Audio Recordings and Fixed Media Works
This page is currently in-progress. Please go to www.soundcloud.com/mark-vaughn for additional audio
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Firma | Foundation (2019), for organ
The content of this piece is entirely comprised of material written by other composers for the organ. The material covers a time period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and includes music from J.S. Bach, Charles Ives, Leon Boëllman, François Couperin, César Franck, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Dietrich Buxtehude, John Bull, and Camille Saint-Saëns. The practice of using pre-existing music in this way is aligned with the compositional techniques of many contemporary composers, but appropriation is everywhere in music, from cantus firmi, to improvisation on a jazz head, to mashups, to sampling. When composing in this way it becomes clear that multiple frameworks for perceiving music are present, including but not limited to the historical, the cultural, the referential, the visceral, and the analytical. Though this work explicitly uses traditions, styles, composers, and histories as the basis for the piece, it is interesting to consider how even non-appropriative works do so as well. World Premiere Performance 4.26.2019 Christoph Hintermuller, organ Performed on the Möller Organ University of North Texas |
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Basketball and Cricket (2018), for stereo fixed media
In this piece I used two field recordings from the University of North Texas campus as a sonic template (tracing paper) for rhythmic, gestural, and timbral material. I then combined this material with the original recordings. Emphasis is placed on the recordings and composed material in roughly equal proportions to present a listening experience that oscillates between the “real” and the “artificial.” |
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The Curved Line in the Garden (2016), for stereo fixed media
The perception of continuity between two articulated points in time and space, monophony in electronic music, creating containers for sounds that become their own composite sounds, the grackles of North Texas, the garden of Eden from the snake’s point of view, the serpent as wisdom in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, dreams of snakes appearing from the ground, snakes eating birds, birds eating snakes, and the musical representation of spirituality in 1960’s psychedelic culture; were all things I thought about while writing this piece. |
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