Reformed

'Reformed' takes its name from a work by artist Ashleigh May Thompson (pictured left), which was hanging on my wall at the time of this piece's composition. Thompson's 'Reformed' uses two distorted scans of another one of her works, which are then cut up and woven together to create a new work.

Similarly, this piece uses a recording of an old work of mine as the raw material. The entire piece is made using samples of a withdrawn wind quartet, which are processed in various ways (largely using techniques related to granular synthesis) and recombined to create new textures and sonorities.

All samples are kept at the same pitch as the original, or are at multiple octave transpositions, meaning some of the original piece's harmonic language remains intact. The piece makes use of these transpositions to explore extreme contrasts of range in the frequency domain.

An archive workshop recording of the original wind quartet can be heard here.

Performers:

Flute - Jennifer Cohen
Eb Clarinet - Patrick Burnett
Bass Clarinet - Will Ozard
Bb Trumpet - Connor McLean