ROBERT ( TOMMY) MCPHEE - SENIOR RECITAL - From the studio of Dr. Nick Rissman - robert (tommy) mcphee

SENIOR RECITAL
ROBERT (TOMMY) MCPHEE

Monday, May 3, 2021
Rothwell Recital Hall
7:30PM

       From the studio of Dr. Nick Rissman
 Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
            Bachelor of Music in Composition

– PROGRAM –

It Lives ........................................................................................................................ (2018)
                                            mixed media (music and video)

Space Pool ................................................................................................................. (2019)
        Kevin Melendez, flute| Zachary Davis, clarinet| Robert McPhee, clarinet

Four Seasons .............................................................................................................. (2021)
                           Cooper Trejo, toy-piano| Rachel Clark, piano

Fortitude .................................................................................................................... (2018)
           Adriana Avalos, horn| Austin Muñoz, trombone| Gerson Reyes, tuba

The Sweetest Poison.................................................................................................... (2018)
                                        Robert McPhee, piano

Zaphod Beeblebrox .................................................................................................... (2019)
      De’vionne Jones, trombone |Joshua Rigsby, euphonium| Logan Sells, tuba

Ice Cube ..................................................................................................................... (2020)
   Robert McPhee, Roland TR8-S drum machine, ASM Hydranth synthesizer, Vox Lil'
                                                        looper pedal

Cool Bug Fact’s ......................................................................................................... (2020)
         Robert McPhee- ASM Hydranth synthesizer, 1010 Blackbox sampler

The Third Eye............................................................................................................. (2021)
      Christopher Graves, saxophone| Robert McPhee, Roland SP-404sx sampler

Culture of Rebellion ................................................................................................... (2020)
    Robert McPhee- ASM Hydranth synthesizer, Roland TR8-S drum machine, 1010
                                             Blackbox sampler

Lunar Truth ................................................................................................................ (2021)
                   "Self-performance" by the ASM Hydrasynth synthesizer

Catnip......................................................................................................................... (2018)
                              mixed media- electric piano, music, and video

 Audience members are reminded to silence all electronic devices before the performance. As a
 matter of courtesy and copyright law, no unauthorized recording or photographing is permitted
                                    in the performance hall.
           The James M. “Jimmy” Simmons Music Building is a non-smoking facility.

It Lives (2018) is a fixed media composition that utilizes the form, structure,
     and musical ideas of hip-hop instrumentals to create an atmospheric
 listening experience. In this way, the piece represents a unique integration
                   of both commercial music and art music.

The work relies on several techniques to create its uniquely eerie and
unsettling ambiance. Subtle tuning and timing adjustments offset the
melodies and drums from the “grid” of beats and twelve-tone pitches
commonly found in digital audio workstations like FL Studio, in which the
project was created. Additionally, the use of digital renditions of acoustic
instruments, including several nonwestern instruments, helps give the
instrumental an expressive and unique feel as it progresses.

Space Pool (2019) was titled after both an abstract concept of a pool in
space, as well as the literal space pool which was and still is a frequent
biking destination near my house. Space Pool makes use of many very
abstract musical concepts and relies heavily on larger-scale musical
changes. The colorful stylistic and harmonic variety is held together by the
abstract imagery implied by these changes. The interactions between
completely distinct musical parameters, such as rhythm, harmony, and style
are what make this composition truly stand out to me as one of my simplest
yet most freeing works.

Four Seasons (2021) was composed as a commission specifically for
Cooper, a pianist with a particular fondness for both the toy and grand
pianos. Though it is played by two performers as seen here, it is possible
(albeit quite difficult) to play the piece as a soloist on both instruments.

In recent years, the interest in the toy piano as a concert instrument has
been steadily increasing. However, a surprisingly scarce amount of music
has been composed for both instruments played together, especially by one
performer. These conditions make the timing of this composition rather
optimal for it to perhaps see future interest and performances outside of the
scope of this recital.

The piece is composed in four movements, representative of the four
seasons, which are either implied through transitionary composition or
articulated through a brief pause in the music starting from the early winter
chords that open the piece and progressing through spring and summer
before finally concluding with an exciting fall section. The inspiration for the
piece derived from a desire to create a work in which I could exploit the
timbral differences between the two instruments in a programmatic context. I

do this by combining and separating the two instruments as I see fit to best
express the musicality of the piece and the nature of the seasons being
depicted.

The piece is my most recent composition for fully acoustic instrumentation,
and as such it tends to integrate a more advanced and chromatic harmonic
language interspersed between clearer instances of tonality. Several late
nineteenth and early twentieth century theoretical concepts influenced some
of my less traditional musical choices, such as polytonality, set theory, and
symmetrical scales. It is also one of my longest acoustic works, and one of
my first pieces to feature a collection of multiple distinct movements.

