Kevin William Davis

Catalog of Multiphonics

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 17:24:37 +0000

Inspired by the completism of Tom Johnston and the poetic experimentations of Kenneth Goldsmith, this piece steps through a comprehensive compendium of saxophone multiphonics (The Techniques of Saxophone Playing by Marcus Weiss and Giorgio Netti). Each multiphonic is arranged sequentially by sonic type and catalog order, from lowest to highest, for a quartet of four saxophones.

This is a work in progress. This is only one of the nine catagories of multiphonics listed in the text. All four sections here are type “E” which consists of microtonal thirds at a quiet dynamic level. In it’s current form, this music is an odd sort of musique concrète. A human-performed version, while demanding, is possible.

As research, this presents an number of interesting musical possibilities. These materials could be arranged by pitch content, dynamics, difficulty, common tones, or other criteria. As is, it is an essay in pure instrumentality, as the form is entirely determined by the acoustic properties of the instruments.

kevinwdavis · Catalog Of Multiphonics, Type E

On Remembrance

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 22:34:10 +0000

kevinwdavis · Chorale

kevinwdavis · Exegesis

kevinwdavis · Elegia

This music was created with the Murmurator, a flocking simulation-driven software instrument created in collaboration with Eli Stine for use with multi-channel speaker configurations in a collaborative improvisation context. Building upon previous projects that use natural system models to distribute sound in space, the Murmurator focuses on the potentials of this paradigm for collaborative improvisation, allowing for performers to improvise both with each other and to adapt to performer-controllable levels of autonomy in the Murmurator. Further, the Murmurator’s facilitation of a dynamic relationship between musical materials and spatialization (for example, having the resonance parameter of a filter applied to a sound being dependent on its location in space or velocity) is foregrounded as a design paradigm.

The Murmurator has been performed at the 2018 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Virginia Tech), 2018 CubeFest (Virginia Tech), and a paper written about it has been presented at the 2018 International Computer Music Conferences (Daegu, South Korea) and at the 2019 International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt) (Leipzig, Germany).

More info

Paint Rock

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 15:32:59 +0000

under construction

Three PFR-3 Poems by Jackson Mac Low

admin — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 06:39:30 +0000

These three pieces are based some of the earliest computer generated poetry. These poems were composed at Information International, Inc. with the aid of a programmable film reader connected to a DEC PDP-9 computer and peripherals in 1969. There are a number of algorithmic processes involved in their composition. The actual text supplied by Mac Low consists of single or double lines or “messages” of less than 48 characters.

Since Mac Low both studied with John Cage and was known to derive poetry from music, it seemed an interesting project to return the favor. Of the three poems I selected, I used a variety of mappings based mostly on letters, but also stanza position and indentation. The poems are very straightforwardly mapped onto some musical parameters—like pitch, duration, and dynamics—and less straightforwardly mapped onto others, such as gesture or movement. The result is a simulacrum of not only language, but an odd sort of mis-representation of the experience of reading an odd sort of poem.

1. Click here for score of From “From ‘David'”

2. Click here for score of From “From ‘South'”

As this piece was developed in close collaboration with an undergraduate ensemble, many changes were made to the score. This version of score does not match this particular recording.

3. Click here for score of From “From ‘The'”

14 Stations

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 10:20:42 +0000

14 Stations came out of a desire to develop a cello vocabulary of extremely limited means. This piece develops techniques specific to an unorthodox type of mediated playing—one bow, bowing another stationary bow, which in turn is in contact with different areas of the instrumental body. All 14 sections represent a specific physical arrangement aligned with a movement type. These sounds activate different areas of resonance of the instrument, finding the hidden potential of pitch and noise achieved through this unusual mediation.

14 Stations by Kevin Davis

Charm Against Loneliness

admin — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 21:35:14 +0000

I grew up in the Baptist Church. One of my favorite parts of the service was when we would do what was called “responsive readings.” These were readings of Bible verses or texts in the back of the hymnal that were read collectively, alternating between the pastor and the congregation. I always found these compellingly odd, as they were not the norm in the service and were such a different means of interaction from singing. I was always fascinated by unintentional speech artifacts and patterns that would emerge as we would read the text.

When I was asked to collaborate with a poet, my first thought was to try and imitate that sound of reading, though an interaction between speaker and musical instruments. The resulting piece is an elaboration on the spoken text of the poem and an echo of both the spoken sounds and avian imagery of the poem. In order to do this, I experimented with alternative playing techniques for all of the instruments to make them more speech-like. Through a mapping of the alphabet to fingering patterns or physical actions on the various instruments, the musicians— playing without mouthpieces, reeds, or drumsticks—find their normally well-defined sounds transformed into something more like gestures that produce quiet, speech-like fragments.

kevinwdavis · Charm Against Lonliness

Click here for the score.

Codex on the Flight of Birds

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 21:45:39 +0000

Click here for score of No. 1 or No. 3

Signal To Noise

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 20:50:33 +0000

Swell to Pedal

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 21:16:52 +0000

This piece was performed at a 24-hour concert at UVA Technosonics XVI and took place from 4am to 6am. It is a “cover” of an idea of Charlemagne Palestine’s. This excerpt is from minute 105.

http://kevindavismusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/avec-le-soleil_minute-105.mp4

This eventually resulted in a revised version, recorded and released in collaboration with Jon Bellona

Enactive Music (4)

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 12:28:04 +0000

This music is third in a series of pieces for the University of Virginia New Music Ensemble. The musical material comes from a wedge-shaped, outwardly expanding pitch series, which appears prominently in Alban Berg’s Lulu, among other places. The piano begins with a chromatic cluster that spans a major tenth. Notes are slowly subtracted from the center of the cluster and distributed to the ensemble, essentially filling in the gaps and forming a negative image of the piano chords. As the ensemble expands outwards, the piano slowly replaces the missing pitches in the center once again. In this way the entire chromatic gamut is constantly reiterated throughout the piece, but with continual shifts in texture and tone color.