Scott L. Miller

4 Instruments and Interactive Electronics

Composer's Note:

Transformation can be sudden or slow, drastic or subtle, proactive or reactive. In music, the listener is often in the role of voyeur, witness to the transformation of sonic materials defined by the beginning and ending of a performance. We can experience such a transformation over an uninterrupted period of time, like a film that shows a seedling sprout, grow, flower, wither, and die. We witness everything, even our constantly changing environment, in a linear progression through time.
But another possibility involves transformation "out of time" or out of the range of the voyeur's perception. Our experience of the transformation is fragmented, akin to viewing a series of snapshots or film clips of a life from birth to death, perhaps even in a non- linear progression, leaving us to imagine the events in between. In Shape Shifting, the ensemble's individual and collective musical gestures are often subject to transformation, and how they react to changes in the sonic environment often influences the process of transformation itself. One approach to Shape Shifting is as a series of scenes--sped-up, slowed-down, or even stills--that document and provide us with different perspectives on the state of transformation, which we can ultimately only measure at the end of the process itself.