UC Berkeley

I have always considered the explorative aspect of music making to be an essential part of my creative practice. I am not only a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, but I am also a drummer, a percussionist, a field recordist, an improvisor, and a sound designer. This piece combines all these creative practices into a long-form composition. Febrile Swing serves as my dissertation — the final requirement of my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley — completed in May of 2023. The first movement, 11-tone mashing, is a solo for the keyboardist. It is a somber ambient composition utilizing an 11-note scale (the octave is divided into 11 unequal tones) and features a fixed media backing track of my field recordings. The mood of this composition is both relaxing and unsettling due to its “mashing” of relaxing synth sounds, unusual harmonies, and earthly sounds recorded from various places and times. Movement II, Fields, opens with pointillistic unison strikes involving the entire ensemble, interspersed with glitchy electromagnetic field recordings captured around the city of Kraków. It gradually crescendos in volume and density over the course of minutes as it climbs towards its apex— deep, loud drones are combined with chaotic, energetic improvisation from the performers. I composed the third movement, Brushstrokes, with a jazz combo in mind; only the drummer, keyboardist, trumpeter, saxophonist, and contrabassist perform in this section. The synthesizer is tuned to a highly unusual scale in which every perfect fifth interval on the keyboard sounds a perfect octave. The keys in between the perfect fifth essentially divide the sounding octave into seven [almost] equal tones. The tones of the synthesizer are transcribed and provided to the acoustic performers in the form of chord changes, and they are asked to improvise using these chord tones. The final movement, Head above water, once again incorporates the full ensemble and utilizes a 21-tone EDO (equally divided octave) scale in the synthesizer. The clustery nature of the synth inspired the orchestration of the piece; dense tone clusters gradually climb and fall by way of alternating half and quarter tone intervals at a brisk tempo.