MARK A. LACKEY media

Sinfonietta for Strings

2010. Lackey. Sinfonietta for Strings. from Mark A. Lackey on Vimeo.

A new work for young string players.

Read by community members, students and teachers
of the Carroll County String Project.
©2010 Mark A. Lackey

This work is dedicated to Margaret Motter Ward and the Carroll County String Project, an organization she founded to redress the shortage of highly qualified string teachers in rural central Maryland.
I am so glad Margaret Motter "Peggy" Ward persuaded me to compose something substantial for the project's young string players, and I am very grateful to the students, family members and others in the community for their interest and involvement. Peggy specifically asked for certain challenges - asymmetrical meter, hooked bowing, extended techniques - while the general design and themes were naturally left up to me. I chose a conventional symphonic plan as another way to serve pedagogical goals and to give the students a stronger sense of continuity with older music they have heard and played.

October Sunrise for wind ensemble

Excerpts, N, Q, T (mp3)
Reading from the top (mp3)
©2005, 2009 Mark A. Lackey

The Peabody Wind Ensemble, reading through an early draft in rehearsal

I love the quiet sense of possibilities in a sunrise, a sense that is especially keen in autumn as a new school year gets underway and the holidays are not far off. On an especially clear chilly morning in October I stood on the corner near our city apartment and watched the sun rising over the university. I was struck by the immensity and gradualness of the event. It is almost impossible to perceive the change in brightness from moment to moment, and yet the difference between the dayspring and the full daylight is so vast that it seems the sun will overfill the sky with light.
While this was the scene that set me thinking about a sunrise composition, I also invite you to find your own mental imagery as you listen. The undulating clarinets and saxophones and a contagious pulse set the stage for the brass to peal out a massive, majestic melody. Later, a quiet, mystical, eerie melody, played by piccolo and contrabass, rises above unusual percussion effects, followed by colorful, joyful, global celebration. -ML

Reading of an earlier draft of the piece, recorded during rehearsal in East Hall at The Peabody Conservatory, 2006.

The world premiere performance of October Sunrise was given by the Eastman Wind Orchestra, Mark Scatterday, conductor, on October 21, 2009 in beautiful Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre.

Seven Sketches of Beginning (mp3).

2008. Soprano and guitar. 11 minutes.

Jennifer Edwards, soprano and Mark Edwards, guitar, August 26, 2008 in a duo chamber concert in Snow Fine Arts Recital Hall, University of Central Arkansas

Seven Sketches of Beginning was written for a brilliant duo, soprano Jennifer Edwards (neé Holbrook) and her husband, guitarist Mark Edwards. Jennifer and Mark were exploring works with wordless vocals and were also very open to extended techniques. Rather than lyrics, the voice part is written using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The seven movements follow the beautiful literary structure of the seven day creation account in the Hebrew scriptures, representing the days programmatically through music. This account may be glossed as follows.

light
sky and sea
plants and trees
sun, moon and stars
birds and sea creatures
land animals and humankind
a day of rest

In addition to programmatic ideas, the form of the text provided a basis for structural details. Each movement foregrounds the number of that day by expressing it as a chromatic interval. The first day is composed on the interval of one semitone, the second day an interval of two semitones, and likewise up to seven. (These intervals are also treated through octave displacement to produce eleven, ten and so on, and the material is not strictly limited to the indicated interval.) Many useful programmatic coincidences were discovered in this pattern, such as the convenient fact that six semitones is tonally a very active interval, the tritone, suitable for a sudden profusion of animals, while seven semitones, a perfect fifth, is the most stable and restful interval, corresponding to the strongest non-redundant partials grounding the natural harmonic series. Jennifer Holbrook and Mark Edwards gave the world premiere of Seven Sketches of Beginning as part of the Exotic-Hypnotic Festival at ArtScape in Baltimore, Maryland in 2008 and have made the piece part of their repertoire.

Blugue for Reed Trio

Performed by The Vientos Trio
Ryan Zwahlen, oboe; Jennifer Stevenson, bass clarinet; Michael Kreiner, bassoon.

Biola University, March 24, 2010

©2001, 2009 Mark A. Lackey, (p) 2010 The Definiens Project

Fairy Tale

I.Once... (mp3)
II.Wicked... (mp3)
III.Frog... (mp3)
IV.Kiss... (mp3)
V.Happily... (mp3)

Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart, flute
Zane Forshee, guitar
Caleb Jones, cello
Kevin Clarke, percussion

Recorded live in Griswold Hall at The Peabody Conservatory, April 27, 2005.
©2005 Mark A. Lackey

embodied

DUO MARE (JeeYoung Rachel Choe, flute, and Akiko Sumi, guitar) gave the premiere of this piece for flute and guitar duo with boom box on the third After Now concert of new music in Baltimore.

