Works by Stephen Lilly

Instrumental/Vocal with and without electronics

Being There (2008) for 1-3 percussionists

Program Notes: Being There (2008) is an exploration of acoustics.   The percussionist tests the response characteristics of the performance space with a variety of instruments articulated either by short impulse-like attacks or tremolos.   Based on what the performer hears, the instruments are eliminated one by one in search of three goals:   imitation of ambient sound (e.g. audience noise, environmental noise, or bleed from outside the space), acoustic saturation (i.e. the end result is either too loud and/or too resonant for the space), and acoustic isolation (i.e. the ensuing sound can be only be heard by the performer and a few members of the audience).

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Deus est machina (2008) for electric bass, two performers, two amplifiers, and live digital signal processing

Program Notes:  Ideally, audio technology would be transparent; microphones would capture sound with pure fidelity that playback systems would then faithfully reproduce.   The coloration caused by transducers, transistors, and analog-to-digital translation, however, has more control over the resulting sonic world than the acoustic phenomena we are trying to recreate.   Accordingly, Deus est machina has very little to do with the "natural sound" of the electric bass.   The piece is a play for bass, two performers, two amplifiers, and a digital signal processor (MaxMSP).   Amplification, equalization, and signal processing are the principle players.   While one performer manipulates the bass, as one would expect of a more traditional concert, the other performer plays the settings of the electronic equipment:   the bass amplifier, MaxMSP (which relies on both the bass amplifier and a stage microphone for source material), and an additional amplifier responsible for boosting the MaxMSP output.   The first act of this play establishes the setting - the noise generated by all the equipment.   The second act introduces the sounds of the electric bass and more drastic signal processing from MaxMSP.   Then, what follows is a third act where all characters exit.  

Portrait in Song (2007) a song cycle for soprano and piano

Program notes: Portrait in Song: a song cycle for soprano and piano is both a commentary on and a participation in the tradition of art song.   From the French "mélodie" to the German "Lied," art song has long been the cornerstone of vocal chamber music, and like anything with such longevity, its tradition is ripe with clichés and assumptions both with regard to musicality and performance - this is where I come in...

Friday, May 18th (2007) a collaborative composition and improvisation with Michael Boyd

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Two for Orchestra (2004)

Program Notes: Five Minutes and Ix , which together comprise Two for Orchestra , are closely related but independent works.   The first movement is a musical representation of the subjective "five minutes," connoting a brief, relatively undemanding experience.   The movement is divided into three episodes.   Each episode is somewhat longer than the previous, and this varies inversely to the pacing:   the shortest episode is the most static whereas the longest is the most dynamic.   Unlike Five Minutes , Ix is not sectional.   Instead of clear boundaries, regions differentiated by texture gradually emerge and disappear.   Some regions have only localized influence, while other regions affect the piece on a global level.   The structural contrast of Five Minutes and Ix is an outgrowth of the rhythmic and textural contrasts which internally organize each movement.   Contrasts in Five Minutes create clearly demarcated sections, but the contrasts in Ix overlap in such a way that the regions emerge through gradual transitions.   Also, due to the independence of each episode in Five Minutes , there are a multitude of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and textural materials.   Ix , however, concentrates on relatively few elements, and the materials are more integrated.

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Like staring at a word... (2003) for soprano and quadraphonic tape

Program Notes: Language is an abstraction.   Simply by meditating on a single word, one can dissolve its meaning and disconnect it from the thing it represents.   Like staring at a word... is the musical representation of this phenomenon.   It goes beyond simply setting Ivan Molton's "Prosopagnosia;" it submits the poem to the very process described therein.   Every dimension of the composition is derived from the aforementioned poem; all of the source sounds for the tape are taken from recitations of the poem by various male and female voice types, and the form is a temporal interpretation of poem's visual presentation.    

E.B. a 5 (2002) for any 5 instruments

E.B. a 4 (2002) for any 4 instruments

Rook (2000, rev 2002) for solo piano

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Damage (2001) for violin, violincello, and piano

Program notes: Damage consists of three movements ( Anxiety , Song for Ecstya , and Cut ) played without pause.   Anxiety and Song for Ecstya are largely autobiographical; each day, I composed a page or so of music in the style of a diary entry.   Later, I softened the edges between each "entry" and organized them into the first two movements.   The decision to break these entries into Anxiety and Song for Ecstya stems from a change in personal outlook, which is reflected by shifts in tempo, pitch construction, and timbral emphasis.   Since Anxiety and Song for Ecstya were written during a time in which I felt sympathetic toward many of the themes expressed in the poetry of Sylvia Plath as well as her autobiography, The Bell Jar , I decided to base the third movement, Cut , on a poem by Plath of the same name.   It moves between a "traditional" setting of the text and using the poem as an abstract source of inspiration.  

