for tape playback
Being inspired by some of the most accomplished composers of the 20th Century gave me the idea to create a piece that would show tribute to these three individuals. With the exception of John Cage, I met the other two composers, George Crumb and Milton Babbitt, as they were guest artists during my graduate years at Louisiana State University. They gave lectures to the university’s School of Music, and as a graduate assistant I worked in the recording studio and engineered the lectures and the recordings.
Taking what I thought were their most profound phrases and sentences from those lectures, I decided to place them in a surreal landscape of electroacoustic sounds and create three short movements. Pairing their recorded voices with the sound of an instrument – and subjecting everything to electronic audio manipulation gave me a result that I was greatly impressed with (and at times it’s even humorous). Each movement’s sounds are generated only from the composer’s lecture recording, and an acoustic instrument.
I. John Cage: “…nothing’s definite”
II. George Crumb: “…influenced by those possibilities”
III. Milton Babbitt: “…a tendency to talk too quickly”