Ouroboros (world premiere)
by Billy Waldman

The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a dragon or snake eating its own tail, used most often to symbolize the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, although different interpretations are used in various cultures across the world. This piece is made up of many short musical ideas which, using a digital looper, continuously repeat in a cyclical fashion, representing the world we live in, surrounded by cycles of all types and sizes that occur independently of each other to make up a beautiful, chaotic whole.

nervous corners (world premiere)
by Gibson Mahnke & Evan Williams

coming/going
by Makenna Harding-Davis

It’s easy to get lost in my own mind when I move throughout the world. But some of the most precious moments come when I drown out my thoughts and focus on my surroundings. That’s what I love about train stations: I get to watch people in the middle of their journey and ask myself why they are there, who/what they are going to, what they are thinking about. Everyone is on their own path, but together they make up a big picture, like a long-exposure image. There’s something beautiful about knowing I am just another person coming and going, and that I, too, have my own story.

to keep on going when it’s pointless (local premiere)
by Henryk Golden

Someone asked me to define irony recently. “To keep on going when it’s pointless” was my answer. I don’t know why I responded in that manner, but my somewhat random choice of words resonated with me. Just to keep on going is often what life feels like. Based on my memories of my own actions, but also the world around us. We keep on going, even though things don’t make sense. Life itself has become ironic. We see the social imbalance, we see developments which are supposed to make life easier, yet they don’t. We, as a society, have the ability to feed everyone and to limit global warming. and we understand these issues, yet we decide not to act. Every day, we decide not to make things better. We live in an ambiguous state. A fascinating reality where people are lost and it feels as if even the powerful, can’t control their own actions, much less, those who are further down in the chain of power. An existential irony, where we keep on going without purpose. The question is, how and when (if) will we get serious about life again?

Will the piece answer this question? I think not.

There3 (world premiere)
by Chloe Villamayor
“I’d live life a lot differently if the SpongeBob soundtrack underscored my life.”

Three mini movements for two Moog Thereminis featuring variations on variations on “Hawaiian Cocktail” by Richard Myhill.

Triptych 1 (world premiere)
by Murk Haji-Sheikh

Triptych 1 is my first experiment with blending sound with the non-linear way we interact with visual storytelling. It is based on the historical practice of storytelling through panel painting. This gained popularity in the Middle Ages in altar paintings, continuing through to more critical works in the 20th century like Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. There have been attempts to convey triptychs in music which present each panel in a linear manner as movements. To me, this loses an important feature of all visual art – the ability for the observer to explore that visual space at their own leisure. Rather than a movement-based approach, Triptych 1 takes three obscured objects and re-imagines them as pure sound displayed as what I am calling “Sound Panels”; each panel takes inspiration from the persistence of vision effect and CRT phosphor decay times. I use a two measure-long delay (verging on “Sound on Sound” looping from early tape music) to layer each instrument back onto itself, allowing the sonic image to build over time. Each voice moves slowly between key centers with the hope that the listener can take this meditative approach to explore each panel as they please.