Channel Surfing
for piano and tape
completed April 1997
duration: Approx. 13 minutes
Premiered October 1997 in Toronto
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Click above to download a portion of
the score in .ETF (Finale) format.
The original inspiration for Channel Surfing came late one night
when flicking through
the large variety of channels offered by my local cable service.
I was fascinated by the
multitude of bizarre and often surrealistic ways that music, sound
effects and dialogue
merged and/or contrasted with each other. Determined to write
a piece of music based
on this material that combined acoustic instruments with electronics,
I began to think of
the piano and how its role in society as the focal point of the
bourgeois home, the
"hearth" of the Nineteenth Century, has been for the most part
been usurped in the latter
half of the Twentieth by the television. This inevitably
led me to consider Marshall
McLuhan's famous aphorism "The medium is the message."
This work is not saying
piano-good, TV-bad. (Certainly much of what the piano was
used for in the past was as
facile and base as most of what we see on television.) Rather
it is an exploration of how
different media affect their consumers in profoundly different
ways, regardless of
content. This work is a psychological profile of a pianist
-- not the specific performer
but a "character" which he is playing -- and his reaction to the
new media.
To request a score, tape, or more information send me an e-mail.
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