Fortitude (2018) is a piece composed for a nonstandard brass trio consisting
of horn, trombone, and tuba. I chose this instrumentation so that I could
express melodic lines with the mellow sound of the horn, while keeping the
ensemble’s tone bright through the more assertive sound of the trombone.

The piece is driven by melodies and harmonies that are inspired rather
directly by hip-hop and trap music particularly from the late 2000s and early
2010s. I wanted to capture the grandiose feel of the songs of this time,
particularly exhibited by major artists like Lil Wayne that integrated the
mainstream and the rapidly progressing underground trap scene. I
accomplish this by incorporating harmonic ideas driven by 4ths, 5ths, and
2nds, and melodies constructed in direct reference to this genre of popular
music.

Given that the work is over two years old, I feel as though this piece was
one of my first strong attempts to break out of the box of duple meter,
particularly given that I come from a background in 4/4 centric commercial
music myself. I use the middle section of the piece as a more abstract
“development” section that includes more duple time and mixed meters
while referencing and contrasting previous ideas in new ways.

The Sweetest Poison (2018) is a self-performed solo piano composition.
Since piano is a strong secondary instrument for me as a performer, I chose
to showcase my musical and technical abilities on an acoustic piano through
this piece. What I thought was a moderately difficult work proved to be quite
an involved learning process, though it was a beneficial task to take on,
particularly given that had I initially composed this piece mostly away from
the piano.

The piece is rather traditional in many aspects alongside my more
experimental works on the program. I find the harmonies and rhythms
somewhat reminiscent of a late romantic to early expressionist musical
language (1850-1900), with some influence from baroque-era counterpoint
as well. Emotionally, I see the work as broadly embodying an aesthetic of
progressive unease and despair, which is implied in the title.

One important takeaway I have from this work is that it is by far one of my
most contrapuntally driven pieces. While the harmonies heard in the piece
may be reminiscent of late romantic music, the actual progressions between
chords are often open to interpretation. Structures like chords are truly
secondary to the way the left hand and right hand interact on a note-to-note
basis. As a result, many sections of the piece can be tonally ambivalent
between two or more keys. Furthermore, while the piece is scored entirely in
triple meter (3/4), a 6/8 duple meter is often implied as well, which provides
a curiously disorienting effect to the listener.

Zaphod Beeblebrox (2019) utilizes the contrasting timbres of the trombone,
euphonium, and tuba to achieve a distinct low-brass trio sound. The differing
tambours of the three instruments compensates for the similarly low pitch
range that they all occupy.

The piece is written in a hip-hop influenced style, with particular emphasis
on rhythm and counterpoint. The piece also features a fair amount of jazz
influence which becomes more prevalent as the work progresses.

The piece is one of the best examples of many works within a similar style,
including the brass quintet “Sipping on Tereré” heard on my 10:20 recital in
2019. You can find this piece on my YouTube channel (“Tommy McPhee
Music”). This performance includes the same performers as well, plus two
others, but I opted to premiere a new piece for three performers instead,
both to adhere to COVID-19 safety protocols and to offer a more recent and
updated glimpse into my musical vocabulary within this style.

Ice Cube (2020) is a work composed for the ASM Hydrasynth synthesizer
(controlled by the Roland JUNO-DS88 keyboard), the Roland TR8-S drum
machine, and any looper pedal permissive of overdubbing (or stacking)
loops. Live looping is an electroacoustic performance technique in which a
musical element is recorded in live performance, and then the live recording
is played back immediately or within a later section of the piece. The clear
and direct role live looping plays in the piece is the reason why I chose to

begin the electroacoustic section of the program with this work, before
advancing to more complicated pieces.

Throughout Ice Cube, I use a looper pedal to layer different complex
synthesizer sounds together to create powerful and interesting timbres,
before embellishing the ostinato chord progression with an interesting
melody. The use of live looping also frees my hands as a performer to
improvise sonic modifications to the pre-programmed drum loop on the TR8-
S drum machine.

Stylistically, the motif of a synthesizer chord progression derivative of
parallel root position m9 chords can be directly traced back to an entire
subgenre of hip hop widely linked to the producer ICYTWAT and often
associated with artists such as Playboi Carti, Ethereal, and the Divine
Council rap group. I took a chord progression and sound design inspired by
this music and embellished it with a fresh mixed-meter setting that
contrasted the ubiquitous 4/4 time signature heard within this music.
Furthermore, I exploited the drum machine’s ability to run rhythmic patterns
of varying lengths simultaneously to create a polymetric and ever-changing
drum loop.

Cool Bug Fact’s (2020) is a piece composed for the ASM Hydrasynth
synthesizer (controlled by the Roland JUNO-DS88 keyboard) and the 1010
Blackbox sampler. The piece is macro-tonal (or could be considered “micro”
tonal) as all melodic lines are played in ten-tone equal temperament. The
synthesizer is used to render the melodic lines, whereas the percussion
loops heard in the piece are pre-programmed into the sampler.

