Daniel Morse
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Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Daniel Morse was raised on every sort of music from Bob Marley to Beethoven, Paul Simon to Prokofiev. This has given him a truly egalitarian outlook towards music, where he sees all styles and genres as being somehow valid and worthwhile—yes, even country-western! After spending high school playing electric bass in a heavy metal band, he went on to receive his Bachelor’s Degree in Music from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studied with Richard Billingham. Returning home to Hawaii, he had an extended stint as a SCUBA diving instructor before returning to school to obtain a Master’s Degree in Music Composition at the University of Hawaii, studying with Takeo Kudo, Donald Reid Womack, and Byron Yasui. He is currently studying with Piers Hellawell and Michael Alcorn at Queen’s University Belfast, where he is pursuing a PhD in Music Composition. His compositional interests encompass both electroacoustic and instrumental music. He is particularly interested in the use of musical contexts, both created and inherited. Recent works include Nachtlied, which was written for the Ulster Youth Choir and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Iapetus, which recently received a reading by the Ulster Orchestra. |
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Compositions | |||
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Klangmasse I |
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| Klangmasse I.mp3 - complete | |||
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*Please note that due to file size constraints, this is only a stereo mp3 of the piece. Quad AIFF files are available on request. Klangmasse I (2007) – 13:15 The sides of a square divided according to the golden ratio. Lines inscribed within the square connecting the points of division. Trajectories of pitch moving through time and space. Complex tones defined also by the golden ratio. Small-scale structure reflected in large-scale form. The humble beginnings of thirty-nine lines of Csound code brought to life with endless hours of signal processing. An instrumental/orchestral approach to electronic sounds. Timbres and colours morphing slowly. Ideas coalesce for a moment, only to be absorbed back into the texture. A debt owed to Penderecki and Ligeti. | |||
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Pillars |
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| Pillars.mp3 - complete | |||
| Pillars.pdf - complete | |||
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Pillars (2007) - ca. 6:00 This piece was written in response to my first trip to the Giant’s Causeway on the north Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. Upon seeing this wonder of the natural world for the first time, I was quite struck by the stark contrast between the causeway itself and the ocean that surrounded and washed over it. On the one hand were precise geometric shapes, and on the other were chaotic, organic curves. While this piece is by no means strictly programmatic, I have sought to convey the contrast I saw in that place. At the beginning and end of the piece are “chorales” or “pillars” which frame the virtuosic moto perpetuo middle section. The chorales can be seen as the causeway itself, while the middle section is representative of the turbulent, organic ocean. | |||
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Nachtlied |
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| Nachtlied.mp3 - complete | |||
| Nachtlied.pdf - complete | |||
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Nachtlied (2007) - 8:20 This piece is a setting of a poem of the same name by Georg Trakl, an Austrian expressionist poet who lived at the turn of the last century. While I was somewhat aware of the connection between Trakl and the composers of the Second Viennese School, I was “formally” introduced to Trakl’s poetry by Schuyler Tsuda, a friend and fellow composer at the University of Hawaii. I was immediately struck not only by the elegance and concision of Trakl’s German, but by the potent images contained therein. The poem (along with my own translation) reads: Nachtlied The poem obviously presents us with some vivid images, and my initial thought for a setting of this text was to take advantage of the many opportunities for word-painting that it presents—to use the electronics to provide a sort of “commentary” on the words presented by the choir. I ultimately rejected this approach, however, and chose to dig deeper. The text, through the images within, presents a very definite sort of mood, or space. I chose to convey a more subjective, abstract impression of this mood-space with the electronics, which I think in the end has yielded a much more satisfactory result. I created all the tape sounds in this piece by manipulating pre-existing audio samples; there is no synthesis in this piece. These samples were either created by me, or taken from license-free sources. In particular, I used many sounds from the Freesound Project (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/ (specific samples used available on request.)) Also, two samples of seismographic recordings of the Earth from http://www.isla.hawaii.edu/sounds/sounds.shtml (sumatra_i52h2_20041226_filter_scale.wav and arenaltremor_100t_rev.wav) were used with the permission of David Fee at the Infrasound Laboratory at the University of Hawaii (ISLA.) My thanks to ISLA for this permission, and for showing me just how mighty the silence in stone can be! Finally, I should like to thank Michael Alcorn for all his help throughout the process of writing this piece, particularly for his guidance (and patience!) while I began to learn Csound, which I used almost exclusively to create the electronic portion of the piece. Thanks are also due to Greg Beardsell and the Ulster Youth Choir for giving me the opportunity to write this piece and to have it performed so well. | |||
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Nachtlied Electronics Track (mp3) |
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| Nachtlied Electronics Track (mp3).mp3 - complete | |||
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Due to considerations of file size, this is only an mp3. An AIFF of this track is available on request. | |||
©2009 by Daniel Morse
All Rights Reserved
Daniel Morse is a member of Society of Composers, Inc. SCI is dedicated to the promotion of composition, performance, understanding and dissemination of new and contemporary music.