By James Dever jamesdever Bandcamp tylerdever Bandcamp jamesdevermusic SoundCloud jamzdenver Twitter.
Released 6/6/2016.
Duration: 7:29.

Listen on SoundCloud or YouTube.

Read artist commentary.

Contributors:

• Brett Andrews (performance)

Artist commentary:

James Dever: (SoundCloud description)

Soliloquy was written for solo viola and electronics in the Spring of 2015. It was premiered on viola at the call for scores winners concert at the 2016 Open Space Festival of New Music in Greeley, CO. It is dedicated to my good friend Abi Evans and all of her help in creating it.

For this performance, it was adapted for cello and electronics and performed by Brett Andrews. Both versions are available.

The idea for the piece came from thinking of how to blend a string instrument with electronic playback. My solution was to record a viola and put the recordings through filters, samplers and oscillators. Midway through is a repurposed old vinyl recording of a viola concerto that I also manipulate through an oscillator. The hope was to make a more organic connection between the playback and the soloist.

James Dever: (YouTube description, excerpt)

Performed at my senior recital at UNC's Frasier Hall on April 28th, 2016. Written for viola, this is the premiere performance on cello by the amazing Brett Andrews.

Soliloquy was written in early 2015. It was one of the very first projects I worked on with my professor Dr. Paul Elwood. It was first formulated from a project I had in a digital composition course I was taking at the university. The project was to create a 90 second to 3 minute track using recordings and editing them in a DAW (in this case, Digital Performer).

I enlisted my colleague and fellow composer Abi Evans to help get some recordings. She would play very brief passages on the viola using many different extended techniques. I manipulated those recordings with various filters and samplers to create the electronic background for the solo instrument.

Originally, my intent was for the electronics accompaniment to purely be edited samples from a live viola that I recorded. Eventually I decided to include an excerpt from a viola concerto as well as a few small effects (like a noise filter near the beginning) to further flesh out the piece.

Compositionally, I really wanted to explore the interesting different extended techniques string instruments could perform. I was also very inspired by composers like Joseph Schwantner being able to utilize pitch sets and serial concepts in more tonal leaning compositions. With that idea in mind I decided to make a reverse 12 tone inspired piece where instead of the row being defined at the beginning before being adapted and augmented, I began with a pitch set and more octatonic passages that slowly opened up more into atonal serialism by the end. The row, and one variation, are only stated in full at the very end of the piece.

Thank you for listening!