You can listen to audio samples on the concert music page of this site.
Dance Attack (orchestra)
Death to the Butterfly Dictator! (soprano and chamber ensemble)
Eight Dudes (solo trumpet, playing 5 instruments)
Eight Poems of Dennis Lee (soprano and string quartet)
Lyre (SATB choir)
People are not cars (electroacoustic)
Rainbow (SSAATTBB choir)
Reiteration (orchestra)
robert, clara, johannes (MIDI-controlled acoustic piano)
Saturday Night at Fort Chambly (orchestra)
Scintillator (solo soprano)
So Joab blew a trumpet (solo trumpet)
Three Conjoined Trifles (bassoon and piano)
Tow Hill (orchestra)
Dance Attack! (orchestra) [2004]
Dance Attack! is intended to be performed as a companion piece to Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, preceding and anticipating that longer work. Like the Rachmaninoff, it is essentially a throwback to the loosely formatted dance suite of earlier times, but viewed through modern formal considerations and seen as a chance to play with extremes of orchestral texture and colour. Almost all of the material in Dance Attack! is derived from, inspired by or shadowing themes in Rachmaninoff’s piece, often having taken on the feel of folk music, “found” excerpts from complete and self-strong (and unidentifiable) regional traditions only glimpsed here. There is also somewhat more “processed” music of a western tradition: some sneaky swing, some spooky ballet, and fragments of a Classical flute concerto – remember that Classical forms were dance suites, once. The ponderous introduction sets the scene as a city street, bordered by dark gray skyscrapers, where the initial visual concept for the work can be explored: what would happen if, as we begin the dreary commute home, briefcase in hand (walking – in this city everyone walks), what would happen if, suddenly, he was seized by the necessity to dance, in the street, and she, seeing him, couldn’t help but dance also, and I found myself joining in as well, and the contagion spread until we were all dancing, down the street, inspired by each other but each dancing in our own way, informed by our own traditions. Of course the formal considerations of the piece take over at times, and in deference to the Symphonic Dances it attempts to cadence in C Major for approximately three minutes, never quite succeeding and leaving Rachmaninoff to finally establish the tonality.
Finalist in the 2004 Toronto Symphony Orchestra's "New Creations" Young Composers' Competition.
Publicly read by the TSO in May, 2004.
Large Orchestra ( 2+pic.2+eh.2+bc.2+cb / 4.3.3.1 / timp+3 / hp / strings)
Death to the Butterfly Dictator! (soprano with chamber ensemble) {text by Kristin Mueller-Heaslip} [2003]
Death to the Butterfly Dictator! is the most substantial musical byproduct of a year of work and travel in Europe. Conceived in the darkening months of 2002, the work was officially begun on January 1st, 2003 in the brooding quiet of the Anjou region of France (often called “France Profonde”) and written in an intense six-week period that took me through Birmingham to Liverpool (via Cambridge), where a kind family took me in, fed me and provided me with the time and stability and desk I needed to write such an ambitious piece of music. I spent a month of days composing and walking through John Lennon’s neighborhood, and a month of nights watching movies and drinking cider mixed with Guinness (the poor man’s Black Velvet), and all of it wearing a fleecy vest and toque. It was a surreal and productive period of my life. Without the immense generosity of the Liverpool family and the dearth of daylight and properly insulated houses, I suspect this piece would not have turned out quite as it did.
Butterfly is truly a monodrama: its reason for being is to tell the complete story of one character, played by one singer. The ensemble is almost always subordinate to this aim in that they listen to the singer/actor, and respond with music that is usually not precisely notated. The result is music that floats forward at its own pace, eight musicians trailing the soprano like butterflies chasing a wandering flower. But an exploration of dichotomy is also at play: notational looseness is held up against rhythmic precision; musical homage against musical parody; past memory against present action; abstraction against blunt reality; concert music against theatre piece; liberty against servitude; beauty against anger; life against death. This is a garden with many scents and colours.
Premiered by Kristin Mueller-Heaslip at Walter Hall, Toronto, with the composer conducting: December 4, 2003.
Won a 2nd-place Godfrey Ridout Award at the 2004 SOCAN Competition for Young Composers.
