White Stone (after Agnes Martin)

for violin and electronics

program note:

White Stone (after Agnes Martin) borrows its title from Martin’s painting of the same name. Martin’s work builds intense emotion from its structure, often based on grids and geometric patterns. Taking on this idea, the violin in my White Stone plays with limited pitches and rhythms; through these restraints I build my own simple structure paralleling Martin’s grids. The electronics act as a wash of color surrounding the violin’s continual motion, providing a soft undercurrent to the texture.

Stemming from my study of Medieval music, I processed an audio sample from Heinrich Isaac’s Missa Paschale through Ableton Live’s audio to midi converter. After cleaning up the resulting excess of midi notes, I retuned the chords to align with the violin’s use of the F overtone series, limiting the electronics to pitches from that series. The resulting chords are far removed from Isaac’s original material, Isaac here serves as a hidden starting point.

Reusing material in a way that obscures the source has become a reoccurring element of my practice. In my evening-length piece Plexus: a work in knots for electronics and dance, with choreography by Gabrielle Lamb, I reduce the opening chords from Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Op. 132 to punctuating chords for the opening of Act II. In Manual City, my collaboration with the visual artist Mao Wei, I composed short pieces for music box based on children’s songs. The songs are obscured through erasures and overlaps to create a strange and still familiar sound world, what the artist calls a “postmodern amusement park.”

White Stone (after Agnes Martin) was written for Kate Dreyfuss, who premiered the work in Nelson Music Room, Duke University in November 2019.