Additional Notes

The backing sounds for Requiem for My Father represent an expansive tonal geography upon which I have constructed the choral sections of this work. The primary sound generator in the sound sculpture are metallic washers spinning downward over threaded steel rods ("cyclical rails") attached to found pieces of metallic scrap—the scrap accounting for the timbre and overtones. These metal rods and weighted washers were carefully arranged for this particular work and represent a meta score from which this work is derived. The found pieces of scrap metal were acquired at thrift stores and garage sales, and each is imprinted inadvertently with an unique and often irregular overtone structure, this making them uniquely interesting. An important note as they were never meant to produce classical music. As contact microphones are built into the sound sculpture, as the "moths" cascade downward over the rails, the sound is ultra-rich in overtones, sub-tones, and fundamental tones of varying strengths these comprising the timbrel landscape of the piece. The rods are also twisted, some clockwise or counter clockwise, other not twisted, all of them slightly swaying during a performance every physical impacting the recording (performance) of the cascading, falling "moths" (washers). Rods twisted counterclockwise causes the moths to toi skid before caught below by the threads. Clockwise twists caused the moths to jump rails with unique rhythms that were sometimes imitated in the choral score. The choral piece is written using traditional key signatures representing an inadvertant tonal construct upon which this composite, complex acoustic landscape rests. The tonal centers of the choral writing were determined by the rough and tumble of the tonal landscape—traditional notation systems were thus used to make the piece technically doable. Restated, the tonal and structural simplicity of the choral parts is necessary and determined by the hands on overtone structure of the pre-recorded backing sounds. DS