Release Date: November 9, 2018
Catalog #: RR8002
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Avant-Garde
Electroacoustic
Electronic
Guitar

Works for Dance

Ted Coffey composer

Using the sounds of handmade paper, electronics, and surf guitar among others, Ted Coffey composes a sometimes fragile, sometimes brutal order that swings from texturalism to song. Written for dance, both fixed media and live computer-mediated performance, Coffey’s music feels spontaneous without sacrificing finely calculated craft.

Petals 8 starts off the album. The composition draws inspiration from gagaku, the ‘elegant music’ of Japanese medieval courts. Featuring, as Coffey described, a “funky-slash-improbable-yet-maybe-inevitable instrumental assemblage,” Petals 8 moves with quiet commitment through cycles of suspended moments — and close vocoded vocal harmonies, too. It is followed by Petals 1, 2 & 3, three attacca movements of electronic music for dance, composed in response to different compositional problems that both music and dance work through.

One Note Solo, which can be experienced here with its original video by Aaron Henderson, demonstrates how a single note can be squeezed and stretched into a composition of spellbinding presence. The final track on the album, Sonatina, is a concluding statement that accumulates eight years of sonic experimentation, from viola da gamba hooks to microphone feedback, demonstrating how computer music transcends time and space.

WORKS FOR DANCE connects visuals and sounds through the computer-mediated experience. Coffey’s latest work with Ravello Records demonstrates how organic movement and electronic voice can come together in one compelling dance.

Listen

Hear the full album on YouTube

Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Petals 8 Ted Coffey Ted Coffey 30:00
02 Petals 1, 2 & 3: Petals 1 Ted Coffey Ted Coffey 2:56
03 Petals 1, 2 & 3: Petals 2 Ted Coffey Ted Coffey 3:47
04 Petals 1, 2 & 3: Petals 3 Ted Coffey Ted Coffey 6:12
05 One Note Solo Ted Coffey Ted Coffey 8:38
06 Sonatina Ted Coffey Ted Coffey 12:31

PETALS 8
Composed 2017/18 for live computer-mediated performance for dance by Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent.
Sound performed and recorded by Ted Coffey: pitched and unpitched metal; surf guitar; synthesized electronic sound; ostrich acoustic guitar; voice; suling; tuning forks spinning at audio rate; Moog bass; Electrosluch; vintage cotton; slow Tibetan temple; bowed semi-hollow body guitar.
Handmade paper performed by Alison Knowles and Ted Coffey, recorded and re-performed by Ted Coffey.
Additional time and frequency domain treatments by Ted Coffey.

PETALS 1, 2, & 3
Composed 2013/14 for fixed media for dance by Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent.
Sound performed and recorded by Ted Coffey: synthesized electronic sound; slow found woodland percussion; slow fire.
Additional time and frequency domain treatments by Ted Coffey.

ONE NOTE SOLO
Composed 2014/15 for fixed media for video by Aaron Henderson, for dance by the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, for dance by Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent.
Sound performed and recorded by Ted Coffey: constructions of acoustically recorded e-bow guitar; tuning forks; synthesized electronic sound; ostrich acoustic guitar.

SONATINA
Composed 2018 for live computer-mediated performance, from elements composed 2011 through 2018 for dance by the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, for dance by Abigail Levine, for dance / theater by Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, for dance by Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent.
Sound performed and recorded by Ted Coffey: synthesized electronic sound; after Takehisa Kosugi’s Micro 1 (1964), recordings of paper wrapped around microphones and released to create entropic rhythmic gestures; constructions of acoustically recorded e-bow guitar; slow Pacific ocean; improvised microphone feedback. Viola da gamba performed by Loren Ludwig, recorded and composited by Ted Coffey. Additional time and frequency domain treatments by Ted Coffey.

Executive Producer Bob Lord

Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Marina Altschiller

Vice President, Audio Production Jeff LeRoy
Engineering Manager Lucas Paquette

Art Director Brett Picknell
Design Ryan Harrison, Edward Fleming

Publicity Scott Feldman, Patrick Niland

Artist Information

Ted Coffey

Composer

Ted Coffey makes acoustic and electronic music, sound installations, and songs. His work has been presented in concerts and festivals across North America, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Judson Church, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (NYC), The Lab, New Langton Arts, Zellerbach Hall, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Wolf Trap and The Kennedy Center (DC), the Korean National University of the Arts (Seoul), The Carre Theatre (Amsterdam), and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany).

Notes

Petals 8 is meant to be a kind of rip of ancient Japanese court music, gagaku. With that ‘elegant music’ it shares cyclic structures, an accreted funky-slash-improbable-slash-maybe-inevitable instrumental assemblage, and an often oblique, mannered time feel. Another influence upon its time feel is that occasionally radical sense of contingency heard in the performances of certain open scores from composers of the New York School. The music is unflaggingly committed to its naive, handmade complexity, among other things to modulate its weirdness and cheap jokes. Petals 8 is dedicated to my teacher Christian Wolff, in respect to his music as well as that of his friend, Morton Feldman.

— Ted Coffey

From the original program note: Three scenes, each treating different sonic materials, in response to different compositional ‘problems’: (1) Road test doing things the hard way plus information-rich syntactic endurance; (2) Try to make lemonade out of a lemony improvisation; (3) Relate species of early digital sound to glo-fi.

— Ted Coffey

From the original program note: The one note solo is native to many musical genres — jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & pop, and ‘serious’ music. Here, the note is C, the least fancy note there is. However, ‘note’ is interpreted broadly. For example, frequencies related to particular Cs via the harmonic series are allowed, and clusters of these frequencies can be used to (AM) modulate other, more strictly formed Cs. Lois V. Vierk’s take on the ostrich guitar provides another deviation. Musical materials are derived from tuning forks, guitars, synthesis analog and digital, and atmospherics. Rhythms include (among others) those related to speech and those regulated by sub-audio rate Cs. For that matter, structure is regulated by periods of super-low Cs, too.

— Ted Coffey

Sonatina contains both the oldest material on this album — gamba recordings of Loren Ludwig forming a loop that closes the track, and the newest — improvised microphone feedback. In between is music made with Abigail Levine in respect to Robert Motherwell, and with Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell for her public theatre work, No Wake.

— Ted Coffey

Bill T. Jones; the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company; Paul Matteson & Jennifer Nugent; Abigail Levine; Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell; the Department of Music at the University of Virginia; Judith Shatin, Matthew Burtner, Luke Dahl, Travis Thatcher, and Composition & Computer Technologies grads & alums; the Vice Provost for the Arts at UVA; the Deans of the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA; Sam Crawford; Kyle Maude; Kojiro Umezaki; Mark Graham & The Sound; Rebekah Wostrel; Elsa Belle Blue Coffey; my teachers.

— Ted Coffey

Videos

Ted Coffey – One Note Solo