audio excerpt: MP3 format

Many of the sounds in Strain are barely audible, the details just beyond reach. Others are noisy, marginal, the kinds of things composers usually work to exclude from their pieces. Perhaps here they find their place.

Strain is based almost entirely upon recorded speech. I chose to camouflage and obscure this material for a number of reasons - not least because I wasn't willing to listen to recordings of my own voice over and over again while working on the piece. If the texts leave only indirect traces of their presence, they animate the music nevertheless, creating the rhythmic structures and sonorities of the composition.

Strain uses its four loudspeakers as a quartet of voices, producing a coherent sense of ensemble. An artificial space is not a goal of the piece, and there is no panning or reverberation of any kind. The loudspeakers are in no way "humanized" through this procedure, but I feel that their material presence becomes an explicit feature of the piece.

Performances:
2003.02.12: Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland
2002.05.29: Teatro Colón, Bogotá, Colombia
2002.03.04-09: "Primavera en la Habana" Festival, Havana, Cuba
2002.01.13: CEAIT Festival, CalArts, Valencia, CA
2001.11.20: McGill University, Montréal, Québec
2000.10.06: III BIMESP 2000 Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2000.07.17-20: SBCM 2000 Conference, Curitiba, Brazil
2000.04.21: CNMAT, Berkeley, CA
1999.08.30: EUM, Montevideo, Uruguay
1999.05.24: Stanford University, Stanford, CA

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