Jeff Morris

Here’s another dance set to “Man Unseen (Theme)” performed by Kimberly Patterson at 60×60 Dance at the Winter Garden in New York City November 14, 2008.

Link: YouTube

I’ve posted some recordings of my work here.

A video of “Man Unseen” (Theme) with dance choreographed by Laura Shapiro and performed at Galapagos Art Space in New York city last September is now available on the 60×60 Dance blog.

Link

Ancient Chinese Secret for three to eight Sudoku and bell players is a sonic performance piece that exploits the inflated mystery of unseen goings-on. In live performance, the details on the paper cannot be seen by the audience, and the sounds produced are only indirectly related to the main task of the performers. In recorded or radio performance, the mystery is heightened because the performers cannot be seen, making the sound seem even more ancient, Chinese, and secret (although they may not be any of these things).

Ancient Chinese Secret score and notes (PDF)

Recorded performance at OurMedia.org (MP3)

My RUhere has been included in a web-based exhibit presented by SoundLAB with the theme “soundSTORY.”  The exhibit is presented as part of NewMediaFest 2007.  

See the exhibit here (you might need to disable pop-up window blockers). 

My Etude No. 3 for horn was selected to be recorded by Tim Jackson for a feature on Composition:Today.  It uses natural harmonics of the horn in a more contemporary way.  (About the few measures he calls “unplayable:” I played them myself many times before writing them in the first place.)

Read more, see the score, and hear the recording here.

I was selected to create the interactive electronic score for this collaborative work involving site-specific dance and photography at Texas Woman’s University, exploring the impossibility of capturing the mundane.  The event was part of The Body and Performance Symposium: Discussions Exploring Collaboration Across Disciplines.

All source sounds were recorded during an average day in the lives of different people. In performance, the sound clips are fractured, so that the treble, middle, and bass frequencies of the sound act as three facets of a flexible beat pattern that articulates time. As they are played, the sounds travel toward, past, and away from the observer independently, causing their speed and pitch to be warped in time and space. The result is a texture of fragmented scenes, woven together, from multiple and mobile points of view in time and space, presenting the sound events as ephemeral strands of instants in time. StillMotion explores the ordinary sublime: on the one hand the impossibility of recording the everyday (as soon as it is marked, it is elevated in some way), and the impossibility of recording a performance (as soon as it is recorded it is a frozen text).StillMotion was originally created for a collaboration with guest choreographers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner, and the dance and visual arts departments of Texas Woman’s University. Photographs and sounds were taken of the dancers acting out an average day in their lives. The photos were used as a basis for the choreography, and the music, choreography and set design grew together organically. The performance consisted of dance depicting functions or feelings captured in the photos, stylized versions of photos on scrims hanging within space (sometimes invading the dance space), and this music, from processed sounds of the “average day.”

Links:

• Press Release

a thought amidst was selected for performance during the International Computer Music Conference 2002 in Göteborg, Sweden as part of the “Money” Project, in which composers around the world were invited to create pieces based on the same brief sound clip.  A CD of the fifteen selected works will be released by Alta Sounds.

Amidst turbulent surroundings, a delictate musical thought persists.

This six-minute composition for unaccompanied trumpet explores serial techniques in a more organic way than is traditionally used in serial music. A very small musical idea (a string of seven pitches) is the underlying “DNA” for the entire piece.  The performer portrays two opposing voices, which manifest themselves and interact in different ways in each of the three movements.  The trumpeter will enjoy challenging leaps and runs as well as the freedom from traditional tonal patterns and phrasing.  This may be played on a trumpet in any key, read without transposing. 

View and buy the score and hear it at SibeliusMusic (plug-in required).

peja’chuqegh is a performance work that mocks everything about the stereotype of the classical string quartet, including its use in society, system of tonailty, form, instrumentation, and the foreign languages in which they always write the directions.  This performance is by faculty and students at the Florida State Unviersity (including Butch Rovan).

Recorded performance of movements I, III, and II (in that order) at OurMedia.org (MP3)