Idyll Patter

for Violin or Trumpet Octet, 2021 - 7:30’

"Idyll Patter" is a play on the phrase "idle chatter." Which is a phrase I absolutely adore because of the casual banality of it. There’s no thought to what’s being said, it is just noise for the sake of noise. Could you make a piece that tries to capture this noise. the chatter from a multiple conversational partners?

The piece is 8 trumpets or violins, barking, uncoordinated and random. Is there anything compelling or musical about 8 people chatting about nothing to no one? I think so!

So much of life is finding beauty in unexpected places, and this piece is about the meaning you find in the sonic clutter: a short motif, sudden pauses, a cornucopia of different sounds. In a sense, "Idyll Patter" is my take on musical chaos. There is no pulse or beat, no composed melody, and no intentional rhythm. Instead, I left he piece up to chance, by entrusting a series random number generators. These "random" numbers are decoded into a series of instructions, which are transmitted to performers through an app. The app is designed to tell them what to play, when to play it, how loud to be, and everything else a performer needs to know to play the piece. This version of the piece is a recording of one iteration of the app, and the performers are playing from a video file, rather than a new score.

The result is a series of sonic clouds, each made up of accidental melodies, unexpected timbres, and fickle harmonies that change at a moment's notice.