Shake It!! (2014)
fl ob cl tbn pn vn va vc
8 minutes
One night in June 2013, as on many other nights, I was grinding The coffee beans for the next morning. This is my daily meditation – not only does its smell function as an herbal therapy, but the coffee powder whirling in the grinder also mesmerizes me. For some reason that night, I decided to add some “spice” or activity to my ritual – shaking the grinder up and down during the process, which resulted in a three-dimensional jiggle.
I am unsure whether or not it made any difference in the taste of my coffee. “It would be fun”, I thought, however, “to translate the effect of the multi-dimensional tremble into music.” What resulted was an idea to compose a piece full of perpetual swirls amongst
different pitches (trill or tremolo), harmonies, timbres, instrumentations, registers, pulses, textures, musical fragments, formal sections, and so on.
Reflecting further on my plan for this music, I recognized that it is also associated with a handful of scientific terms such as “the uncertainty principle” or “the atomic/molecular orbitals.” I thus incorporated aleatoric or improvisational passages with various types of
constraints and throughout the work (but no more than 20% of the time) I allowed the performers to play differently from what is written. For this reason, the subtitle of the piece is “or Something like That.”
No matter how complex my explanation may sound, the composition is all about FUN – let’s drink in the music and shake it to feel dizzy.
8 minutes
One night in June 2013, as on many other nights, I was grinding The coffee beans for the next morning. This is my daily meditation – not only does its smell function as an herbal therapy, but the coffee powder whirling in the grinder also mesmerizes me. For some reason that night, I decided to add some “spice” or activity to my ritual – shaking the grinder up and down during the process, which resulted in a three-dimensional jiggle.
I am unsure whether or not it made any difference in the taste of my coffee. “It would be fun”, I thought, however, “to translate the effect of the multi-dimensional tremble into music.” What resulted was an idea to compose a piece full of perpetual swirls amongst
different pitches (trill or tremolo), harmonies, timbres, instrumentations, registers, pulses, textures, musical fragments, formal sections, and so on.
Reflecting further on my plan for this music, I recognized that it is also associated with a handful of scientific terms such as “the uncertainty principle” or “the atomic/molecular orbitals.” I thus incorporated aleatoric or improvisational passages with various types of
constraints and throughout the work (but no more than 20% of the time) I allowed the performers to play differently from what is written. For this reason, the subtitle of the piece is “or Something like That.”
No matter how complex my explanation may sound, the composition is all about FUN – let’s drink in the music and shake it to feel dizzy.