Soprano; b-flat clar./bass clar./alto sax (one player), trumpet/flugel., trombone, tuba, violin, viola, 'cello, percussion; conductor (theatrical part)
Eight Dudes (solo trumpet: playing B-flat piccolo trumpet, B-flat trumpet, B-flat cornet, E-flat trumpet, and B-flat flugelhorn) [2005]
As with so many of my pieces, the title came first. Eight Dudes is a play on "études", suggesting a collection of short pieces that engage the virtuosity of both the performer and the composer. I already knew that eight movements were required - and up sprang eight further puns on my initial play-on-words, eight evocative movement titles from which the music grew. These "dudes" are études and also character pieces, a lineup of exaggerated moods and personalities that sprang from the same source.
The movements are unified by closely related four-note pitch sets, but the main impetus for the work was dramatic and conceptual. Throughout is an exploration of duality and binary conflict on many levels, from the duet for soloist and themself in A Tune to the quick-draw showdown in High Noon to the contrast of a movement with no notes (Point Moot) to one with as many notes as possible (The Move). This set of pieces is intended to be performed as a whole, with the movements in the specified order, but certain movements may stand up well on their own.
Eight Dudes is not specifically a theatre piece, but it may be performed with as much theatrical staging and imagination as the performer desires. At the premiere, for example, the soloist wore the fedora used as a hat mute in Dark Moon when it was not in use. I have found that the use of five different instruments in the course of eight short movements is theatrical in and of itself! Performers may substitute different trumpets for the ones specified if necessary, as long as the original keys are respected and the work retains a wide variation in tone colour.
Eight Dudes was composed in Edmonton during my degree at the University of Alberta, and was included in my Master's defense portfolio. It was premiered by Russell Whitehead.
Eight Poems of Dennis Lee (soprano and string quartet) {texts by Dennis Lee, used with permission} [2002]
If you grew up reading Dennis Lee’s poetry, as I did, then you’ll probably understand the incredible admiration that I feel toward his work. Perhaps, like me, you experience a wave of childhood nostalgia whenever someone mentions “Willoughby Wallaby Woo” that sends you to your bookshelf, compelled to leaf through Alligator Pie for the umpteenth time. Mr. Lee’s poems are infectious, addictive and, furthermore, inherently musical, as though each one has associated dance steps that only a child (and that shadow-child deep within even the most “mature”) can remember.
And if the preceding paragraph rings true for you, then you probably also understand how difficult it was to choose eight poems out of so many. I couldn’t take all my favorites, and I couldn’t use only the most famous ones. In fact, I don’t remember what my criteria were. I just took the eight that seemed right at the time, and I think the child in me was delighted by the fact that these eight didn’t really go together, and that my challenge was to pull them together into something cohesive. Think of this cycle as a loosely unified variety show put on by eight different children, or one child with a particularly active, even spastic, imagination and a hamper-full of grown-up clothes. After all, mood swings and near-hallucinatory imaginings – things that we as adults label as improper, or even insane, and try our hardest to suppress – are an everyday part of the life of a child.
Premiered by Kristin Mueller-Heaslip and the Downtown String Quartet at Victoria College Chapel, Toronto: August 10, 2002.
Poems (in order): Goofus, One Sunny Summer's Day, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Summerhill Fair, Can You Canoe?, Mrs. Murphy and Mrs. Murphy's Kids, Alligator Pie, Rock Me Easy.
Lyre (SATB choir with divisi, optional piano) [2005, revised 2007] {text by Alex Eddington} [CMC sc/pts]
Lyre was commissioned by David Fallis and the Toronto Chamber Choir for their concert in the Metamorphosis Festival in Toronto in May 2005. The theme of the festival was Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the TCC chose to put together a concert of music inspired by the myth of Orpheus.
Rather than using an existing text, ancient or otherwise, my approach to this piece was to create a world of closely related phonic sounds. I began by deriving a list of “rhymes” (some of which are rather stretched) to the word for Orpheus’ instrument, the lyre. I found that some of these words fell quite naturally together, creating images and stories that are sometimes mythological, and sometimes mundane. I don’t expect the audience to hear the words, however: they are subtext rather than text, a private storyline for the choir to sing about when really, what the audience hears is a stream of related syllables. For this reason, I request in the score that the text not be printed in the program.
As for composing the music, I let the text-stories speak to me as I played around a scale that is somewhat octatonic and sounds “ancient” to me. The piece is framed by a choral imitation of a strummed instrument: the Lyre of the title.
Premiered by the Toronto Chamber Choir, conducted by David Fallis, at Christ Church Deer Park as part of the Metamorphosis Festival, May 2005.
