Fixed Media
Selected works from this category.Come to Think of It: Three Elegies for Altered Instruments and Electronic Texture
These three elegies are not merely about loss—they are about remembering, about the layered complexity of memory when it passes through another’s mind before reaching our own. Each title begins with one person thinking of another—each movement a reflection shaped by proximity, distance, and imagination. The instruments, electronically altered, do not simply sing—they murmur, fray, bend, and hover, like memory itself: fragile, transformed, and searching for a listener.
I. Thinking of Eric Thinking of Carl (Who Holds [I believe] Summer)
This movement is a meditation on love and care in the face of profound change. Eric tends to Carl, whose memory and capacity have been reshaped by illness, yet who may still—quietly, inwardly—hold summer: that season of warmth, freedom, and golden recollection. The music is intimate, its phrases fragile, as if woven from air barely held together. The altered winds do not so much sing as lean gently toward what once was.
II. Thinking of Ronan Thinking of Paris (Who Carries [quietly] 1870–1871)
Ronan knows Paris now: a city of light and sound, of music and movement, of street-level rhythm and digital speed. Ronan sees a city in constant present tense. And Paris, for all its brilliance, receives Ronan with open boulevards and streaming possibility.
But Paris also remembers. Beneath its splendor, it carries what it rarely reveals: the scars of 1870–1871, of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. These memories do not speak often. They are curated, tucked carefully behind facades and inside monuments, carried quietly, like breath drawn but not released.
The music moves between Ronan’s brightness and the city’s deeper, withheld remembrances. The altered sounds shimmer in present motion while threading through echoes that Paris does not forget, even as it chooses not to say them aloud.
III. Thinking of Bowie Thinking of Transistors (Who Lament [wistfully] Faded Dials)
This final movement imagines Bowie—ever attuned to time, decay, and reinvention—thinking of transistor radios. Not just the devices, but what they represented: the flicker of a broadcast caught at the edge of a signal, the thrill of music captured on the move, the closeness of sound in the smallest of spaces.
But the transistors are fading. Their dials no longer glow. And in this imagined reverie, they lament, not with drama, but wistfully—half in sorrow, half in hope that someone still hears them. Their song is gentle, shaped by static, shaped by memory. They do not cry out. They send out a quiet frequency, just in case.
These three elegies are not merely about loss—they are about remembering, about the layered complexity of memory when it passes through another’s mind before reaching our own. Each title begins with one person thinking of another—each movement a reflection shaped by proximity, distance, and imagination. The instruments, electronically altered, do not simply sing—they murmur, fray, bend, and hover, like memory itself: fragile, transformed, and searching for a listener.
I. Thinking of Eric Thinking of Carl (Who Holds [I believe] Summer)
This movement is a meditation on love and care in the face of profound change. Eric tends to Carl, whose memory and capacity have been reshaped by illness, yet who may still—quietly, inwardly—hold summer: that season of warmth, freedom, and golden recollection. The music is intimate, its phrases fragile, as if woven from air barely held together. The altered winds do not so much sing as lean gently toward what once was.
II. Thinking of Ronan Thinking of Paris (Who Carries [quietly] 1870–1871)
Ronan knows Paris now: a city of light and sound, of music and movement, of street-level rhythm and digital speed. Ronan sees a city in constant present tense. And Paris, for all its brilliance, receives Ronan with open boulevards and streaming possibility.
But Paris also remembers. Beneath its splendor, it carries what it rarely reveals: the scars of 1870–1871, of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. These memories do not speak often. They are curated, tucked carefully behind facades and inside monuments, carried quietly, like breath drawn but not released.
The music moves between Ronan’s brightness and the city’s deeper, withheld remembrances. The altered sounds shimmer in present motion while threading through echoes that Paris does not forget, even as it chooses not to say them aloud.
III. Thinking of Bowie Thinking of Transistors (Who Lament [wistfully] Faded Dials)
This final movement imagines Bowie—ever attuned to time, decay, and reinvention—thinking of transistor radios. Not just the devices, but what they represented: the flicker of a broadcast caught at the edge of a signal, the thrill of music captured on the move, the closeness of sound in the smallest of spaces.
But the transistors are fading. Their dials no longer glow. And in this imagined reverie, they lament, not with drama, but wistfully—half in sorrow, half in hope that someone still hears them. Their song is gentle, shaped by static, shaped by memory. They do not cry out. They send out a quiet frequency, just in case.
