Concerto for the First Sunday of New Year was composed for David Fulmer, Eliot Gattegno and the Second Instrumental Unit. Within this work fragments of German-Baroque music involving new-year celebrations are embraced and refashioned.  Through particular procedures of self-replicating systems the music is transformed and re-grown.  Here fractal geometry and cellular automata propel new outgrowths, amplifications, and even exaggerations of references to pre-existing passages of music from the eighteenth century into interesting musical syntaxes. Such new creations seem to me entirely novel, and I am increasingly fascinated by the manner in which entirely fresh energies may be drawn from dynamic forces embodied in earlier music.

Gibbons, Gongs, and Gamelan unites several ideas touching upon Orlando Gibbons’ (1583-1625) fragmented keyboard work The woods so wilde.  Although the structuring of this new piece embodies some rigorous workings, conjoining early music with Fractal geometry, its overall temperament is somewhat spontaneous, evoking in my mind playful -if not fantastical- imagery.  Gibbons here as nimble primates playing through episodes whose sounds (because of the music’s recursive growth) are so closely allied to gamelan (and non-Western) textures.  They also exist, not in a jungle, but a temperate fantastic forest, woods so wilde.  This work, for me, also captures a celebratory tone in that I composed it during the Holiday week of late December 2005, when bells, gongs, and carols were in my ear.  What resulted was a strange yet joyful image:  Renaissance monkeys at play….in the woods…….at Christmas time.