Electric Fugue

2022

This EP demonstrates a solidifying of my musical direction, after the effect getting a bachelor’s in music from a liberal arts college had on me. I had fallen in love with opera, learned what the classical forms are, learned all about formal counterpoint, and started studying orchestration. I had a lot to synthesize into my old musical voice. I also got to see some of the elitism and gatekeeping in the academic music community, so there was some figuring out that I had to do regarding how not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This represents all of that, as well as the changes in my personal life: I got married in 2019.
These are the first songs I’ve written that employ a full orchestra—or at least that employ it with its instruments’ ranges and characters in mind. I did write a short little experiment back in the Aughts that used a complement of woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings, but it felt like more trouble than the result was worth back then, and I didn’t know any of the rules of orchestration. Although I’ve always felt that following rules to the letter isn’t conducive to good artistry, you can’t bend or break them deliberately if you don’t know them, and the best art, in my opinion, is the art in which everything is deliberate, even the acceptance of the inevitable accidents.

There is a cover song on here: “Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre,” from Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen, with a digital orchestral arrangement I made using the 1877 Choudens Pére et Fils score as reference. The great thing about classical music (at least classical music from before the 1930s) is that it’s public domain, so covering it requires no mechanical license.

The artwork in this EP is a series of manipulations I did to a picture my brother accidentally took. We were doing a promo photoshoot when he almost dropped his camera. He caught it, thankfully, and it took a blurry picture of the glare from the cymbals of my drum kit, a green screen floor, and a black curtain. I put some digital emphasis on the colors, bumping up the brightness and the contrast and playing with the exposure until it looked just right. I then made several other iterations, throwing the color balance way off to reflect the character of the songs I would attach those iterations to as singles. As implied above, accidents are a part of art, and it’s up to artists to either reject them or to work them into their intentions.