I used different compositional strategies throughout my upcoming tentet album Server Farm, which comes out on February 21st on my label Irabbagast Records. The album features some of New York City’s finest musicians and improvisers – Mazz Swift on violin and voice, Peter Evans on trumpet and flugelhorn, Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg on guitars, Matt Mitchell on piano, Fender Rhodes and Prophet-6, Michael Formanek on acoustic bass, Chris Lightcap on electric bass, Dan Weiss on drums and Levy Lorenzo on kulintang gongs, laptop, electronics and vibraphone along with myself on tenor and sopranino saxophones and effects. Not only is the diverse instrumentation a great starting point for creating different sounds and textures, but knowing and performing with them all (in some cases for over twenty years) also helped shape the writing – I was able to be comfortable in writing less (and ask them to feel free to mess with the written parts) than I might have otherwise. Further, knowing the musicians’ strengths and tendencies enabled me to take advantage of compositional directions I hadn’t before.

The album deals with the threat of AI and how humans react to it– how we can use the speed of knowledge to our advantage, but also how we may succumb to it, both physically and mentally. The story begins with Levy Lorenzo improvising on kulintang gongs, the native instrument from my homeland, the Phillipines. The first movement utilizes the pitches from the eight gongs and generates its melodies and harmonic language from mainly those notes. By the time we reach the end of the album, Server Farm highlighting the mental toll and paranoia this constant threat of AI could cause. Throughout, I employ different generative methods for the melodies, harmonies and rhythms. Later movements use different scales/clusters for inspiration, and in the final movement Spy I wrote a poem that the melodies (occurring over rising pedal points throughout) are based on. These purposefully varied methods of origination helped avoid any writer’s block or compositional stagnation while preparing the album.

The second of the five pieces, Routers, revolves around a 16-12-26 bar form, and is written in a more jovial and fun mood than where the album ends up. The piece depicts the beginnings of the human/computer merger and the vast possibilities that come with it. Some of the melodies throughout this album were conceived individually in the early stages of development, but in this case the melody and chords were composed simultaneously and slowly over the course of several weeks. These bars (sections E and F of the score) seemed so fully formed to me that I wanted to showcase them in a different way than the other four compositions, as well as find a departure from my normal writing style.

Click to see full score

It occurred to me that this completed 54 bars could be viewed as a release point from previous tension, and that the composition was calling for a consistent, long form growth. I set out to take this section and remove rhythms and notes from each part for the previous chorus, and even more for a chorus before that. The listener starts Routers with only fragments and shards of melodies or chords and only over the course of seven minutes does the original, completed melody come into view. This continual churning and growth of information is then used as a long and growing background part to an extended saxophone solo, processed with effects pedals. To further add to the tension, I created open vamp sections between each of the forms.

I also gave the musicians freedom to create their own textures, harmonies or extended techniques. The vamp sections are primarily rhythmic, where the rhythms are dictated but the pitches or chords are not. This places a lot of responsibility on the musicians to convey their parts as well as personalize them. For me, this is the ideal, and a close cousin to the Ellington Effect that Duke Ellington so famously and effectively utilized. Further, the musicians were instructed to “mostly” follow the written material, where at any time the musicians can improvise and choose their own direction. This openness leads to vastly different performances of the song for each performance as well as (in the right hands) a more focused and rewarding experience for all involved. Individual musicians were given specific instructions on suggested ratios of pitched notes versus noise-based movements, and others were given very specific melodic parts to play. The goal was to have a kaleidoscopic and shifting growth of parts, melodies and rhythms for the saxophone soloist to interact with.

Another consideration for the Server Farm album was to have each movement feature different musicians in unique combinations. As the five movements of the album came together, I had lists of different person combinations to keep the album as a whole varied and unpredictable. Further, my love of rubato passages and avant garde-leaning textures demanded to have equal representation, so the other movements have more of those elements. Beyond thinking about how to maximize the possibilities of each song, the puzzle of arranging each movement is an important part of creating a vibrant and challenging (for both the musicians and audience) album.