Alexander Ness: Homepage (a work in progress)

asness@gmail.com

Site contents

Upcoming Performances
My Creative Work
My Academic Work
People Making Good Music in NYC
Licensing

Upcoming Performances

My Creative Work

Video
Music
Writing
Posters

A humble performance request: Please get in touch with me if you are interested in playing any of the scores available below! I’d like to know who you are.

Close readers will notice discrepancies between scores and their recordings. I’m not sheepish about these differences—in fact, I celebrate them! In my musical practice, I want the score to be a springboard to experimentation and exploration rather than a rigid sonic blueprint. In rehearsals and performances, the performer may decide to do something different from what’s written, or I may request a change that doesn’t make its way back to the score. I’m more interested in flexible musical thought than in submission to the written document.

Video
- Video Scores
  - ακουσμετρία (“Akousmetria”) (2009)
  - This piece started as a graphic score, but after a couple difficult rehearsals, I turned the score into a video for the musicians and audience to watch:
- “Ideomania” Series
  - “Qāyadā” (2009)
  - A composition for synthesized video and audio.
  - Interaction of Color [in progress] (2006–2009)
  - Rotations [in progress] (2009)
Music
- Scores and recordings
  - “Thread Chorale” (2009):
  - for Hot Air/Tight Strings,
  - who commissed the piece
    - A recording of their outstanding performance at Roulette (April 2009):
    - Graphic score
      The first page is the composition in its most general form, and the following pages are a realization of this form for flute, violin, and geometric animation. Each note color corresponds to a playing technique:
      - Violin: open string harmonic stopped string
      - Flute: clear tone breathy tone multiphonic
    - Staff notation with glyphs
      This score correlates the string-tablature and flute-fingering diagrams of the graphic score to more conventional staff notation.
    - Staff notation alone
  - श्रुति (“Shruti”) for solo viola (2006)
    - Complete score
  - ﺧﻴﺎﻝ (“Xayāl”) for flute and percussion (2007)
    - Epigraph
    - Performance notes
    - Complete score
  - “Glass Drum”
    - The Zakir Hussain recording that inspired the piece
      - Audio excerpt
        
        Transcription of part of the above excerpt. The lines above the bols indicate synocopated word groupings. The asterisks mark four-word groups; to my ears, these groups anchor the passage.
    - The piece itself
      - as played by Hayang Kim [to come]
      - Complete score
- Recordings without scores
Writing
- Uniform Diversity: The Common Myth of Tonal Progress (for NewMusicBox)
Posters: I make posters with Processing and, more recently, Python (using the ReportLab PDF tools). (Note: the links to source code aren’t working yet; contact me and I’ll send you whatever interests you.)
- Drone Level Orange album art (June 2009)
  - PDF
  - Python source code
- Poster for Monkeytown show (June 2009)
  - PDF
  - Python source code
    - gblMonkeytownTiles.py
      (run this script in a folder
      with the following modules)
    - posterDefs.py
    - skewTilings.py
- Posters for Due East and ICE concerts
  (April 2008)
  - Due East poster and variations: PDF
  - ICE poster sample page: PDF
  - Processing source code for Due East posters
- Poster for Kammerensemble Neue Musik concert
  (November 2007)
  - PDF
  - “KNM” typography variations: PDF
  - Processing source code