the ticking of eternity

It was announced today that The Ticking of Eternity won the Civitasolis Reed Quintet's call for scores! It will be performed, recorded, and released online in Fall 2020.

In their call they asked for a miniature (30 secs - 3 mins) for reed quintet (ob, cl, asax, b. cl, bsn) that featured some extra element like extended techniques, fixed media, or choreography. I used this as an excuse to drop what I was doing and bring to fruition an idea I've had for a while. My wife used to be a professional actor and also loves to do audio work. I found an excerpt from a poem that we both loved, recorded her performance of that poem, and then used that as the fixed media for this work. While there is some electronic work done to her voice, most of the compositional interest of the piece comes from the relationship of the text to the music. 

More on Civitasolis: https://www.civitasolisquintet.com/