Hidden Frequencies
Hidden Frequencies is a composition for fixed media and dance, composed for choreographer Rebecca Salzer. The piece unfolds through a modular structure—thirty-one phases spanning 244 measures—organized by repetition, rupture, and recalibration. A recorded cello moves throughout the entire work—not as surface detail or only a featured voice, but as a generative force within the design: shaping contour, distributing tension, and shifting the center of gravity from within.
Early sections establish a sense of regularity through 8-measure units, but this symmetry begins to falter as the work approaches its point of maximum tension. Near the divine proportion—just past the 61% mark in the duration—the architecture begins to bend. Phrase lengths contract and expand; tempo accelerates, then slows. Duration is no longer neutral. This is not a climax in the traditional sense, but a spatial and temporal shift—a reorganization of pressure and weight within the form itself. The cello, already embedded as a continuous thread, gathers force in this moment. Its voice intensifies, crossing structural thresholds and asserting direction through the arc of acceleration and into the stillness that follows. It expands not in volume but in gravitational pull.
Sonic materials arise as conditions to be inhabited. What connects them is not repetition, but alignment—an underlying logic of proportion, decay, and spatial balance. Energy accrues and dissipates, tethered to something that resonates beyond theme alone. The piece draws its coherence not from surface design, but from the architecture beneath—from durations, densities, and silences measured not only in time, but in weight. Hidden Frequencies moves at the threshold between resonance and perception, shaped by forces that govern from below: inaudible, but exacting.
Hidden Frequencies is a composition for fixed media and dance, composed for choreographer Rebecca Salzer. The piece unfolds through a modular structure—thirty-one phases spanning 244 measures—organized by repetition, rupture, and recalibration. A recorded cello moves throughout the entire work—not as surface detail or only a featured voice, but as a generative force within the design: shaping contour, distributing tension, and shifting the center of gravity from within.
Early sections establish a sense of regularity through 8-measure units, but this symmetry begins to falter as the work approaches its point of maximum tension. Near the divine proportion—just past the 61% mark in the duration—the architecture begins to bend. Phrase lengths contract and expand; tempo accelerates, then slows. Duration is no longer neutral. This is not a climax in the traditional sense, but a spatial and temporal shift—a reorganization of pressure and weight within the form itself. The cello, already embedded as a continuous thread, gathers force in this moment. Its voice intensifies, crossing structural thresholds and asserting direction through the arc of acceleration and into the stillness that follows. It expands not in volume but in gravitational pull.
Sonic materials arise as conditions to be inhabited. What connects them is not repetition, but alignment—an underlying logic of proportion, decay, and spatial balance. Energy accrues and dissipates, tethered to something that resonates beyond theme alone. The piece draws its coherence not from surface design, but from the architecture beneath—from durations, densities, and silences measured not only in time, but in weight. Hidden Frequencies moves at the threshold between resonance and perception, shaped by forces that govern from below: inaudible, but exacting.
Transformations III: Not Here and Now
This dialogue unfolds across time—between the voice of a narrator in the present and the voice of a poem that contemplates the end of thought itself. At its center is Philip Larkin’s The Old Fools, a text that confronts the erosion of memory, coherence, and identity in the final stages of life. Its stark honesty—refusing to sentimentalize decline—shapes an electronic environment that does not simply accompany the poem but arises from it: deliberate, unsettled, and in constant transformation.
The narrator—voiced by Joanna Cobb Biermann—moves within this evolving sonic terrain, where textures shift, gestures recur in altered form, and moments dissolve just as they begin to cohere. It is as if memory itself were trying, again and again, to reassemble what time has unraveled. In this space, sound and language become equal participants—echoing, distorting, and reframing one another—until meaning hovers not in clarity, but in the fragile effort to remember.
This dialogue unfolds across time—between the voice of a narrator in the present and the voice of a poem that contemplates the end of thought itself. At its center is Philip Larkin’s The Old Fools, a text that confronts the erosion of memory, coherence, and identity in the final stages of life. Its stark honesty—refusing to sentimentalize decline—shapes an electronic environment that does not simply accompany the poem but arises from it: deliberate, unsettled, and in constant transformation.
The narrator—voiced by Joanna Cobb Biermann—moves within this evolving sonic terrain, where textures shift, gestures recur in altered form, and moments dissolve just as they begin to cohere. It is as if memory itself were trying, again and again, to reassemble what time has unraveled. In this space, sound and language become equal participants—echoing, distorting, and reframing one another—until meaning hovers not in clarity, but in the fragile effort to remember.