The score and parts for Lyre are available through the Canadian Music Centre library.
Notes by Alex Eddington: November 8, 2007
People are not cars (phonetic suite) (electroacoustic) [2006]
People are not cars is a suite of five short pieces composed for “The Parking Lot Project”, a site-specific performance presented by Mile Zero Dance at The Works Art and Design Festival in Edmonton in July 2006. They were mixed in as part of a half-hour collaborative electroacoustic score that was broadcast live by the University of Alberta campus radio station (CJSR), and filled the parking lot through the car radios of our spectators.
Responding to the intended site of the dance, I found myself musing on the nature of the parking lot as a sort of temple where one – whether car or human – can contemplate the complex interrelationships between people and their machines. I wanted to create music that made engines out of the most human of sounds – the voice.
All five pieces use the same small set of samples. I recorded three actors (including myself) speaking all phonemes of the English language. I recorded each phoneme spoken neutrally, then asked the actors to play around with the phonetic material – resulting in them bringing a good deal of colour and character to such short vocal samples. The pieces are constructed entirely through cut-and-paste techniques and dynamic shaping, and the samples are never pitch-shifted or processed in any other way. The goal was to create a variety of music out of a very limited palette of easily recognizable material.
notes by Alex Eddington: February 19, 2007
Rainbow (SSAATTBB choir) [2005]
Rainbow was born of the composer's desire to find a musical metaphor for natural light phenomena, particularly the spectrum of visible light observed in rainbows. The premise of the text is that the spectrum of phonetic sounds in human speech - particularly vowel phonemes - provides an appropriate mapping of the colour spectrum into sound. The exploration of sonic spatialization in this work is inspired by the (illusory) vastness and (often incomplete) symmetry of rainbows.
Rainbow was composed as part of Alex Eddington's MMus composition portfolio.
notes by Alex Eddington: April 2006
Reiteration (orchestra)
[2009]
Reiteration is a piece about reiteration, and “reiteration” has two meanings
(sort-of): Repetition and Recursion. The two contexts in which you might
(might) use this word, that matter to this piece, are:
Rhetorical: repeating what you are saying (sometimes with variations), in
such a case that repeating it will strengthen your argument - instead of just
making it redundant.
Mathematical: An “iterated” (recursive) function is a function which is
composed with itself, ad infinitum, in a process called iteration. A really
simple example would be 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2...
forever. An example in this piece of music is the way intervals, lengths of
notes etc. grow by adding one semitone, one eighth-beat, again and again
and again... though not forever. (A “reiterated” function would be, I guess,
an iterated function times itself, which probably couldn’t exist in our
dimension).
Everything in the piece is governed by that same simple principle: add one
unit to the interval; add one unit to the beat. Then take them away one by
one, then start again. In various ways, this is how everything was
composed: melodies, harmonies, rhythms, even the overall structure.
But really: who cares? Reiteration isn’t music by numbers - it’s quirky, fun
and has a lot of rhythmic drive. The tunes are catchy. It turns out that when
you create harmonies by additive intervals, you get Hollywood. And when
I went back to revise the piece before the premiere, I changed the number
of bars in my supposedly mathematically perfect structure: and the piece is
better for it! It’s the imperfections that make music beautiful...
Reiteration was the winner of the 2008 Orchestras Mississauga Emerging Composer Competition, and was premiered by the Mississauga Symphony Orchestra in March 2009, conducted by John Barnum.
notes by Alex Eddington: March 2009
robert, clara, johannes (the piano remembers) (MIDI-controlled acoustic piano) [2007]
This work was composed for the dance piece Madness, Devotion, Desire, conceived by Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, choreographed by Cheryl Fontaine and performed by myself and Colin Atkins at the Expanse festival of movement arts in Edmonton in March, 2007.
Musing on the intertwined lives of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, three great 19th-century composer-pianists, I began to view the piano as a point of intersection between them. I imagined that an old piano that stood in the Schumann household during those decades might today, if coaxed, remember some of what those three people once played on it. Sometimes it remembers the music exactly, but sometimes, being the old piano that it is, it becomes confused. Somewhere within in these faulty recollections of music history, the passions of three long-dead musicians can still be felt.
