The 10 Plagues for woodwind octet

I'm finally getting around to posting my collaboration with visual artist Brian McMillan and conductor Leonardo Lebas. Campo Aperto is playing. Check out their stuff on youtube. The music was written when I found that my friend Leo, who is a wonderful conductor and composer, was doing new music for winds and horns with his group. I sent some midi files of the sketches off to my friend Brian who offered to do some visual interpretations of the music. The pieces were played twice in Lincoln with the images projected onto a wall at the second performance. They were performed a third time in Morelia, Mexico at a festival of new music. The movements are mostly freely composed without much of a system. I am sometimes inconsistent when I'm committed to a non-systematic approach. The snippet of melody that appears at the very end of "the slaying of the first born" is a dreamy paraphrase of the chant used for haftorah in synagogue services.

1. blood 2. frogs 3. flies



4. noxious creatures 5. pestilence 6. boils breaking out into blisters



7. hail 8. locusts



9. darkness



10. the slaying of the firstborn

Labels: , , , ,