious, eclectic performance of new music.

The evening began with "No Hipster Hats" for trumpet and tape by…

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Meg Wilhoite, NY new music blogger, covered the Quiet City Presents show last Friday at the Secret Theatre, upon which I joined a bill of fellow sonic pioneers to present some of the stuff I've been up to recently. I'm happy to repost her writing, which is motivating; I often find it difficult to gauge an audience's interest while in the middle of performing, and so reading that there was visual interest in what I was doing comes as much appreciated feedback. Whereas my personal, internal criticisms are the fuel for seeking improvement, constructive review is a reassurance that I'm communicating with some level of effectiveness. I'll also take a moment to shout out Luke Schwartz and Vasu Panicker - they're doing something quite cool with the Quiet City music network, and I'm eagerly awaiting their future endeavours.

On an airplane, and I’m searching through my phone’s playlist for things I used listen to but don’t really anymore. I came up with this, in order:
• Eric Ewazen Sonata for Trumpet
• Linkin Park Hybrid Theory

Really happy, then really angry.

I found that when I led off with the Ewazen upper, I was too happy to be angry with Linkin Park, and instead just found myself enjoying the band’s sound. The Ewazen gave me a more detailed emotional narrative so that when I came to Linkin Park, the emotions were not affecting me in any way, yet I still find the literal sound interesting enough to listen on.

The two pieces fulfilled two different functions: Ewazen was entertainment for my heart and brain, which like to be stimulated by finer textures, interesting or unique harmonies and tonalities, more specific emotional material.

LP was entertainment for my [soul?], which likes to hear music and sound purely for the aesthetic qualities.

So, two very different pieces of music performing entirely different functions.

For what functions do you listen to music?

For what functions do you write music?

Thanks to Composer’s Circle sharing me on the day’s feature, I thought I’d write a bit about no hipster hats.

This is my first project/prototype in the way of variable-length electronic landscapes. The piece functions by giving the player the freedom to progress through the music via advancing through a long series of “stopping points” constructed inside the music’s infrastructure. At any given point in the music, the performer can stop, decide, “I like the groove here, I think I’ll hang out here for 2 minutes,” and make it so. Or, “I’m not feeling this spot here as much as yesterday; I’ll only spend half the time I spent here last performance,” and make that so as well. Some places are a little more strict in how they must be played through, but assembling the score with multiple sorts of notation systems interwoven with each other. It’s still very much a prototype, which makes it exciting, because I already like where it’s heading and there’s so much more to do.
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Everyone in America knows what American pop music sounds like.  Here’s what some pop music from a relatively large niche international population sounds like.

Hatsune Miku, the explosively popular pop singer who is literally a synth.

Hatsune Miku, the explosively popular pop singer who is literally a synth.

Downtempo/chill beat: (with some awesome Chinese violin)

Pop/rock ballad form:

And my favorite setting for Miku, trance:

Composed with electronic samples both recorded and synthesized, pop melodies are presented in a sonic palette about as wide as YouTube is big, with the common ground in the singer, Hatsune Miku (初音ミク): a synthesizer in Yamaha’s VOCALOID software with an associative anime character as an avatar. Read More

From my friend Musicuratum across the pond in Amsterdam comes an early review of KuuMA‘s debut LP, becoming the moon, and thus breaking the news of a new Sight/Sound project.  KuuMA is the moniker of a musician in Kyuushuu whom I first got to know during a semester at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. The album is lushly dense, and as Musicuratum says, “it seems to ask of us a rather different kind of auditory absorption”, and this is the reason I’m bringing this to the Sight/Sound circle.  We’ll be bringing out more details about KuuMA’s first album in the coming weeks, but for now, have a listen…

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The speed at which we are sometimes required to compose.

The speed at which we are sometimes required to compose.

This past summer I was required to create remixes of tunes I never heard because another composer missed their deadline. I had to have four remixes done for a dance performance in two day. This put me in quite the creative quandary. How was I going to keep this creative project from crashing 120 miles per hour into a concrete wall? I decided that the easiest solution was to dig into my hard drive and remix some of my old tunes. This approach worked for two of the remixes, but I became troubled when the remixes just sounded stereotypically like me. To avoid this performance turning into an obvious self-love fest , I decided that I needed to find somebody else’s music to remix.

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Reblogged from Musicuratum:

In New York, operating in the realm between classical and experimental and electronic music that’s so well-established in that city, there’s a young composer whose music is – to resort for once to a much-misused word – ravishing in its smooth sonic beauty, Adam Cuthbért: it’s a quality that is pronounced in his piece “Rikai アダム・カスバートの「理解」,” included in the playlist, and even more evident, perhaps by virtue of the omission of the visual accompaniment, in the tracks he’s uploaded on his…

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A new friend from Amsterdam known only as Musicuratum, whom I met via the budding community of the newly and heavily upgraded Soundcloud, recently did me the biggest honor a composer can be done: he listened to ALL of the music I've posted on the internet. Seriously, I don't think even my mother has taken that time.  As if that wasn't enough to earn my eternal gratitude, he wrote this feature on his blog after we conversed for a while via Soundcloud's messaging system.

Do make time to peruse Musicuratum - I'm rather amazed with the sheer quantity of curated content his blog contains. It's yet another reason to join Soundcloud, and above all a really beautiful testament to the size of the body of good music that's out there on the internet, waiting to be discovered.

This may start to become a series, because making these is just too much fun.  This was done with the same setup, same tools as last night’s, but with the drums added.  It’s also good to note that this one didn’t crash my software – I think the trick to managing over 30 loopers is to clear the loops from memory as soon as they become obsolete.  It’s kind of like whack-a-mole on the Launchpad at the moment… gotta be an easier way to maneuver that.

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