I found two sets of variations on the same theme by Robert Schumann: one by his wife Clara, and the other by his friend and student Brahms. These variations are thoughtful, melancholic, and also date from near the end of Schumann’s life, just before his final madness. I composed my own variations on some of the variations, using the notes as they appear on the page but abandoning rigid notions of time and sequence. Robert Schumann’s “chiarina” – his song for then-child Clara from Carnaval – also makes an appearance. Robert’s theme appears at the beginning of my piece, initially masked by full-keyboard glissandos.
The music was composed in MIDI sequencing software, but my computer played a real instrument: an acoustic Yamaha Disklavier piano. This is essentially a player-piano, but controlled by MIDI commands instead of the traditional paper roll. The real piano gives the music a sense of humanity and nostalgia, but the piano is made to play music impossible for human hands. For me, this über-human sound evokes the supernatural. After months of working on my computer, it was a strange, spooky joy to watch the Disklavier interpret my music.
notes by Alex Eddington: March 1, 2007
Saturday Night at Fort Chambly (orchestra) [2009]
This piece is a tribute to my only Canadian ancestor, who was a soldier stationed at Fort
Chambly, Québec, seven or eight generations ago. I don’t know all that much about him,
or what his life would have been like – but I do have a kind of connection to him.
Chambly is known today for its brewery (Unibroue), some of whose beers have long been
favourites in my circle of friends. Many of the beers are crafted in old-fashioned ways,
and I find myself wondering: did François Édouard Montee and I both drink Blanche de
Chambly?
I began by delving into Marius Barbeau’s collections of French Canadian folk songs that
my ancestor and his fellow soldiers likely would have known and sung. I imagined, what
would a night off in the barracks have been like? What were some of the personalities
there?
There is not one original tune in this piece – it is a collage. I chose 24 folk songs
(including some you have definitely heard before) and pitted them against each other -
often simultaneously. You will hear “characters” in the music: a trumpeter playing
something like a Last Post, a fiddler, a gaggle of attention-craving woodwinds, some
drunken trombones. The soldiers in these musical barracks cut each other off, vie for
musical dominance, accompany each other awkwardly, and sometimes belt out their
favourite songs with something approaching reverence. And all the while, the beer keeps
passing around...
Saturday Night at Fort Chambly was commissioned by the Scarborough Philharmonic
Orchestra for their 30th anniversary season, and premiered on October 17th, 2009,
conducted by Jerome Summers.
Scintillator (solo soprano) {text by randomly generated email spam} [2008]
The text is not mine – nor anyone’s; it was delivered as a spam email, with the subject heading "Scintillator". Spammers use software that strings together sentence fragments of online Public Domain texts, as a way of getting past email spam filters. This software is sort of like an computerized John Cage, strolling on an e-beach, picking up seashells without any interest in order or context. And sometimes, the result is striking.
My approach as a composer was first to make my own guesses as to what text-strings come from the same material (bhishma, bahlika, vena etc. made it clear that this is the case), and where the material changes. I treated some words as pivots between sources, whereas other changes are instantaneous. Then worked instinctively, treating each text fragment with full compositional seriousness, only consciously connecting my musical material when I had decided that two texts shared an origin. The shifts between material are frequently as though a radio station has been suddenly switched – although this is a radio that only plays solo vocal music (perhaps with imagined accompaniments).
My setting contains some humour, certainly, but ultimately Scintillator is a mystical piece. The text is the voice of The Internet: sublimely random, beautifully infinite. The singer is a medium for all music, and this is what she channels in these few minutes.
Scintillator is dedicated to Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, who gave the premiere on her tour concert as winner of the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté competition...and who also received the spam email.
notes by Alex Eddington: June, 2008
So Joab blew a trumpet (solo trumpet) [2007] [CMC sc]
The trumpet has a long history behind it. Many cultures worldwide have for millennia had forms of the instrument, from the conch to the shofar to the long Roman tuba. And like the bell of a church or temple or town hall, the trumpet’s history is defined by its ability to be heard over long distances. A trumpet defines a territory, establishes dominance, reinforces power. A trumpet warns of intrusion, and rallies a people. A trumpet starts a war. Trumpets could be used to send coded musical messages. Trumpets announce a young man’s readiness to marry. Trumpets call out, and wait for a response.
As I mused on these things I wondered: who is the trumpeter calling to? What is the message? And will there ever be a response? The first section of So Joab blew a trumpet is an oppressive fanfare that sounds like a rhythm-coded message – but the message is remains undecoded, and receives no answer. The second, slower section seethes with unrequited passion as a young man somewhere on a mountain calls his love to any and all young women, and waits for a response.
