Browsing by Author "Supko, John"

1. At the Conflux

At the Conflux is a three part musically driven time-lapse film that tours Japan by road and rail. It is an exploration of its sprawling nocturnal cityscapes crisscrossed by thruways, its urban grid illuminated by fiery-hued highways pulsing through the city like arteries circulating blood, its towering skyscrapers watching over all, unmoved—soaring sentinels of steel and glass, its patterns of people rhythmically engaging with the machinery of modern life. A spacious Japanese flavored soundscape contrasts with the frenetic energy of the imagery. Piano, violin, trumpet, trombone and upright bass lines are decorated with snippets of field recordings captured in Tokyo and Osaka.

2. Craft and Expression Entwined in the Music of Martin Bresnick

The music of Martin Bresnick is filled with allusions to literature, history, politics, and music of the past. These extramusical references are often combined with complex musical structures. Symmetries and serial operations are staples of his craft. These two aspects of his work often exist in different conceptual realms. However, from the early 1990s onwards, there is a trend in Bresnick’s music in which technical elements entwine with expressive aims. This short article explores the relationship between compositional technique and referentiality through two exemplary works, the String Quartet No. 2, Bucephalus (1984) and The Bucket Rider (1995) with a brief exploration of the aesthetic of Arte Povera, an avant-garde art movement of the 1960s and 1970s Bresnick used as the title of the set of pieces to which The Bucket Rider belongs.

Last Wave Reached:

Last Wave Reached is a setting of poems by Kay Ryan , U.S. poet laureate, 2008 - 2010, for three female singers and large chamber ensemble. Ryan writes compact, intricate miniatures full of unexpected rhymes and alliterations, odd meters, playful word choices, and penetrating imagery. In this spirit, Last Wave Reached unfolds as a series of distinct musical vignettes, each one evoking a single world of sound. The language is succinct, and instrumentation varies widely from movement to movement. Overall, the piece explores themes of repetition, return, finality and (im)permanence.

Register, Harmony, and Phrase Design in Webern's Op. 24 and Op. 27:

Many analyses of Webern's mature music have considered pitch-class relations in depth, but few authors have explored Webern's rich use of registral pitch space. Furthermore, little has been written about the design of individual Webernian phrases. In "Register, Harmony, and Phrase Design in Webern's Op. 24 and Op. 27," I make steps towards filling both gaps. In section 1, I focus on the first movement of the Op. 24 Concerto, show how Webern groups row forms by trichordal and hexachordal invariance, and demonstrate that invariant harmony interacts meaningfully with register to shape the global form of the movement. In section 2, I broaden my scope to demonstrate that register also plays a crucial role in shaping phrases and creating cadences throughout Opp. 24 and 27. In addition to intrinsic, pitch-based approaches, I show that we must consider extrinsic factors like rhythm, tempo, and articulation to arrive at a full understanding of Webern's phrasal technique.

This dissertation contains two parts: an original album for voice, clarinet, electric guitar, hand percussion, and electronics; and an article analyzing ethical use of responsive technologies in art, music, and design.

Lilacs: Digital Songs and Poems for Voice, Clarinet, Percussion, Electric Guitar, and Electronics is a musical work in twelve sections inspired by the experience of losing a loved one to cancer. Themes of healing, hope, loss, and grieving appear in several of the songs and poems. The texts are original, except portions of “The Promise” which were excerpted from Isaiah 43:2-5. The musical sections comment on the ideas in the main poem, “the words that should not be said,” which is broken into four pieces. My music and text evoke an emotional process that is difficult to navigate: how to display a socially acceptable public face while privately grieving. Which words are “safe,” and which words should be “held close to [our hearts]”?

In some ways, my work is similar to a 19th-century song cycle, which usually involved solo or ensemble voices and instrumental accompaniment (especially the combination of voice and piano). Like song cycles in the 19th century, Lilacs is meant to be cohesive; the songs are meant to go together and comment on one another. In the context of this form, my choice to mix voice and choir is unusual, though there is a precedent in Schubert’s The Lady of the Lake. My choice to electronically overdub my own voice certainly departs from standard song cycles, which were most popular in a day where electronic manipulation was impossible.

