(2014) for percussion and electronics, 24 movements, variable duration
instrumentation: one performer playing four complex resonant instruments (such as triangles), and two sizzle cymbals or gongs.
Glisten of Places (2014) is a composition and a collection method for living in the world through sound. The piece celebrates the extraordinary sounds of unique places and encodes their location in a secret musical code using latitude and longitude coordinates with rhythmic sonifications that encourage a listener to focus fully on sound and being. The “Where?” of place becomes an interstitial location between the imagination of the listener and a geophysical location, an unknowable but perceivable “glisten” of the place. The score provides a book of 24 movements, each an encoding of a unique sounding place, and it offers detailed instructions for a musician to make their own movements by geo-tagging soundscapes and translating that into percussion music to play in counterpoint with a field recording. In this way Glisten of Places can be personalized by each performer or presenter. Some of the stunning soundscapes include underwater sounds recorded on a coral reef, inside the ice of a glacier crevasse, morning birds in a boreal forest, molten lava flowing from an erupting volcano, sea lions and sea birds on a rocky island, gaseous bubbles from a natural asphalt lake, inside a singing sand dune, inside a fire ant hill, a waterfall in a cave, underwater sounds of orcas and humpback whales, two sides of a bridge over a river in a mine, glacial melting and calving, mountain wind, and more. The work was commissioned by and is dedicated to Jeremy Muller. Muller’s forthcoming debut solo percussion album, Within the Within, includes these movements along with new movements created by Muller.
Glisten of Places (2014)
Performance materials include a PDF score and 27 field recordings corresponding to each movement.