“The eyes of our souls only then begin to see, when our bodily eyes are closing.” (William Law) Inspired by Mallarmé’s poem “Les fenêtres,” Windows similarly expresses characteristic symbolist themes of mysticism and otherworldliness, a heightened sense of mortality, and awareness of the power of spiritual corruption. Simultaneously attractive and profoundly disconcerting, we see the window as an entrance that invites us to reflect our own path and the possibilities beyond it. Yet the window as a barrier suggests that we have limitations, and may never fully transcend this world. The piece speaks to the illusion that we can control our life, where in fact unforeseen events mercilessly alter its course. In the end, it wonders if it’s possible to escape, recognizing the inability to rise above human deceits.

The dowser offers a system of decision-making in which there is no demonstrable connection between the process of seeking and the anticipated outcome. A twitching rod, a swinging pendulum indicates, “dig here.” Often those who turn to this ancient practice of magical divination do so not out of a belief that it will work, but that it must. A dry well is a crisis. “Water witching,” as it is known in rural America, is a way of coping with one’s “environment under conditions of uncertainty and anxiety.” The water witch – like the hydrogeologist – is concerned with imagining underground flows of water. The basic materials of water-witching are saxophone multiphonics: fleeting acoustic phenomena that require subtle control of embouchure, fingering, and air-pressure. They are unstable and unpredictable sonorities that float between harmony and timbre. water-witching wanders through this acoustic terrain. Frictions emerge from this “in-between-ness.” Stillness is filled with tension through the hint of something just below the surface. water-witching is dedicated to my mother and the memory of her father.

WoKlingend? is a fixed-media electroacoustic work in 4 channels. In its brief (5 minutes) duration, the piece tests our perceptions of near and far, of familiar and strange, and loud and soft. The quadraphonic design is front-prominent for most of the work, with the rear channels sneaking up from time to time to ambush the front focus of the work. Almost all sounds were formed in Csound, but a recording of a jackhammer features prominently in several places.

The starting point for this sound/image piece was footage of water flowing in a highly compressed state. In this kind of water flow, vortices appear and interact with each other. The patterns that this creates served as a model for the transformation and displacement of particles in three-dimensional space. The sound is linked to the image through the particle-based behavior of the granular synthesis routines. Through the asynchronous fluctuations of the microstates, sound and image interact to produce an environment of intermittent and constantly changing textures. The single-screen version of Turbulence – Convections premiered at Nomades, a program of video and electroacoustic music at the Onomato Gallery (Dusseldorf), curated by Claudia Robles-Angel in July 2015.

This work was written for Maja Cerar. It begins with a purely responsive live electronics element, then opens into a second half which incorporates fixed media and live electronics. The spatialization is malleable, conceived to be adapted to a given space. The piece explores notions of projection and introspection.

Inharmonic partials are sounds that are not harmonically related to each other, as they are in most instrumental or vocal sounds, because they do not combine to create a sense of pitch. This work is another in the series of pieces I have written in order to create complex, evolving inharmonic sounds that include many different components that fade in and out over the course of a tone. In this work, the sounds are all compressed into the very small acoustic space of less than a perfect fifth. While each sound occupies only that small area, the tones within each passage sometimes are also compressed within a small space, or are spaced widely over the acoustic spectrum. The work consists of numerous short passages that include different numbers of notes, densities, and rhythmic distributions. The inharmonic components are presented in ways that both fade in and out over the course of the tone or are attacked and decay separately. The piece was written in 2014 and synthesized using csound.

After the music was completed, Sylvia Pengilly created the video to the music.

Windswept, for flute and cello with live computer processing, is a work that paints an ethereal (windswept) landscape punctuated by silence, using the extended timbral resources of the two live instruments. These timbres are, in turn, extended by computer processing.

HO was realized with the sound-synthesis-language Csound mainly using additive synthesis. Percussive islands of sound. Spatial movements, modulated noise, lingering sound in a wide space. Moving area. Deconstruction of the sound islands, variation, densification and repetition. Single steps prove the composers temporary attendance in a quietful and reclusive location called Ho in western Denmark.