Lilacs was conceived in an electronic format and is designed to be heard at home or on headphones, a listening experience which is not standard for song cycles or classical music as a whole, and relies on electronic devices as mediators of acoustic intimacy. The mix of styles, electronic format, and navigation of multiple music styles in Lilacs also suggest that this work is an avant-garde digital concept album in the same vein as The Beatles’ Revolver, but the fragmented narrative provided by my original poems are reminiscent of theatrical monologue. Taken together, the elements of my work suggest that Lilacs asserts its own genre. The final track, “Branches,” is submitted with the written dissertation, and can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/sacurzi/12-branches.

In my article, I analyze four case studies of interactive art to show that existing projects can inform the ethical design, use, and promotion of current responsive art and commercial projects. While responsive technologies incorporate fields as diverse as science, music, fashion, medicine, art, and textiles, critical discourse on the cultural meaning of wearable electronics and responsive textiles has been limited, with most literature and scholarship focusing on the technological advancements themselves. As a result, creators and consumers of wearable technology engage with increasingly “modern” garments but only rarely interrogate their use.

I analyze the interactive artwork of Yuri Suzuki, Anna Biró, Alyce Santoro, and Joanna Berzowska. First, I demonstrate the ways in which these artists disrupt dominant power dynamics of gender, ecology, disability and globalization; based on these analyses, I then develop a table of ethical considerations for the design and documentation of responsive textiles and haptic sound art. I intend this table be a practical tool for creators of responsive technologies in art, design, and commercial applications. I hope that my research will affect decision-making regarding photographic styles for the purposes of advertising or (in the case of artists) public documentation, which currently promotes thin, white, cisgender women. My work also has tangible benefits for commercial applications, where ethical sourcing and labor can protect companies from expensive lawsuits, loss of income from damaged brand image, consumer boycotts, and even embargos such as the United States suspension of trade with Bangladesh after the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

The dissertation consists of an original musical composition, Nobilette, for orchestra, an original musical composition, Rouge, for chamber ensemble and electronics, and an essay, “On Simplicity in Music.”  The essay examines three composers, Erik Satie (1866-1925), John Cage (1912-1992), and Alvin Lucier (1931-2021), and their relationship to musical simplicity.  These composers use unconventional constraints, and in doing so, offer a unique foundation from which to appreciate musical simplicity.  I use these cases as a three-part frame to structure the essay.  The three parts focus on (1) the simplicity of the perceptible attributes of Satie's music; (2) the simplicity of Cage's articulatable concepts; and (3) the simplicity of both perceptible attributes and articulatable concepts in Lucier's work.  Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, Quatre Ogives, Vexations, and Musique d’ameublement, exhibit simplicity primarily through perceptible constraints, chiefly in their audible forms, prevalent use of repetition, and specific musical attributes related to melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture.  Cage’s Music of Changes exhibits a simplification of his pre-compositional process, yet the perceptible qualities of Music of Changes are complex. To the contrary, Cage’s 4’33’’, exhibits simpler perceptible qualities, but the underlying rationale for Cage’s “silence” is complicated. Simplicity in Music of Changes and 4’33’’ is found in either the conceptual framework or the perceptible qualities, but not in both. Lucier’s compositions I am Sitting in a Room and Music for Solo Performer, however, exhibit simplicity in both the perceptible qualities and their underlying conceptual frame. In examining these cases, a definition of simplicity begins to emerge: a unity of concept, or constraints concerning the perceptible attributes of the composition that come from a limited selection of materials and their transformation through stasis, repetition, or other audible procedures. 