The sampler is also used to live loop melodies and even reverse melodies
and rhythms heard simultaneously. These loops often occur in counterpoint
and stretto with each other, and the varying lengths and meters of the
ostinatos creates an interesting set of musical and formal polyrhythms
throughout the piece. This creates for an unsettling and ever-changing
ambiance throughout this thematically compact piece.

Naturally, the piece pays homage to a variety of different styles within both
commercial and classical music. Most notably, the drums and most of the
sound design is directly derivative of trap and hip-hop music. Musically and
formally, the work draws inspiration from the minimalist process music of
composers like Steve Reich, as well as a more subdued inspiration from
expressionist and early serial composers like Schoenberg.

The Third Eye (2021) is a piece for alto saxophone and the Roland SP-
404sx sampler. Both instruments are played entirely separately during the
piece and can even be played by the same person during live performance,
though we opted for a split-part montage performed by two musicians within
this rendition.

The alto sax drives the piece forward with motivic material that is later
played back on the sampler, to be reversed and transformed by various
effects. The piece also features an aleatoric section in which the order and
types of events that happen are controlled by rolling dice and flipping coins.
All the audio samples are recorded prior to the performance of the piece, but
then performed and manipulated in real time.

The piece is one of my first compositions that uses serialism and set theory
almost exclusively in favor of tonal harmony. The ordering of notes and the
resulting intervals between them therefore become some of the driving
forces of musicality, along with rhythm, articulation, tone, etc. I also like to
use tone rows that sound the same when inverted upside down and when
reversed. This way, when I reverse the audio sample, the ear also hears
what the melody would sound like if flipped upside-down. This general
serialist technique was used a lot by many twelve-tone composers, though
they simply wrote the order of notes backwards rather than reversing an
actual audio recording.

Culture of Rebellion (2020) is a structured improvisation composed for the
ASM Hydrasynth synthesizer (largely controlled by the Roland JUNO-DS88
keyboard), the Roland TR8-S drum machine, and the 1010 Blackbox
sampler, which is exclusively used for live looping. The piece is centered on
many of the same techniques and creative tropes heard in earlier pieces on
the program but synthesizes them together in a compact and compelling
way, while integrating a significant degree of indeterminacy.
The element of chance controls the piece in two main ways. Firstly, multiple
sections of the work are to be improvised live by the performer, a technique I
frequently use within my electroacoustic music. Secondly, certain sections of
the work make use of randomized settings on the Hydrasynth’s arpeggiator.
An arpeggiator is a classic hardware synthesizer module that allows blocked
chords played by the performer to be sequenced into a series of individual
notes determined by an algorithm. I use the randomness of the arpeggiator
to create new melodies simply by holding down a diatonic cluster of pitches
on the synthesizer. I can exert limited control over these melodies by slightly
shifting the clusters around, and by modifying the arpeggiator speed. I
conclude the piece with a semi-improvised choir patch that is a stock sound
on the JUNO-DS 88 keyboard, which I normally use only to control the

Hydrasynth through MIDI input.

Lunar Truth (2021) is a generative work of indefinite length for the ASM
Hydrasynth. It is a complex synthesizer patch that randomly generates
music according to a pre-programmed algorithm. The only performance
forces are pushing a key to start the patch, and eventually deciding to turn it
off.

Many musical ideas contributed to the creation of this sonic rendition of an
ambient lunar landscape. I focused a lot on a sort of derived microtonal
scale created by combining many simpler micro and macro-tonal
temperaments like 9, 15, and 18 evenly spaced notes per octave. These
tunings combined to form even stranger types of harmony when fused
together into a sort of scale within 90-EDO (equal divisions of the octave). In
addition, through the use of tone rows possessing various forms of
symmetry, I was able to create a harmonically unique patch with limited
programming power.

One aspect that really makes the work hang together is the hardware
limitations of the synthesizer. In order to get such a complex patch, I often
had to route random noise generators (used for the chance/generative
effect) to several parameters at once, as well as many of the other triggers I
used throughout the work. I also used this mindset when integrating the
sonic capabilities of the synthesizer into the actual notes being played. This
makes the sonic landscape hang together with a surprising musical
cohesion.

Catnip (2018) is a fixed media composition that ironically relies primarily on
samples of acoustic instruments. It is a “lofi” style instrumental that has
notable jazz influences as well as choral writing influenced by my
experiences as a vocalist long ago. I felt this work would make a great
credits track given its overall tone, form, and concise length. Perhaps in the
future, this work will be re-arranged for a small acoustic ensemble, but for
now I wanted to preserve it in largely its original form with the minor addition
of a live performance by myself of the electric piano introduction and
conclusion layered onto the original audio.