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Eletronic

Appulse Redux (2007) for stereo tape

Program notes: Appulse Redux is a resurrection of my earliest attempt at computer music.   The original work was an exploration of timbre and temporal perception.   The current incarnation recasts only the best moments in an extreme distillation of the dialectics and metamorphoses that shaped the longer work.   This piece is composed entirely of synthesized sounds using Csound, Composers Desktop Project (CDP), and Sony's Sound Forge and Vegas software.   The sounds were created in Csound and then processed using CDP and Sound Forge.   Finally, the work was pieced together in Vegas.

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Variations on a Series of Impulses (2006) for quadraphonic tape

Program notes: Variation on a Series of Impulses was created in the Voltage-Control Studio at the Institute of Sonology, Netherlands, in the Spring of 2006.   The theme and its sonic transformations were worked out in an analog environment, but each variation was sculpted in a digital sequencer.  

The theme was generated by a random pulse generator whose mean frequency (pulses per second) was controlled by four different randomly generated envelopes (one for each of the four channels).   Another set of four randomly generated envelopes was used to control the amplitude of each channel.   This theme was then transformed by various combinations of four analog processes:   multiplication (AM, FM, and Ring Modulation), filtering, feedback (tape delay and "bucket brigade" delay), and demodulation/triggering (using the amplitude and frequency contours of the theme to control other sound-generating devices such as noise generators and oscillators).  

The titles of the individual variations refer to the processes above.   A "1 st order" variation is one in which the theme was processed only once.   If no alterations were made to the output this is called a "theme" variation.   The "extension" variations are the result of combining and/or overlapping several 1 st order transformations, which creates a structure one step further removed from the theme than the "theme" variations.   The rest of the variations are primarily higher order transformations (i.e. transformations of transformations of the theme), and therefore, these are the furthest removed structurally.   Finally, I should add a note about recursion, which in this case can refer not only to transformation by feedback but also to recursively transforming the output of a transformation (i.e. a transformation of a transformation of a transformation of a transformation of the theme, where all the transformations are the same process).          

Formally speaking, the three parts of the piece begin with the theme, or a "theme" variation, and then move progressively further away both structurally and sonically (although Part 2 does include a quasi-reprise of 1 st order material in its conclusion).  

In the age of the computer, it is sometimes refreshing to reflect on technologies of the past, especially if there are still creative statements to be made with them.

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statics: cyclian (2006) for quadraphonic tape

Program notes: Both culture and aesthetics are intimately related to perception.   Ideological stances derive from such perceptions and thus form the basis for all human judgment.   But how much of what we perceive is an illusion - a series of coincidences that trigger false conclusions, some of which having catastrophic consequences?   This short piece is constructed from the most basic of sonic elements - silence and impulses.   I designed a computer program to arrange these elements using an implementation of a non-linear iterative map that constructs sound from individual samples.   All semblance of pitch, rhythm, and structure are an illusion, a coincidental concatenation of impulses from which our perceptual mechanism attempts to create gestalt events.   Can one trust human judgment when order and possibly even beauty result from such quasi-random processes?  

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statics: convergence (2006) for quadraphonic tape

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statics: congruent (2006) for quadraphonic tape

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Homogeny (Appulse 2) (2006) for quadraphonic tape

Program notes: Homogeny was created in the Voltage-Control Studio at the Institute of Sonology, the Netherlands, in the Fall/Winter of 2005-06.   The sonic and temporal designs were worked out in an analog environment, and only after the form of the piece had solidified was it converted to digital format.   Homogeny continues the sonic explorations of Appulse , a computer-generated tape piece from 2001.   In fact, in many ways the "patch" used to create Homogeny is simply an analog version of the Csound instruments designed for Appulse .   The title Homogeny refers to the singularity of the source, the patch.   Every sound in Homogeny is derived from this source, via changes in the patch's input parameters or a filtering/modulation of its output.   

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