This dissertation consists of two distinct parts. The first is an original music composition. The second is an analytical article about Joan Tower’s musical language through the lens of musical borrowing in three works.Chapter 1, Of My Own, is composed for woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn) and string quartet (violin I, violin II, viola, cello). This composition experiments with minimalistic repetition, ambiguous harmonic motion, sectional juxtapositions of form, and motivic transformation, while maintaining an accessible style through clear narrative development. Inspired by current events surrounding women’s rights, Of My Own, focuses its narrative on three coming-of-age stories from the perspectives of a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. Over the course of twenty minutes, each of the three movements functions individually but also includes overlapping musical themes and other structural similarities. Chapter 2, “Constructing a Compositional Language Through Musical Borrowing: Joan Tower’s Homage to Beethoven, Steps, and Made in America,” attempts to discover the ways in which American composer Joan Tower developed a compositional language through musical borrowing. Over Tower’s long career, many of her compositions have been dedicated to friends and performers; however, a subset pays homage to influential composers and historically important works, while still exhibiting the personal compositional language characteristic of Tower’s pieces from the second half of her career. This group of works features borrowings from the music of Beethoven, Carter, Copland, Debussy, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Samuel A. Ward. As a self-described “intuitive” composer, Tower insists that her music is only reactive to local musical events and that her work must be experienced contextually as a whole because pitch, rhythm, register, dynamics, etc. cannot mean anything in isolation; she maintains that each element is “dependent on its environment for its identification.” Despite her stature as an important American composer, Tower’s compositional methods and musical language have been insufficiently studied by contemporary scholars. Previous research and interviews with the composer contain contradictory information about Tower’s intuitive approach and various compositional processes. Furthermore, her use of pre-existing material, revisions, and pre-compositional plans complicate an understanding of her musical language in the context of her intuitive process. Through a comparative and teleological study of Joan Tower’s musical borrowings, this article offers insight into Tower’s compositional language through an examination of three pieces: Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven), Steps, and Made in America.

This dissertation consists of two parts: a composition for ensemble and electronics, and an analytical article on jazz improvisers’ modern approaches to the Twelve-Bar Blues form.

Chapter 1, Pareidolia, for clarinet/tenor saxophone, percussion/drum set, piano/synthesizers, string quartet, and electronics, is born out of my interest in auditory illusions and the spontaneous perceptions of meaningfulness known as apophenia and pareidolia. The composition combines prepared electronics comprised of field recordings of various machine noises and pre-recorded musical material with live manipulation of the ensemble’s sound, uncovering hidden harmonies and rhythms lurking in the recorded noise materials. The two main machine noises are the Duke University’s Biddle Music Building’s elevator and the washing machine at my house. Pareidolia is in seven sections, lasts about twenty-five minutes, and weaves together disparate musical ideas and genre influences with mindful transitions.

Chapter 2, “Implied Reharmonizations in Postbop Improvisations over the Twelve-Bar Blues,” constitutes an effort to illuminate the process jazz improvisers go through when they decide to diverge from lead-sheet harmony. The vast majority of the scholarship on jazz harmony is concerned with the lead-sheet versions of jazz tunes. Jazz improvisers have been manipulating chord progressions found on lead-sheets for decades. Most of the contemporary techniques employed by jazz performers during improvisations are unknown to, or misunderstood by classical music audiences and scholars. The Twelve-Bar Blues has been a vehicle for jazz improvisers to expand on the jazz language from the very beginnings of the idiom, to bebop, to postbop, and more recently jazz-fusion. With the use of chromatic approach tones and superimposition of non-diatonic scales and upper structure triads, the vocabulary of jazz improvisation expanded the tonal scope of solos. Within the context of the Twelve-Bar Blues, improvisers tonicize distant key areas and imply complex harmonic structures.

Secondly, it aims to form a bridge between the distinct languages of jazz performers, and theorists in academia. Scholars like Paul Berliner, Steven Strunk, Keith Waters, Dariusz Terefenko, and Garth Alper have helped establish jazz scholarship with their research on the expansion of tonality in jazz and the invariant properties of the idiom. Yet a disconnect has persisted between jazz vocabulary and common practice terminology due to the improvisational nature of jazz. To remedy the discrepancy between jazz vocabulary and common practice terminology, this article aims to present its findings in a manner which is accessible to scholars of both worlds.

Quilt is an album made from sounds sourced from my mother's quilting practice and from recording sessions held with the piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. For Quilt, my mother and I designed a quilt based on the Quartered Stripes Quilt pattern. The sounds of my mother ironing and cutting the fabric then piecing the fabric into the quilt were sampled and processed. The recording sessions with Yarn/Wire included them recording musical passages I had written them, as well as structured group improvisations, and free-form experimentations. Quilt joins the two sources into one sonic world.

Instrumental Objects is a three-episode podcast series about the creative practice of Baltimore-based avant-electronic duo Matmos. The podcast uses the multiple definitions of the word "object" as lenses to examine Matmos' approach to music making. Starting with objects reimagined as instruments, then move to Pierre Schaeffer's idea of sonic objects, then end with the contemporary ideas of Object-Oriented Ontology. Presented as a podcast, my research is able present deconstructions of Matmos' works, interviews I conducted with them, and fly-on-the-wall excerpts of them creating material for the album The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form.

