Length: 7 minutes
Composed: 2019
Commissioned By: Angela Kim
Premiere: January 30, 2020. Southern Illinois University. Edwardsville, IL

Program Note: Aftershock was commissioned by pianist Angela Kim as part of her multimedia program “Chaos Magick” and was premiered in January 2020. The video was created by Michael Boswell and Peter John Kearney. The music was inspired in part from re-reading Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, one of my all-time favorite books about music, which made me start re-thinking my stance on classical forms. In much of my music up to this point I had always tried to structure my music with distinctive forms tailored to the specific piece, and was generally highly suspicious of any structures ending with recapitulations of their opening material. Upon re-reading Rosen’s book however, I began to consider if there might be a way to adapt ideas from “classical” forms into my musical language. In this piece I attempted to imagine a version of sonata form with timbre taking on a structural role, with harmony relegated to more of a supporting role analogous to texture in Classical music.

The electronics are made up of short samples taken from various recordings of music I love, ranging from Lachenmann to Rage Against the Machine, along with piano samples that extend the piano with fast stuttering loops. Although the electronics are all pre-recorded it is meant to sound as if the pianist is triggering and controlling all of these crazy sounds in real-time, with the acoustic and electronic merging together into a hybrid super-instrument.