Happy 7th Mary                                                                                                                     Joe L. Alexander
 

Rock, Paper, Scissors                                                                                                            Charles Haarhues
 

Music Through Prisms                                                                                                          Mikel Kuehn
 

2 Days in the Tank                                                                                                                William Price
 

Variations on a Theme of A. J. Croce                                                                                  Brian Willkie
 
 

    Joe L. Alexander’s music has been played throughout the United States and in Quito, Ecuador. Performances include recitals/regional conferences of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, the Louisiana  Composers’ Consortium, the Society of Composers, Inc., the College Music Society, and Southeastern Composers League Forum, as well as Bowling Green State University’s 21st annual New Music & Art Festival, and New Music for Young Ensemble, Inc. 1994 Composers' Competition.  This past April, he was commissioned by the Monroe (Louisiana) Symphony Orchestra to compose Louisiana Blue (baritone, flute, piano with orchestra accompaniment; text by L. B. Morgan) for their annual 2003 Lagniappe Concert.  His Two Bryant Songs (soprano, Bb clarinet and piano) were released on CD by Living Artist Recordings, Vol. 5, Winds and Voices.  Dr. Alexander teaches low brass, serves as the Head of Theory/Composition and is Director of the Music Skills and Development Lab at Louisiana Tech University.  He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of North Texas and studied composition with Newel Kay Brown, Douglas Knehans, Martin Mailman, Cindy McTee, and James Riley.

Happy 7th Mary
    Happy 7th Mary was composed as a 7th anniversary present for my wife, Mary, in February 2001.  It is based on a spoken text which was then manipulated, using Sonic Foundry’s Sound Forge and Vegas Video.  It is dedicated to my wonderful wife.

    Charles Haarhues is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree at LSU, where he studies composition with Dinos Constantinides. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Eastern Illinois University, where he studied composition and jazz improvisation. In addition, he has performed traditional African drumming with Abubakari Lunna, Gideon Alorwoyie, and Oscar Sulley Braimah. He has received commissions from John Perrine, Of Moving Colors Productions, and the LSU Union Art Gallery for artist Doug Taylor's holography exhibit. In the Spring of 2003 he was commissioned to write arrangements for a joint performance of the Acadiana Symphony and the Cajun band Steve Reily and the Mamou Playboys. Recently he has turned his attention to the study of Japanese music, and has written songs based on the Japanese poetic forms Haiku and Tanka for his wife, soprano Mayumi Yotsumoto. In November 2003 his orchestral piece, Sakurajima, was performed by the Louisiana Sinfonietta under the direction of Dinos Constantinides.  Haarhues draws upon this diverse background to compose music that defies easy categorization.

Rock, Paper, Scissors
    This piece was commissioned by the Of Moving Colors dance group for their Spring 2001 production, White. The music was created using the KYMA hardware/software system as well as Peak and ProTools software. First recordings were made of rocks clacking, paper being shredded, scissors snipping, and the singer Mayumi Yotsumoto improvising melodies on the children’s game Rock, Paper, Scissors. Next recordings were edited and manipulated. For example a recording of the composer saying 'paper' was rhythmicized using a drum machine, and the singer's vocalizations were harmonized to sound like a choir and then delayed using echo effects.  Perhaps the most unusual manipulation of a natural sound involved a pair of snipping scissors being transformed  into guitar-like sounds. First rhythms were generated using a drum machine. Next these were resonated and tuned to create actual pitched notes. Finally these sounds were processed using reverb, chorusing, and delay to fatten them up. The resulting instrument sounds something like a cross between an electric guitar and a Japanese koto. Even though some samples of actual instruments were used, most of the sounds in the piece were created this way.