My dissertation comprises three original musical compositions informed by the literary works of Nathaniel Mackey and an analytical article on the music of French composer Pascal Dusapin. As a whole, the collection seeks to address the confluence of music and literature and to investigate how the interaction of these diverse art forms can affect the perception of meaning for the listener or reader.

Chapter 1, Red Wind, for soprano, narrator, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, contrabass, and percussion, sets to music excerpts of Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems Blue Fasa. Mackey’s serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and “mu,” which draw heavily upon non-Western traditions for inspiration, take “an Eastern turn” in Blue Fasa. Red Wind interprets selected verses from Blue Fasa in five movements that exhibit a wide variety of musical influences ranging from classical to blues, bossa nova, jazz, and ragtime. This interplay is intended to mirror the poet’s own penchant for signification. Addressing themes of migration, societal conflict, transit, and multiple identities found in Mackey’s poetry, the piece presents a window through which listeners may bring new meaning to this poetry. Mackey himself performed on a recording of Red Wind, available at https://soundcloud.com/sid-richardson/red-wind.

Chapter 2, Bass Cathedral, for clarinet solo and wind ensemble was inspired by the novel of the same name by Nathaniel Mackey, which is the fourth installment in his ongoing fictional series From a Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. The work investigates various methods of encoding text from the source material into the compositional parameters of the work, including phrase lengths, harmony, and gestural content. Bass Cathedral, first performed by Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s Wind Ensemble at Old South Church in Boston, also explores spatial relationships in the ensemble, which is divided in five separate groupings on stage.

Chapter 3, Red Wind (Desert Remix), is a reimagining of Red Wind in a generative media environment realized in the software program MAX/MSP. Selected excerpts of Red Wind are fragmented and reorganized by the algorithm in real time, out of which emerges upon each listening a new variation of the piece. The score is, in effect, a software application. Red Wind (Desert Remix) addresses computer music’s ability to reorganize and re-contextualize compositional materials in a way that elicits a plurality of possible meanings for the listener.

Chapter 4, “Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin’s Quad - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze,” presents an analysis of Pascal Dusapin’s violin concertino Quad - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze (1996). It focuses on the formal layout of the work and the interdisciplinary nature of the composer’s method. By examining these connections in detail, this study underlines the importance of these two luminary figures to Dusapin’s idiosyncratic musical philosophy. Drawing heavily upon the composer’s writings about his work and an in-person interview, this study sheds light on Dusapin’s compositional process that emphasizes form and the distribution of energy within a given work. Analytical concepts drawn from Beckett, Deleuze, and Dusapin are applied to the violin concertino to illustrate how the flow of the work is exhausted by the fusing of its rigorous formal processes with powerful emotional content.

This dissertation is made up of two parts. The first is an original composition for chamber ensemble, and the second is an analytical article about memory in Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered.The original composition is entitled Abstract music for an imaginary film: nos. 1-9 and is scored for two pianists and two percussionists. The piece is an attempt to translate imagined visual imagery into an auditory experience. The individual movements could each be interpreted as musical representations of imaginary minimalist paintings in a gallery or as a series of imaginary short films consisting of gradually shifting swathes of color. While the formal aspect of the piece is entirely organic and intuitive, the rhythmic devices and layering are derived from calculated mathematical sequences and patterns. Overall the piece should conjure the image of slowly evolving abstract shapes that morph with the gradually shifting patterns in the music. The article, entitled “Composing Memory: Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered”, examines the thirteen-movement song cycle and how it relates to various aspects of memory. Text painting is a central focus of the analysis, specifically in regard to recurring melodies used to represent memory and the use of large-scale formal devices across movements. Snider’s use of vocal canons and heterophony are also examined, specifically how certain vocal textures connect to the idea of memory. These compositional elements deeply connect the music to Nathaniel Bellows’ poems which serve as the text of the piece. By emphasizing the value of closely studying a relatively new work by a prominent composer within the NYC indie-classical scene, I hope to shed light on some of the noteworthy compositional techniques used to enhance the piece.