I hope you have fun with this! (Or, to put it another way: "embodied enacts the re-embodiment of situated cognition and our sensorimotor experience of music as described by Vijay Iyer, a way of experiencing music that has been devalued in binaries of 'high' and 'low' art. Because of its engagement with popular style and with the physicality of dance, it exists in opposition to the abstract, language-based, phallogocentric models of musical meaning that have been dominant in the discourse within and about modernist music. Additionally, the unresolvable tension between the sounds from the boom box and the sounds from the flute and guitar, as well as dualities between electronic sounds and recorded 'real' sounds of clay and glass objects that foreground their earthiness, are themselves suggestive of these binaries and of the ever-present gap between our idea of a thing and the thing itself for which Derrida coined the term différance.")

Recorded live during the third After Now concert.
Red Room, Baltimore, MD, March 8, 2008.
©2008 Mark A. Lackey

Sacred Words In Dead Languages

Catherine Wong, B-flat clarinet
Devin Adams, alto saxophone
Daniel Miller, B-flat trumpet
Iain Roush, guitar
Dave DeDionisio, guitar
Mark A. Lackey, electric guitar
Doug Perry, vibraphone

Sacred Words In Dead Languages is dedicated with gratitude to these performers and to guitarist Tristan Panniers (now residing in Japan) and trumpeter Brody Gusar (now in Florida). I made the acquaintance of Cat, Devin, Iain, Doug, Tristan and Brody a few years ago, when they were near the beginning of their conservatory studies at The Peabody. They invited me to join their table in the cafeteria one day. Half-jokingly, perhaps, first one and then another asked me to compose something until they were all asking for new pieces. I noted a remarkable camaraderie among the group in spite of deep differences in world view, and decided it might be interesting to write a stochastic piece, a work that would focus on the group dynamic by giving them figures to play but letting them decide, in performance, when to enter, how many times to repeat a figure and so on.

Columns in the Air

Mindy Heinsohn, flute
Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart, flute
Rachel Choe, flute
Gina Kim, flute
Mark Lackey, electronics

©2007 Mark A. Lackey

Convergence

Convergence for orchestra was one of seven finalists in the Columbia Orchestra 2009 American Composer Competition. (Congratulations to winner Albert Hurwit and the other six finalists!)

The creation of this orchestral work was guided by a very simple abstraction: the confluence of two very different beings, one exquisite, the other ardent, with each one by turns elevated and ennobled, tempered, vivified by the other.

Measure 36, giocoso:
quirky, playful pizzicato strings (676 k)

Measure 60, cantabile:
yearning, romantic first violins and cellos (1027 k)

Measure 88, drammatico:
bold, tense counterpoint between various sections (386 k)

Measure 119, dolce:
lyrical oboe solo against rustling pianissimo string trills (772 k)

Measure 153, spinto ed intenso,
a heavy, hard-rock inspired orchestral tutti (676 k)

Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore, Maryland. Hajime Teri Murai, conductor.
Recorded in rehearsal, 5 March 2003.

©2002 Mark A. Lackey

Excerpt from Blugue (633 k)

Russell Kirk, alto saxophone
Glenn Quader, alto saxophone
Jacob Yoffee, tenor saxophone
Recorded live, Griswold Hall at The Peabody Conservatory of Music, 6 March 2002.

©2002 Mark A. Lackey

Like many Americans, on September 11, 2001 I sat and cried and prayed most of the day. Late that night, I sat down at the piano - a very atypical way for me to begin composing - and found a few simple sounds that helped me begin to work through my feelings. Within a few weeks those sounds had expanded into this piece. It is humbly offered in the hope that you may also find some comfort in it.

The medium is. (Or, to put it another way: "Medium foregrounds the mediating physicality of the printed score as object through an unconventional choice of print substrate. Moreover, Medium foregrounds the technological mediation of interpersonal communication, reanimating the now-clichéd McLuhan expression "the medium is the message" by deploying cellular telephones as theatrical properties and their carrier networks as signal processors, impeding the intelligibility of the vocal performance while enhancing its sonic interest.")

Excerpt from Rite of Spring (193 k)
Recorded toward the end of 2002 and the first few days of 2003; remixed 2007.
©2003 Mark A. Lackey
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