Genevieve Feiwen Lee - Tom Flaherty- Mixed Messages (2022) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Composer and cellist Tom Flaherty releases Mixed Messages, a collection of his electro-acoustic works for various instruments. Flaherty's music combines a versatile approach to diverse electronic approaches with a humanist's sensibility towards drawing inspiration from extra-musical events and phenomenon. Mixed Messages features performances by Sara Parkins, Maggie Parkins, Alma Lisa Fernandez, Cynthia Fogg, Jeff Gauthier, Sarah Thornblade, Mark Winges, Genevieve Feiwen Lee, and Vicki Ray.

Flaherty features several of his electro-acoustic works in this collection, highlighting his interest in phenomena, both musical and extra-musical. In each of these pieces, Flaherty posits a kind of puzzle and then uses the canvas of the piece to work through it, whether it relates to a programmatic idea, the relationship between instrument and electronics, or a component of the musical material itself. Within that frame, his expressive palette is broad and affecting and his development of material deft. This dynamic between conceptual frame and evolving detail gives Flaherty’s music substance and invites listening on multiple levels.

Shepard’s Pi for toy piano refers to the Shepard scale, a phenomenon of acoustics where simultaneous octaves are arranged in such a way as the sequence of pitches seem to rise endlessly without ever reaching the next octave. Flaherty chose to explore a similar paradigm on the toy piano because of the ambiguity that results from the sounding rods — in some registers the overtones of a given note can obscure the fundamental to such a degree that it is not clear what the principal pitch is. Flaherty toys with this concept and its manifestation on the toy piano, writing scale passages that mysteriously seem to remain in one register even as they ascend and rhythmic material that can be interpreted from different metric angles. Reinforcing the word play, Flaherty also embeds references to pi, 3.14159, in the number of sections, tempi, and electronic sounds that are integrated briefly.

TRACKLIST

1. Genevieve Feiwen Lee - Shepard’s Pi
2. Maggie Parkins - Threnody
3. Cynthia Fogg - Under the Weather
4. Eclipse Quartet - I. Spin
5. Eclipse Quartet - II. Swing
6. Eclipse Quartet - III. Tag
7. Cynthia Fogg - Violelation
8. Sarah Thornblade - Mixed Messages
9. The Smudges - Release



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