Mapping Sound Worlds: A Composition Portfolio

Abstract

This portfolio combines a selection of musical works I created between 2017 and 2022. In many ways, each of the eight selected pieces, no matter how sonically, conceptually, or stylistically different from each other, intertwines with the ideas of the Internal Family Systems psychological model (IFS), where the mind is naturally seen as subdivided into an indeterminate number of subpersonalities or parts that develop a complex system of interactions among themselves. This philosophy has become crucial to my daily practice over the last seven years, deeply affecting my creative process and conception of individual sounds and their sound worlds. Most importantly, it has profoundly changed the way I listen.

My earlier piece Cositas Diminutas (2017), encapsulates my fascination with the thingness of found objects and explores how they shape a performer’s behavior in a musical context of a prepared piano. The narrative in this piece builds around the theatre of objects inside a piano, where each object is seen as an extension of the instrument and the pianist (a puppeteer) and represents a part of their multifaceted, complex entity.

My further experiments with the genre of music theatre culminate in Thousand Splinters of a Human Eye (2017), where each performer metaphorically represents a living thought inside one’s mind. Together, the “thoughts” form one intricate system in action. Carefully designed improvisatory situations in the piece invite curiosity and humor into play resulting in surprising interactions between the characters on stage. For the scores of both pieces, I developed a method of layered scores where each page consists of two or more layers (each combination is scanned separately). When read together, the pages reflect the multi-dimensionality and simultaneity of sonic situations.

The piece Silenced (2019) manifests a stylistic and conceptual turn of my compositional path, focusing on extending the sound world from within the sound itself – drilling a well of sound in pursuit of unfolding its utmost corners and amplifying its tiniest details with the means of analog electronics. This self-contained electronic eco-system enables the resonant space inside the timpani to speak for itself in the form of emerging voice – feedback, inviting for a more intimate interaction between the performers and the instrument, as well as between the performers themselves.

A Cow in the Backyard (2020) originates from the sound of a found object (a garbage truck) and explores the transformation of the mundane into art through granular synthesis, instrumental writing, and stop-motion animation. The electronic tape serves as a bridge between the ensemble and the visuals. Its emancipated rhythmical layer responds to the inherent rhythm of frames in the animation and mutates into motives over time. It plays the leading role in the musical part of the piece and brings what usually stays implicit and hidden to the foreground.

Following up on Silenced, my large-scale work for six electric guitars, Asymptotic Freedom (2020 – 2021), delves further into the possibilities of a monochrome ensemble. In this piece, I aim to expand the vibrating space within the instrument outward and create space through sound by composing sonic reflections from one guitar to another. At any given moment, the geography of Asymptotic Freedom permits the coexistence of macro- and micro-sound spaces, and local sonic events. Furthermore, I largely diversify and expand the possibilities of the feedback palette, which plays a significant role in enhancing the spatial awareness of a listener.

The composition X is Where I Am (2021) explores an intimate expression of Self – a female voice – through its many parts in the ensemble and is centered around the theme of displacement and home. A moving agent in a concert space (the voice) is transmitted via transducers inside a prepared piano on stage. The separation between the vocalist and a slightly distorted resonance of her voice naturally sets the trajectory for the unfolding. The ensemble dispersed in the hall acts as a resonant body for the voice, gradually transforming the sound space throughout the piece. The motivic language of X is Where I Am, roots in Russian folklore and alludes to the genre of Russian lament, which is explored further in my piece Whispering to the Stars.

The research on intimate expression continues further in my work Whispering to the Stars (2022). Following a gradual emergence of translucent melodic motives, the piece enters obscure corners of the originating sound field. Eventually, the three voices erupt as a choir, filtered through the vessels of the brass instruments, completing the range of emotion in the lament. The spatial quality inherent to this piece significantly advanced during its adaptation to the Wave Synthesis System in 2023.

Forget Me Not (2022), the last piece in my portfolio, follows the evolution of a melodic line into a fabric of interlacing strands. The interaction between the amplified piano voice, altered via guitar pedals, and a saxophone creates a subpersonality of the latter, sonically affected by the pedals – this is a particular example of the creation’s internal complexity that reflects its ever-changing multifaceted nature. Similarly, all instruments in the ensemble permeate each other and share the gravitational pull forming a palpable layered substance curled into a vortex of sound space.