Mirror Image, co-composed with Will Judd

More Information: Mirror Image was composed as part of a comission of sorts by Percussionist and Filmmaker Ross Karre. Having worked with and made a documentary about percussion virtuoso and composer Matthias Kaul, Karre was inspired to create a system of instruments that use Styrofoam as a resonant body. Karre's Styrophones, as they are called, rely on placing pieces of scrap metal in physical contact with masses of Styrofoam and then using various percussive techniques on the metal to produce shocking sonic results. 

Though an extraordinary composer himself, Ross Karre generously offered the students of Oberlin's TIMARA department the chance to compose original works for the debut performances of the Styrophone system. In addition to Orson Abram, Oliver Harlan, and Willa MacFarlane, Will and I accepted the commission.  

When Will and I met for the early phases of our collaboration, he had talked about the idea of using a mirror as both a metaphorical and structural guide for our piece. We eventually determined that we would structure our piece so that a graph of its intensity over time would be palindromic. We began our composition process by creating fixed media. Karre had provided all of the composers with samples of each Styrophone, as well as recordings of improvisation sessions he had performed with all of the Styrophones together. Will and I used the Styrophone recordings as well as glass foley and a few other assorted samples to make the initial draft of the work.

To allow the piece to work along side Karre's live performance, we initially discussed using an Ableton Live set. We ended up deciding that Ableton might be too rigid of a system to work in this capacity, so we moved forward with a Max project. This project would allow us to run VST plugins like Emergence and Codec unquantized, while also letting us play different pieces of fixed media whenever we wanted in case something unexpeced happened on stage. 

 Due to the quick turnaround between these sessions and the actual performance, the guidelines we all decided on were memorized. Scoring this work was therefor somewhat of a retroactive process, the majority of which was handled by Will. Will worked with Willa to make a map of the Styrophone table and used that map as a guide for his staff notation. On this diagram, Will labeled the different channels Karre used to amplify the Styrophones so that we could process them in Max.  

Our hope for the score is mainly that we will be able to reproduce this piece, assuming the Styrophones travel at some point in the future. Working with Ross was an incredibly exciting opportunity, and Will and I both look forward to the next chance we get to make some sort of collaboration happen again.