    Composer Mikel Kuehn received degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music (Ph.D., MA) and the University of North Texas (BM). Kuehn’s music has received awards and honorable recognition from ASCAP, BMI, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2000 and 2002 First Hearing Contests), Eastman (Hanson and McCurdy Prizes), the League of Composers/ ISCM, the University of Illinois Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Contest, and the Luigi Russolo Competition (ITALY).  His music has twice been selected to represent the United States abroad (by ISCM and SEAMUS), in both the acoustic and electro-acoustic mediums, and has been programmed on concerts and conferences by the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, the Bonk Festival, Cycle de concerts de musique par ordinateur (Université Paris 8, FRANCE), the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (Cliff Colnot, cond.), pianist David Burge, Electronic Music Midwest, Ensemble 21, Festival Elektrokomplex (Vienna, AUSTRIA), the Florida ElectroAcoustic Music Festival, saxophonists Jean-Michel Goury and John Sampen, Harvey Sollberger and the New York New Music Ensemble, the International Computer Music Association, the June in Buffalo Festival, the Kesatuan Duo, the League of Composers/ISCM, members of the New Millennium Ensemble, the Orpheus Chamber Music Series, the Society of Composers, Inc., Sonic Residues 02 (AUSTRALIA), et al..  Kuehn’s Between the Lynes has been described as having “sensuous phrases … produc[ing] an effect of high abstraction turning into decadence” by author and New York Times critic Paul Griffiths.  He has delivered papers at national conferences of SEAMUS, the Society of Music Theory, the Society of Composers, Inc., and Eastman’s 2003 Berio Festival.  He is the author of nGEN, a free multi-platform computer music application used internationally. Currently Assistant Professor of Composition at Bowling Green State University, he is Coordinator of the Composition Area and directs the New Music Ensemble.

Music through Prisms
    Music through Prisms, for 2-channel tape, was inspired by a vision of applying a light prism to sounds.  The prism, a triangular or hexagonal piece of glass, is used to disperse or “split” a light wave into its representative spectrum or constituent colors; hence, the “rainbow” effect that occurs when it is subjected to white light. As sound and light are in a sense the same material (waves) — although their physical quanta are different — what would be the effect of passing sound waves through prisms?  The “prisms” in this sense are processes that in some way alter or transform the original sound’s spectrum.  Just as glass prisms are capable of breaking white light into all of its representative colors, these musical prisms break, extract, and isolate or recombine elements of the source’s sonic spectrum.  In many cases, this entirely distorts the original sonic identity of the source.  Over the course of the work’s twelve-and-a-half minutes, a metamorphosis occurs in which the source material (the music that is fed into the prisms) is gradually revealed.  The food for the prisms are four previous works of mine, two acoustic: Fünf Parabeln for soprano and chamber ensemble, and Between the Lynes for flute, ‘cello, and piano; and two electro-acoustic: Diaspora (electronic), and ...remembrance of things past... (a text-sound composition based on a recitation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX ).

    William Price's music has been performed at many international events, including the 2003 Sonic Circuits Festival, the 2002 SEAMUS Conference, the 11th Annual Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, the 2000 World Saxophone Congress, the LSU Festival of Contemporary Music, and the North American Saxophone Alliance New Millennium Conference. He has received awards and commissions from numerous organizations including ASCAP, the Louisiana Music Teachers Association, and the Southeastern Composers League.  His music has been performed and premiered by the Louisiana Sinfonietta, Ensamble Rosario, the Red Stick Saxophone Quartet, Iwona Glinka, Athanasios Zervas and has been broadcast on public radio stations throughout the country.  William is currently the president of the Mid-South Chapter of the NACUSA and will receive his DMA in music composition from LSU in May 2004.  He is currently instructor of electro-acoustic music and composition at LSU.

2 Days in the Tank
    2 Days in the Tank, was realized in the Electro-Acoustic Studios at Louisiana State University and was created using the audio programs Csound and Protools.  All of the sounds used in the piece were derived from the manipulation of the spoken text, "The drunk tank judge is late," which is a poetic fragment from the larger poem "The Drunk Tank Judge," by beat poet Charles Bukowski.  The text was recited and recorded by the composer and modified using phase vocoding, linear predictive coding, and granular synthesis techniques.

    Brian Willkie is seeking his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University where he works with Dr. Stephen Beck in the Music and Art Digital Studio (MADStudio) and the Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technologies (LCAT) and studies composition with Dr. Dinos Constantinides.  His works have been performed in Japan, Argentina, and regionally in the Southeastern U.S. and are published by Dorn Publishing. Brian received his Masters and Bachelors degrees in composition from the University of Georgia at Athens where he studied with Dr. Leonard Ball. In addition to many master classes with Pulitzer Prize winning composers such as George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Joseph Schwantner, he has also studied in Paris at the Center for the Composition of Music Iannis Xenakis (formerly Les Ateliers UPIC).

Variations on a Theme of A.J. Croce
    Though relatively new, electronic music has already established a set of techniques to manipulate sound dating back to the earliest musique concrete works of the mid 20th Century. These techniques include slowed or accelerated playback, pitch shift, fragmentation, and reverse playback. Variations on a Theme of A.J. Croce takes a sample of an existing popular song as its source and applies these techniques, simultaneously juxtaposing different sonic worlds while presenting the transformation of a sound source into a collage of sound.