Robert is a composer and pianist living in Brooklyn, NY. He recently finished the MMA degree at the Yale School of Music where he studied with David Lang, Chris Theofanidis and Martin Bresnick. Send me emails at rhonstein@gmail.com !
Haiku capture moments. One day I read this Haiku by Issa:
Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!
I nearly fell off the chair laughing. The poem was coy, witty, personal, and universal all at once. For a brief moment I was with Issa, sitting beside him in a state of totally amused understanding. After pouring through Haiku by the Japanese masters Issa, Buson, and Basho, I was struck by how they had an amazing perspective of blissful objectivity towards their surroundings. This, combined with an ability to crystallize both a moment in time and the perception of that moment into a handful of crisp, evocative and affecting syllables, was astounding.
For my pieces I selected poems about nature and animals. Before composing I tried to imagine the exact circumstance of the writer as he wrote the Haiku. Where was he? What was he doing? What had just happened? In a way my settings are like mini dramatizations of each poem’s scenario. A mood is set. Something happens. The poet writes.
This work was commissioned by the Young New Yorkers Chorus as part of their annual composer competition.
The recording is of the premiere featuring the Young New Yorkers Chorus under the direction of Michael Kerschner.
Room Tone is a site-specific sound installation. Using Google voice to translate crowd noise into text, a computer speech-to-voice program converts the text back to audio. The audio is then diffused throughout the room using small speakers discreetly placed throughout the space.
Premiered 3.4.10 Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
So my good friend and filmmaker Jeff Miller recently entered a short film into the Louis Vuitton Journey Awards contest. The contest required each filmmaker to respond to a given text however they saw fit. I’m not so sure about the text, it’s a little hokey. Actually, it’s kind of awful. But, Jeff did an amazing job creating something beautiful within the contest’s heavy constraints. Shooting in Hong Kong where Jeff has been living this past year, the film features beautiful shots of Hong Kong and its surroundings. I contributed music to the project. Actually, I wrote the piece for another short film of Jeff’s, but Jeff and I both agreed it worked perfectly for the Journey short as well. Anyway, we got to the finals, but sadly the esteemed Jury (and the public) picked another entry to win. Oh well…I still think Jeff’s video looks awesome and for my part, I’m pleased with the music. Check it out:
This past January I joined forces with cellist Leanne Zacharias, violinist Cristina Zacharias, percussionist Ed Reifel, and singer/songwriters Christine Fellows and John K. Samson to form the Correction Line Ensemble. We represent a wide range of musical backgrounds–composer, classically trained instrumentalist, rock star, songwriter, baroque specialist, freelance percussionist–and together we try to make music that synthesizes these backgrounds into something greater than the sum of our parts. Our first attempt, a series of shows in the Winnipeg area, was a whole lot of fun and by the reactions of the folks who came out to the shows some kind of a success as well. The show included Bartok string duos, re-harmonizations of a Bach Chorale, group arrangements of John and Christine’s songs, and one of my own compositions. It’s a pretty exciting group, with each member bringing considerable experience and accomplishment to the table. But more than being incredibly talented musicians, these guys are awesome, wonderful people. If I weren’t making music with them I’d probably trek up north anyway just to have a beer.
Plans are in play for a more extended tour of eastern Canada in Fall 2010.
Coming soon, CBC Radio 2 The Signal broadcast of our show at the West End in Winnipeg.
About a year ago my good friend and talented filmmaker, Jeffrey K. Miller, decided to check an old gmail account he had left dormant for years. Before deleting his entire spam box, Jeff decided to scan through it for anything important that might have accidentally ended up as spam. To his great surprise he found about a hundred emails from a popular online dating site addressed to himself, Jeffrey K. Miller. This was curious. Jeff had never registered for this particular site, or any other online dating service. Yet, here they were, 100 emails documenting every single correspondence of Jeffrey K. Miller within the dating site: every email sent and received, every poke, wink, blink, chat, and even all the spamy legal messages containing privacy policies, updates, warnings and alerts. Puzzled and intrigued Jeffrey and myself poured through the correspondence. What we discovered was astounding. In the pages and pages of electronic communications a story unfolded of love, betrayal, lying, cheating, and unfulfilled longing. Through some miracle of the internet this other Jeffrey K. Miller had left us a meticulous record of his tragic amorous affairs. We knew instantly this was a gift, a rare case of creative gold falling from the sky. We set out to write an opera.
