Of all the sublime moments in operatic literature, few surpass “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” (I gaze at you, I possess you), the final love duet between Nero and Poppea in Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea”.
This enduring masterpiece aims to represent love’s supreme power over all other forces through the unifying of the couple in unbreakable bonds of love.
After many long months of development and testing, I’m thrilled to announce Isomer’s composition debut! And if that’s not exciting enough, Isomer’s first project was recently selected for programming on basic.fm this fall.
“Valley of the Tharsans” is a sci-fi radio play with a keen sense of nostalgia for the science fiction of the early- to mid-20th century, when finding intelligent alien life on nearby planets seemed completely feasible. The piece is narrated by the head of Lanscorp, a mega-corporation that is the first to send colonists to Mars in 2016.
The aliens’ “natural” music, created entirely by Isomer, is based on models from the 1922-3 work “Hyperprism” by Edgar Varèse, an important early 20th-century composer who elevated the role of rhythm and timbre to equal that of pitch and harmony, thereby adding new dimensions to the way music is structured and perceived.
The sound of the narrator was created using acoustical analysis and resynthesis techniques to transform the natural sound of the actor’s voice. Additionally, the speech patterns found in the narration were fed into Isomer as models, allowing the musical output to tightly conform to the actor’s performance.
“Valley of the Tharsans” is science fiction through and through: its narrative surrounds the discovery of an intelligent alien race, and its musical score was created by artificially intelligent software from musical models that, when originally conceived, evoked a futuristic musical landscape.
Script: Alison Wilder and Greg Wilder
Voice Actor: Beau James Fisher
Music Composition: Isomer
Production: Greg Wilder and Alison Wilder
Due to inherent limitations in our own perceptive and cognitive abilities, we find the anticipation and realization of unexpected events and connections (within certain parameters) extremely satisfying. We subconsciously predict moment-to-moment what’s going to happen next, and to a large degree, the fulfillment and/or denial of these predictions dictates the amount of creative enjoyment we experience.
Moment of First Awakening (2012) is an audio-visual collaboration between musician/video artist Alison Conard and composer Greg Wilder.
In the spring of 1985, conductor Clive Wearing suffered from a virus that attacked his brain’s ability to form short-term memories. He was left with less than 2 minutes of recall at any given time.
To this day, Clive keeps a journal in a stilted attempt to record his existence:
Clive lives in a perpetual state of temporary standby. His entire awareness is limited to a tiny window of time — a momentary gap that creates for him a continuous moment of first awakening.
While Infernum is a pure electronic work, its surface texture recalls acoustic instruments in real spaces — transformed and heightened in ways only possible through digital means.
Fleeting moments of nervous calm alternate with a terrifying wall of brass glissandi (up to 60 trombones!), creating the effect of a fear-response oscillating between the conscious and subconscious.
The video was assembled from footage and animations made available by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams.
April 2002 | Fixed Media, Stereo
Vyšehrad was completed at the end of my doctoral studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.