The violin’s musical vernacular in Arborea consists entirely of open strings, natural harmonics, and extended techniques based on harmonic phenomena. These techniques, while limited in pitch, allow the violin to accomplish extraordinary technical feats and leaps that would be otherwise be entirely impossible on “normal” stopped tones. Various idiosyncracies in the patterns of harmonic fingerings are exploited to create unusual contours and crossed voicings between strings that add a mechanically virtuosic edge while maintaining a subdued dynamic.

The soundtrack extends the violin’s voice and limited pitch content by featuring processed sounds derived from the instrument itself. Rhythmic ambiguity in the accompaniment throughout contrasts with the soloist’s motoric gestures. Timbres of the soloist and the electronics blend in a sound world caught somewhere between the realms of the acoustic and the electronic, with occasional instantly-recognizable “natural world” sounds adding a slight outdoor coloration. Listeners are thus provided with a sort of aural garden in which they are free to appreciate, explore, and immerse themselves in a soundscape that blurs the line between the organic and mechanical.

This is my third work for instruments and computer. I got this work completed taking up the image from fantasy. As the music progresses, five players and computer generated tone will affect each other, forming a certain shape and soon it will get lost. Swaying the floating boundaries of certain things and uncertain ones, they only trace it.

Three Easy Recipes (2015) is a short music video that took on an interesting new life as I discovered 3D rendering software (Cinema 4D) and particle systems (Trapcode Suite) after years of working with flat video only. It was terrific fun to produce as I discovered the amazing visual transformations one could confer upon eggs, Jello-O and fruit. The project was, in fact, a technical etude in preparation for a more serious work for contemporary dance-based video and music. In my later years of a career primary spent in music composition, both electronic and acoustic, the new tricks this dog has learned have renewed the old feelings of being humbled by a strange, marvelous and complex technology where one has barely scratched the surface. Special thanks to my wife Sandi for being both chef and hand model.

Completed in 2015, The Pillar II is a composition for percussion and electroacoustic sounds. The work utilizes text from the introduction of Vladimir Solovyov’s The Spiritual Foundations of Life (1885). Initially, the composer became interested in Solovyov when considering the parallels between Scriabin’s and Solovyov’s conceptions of “all-unity” and “wholeness.”

According to Solovyov, “Perfect all-unity, according to its very conception, requires full equilibrium, equality of worth, and equality of rights between one and all, between the whole and the parts, between the common and the individual.” -Nichols

Completed in 2015, “THE PILLAR II” is a composition for percussion and electroacoustic sounds. The work utilizes text from the introduction of Vladimir Solovyov’s The Spiritual Foundations of Life (1885). Initially, the composer became interested in Solovyov when considering the parallels between Scriabin’s and Solovyov’s conceptions of “all-unity” and “wholeness.” According to Solovyov,

“Perfect all-unity, according to its very conception, requires full equilibrium, equality of worth, and equality of rights between one and all, between the whole and the parts, between the common and the individual.” The composer thanks pianist Tatiana Shustova for her assistance with the translation and beautiful rendering of Solovyov’s text. Translation below:

“religion is a theandric, that is to say a divine- human, activity. With religion, as with everything else, it is first of all necessary to master certain fundamental methods and activities without whose practical background no progress can be made and these things must not be chosen haphazard and arbitrarily but must be determined by the essence and object of religion itself. Generally speaking, we live unworthily, inhumanly, enslaved by temporal things; we are in rebellion against God, we quarrel amongst ourselves. but man, immersed in this life, has to find some foothold outside of it before he can begin any process of correction.

we are self-indulgent-the very opposites of the essentials of what life ought to be, a free submission to God, a unity with our neighbors, a control of our natural inclinations.”

Adapted from Paul Valliere’s translation

The Pillar II was commissioned by percussionist Scott Deal.