Solo Instrumental
Buffalo is a piece for solo piano dedicated to several of my friends and their families who have lost their mothers. It was inspired by a Laura Kasischke poem of the same name, from the collection Dance and Disappear. The poem is a meditation on motherhood, spirituality, loss, and the intimacy found within life’s small joys.
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These elements become apparent through contrapuntal development, vertical harmonic progressions, and the unfolding of melodic ideas. They create imagistic moments that arise and recede at times gently and violently, much like the poem – and grief – itself.
Clarity and immediacy are fundamental to the piece: relationships are laid bare for the listener so that each development attains an elevated intimacy. This intimacy extends to the score itself, where performers are asked at times to play as though the music is inhaling and exhaling.
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Hopefully, by the end of the piece the audience has had a space to reflect and become immersed in the meditation.
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Buffalo was premiered at the College Music Society 2023 national conference in Miami, Florida by pianist Charles Geter.
Project CETI (Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a non-profit organization applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. I heard about Project CETI while listening to a news podcast; several members of the research team explained how they believe that sperm whales may in fact have their own alphabet,
which would mean they have their very own language. If the researchers could decode the alphabet using artificial intelligence, then they could translate the language and prove the existence of a species with higher level cognitive thinking similar to our own. The researchers even used musical terms to describe their language, such as coda, tempo, and dynamics. I found their interview and their potential discovery to be incredibly exciting and transformative.
CETI is inspired and influenced by the language of sperm whale communication. Sperm whales communicate using what we might identify as loud clicking. These clicks often have pitch material such as fast stepwise motion and subtle, but present perfect intervals. When several communicate together, there arises an incredible counterpoint defined by a cascade of sound that contains a variety of rhythms and small pitch shifts.
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The current recording is a midi realization, with a live performance/recording coming soon!
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