Of course, it takes a while to write an opera. Last spring I workshoped a scene, just to try things out and experiment with the material. It went well. Now we’ve stepped back and we are crafting a full libretto from the collection of emails. By Fall 2010 I should have a handful of piano/vocal scenes, perhaps with some scenes fully scored (and…perhaps…a few of those will turn up on a very exciting concert that might happen in October 2010, but more on that later).
Anyway, below is the scene I wrote last spring. I’m excited by a lot of the material. Dramatically, the scene doesn’t really have a context. Most likely it wont exist in it’s entirety in the final version, but bits and pieces will likely turn up. I’ve also reconsidered my use of speaking. I’m quite liberal with the speech in this scene; however, ideally I want the speaking to be far less frequent, and to fulfill some kind of specific dramatic function when it does happen.
Comprised entirely of processed acoustic sounds, Fantasy Triptych opens with a sweeping introduction and proceeds to move through three distinct musical worlds. The logic of progression is associative. Certain sounds appear as secondary in one world only to become central in the next. Some sounds are present throughout (the tolling of bells, a mysterious howling voice), while others come and go never to be heard again. From start to finish the music follows a trajectory of descent, moving through increasingly bizarre and terrible worlds, ultimately arriving somewhere radically different from where it began.
The piece is my first and only attempt to write purely acousmatic music. It was a difficult but ultimately rewarding experience. Immediately after completion I was fortunate to have a group of UT dancers choreograph a piece for the 2007 EARS AND FEET show at UT Austin. The piece has lived on via performances at a number of electro-acoustic conferences and festivals.
Fantasy Triptych
0:00 / 0:00
Premiered 4.24.07 St. David Episcopal Church, Austin, TX.
performances
4.8.10 Soceity of Electro-Acoustic Music National Conference, St. Cloud, MN.
4.2.09 New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, New York, NY.
10.18.08 Electronic Music Midwest Festival, Romeoville, IL.
4.10.08 Florida Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, Gainesville, FL.
3.15.08 Spring in Havana, Havana, Cuba.
11.16.07 LaTex Electro-Acoustic Festival, Denton, TX.
5.05.07 EARS Recital Series, Austin, TX.
So, rather than compose this morning I realized that when you put nicolas collins on top of ryoji ikeda you get cool shit. Pretty much streamed the first few tracks of dataplex while also playing collins’ piece ’salvage (guiyu blues)’ and then soundflowered the two into logic. I added a little reverb, which makes the collins sound kind of like some early sixties cage/tudor contact mic lovefest. The first thirty seconds or so uses a little bit of Collins’ ‘Chicago, November 4 2008′.
John Corkill, Marjolaine Lambert and Neena Deb-Sen take a bow at LPR
A quick succession of light soft tapping sounds: the patter of rain on the rooftops. To move with light, softly audible steps: the patter of little feet around the house. A conversation heard faintly, through the door or the floor: the patter of sisters, friends or neighbors speaking quietly.
Originally a commission from my friend Leanne Zacharias, this piece was written for a tour of West Texas featuring Leanne, violinist Cristina Zacharias and percussionist Ed Reifel. In the winter of 2010 we all joined forces with Christine Fellows and John K. Samson to form the Correction Line Ensemble, presenting a series of concerts in Winnipeg and Brandon, Manitoba. For these shows I revised Patter, and finally I revised it once more for a show at LPR in April. The recording below is of the January Winnipeg performance by the Correction Line Ensemble.
