Arnold Schönberg - Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, op.19 (1911, 5 minutes)
Morton Feldman — Last Pieces (1959, 10 minutes)
Thelonious Monk - Monk’s Mood (1947, 4 minutes)
Henry Cowell - The Hero Sun (1912, 4 minutes)
Ruth Crawford Seeger — Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930, 1.5 minutes)
Chris Brown - Sparks (1976, 8 minutes)

This piece focuses on sense of belonging, displacement, migration, and security that have always been questions that I’ve been seeking answers for myself. In I belong to nothing; I belong to everything, I will challenge myself, as a performer with my personal struggle, and let it speak and transform through the sound. I use electronics and my vocals, both of which I will relate to the concept, embracing them and deconstructing them simultaneously, under this title to free myself from the lexicons that I’m used to have and to find a way to find sense of belonging inside the sound. I will be structuring the performance around the poems that I wrote by deconstructing them using my vocals alongside electronics. I will try to play around the boundaries by using improvisatory approach in abstract and poetic form of a structure. -- E.E.

Today we are pleased to present a Bay Area preview of a new work we are premiering at TENOR (International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation) in Boston next week, of a new composition and digital scoring system created in collaboration with electronic musician Tim Perkis. More than a few years ago, we discovered visual artist Sol LeWitt’s series of drawings and sculptures, Incomplete Open Cubes (1974/1982), where he explored the 122 ways of "not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete." We were transfixed by the obsessive, iterative quality of the work, and by the vast array of quirky symbols that LeWitt’s serial process generated. It seemed to us that these symbols—each unfinished cube, whether perceived as a line drawing in two dimensions or a sculpture in three—could give rise to a system of musical notation.

While LeWitt’s process involved setting up a scenario and letting it run its course through serial operations, we decided to engage with the unsolved cubes more poetically, letting our compositional ideas flow from the character and personality of individual shapes. We organized the cubes into related “series” or “genealogies,” composed musical material (vocabulary) both for series and for individual cubes, and also created processes (syntax) for how pre-composed material can interact and be manipulated, transformed and developed through improvisation in the course of performance. As we were creating this work and formulating its rules of engagement, we realized that we were developing a real-time collaborative compositional tool based on our own proclivities and interests as improvising composers—one that offers us options for musical content, form and procedure which may not emerge organically from a completely improvised performance.

The network-based digital score Tim programmed allows us to choose a “set” of a grid of cubes for any given performance ahead of time, and then select individual cubes or series of cubes in real time via an iPad control panel as we are playing. These cubes direct us towards composed musical material or rules for processing it—with listeners able to follow our decisions on the overhead screen as areas of the grid of cubes are selected and deselected throughout the performance. Our hope is that our musical decisions will be more transparent to audiences through this ability to watch the grid as we manipulate it over the course of our set, to help guide listeners in understanding the trajectory of our performance and our evolving relationship to the sounds and structures encoded in the cube symbols.

Accelerating the Narrative Score for Improvisation using Film Language.

(DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a performance reacting to projected images.)

Narrative has been a part of music since earliest times. It may be what the whales were singing about before humans came on the scene. Improvising artists use it overtly or subconsciously to guide their work. While it seems oxymoronic to write a score for improvised music, “Improv” needs all the help it can get. This score takes the narrative map one step further, using the shorthand of film language, which took leaps over literary narrative in real time.

When people began to edit motion pictures to tell larger stories, about 120 years ago, audiences were initially confused about the juxtapositions of images across time and space. Within a decade, though, the understanding of this linear collage had spread worldwide. It was heralded as a brand new art form.

Though not engaged mechanically, music was part of the presentation almost from the start, in all but the most threadbare nickelodeons. A whole sublanguage of music for cinema was established before the advent of sound-on-film roughly 90 years ago. In its subservient capacity, film music developed its own subtle codes; tracking emotional development, setting tonal ambience (literally and figuratively), and underscoring physical and psychological action. If you weren’t sure how the images made you feel, the music would tell you what the filmmakers wanted you to feel.

This score for improvisation is a type of game piece. The performers follow a set of prompts drawn from references to film archetypes, conventions, clichés, and memes, not exclusive to musical score per se. The structure is film’s typical three acts, each containing a series of scenes. We will pause after each act and reveal some of the scene prompts. Performances of this piece can be linear or random, depending how the scenes are shuffled. In no way are we meant to all be seeing the same movie in our heads. What is meant to come through is the dramatic scaffolding and emotional arcs.

Now, more than ever, we are living in a screen culture.

A fence, a rooftop and the distant sea were all present there facing my desk while I finished the piece in Beirut in December 2016. These elements were a reminder of how near my home town of Damascus was yet how far it seemed after being away for five years. The piece is about random memories of individuals, more precisely it is about two characters searching for memories from home, and how they jump from one random memory to another while allowing themselves to drift away with their own thoughts, until they realize that the most powerful memories were the simplest, and they hold on to that endlessly.