jonathan wall

GANGNA~1.MID was composed for Dartmouth College’s MIDI Jamz on Ice competition, where it was premiered on November 14, 2012. The work is a setting of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” using Max/MSP to process and layer MIDI ringtone arrangements of the popular song.

“I Will Remember Not Just to Touch” is an improvisational composition for three laptop musicians. The piece is implemented in Max/MSP, which detects the players’ fingers on MacBook trackpads and uses that data to control the volume, pitch, and rhythmic density of several musical and non-musical sounds. The piece was premiered in front at UNCG’s 2012 Collage concert.
An interactive excerpt of the piece is available to download for multitouch-enabled Apple computers (post-2007 MacBook Pros, for example).

Whither, Thence, Repeat seeks to take a familiar instrument (the piano, interpreted here as MIDI keyboard) and transform its most basic functionality—what if the piano could “remember” previous rhythms and continued playing them on its own? What if these rhythms were interpreted instead as harmonic intervals, or used to control sample playback? My redesigned MIDI instrument is utilized here to provide a musical setting for a public-domain reading of the eighteenth-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson’s A Grammar of the English Tongue.

This is an arrangement of the first movement of Brian Eno’s brilliant Music for Airports (1978). His recording, composed of overlapping piano and synthesizer tape loops, is a beautifully subtle introduction to one of ambient music’s most significant works. Although Eno’s early ambient pieces were conceived and realized as studio works, they have since taken on a new life of performance through ensembles like Bang on a Can (Airports) and Contact (1975’s Discreet Music). In my arrangement, I kept the instrumentation to only piano and vibraphone to capture the original recording’s sparseness. In order to still convey a wide repertoire of sounds, I utilized a wide variety of extended techniques, borrowing many from George Crumb (mutes, harmonics, and other methods of playing inside the piano) and developing some on my own (using fishing line and a violin bow). The piece is especially demanding of the third performer, who moves between the inside of the piano and the vibraphone. This recording of Music for Airports: 1/1 was performed in a reading by David Eisenband, Tim Hambourger, and myself in December 2010.

Machine Work is a collection of five short vignettes edited and scored for John Supko’s Sound+Image course. Each section depicts some element or aspect of machine “life.” The first and fifth, consisting of uncut factory footage, represent tranquility and brutality, respectively; the second and fourth suggest organic processes; and the third segment further relates machines to the natural world. Machine Work was presented on April 22, 2010, at The Inner Frame: A Concert of Multimedia Works Created for Sound+Image.

ttett is a remix of Stephen Jaffe’s Cut Time Shout for two pianos (also arranged for orchestra). My version takes a short snippet of the original, a lively and virtuosic encore piece that riffs on various classical and popular music tropes, and time-stretches these few notes so that they proceed at less than 1% of their original speed. Using these granular texture as an inspiration, I added a piano accompaniment that emulates Charlemagne Palestine’s “strumming” technique. Additionally, distorted samples of the original recordings are triggered during the performance.