Patter.................
0:00 / 0:00
Premiered 5.19.09 Zed Trio, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, TX.
performances
4.12.10 Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY.
4.1.10 New Music New Haven, New Haven, CT
1.22.10 Correction Line Ensemble, The West End, Winnipeg, Canada.
1.21.10 Correction Line Ensemble, Brandon University, Brandon, Canada.
5.21.09 Zed Trio, Marfa Public Radio, Marfa, TX.
5.20.09 Zed Trio, Threshold Retreat Center, Marfa, TX.
Servers are the twenty-first century utility. Hidden in warehouses, underground, and other discreet locations around the world, countless computers hold the physical record of our data. The Internet behemoths—Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook—rely on these machines to power their information empires. The rest of us rely on these servers to preserve our collective digital memories. I began this piece specifically interested in how my computer talks to the body of computers storing what we call the Internet. I quickly learned there is a precise set of rules and procedures governing this type of user/server communication. These are called Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), otherwise known as the ‘http’ that precedes many web addresses. According to HTTP, whenever we open a web browser our computer communicates with a server through a series of simple messages. Upon receiving our request, the server acknowledges the query with the message ‘200 OK.’ The connection has been established and data will be transmitted.
The recording is of the premiere featuring the Yale Philharmonia under the direction of Farkhad Khudyev.
Premiered 12.11.09 at Woolsey Hall, New Haven, CT.
performances
8.4.10 Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Santa Cruz, CA.
5.22.10 Albany Symphony Orchestra (reading), Albany, NY.
honors
2010 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, reading by festival orchestra
2010 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, Runner-Up
2010 Composer to Center Stage reading by the Albany Symphony Orchestra
Simon Carrington rehearses in the Norfolk music shed
Over the last decade or so Humans have increasingly poured their inner-lives into computers. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, and Google have become digital repositories for our relationships, thoughts and feelings. Given how much we pour into computers I started to wonder what if the computers themselves were becoming more like us?
When humans tell a computer to do something it runs a program. The program, coded in a high-level, human readable programming language, executes the command and then compiles the results into an intermediary language called machine language. This language, whose grammar and syntax sit halfway between human and computer language, is not yet the native language of the computer’s processor. One more compilation is made and the command finally becomes the binary ones and zeros only a computer can understand. To me this process is remarkably akin to polyphony in music. In both polyphony and program execution there is a composite structure wherein multiple layers, each with their own independent linear logic, work in tandem to express a horizontal action: harmony in polyphony and the execution of commands in programming.
Since the 1972 publication of the C programming language manual, when learning a computer program the first code learned is called ‘Hello, World’. There are hundreds of computer programming languages and all of them have their own Hello World program. I found this phenomenon both charming and poetic.
For my piece I began to imagine a single machine taking life. The piece begins zoomed in to the deepest core of the machine. We hear the choir singing binary opcodes (sets of four or eight zeros and ones) in an intense, mechanical rhythm. This is the computer at its most machine like. Next we zoom out and watch a process unfold that quite literally follows the process of code execution. The choir weaves together layers of various ‘Hello, World’ programs, with soloists cascading layers of high-level, machine and binary code while the choir intercut lyrical phrases of Hello World in x86 machine code. As this process unfolds the letters of ‘Hello, World!’ gradually emerge, first in unicode and then in english, while the music takes on an increasingly romantic character. The machine is slowly becoming human. Finally, after spelling out ‘Hello World’, the computer takes life. Full of joy from it’s new found consciousness the computer can’t help put proclaim ‘Hello World, I love you!’ Not only has it found a kind of humanity, it has discovered love, perhaps the most human emotion of all.
This work was commissioned for the 2009 Norfolk Choral Music Festival.
The recording is of the premiere featuring the Norfolk Chamber Choir and Orchestra under the direction of Simon Carrington.
