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 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 , 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 , 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 ’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 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 somewhat reminiscent of a late romantic to early expressionist musical language (1850-1900), with some influence from baroque-era 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 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 , 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 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.