The Three Needle Technique (2011)

The Three Needle Technique is my thesis, submitted for the MM in Composition at UW – Milwaukee.

Score (.pdf)

The Three Needle Technique – Prospectus

The Three Needle Technique is scored for a small chamber ensemble consisting of two pianists and two percussionists – one playing a snare-drum and hi-hat and the other playing a suspended cymbal and concert bass drum. Each performer is also asked to recite textual material throughout the work. The piece is composed for the group Yarn/Wire and will be premiered during a concert beginning at 7:30pm on April 14th, 2011 at Vogel Hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Three Needle Technique represents a merging of multiple threads of my compositional interests – indeterminacy, complexity, and political ideology. The piece is a critique of the treatment of non-human animals in research settings, specifically the Primate Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. The text is composed of fragments of leaked scientific documents describing procedures inflicted upon the primates.

The various structural levels of the work contain different levels of performance indeterminacy. In The Three Needle Technique, the order of moment-to-moment musical events is determined at the moment of performance, but the overall shape of the piece unfolds in a directed way.

The smallest musical units – phrases – are precomposed and highly specific. The materials were derived from a custom computer program, which used the text of the piece as input. A relationship was established between alphanumeric characters and musical pitches and rhythms (in the form of MIDI output). Carefully selected phrases of the computer output were freely modified or recomposed, while retaining the basic pitch and rhythmic structures. This material is intended as a loving caricature of the “scientific” approach of post-war complexity.

My interest in politically informed music is in part inspired by my research into the composer Cornelius Cardew along with other radical political composers. The Three Needle Technique expresses its political message through theatrical modifications of the sounding material. Beginning midway through the piece, the performers are asked to attempt to continue performing with primate puppets on their hands and within their instruments. As the work unfolds, the “research subjects” become a wrench in the gears of highly rationalized scientific experiment – the highly complex, formalized, “scientific” musical materials are subverted and destroyed by the absurdity, irrationality, and cruelty of animal experimentation.

Greg Surges

spacer Musician/hacker living in San Diego, CA. Studying computer music at UCSD.
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