As these two different narratives oddly come together to become each other’s answer, a third voice emerges: a fragment of Biblical text spoken by the soloist. I don’t know who Joab is, only that by blowing a trumpet, he stops a group of people in their tracks. I don’t know the details of the story, and I’d rather imagine them for myself. This text will remain a rich fragment for me. Perhaps this text is the message encoded in the fanfare – and perhaps this story fuels the yearning heart of that young trumpeter on the mountainside.
Commissioned and premiered by Jeremy Maitland, Montreal QC, April 2007.
The score for So Joab blew a trumpet is available through the Canadian Music Centre library.
Three Conjoined Trifles (bassoon and piano) [2008]
While 'Three Conjoined Trifles' is basically one simple journey through one simple series of notes and intervals, there are many detours along the way. The pace of travel varies enormously. Some sections of road are repeated seemingly endlessly - and others become the fodder for overanalytical navel-gazing. But eventually we reach a sort of vista where all the distance we have travelled is laid out behind us, and our destination looks an awful lot like where we started - only flipped around.
Each 'trifle' combines the bassoon and piano in a different configuration. In the first, they play in near-unison; in the second, they are indifferent to each other; and in the third, a traditional struggle between soloist and accompanist ensues. This is very much a collaborative piece - but the last word (and the first) belongs to the bassoon.
Commissioned by Catherine Carignan and premiered by Carignan with Allie Cortens, piano: Victoria BC, April 27 2008.
notes by Alex Eddington: April 26, 2008
Tow Hill
(orchestra) [2009]
"Tow Hill" is a contemporary tone poem - a programmatic orchestral piece that depicts an exotic place or tells a story - but, unlike many of the great Romantic tone poems, the story is personal, and the place is Canadian! The piece was inspired by my visit to Haida Gwaii / the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia in the summer of 2008.
Tow Hill is the name of a remarkable volcanically-created cliff that rises above an otherwise low landscape by the ocean at the northern end of the islands, and flanked by several drastically different beaches. The “story” of the piece is simply my own experience in visiting this place, both sonically and emotionally. Much of the material is transcribed from the audio recording I made of my visit, with the sounds of nature translated into instrumental gestures in a way that tries to capture the mystery of the place and the thoughts of one visiting it. The piece is divided into 6 consecutive sections, some of them spacious and some mere snapshots.
The music begins in the small parking lot at the trailhead, as my friend and I - surrounded by mist - contemplate the walk to Tow Hill. How far is it to the sea? Will the weather hold? What is Tow Hill actually like - we know so little about it. We begin to walk alternately along the path and the river, exploring separately and together (as chronicled by jaunty “walking tunes” in the strings), as I record the deep, strange, mist-muffled sounds that approach and recede. This includes a continual stream of birds (including a raven, a bald eagle, a wren, a flicker, unmusical chirps and a particularly jazzy songbird); the river, light rain, small rushing creeks, and several awkward attempts on my part to get past fallen trees and slippery river rocks. The great white noise of the ocean steadily grows as we approach it - played here by long rolls in the percussion section.
Suddenly Tow Hill comes into view, and is so much larger and more striking than we could have imagined that it stops us in our tracks. The sheer cliff of the hill is made of eroded hexagonal pillars of rock, and the hardy trees on top of it are perpetually shrouded in mist. We explore the bizarre nooks and crannies of an alien landscape of pitch black lava rock - including the remarkable natural "blow hole", where the incoming waves create a loud shooting geyser or seawater at times that I could never quite predict, and where the pressure forces air to whistle through small fissures in the black rock. This is one of the strangest, loneliest places I have ever visited.
The last two sections are brief “snapshots” of two contrasting beaches below Tow Hill. Agate Beach is made of thousands of small, perfectly smooth round stones in myriad colours: red, yellow, black, speckled grey, glassy white... North Beach, on the other side of the Naikoon river, stretches many miles up to the very northern tip of the islands. In Haida mythology, this perfectly flat expanse of sand is the place where Raven found the first humans in a clamshell.
Tow Hill was commissioned by the Scarborough Philharmonic with assistance from the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council. It was premiered by the SPO on April 18, 2009, conducted by Ronald Royer.
notes by Alex Eddington: April 2009
