After Some Songs

Valentine (after My Funny Valentine)

Many Mornings Many Moods (In a Sentimental Mood)

A Touch of Africa

You (There’ll Never Be Another You)

Echoes of Brazil (Corcovado)

Elusive Lady (Stella by Starlight)

Another Approach to Rhythms

As we entered the 1980s and 1990s, lighter and less expensive synthesizers, table-top computers, and a variety of software companies began to dominate the electronic music marketplace. In the early 1980s, MIDI emerged as a global standard for equipment and software. I formed Intelligent Music, a software company. And, looking for easily portable equipment, I used a Yamaha synthesizer. For software, I used a Macintosh computer running M, an interactive composing and performing program developed at Intelligent Music by David Zicarelli and others in the company.

After Some Songs, composed between 1986 and 1995, is a collection of short improvisational pieces for electronic sounds and percussion and occasionally other instruments. Several of the pieces are abstractions of jazz classics, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. The songs provided a starting point, a way of thinking about the music, and a lyrical surface to an underlying complexity.

The collection was originally intended to provide the music for a solo concert to be played by Jan Williams. My idea was that Jan’s playing would be enlarged and extended in its sounds if both acoustic and electronic sounds seemed to be coming from the same instrument. To achieve that effect, I created a sound palette in which many of the electronically-generated sounds so closely resemble the acoustic percussion sounds that sometimes it’s hard to know whether a sound is acoustically or electronically produced.

I’ve played these pieces with Jan many times, in many places, and in many versions. Many Mornings, Many Moods, for example, was at first a concerto for solo percussion, orchestra and electronics, commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and premiered by Jan Williams and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at the North American New Music Festival in 1988. I’ve also played these pieces in Europe with Bruno Spoerri and Reto Weber. A Touch of Africa, in fact, was composed in Bruno’s studio near Zurich.

In performance, I’m sitting at a computer, manipulating screen objects to control a synthesizer. Jan plays along with what he hears. At the same time, I’m following what he does. It’s as if I’m conducting an improvising orchestra which is accompanying an improvising soloist. We’re following each other in performance, matching sounds and gestures, letting the music unfold as the result of that mutually influential process.

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For other compositions, click on a title

Blues Mix 1966
Albany Music 3 1966
Jack in January 1967
Street Scene 1967

Drift 1970
Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing 1971
Echoes 1972

From The 14th On 1973

Flowers 1975
Settings for Spirituals 1977

Solo 1978
Scenes from Stevens 1979
Follow Me Softly 1984

After Some Songs 1995
Spring Drum with Pierre’s Words 1997

Many Times … 2001
One World 1 2006
Micro Fictions 2009
Different Cities 2013