Works by Wesley Fuller

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Price $10.00 per work, $5 for Fixed Media works (on CD)

Four Phases for Three (1995)

Duration: 9:34

Instrumentation: Flute (live), Percussion (live, 1 player), and Computer.

Notes: Commissioned by the McCormick Duo, Kim McCormick, flute, Robert McCormick, percussion. The music explores ways of interaction between the three participants, and the four phases could be described as (1) quiet approaching, (2) slow inter-weaving, (3) individualistic asserting, (4) quiet receding. The computer’s music is influenced by passages from the book Sea Change by American marine biologist, Sylvia A. Earle, and uses a “microtonal” 24 note equal tempered scale, and the Csound synthesis software with digital to analog techniques exclusively.

The Camargo Trio (1990)

Duration: 11:10

Instrumentation: Piano (live), Percussion (live, 1 player), and Computer.

Notes: The Camargo Trio is a continuous structure of unfolding, relatively short phases, each with its own texture, color, and pitch-rhythmic profile. Only the last phase summons up memories of previous musical shapes. The piece was made possible in large part by a composer-in-residence grant from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. The work is dedicated to the composer’s two granddaughters, and properties of their names were used in the designing of several of the musical constructions. Certain aspects of sounds and motions heard in the environment around the composer’s studio in Cassis occur in the piece, musically transformed. The computer sound synthesis was realized using Csound software. The timbres were created using digital to audio techniques exclusively, and techniques of Frequency Modulation, Ring Modulation, White Noise and various types of filters. The work is recorded on Neuma Records CD, Electro Acoustic Music III, performed by pianist Jacques Linder and percussionist Robert McCormick.

Variations for Piano (1986)

Duration: 20:18

Instrumentation: Piano

Notes: The Variations for Piano (1986) opens with the source, a quiet. unhurried sounding of 88 different pitches. Fourteen Variations follow, each of which, in widely differing ways, derives its music from this source. A main aesthetic of the work is the use of two sets of compositional opposites: (1) programmatic and non-programmatic variations; and (2) fully notated variations, and variations which employ a kind of “open structure”wherein the pianist is given only pitches, and then is asked to choose one of ten short poems of Matsuo Basho (Japanese:1644-1694) provided in the score, and to create a miniature musical impression which reflects aspects of the poem—motion, color, mood, etc. Close observation of the nature of the pitches and the poems will of course lead to the matching of a particular poem with the given collection of pitches. The fully notated variations 11, 13, and 14 are programmatic with the literary impetus coming from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem, The Snowstorm. The Variations of the piece vary in length from approximately 15 seconds, to 2 and ½ minutes. All fourteen variations, non-programmatic and programmatic are separated by silences.

Time Into Pieces (1977)

Duration: 9:15

Instrumentation: Piano (live) and Computer

Notes: Time Into Pieces was written at the Colgate University Electronic Music Studio, Dexter Morrill director, where the composer was in residence in 1976. The five pieces are separated by short silences, and framed by a short computer introduction—“charivari”-- and a short piano epilogue. One definition of charivari is “a noisy mock serenade to newlyweds”. The title is taken from David Burrows’ essay Music and The Biology of Time in which he writes: “No activity is more real or fundamental to an organism: making time into pieces is exactly what we are about.” The music explores a continuum between control and freedom, with the sharpest contrast occurring between piece three (quiet, canonic control) and the beginning of piece four (quasi-randomness suggested by the computer with the piano hanging on). The work was created using the Music 10 System (Stanford) and the Score program (Leland Smith). The work is recorded on the 3D Classics label (Paris), performed by pianist Catherine Fuller.

details/lines (2006)

Duration: 9:26

For Fixed Media

Notes: details/lines is an electronic tape piece created on the computer. All but one of the sound events of the work, ranging in duration from 1 to 90 seconds, began as short “details” drawn from earlier computer works and experiments of the composer. (“Details” is used here as somewhat analogous to the process of extracting a detail from a painting.) These “details” were then digitally sculpted and transformed (abandoning at that point the analogy to “details” as used in visual art). Two excerpts from literary works had direct and indirect influence over the sculpting and transformation of particular sound events, and ultimately over the entire piece: from John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice: “the warning….uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells, against the stones of Venice” (direct, though transformed programmatic influence over the third detail to appear in the piece); and from Ezra Pound’s from Canto CXV: “a blown husk that is finished/ but the light sings eternal/ a pale flare over marshes/ where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change”. (Indirect, non-programmatic influence over the longer passage of two part texture near the center of the piece, its musical properties abstractly drawn from structural attributes--not affects--of the quotation.) One of the digitally transformed details, used in both short and longer sound events, is drawn from an earlier analog electronic work, the composer’s sound design for a production of David Mamet’s play, The Woods. The great film-maker Angelo Antonioni has described what he called his “working backwards”…..from “a series of images to a state of affairs”. Substituting “sound gestures” for “images”, the composer believes that Antonioni’s words relate to the structural growth and temporal perceptual process of “details/lines”: as the structure of details/lines proceeds and accumulates, the work moves towards a “state of affairs”, which will be quite different, listener to listener, hearing to hearing.

sherds of five (1994) 

Duration: 10:07

For Fixed Media

Notes: sherds of five is a tape piece for computer and is highly influenced by particular characters and passages from Jean Genet’s novel, “Our Lady of The Flowers.” The work received its first performance at the conference, Technology and the Composer: The Continuing Tradition of Music Composed for Tape, in June, 1994 in Luxembourg City. In any of my music that is involved with a specific, motivating source—literary, pictorial, etc.—there are degrees of separation between that source and the structuring of the music. I enjoy exploring the range of these degrees. The computer music uses a “microtonal” 26 note equal tempered scale. All timbres were created using digital to analog techniques with the synthesis programs of Csound (Vercoe/M.I.T). An essay written by Theorist/Composer Stephen Lilly dealing with structural, rhythmic and timbral aspects of the work has been published in the journal, Perspectives of New Music, Volume 43, No. 1 (2005). The piece is recorded on the Neuma Label CD: Electro Acoustic Music V.

vers (2001)

Duration: 12:42

For Fixed Media

Notes: Vers is a tape piece that combines recorded spoken words with music created on the computer. The work reflects the composer’s many months within the pages of Jorie Grahams’ Swarm, a volume of thirty-six poems published in 2000. The four poems and two fragments, chosen by the composer, focus on at least two of the wide-ranging concerns of the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, specifically, the weight of fulfilling the innate desire and need to speak --- “the hard journeying, my sweet mind shouldering/so willingly the impossible”--- and the accepting of that responsibility along with the human need for love and closeness with another. The poet cites poem 640 of Emily Dickinson (which begins “I cannot live with you/it would be life”) as animating the book throughout. Stylistic elements of the music are derived from structural and semantic properties of the words. In no way is the music an “accompaniment” to the words in the traditional sense. Rather--- in the spirit of the statement of painter Robert Motherwell: “The Subject Matter is Just the Medium”---- the music is a transformation of properties of the words into sound. Thus, the spoken words and the music—sometimes together, sometimes alone---are each, in their own fashion, sounding attributes of the text. All of the computer music is created with digital to analog techniques using the Csound synthesis software. vers is recorded on a Capstone Records CD: Music/Text II.