Instrumentalist(s) speak or perform text

Commissioned by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players;

Christopher Shultis with amplified cactus: perf of John Cage's Child of TreeSpoken texts about music to be pre-recorded by the performers, and are played back variously in performance. Texts drawn from the writings of John Cage, and by the composer.

Composer's note: 

Lewis Nielson - You Choose - Sarah Pyle, flute; Ran Duan, piano

Program Note: You Choose (2010) is a text-setting by Roque Dalton in which the chamber players become singers.  Like other works I have written, my hope is to produce a sense of community amongst the performers and to break the plane between audience and performer by placing the players’ vulnerabilities as vocalists “on-view,” as it were, and allowing listeners to relate to what the takes place more equally.  Dalton’s poetry, always attacking any form of officiousness and over-organized governance, consists of a speech given to like-minded comrades that, owing to the speaker being a little less than coherent owing to drink, ends in a warm but none-too-clear discourse on love. Very much of the people, I would hope that the vocal performance—very much of an uncultivated, spur-of-the-moment vocal style—would take place in the spirit and same haphazard collision of approaches presented in the poetry itself.

(Composer's program note excerpt)
The primary idea behind my composition is that of generating a musical process and seeing what happens to it: not necessarily “evolution” in the scientific sense, but a brand of musical “development” – organic growth and gradual change. Accordingly, Darwin’s Dream begins with a perky little electronic motive (created on an ARP synthesizer at Bowdoin College some 30 years ago). It is quite repetitive at first, almost minimalist, but gradually a few other layers of sound from my memory bank (literally, early works of mine taken from my tape collection) are added to the mix, altering the course of the soundscape.  Whenever a fairly dense texture is reached, I return to the original electronic tune and add a completely different set of sound-memories, leading to another altered fabric. The very last of these alterations produces the most complex texture of all, and segues into a snatch of the 1950s worm music – only to fade away to my original little tune.

Instrumentation: Trumpet in Bb, clarinet in Bb, guitar, percussion (drum set), piano, audio recording, toy birds (making authentic robin sounds).

For movement 1, players speak isolated lines written by Chopin, Robert and Clara Schumann, George Sand.

For movement 2, players speak isolated lines from folk-song lyrics and poems having to do with robins.

NOTE: each movement may be performed alone, as a separate piece.

For movement 1, CD #1 recording –  (8:00) (Chopin-Liszt Birthday Tribute) - is activated at the start and continues until the movement's end.
For movement 2, CD #2 recording – TRACK 1  (:54) (bird sounds) AND TRACK 2 (:21) (Jolson’s Red Red Robin) is played from a boom-box or other on-stage sound source, only at certain moments. It is usually operated (start and stop) by the percussionist.
Movement 1 commemorates the 200th birthday year of Schumann and Chopin. Fragments of their music are heard throughout the movement.
Movement 2 uses quoted fragments as well, all related to images of a "robin" (the word or the bird).

Four audience groups, four conductors.  composers note:

Music for Audience and Soloist dates from the mid-1970s. It was originally intended for a conference of and for gifted teenagers. These young people were the first “performers” (and also the first “audience!!”), at a session I led on the subject of experimental music – in particular, the overlap between music and theater, and the possibility of group improvisation within a framework of tight control. 

In this piece,  the audience is divided into four groups, each led by a separate conductor and each reading from a separate part containing four “cues.”  These cues can be activated (i.e. chosen by the conductor) in any order and at any time. On the surface this may seem like a recipe for chaos. But in fact Music for Audience and Soloist ˆ has a very limited vocabulary of only 16 musical-theatrical events (4 times 4), almost all of them related either by close similarity or sharp textural contrast. (Ideally,  the conductors will explore these relationships as the piece progresses.)