I think I’m done cleaning up my page, though I’m sure I’ll be taking care of errors that I notice over the next couple of weeks.

Enjoy!

Be back with you very soon.

Just to prove that I still write notes-on-paper music without electronics, I’d like to share a piece that was premiered by the TaiHei Ensemble last Sunday. I usually direct the ensemble, but this last quarter, due to traveling, hosting, and academic responsibilities, I entrusted the job to my friend Aaron Pergram, virtuosic bassoonist and altogether extremely organized person (not a label I use lightly).

Aaron did a fantastic job, and you can hear the whole program here, but, for some reason, he’s passed the baton (the figurative baton) back to me.

Anyway here’s TONGTOKKUNG:

TONGTOKKUNG – Simon Hutchinson

Esther Fredrickson, flute;
Jannie Wei, violin;
Katie White, viola;
Kelly Quesada, cello.

One of the great influences and inventions of Western Music is its notation system. This system of recording a document of a musical work on paper allowed composers to explore complex counterpoint and harmony and convey these ideas to other musicians. From the perspective of world music, however, this system also has its limitations, and these shortcomings become more obvious when we notice that Western Music is primitive in its exploration of timbre, microtonal inflection, and rhythm relative to some other cultures’ traditions.

While I still use Western notation, I hope to explore some more complex rhythmic ideas in my piece, TONGTOKKUNG. We open with an uneven meter of seven beats, not uncommon in the rhythmic explorations of 20th-century composers, but then that rhythm switches to a traditional Korean rhythm, tongtokkung, a far more complex pattern of 24 beats. The piece then switches between these two ideas, and, to my ears, the “uneven” seven beats becomes a point of rest compared to the intensity of the tongtokkung.

Few web updates these days, but plenty of activity, while I get caught up with my calendar of upcoming events, here’s the Post-Haste Reed Duo performing my virtuosic chop-buster, bioMechanics at the SEAMUS national conference on February 10th.

While we’re still working on the studio cut of this piece, here’s a video of Aaron Pergram’s live performance of “Doppelgänger” from the Future Music Oregon concert, November 19th, 2011.

When composing for soloist and electronics, I often approach pieces as concerti, with the live performer conversing with an electronic “ensemble.” Traditionally, this genre has given composers the opportunity to explore the relationship between an individual and society as well as provide discourse on the importance of both individual and social expression and contentment. The introduction of the soloist’s doppelgänger, a supernatural duplicate, turns this piece into a kind of double concerto, with the soloist faced not only with society but with the implications of the spectral double, supporting or undermining the efforts of the individual to find a place in the social world.

A very belated update! As always, my internet presence has fallen victim to the trappings of my real-life presence. I have had some wonderful performances in the last few months, including two performances of my latest electro-acoustic piece, Doppelganger for Bassoon and Electronics performed by Aaron Pergram. We’re just working together now to put the finishing touches on our studio recording of the piece and then I’m looking forward to sharing it.

In the meantime, here’s a live recording of a fun piece I performed with Wes Price at the TaiHei Ensemble concert on November 5th:

Cowboys and Samurais: Blues for Guitar and Shamisen (2011)

Wesley Price, Guitar
Simon Hutchinson, Shamisen