Balance-Unbalance 2015

Desert Stroll by Gil Dori
Desert Stroll is a micro-tonal mobile, in which the performer chooses how to progress through the piece. It is inspired by Jeanette Chico's poem The Desert, and honors the Sonoran desert as well as the indigenous people of this area- the Tohono O'odham. The composed material derives from a study of Tohono O’odham songs, and features their unique micro-tonality, melodic gestures, and vocal inflections. The live electronics create a constant fluctuating sonic landscape, similar to the ever-changing landscape of the desert itself. Desert Stroll does not simply quote, nor tries to emulate, Tohono O’odham music. Instead, it fuses their musical idioms within newly composed material, rooted in contemporary art music aesthetics.

Josh Bennett, Clarinet
Josh Bennett is a freelance musician and educator in the Phoenix Valley. He has performed throughout the valley with various ensembles including the Arizona Opera, Crossing 32nd Street, Phoenix Theater, and the Symphony of the Southwest. He is also a founding member of the electro-acoustic free improv trio Static Announcements. As an educator at Paradise Valley Community College, Josh has taught Applied Clarinet, Jazz History, Rock History, Survey of American Music, Music Theory, and World Music.


Between my Sky and your Water by Ricardo Dal Farra
Entre mi cielo y tu agua (Between my sky and your water) is a picture in sound of the geography and culture of some Latin American regions, and its links with the geography and culture of the Nordic region. 

Surrounded by water or asking for it, with clear and bright skies or cloudy days and long nights, maybe different languages but perhaps common hopes. Impossible connections, feelings, thoughts and sensations flowing between my sky and through your water. 

This piece was composed in 2007 using sounds recorded by colleagues in their native lands, in the north of Europe, with plenty of water around; and by colleagues living and visiting the Cusco region, ancient heart of the Inca’s empire in the higher mountains of Peru, closer to the sun but far from the ocean. 

Entre mi cielo y tu agua is part of the North-South project. An initiative by Nordic and Latin American composers to share experiences and to know more about each other’s culture exchanging ideas and sounds, and composing a series of electroacoustic works. All pieces are based in a common pool of sounds, created by the contribution of each composer in the group


Difficult Bamboo by Mason Bates
Led by Charlie Blanco

As with many composers of the twenty-first century, Mason Bates is approaching ecological issues in our society through programmatic titles in his compositions; more notably, Liquid Interface and Alternative Energy. The environmental responsibility of our generation is at the heart of his compositional output and his exploration of ecological concerns in Difficult Bamboo bring the listener to a deeper level of communication with our everyday soundscape. 

Difficult Bamboo situates itself in the form of “Balance/unbalance” as a statement of environmental strength in an unbalanced global ecosystem. Just as bamboo is difficult to kill and control its growth, this piece explores endless possibilities of rhythmic complexity and, although lyrical, is always engrossed by the underlying rhythms passed through the ensemble. This intersection of the early twentieth century Pierrot ensemble (1912) reaches all the way to the present year of composition (2013), reimagining performance possibilities in the twenty-first century. 


Dusk (for Elizabeth Wood)  by Annea Lockwood
Dusk incorporates the low frequency sounds generated by seabed ‘black smoker’ hydrothermal vents, transposed bat calls (Avisoft Bioacostics, Berlin), and percussionist William Winant on gongs and a tam tam. The vent recordings were generously made available by Dr. Timothy Crone of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, and were recorded in the Main Endeavor Field on the Juan de Fuca mid-ocean ridge off the coast of Washington State and discussed in his paper, 'The Sounds Generated by Hydrothermal Vents' published in PLoS ONE.