Date of Submission

Spring 2016

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Music

Project Advisor 1

Matthew Sargent

Abstract/Artist's Statement

My music expresses my feelings. To express emotion is different from conveying it. My music does not seek to make a listener feel my feelings or help a listener understand me. The expression of emotion happens while I write the piece. My feelings stop mattering once the piece has been written.

I’m not trying to say anything universal. The concert hall or headphone setting is essential for my music because it is meant to be experienced alone.

What I want to do is create a musical space capable of eliciting real emotional reflection. I have no idea what kind of emotions a listener may have to reflect upon.

Music is an echo chamber for an individual’s psyche. I try to build a space that echoes all kinds of thoughts and feelings, although in any given space some thoughts and feelings will sound louder then others. I don’t worry which thoughts and feelings may be loudest.

Music has the power to transcend a listeners intellect and have a visceral and immediate emotional impact. This emotional impact comes from musics ability to resonate with a listeners thoughts and feelings and by resonating amplify them.

Music cannot induce feelings in a listener which the listener has not already felt to some extent. It can make those feelings stronger or weaker.

Music exists in time and thus moves linearly, from point A to point B and so on. Each musical moment has two significances: the first is the significance of the moment itself and the second is the significance of the relation between this moment and the moments that proceeded it. The impact of a piece of music is the cumulative impact of each differentiated musical moment. This is the plane on which musical manipulation may occur.

The goal of object music is to take time out of music (as it is impossible to remove music from time). Point A and point B (and C, D etc.) are constantly and dynamically superimposed such that each individual moment has exact same musical significance as every other moment.

There are basically two steps in writing object music:

I express myself musically by writing melodies harmonies and timbres. I then compose the piece, a process of superimposing what I have written onto itself and obfuscating that material with various rhythmic and formal devices.

The final product is the original material stripped of its original teleological significance. One no longer needs to hear the entire melody, or follow the harmonic/timbral progression to understand the piece. 15 seconds will express the piece as accurately as 25 minutes, although a listener will obviously take more out of the piece the longer its duration.

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