SOUNDING PUZZLES (2021)
13'
audio/visual album
in collaboration with the Santa Cruz County Youth Symphony
Sounding Puzzles was created with the Santa Cruz County Youth Symphony in the spring of 2021 and asks the question: how does a group of musicians make a work of art together, remotely, with no conventional score? Over the course of seven weeks, the musicians and I explored a series of creative challenges that involved a combination of compositional invitations, scavenger hunts, animated obstacle courses, and improvisational games. Each musician developed and recorded their own musical ‘puzzle pieces’ from their own spaces in the form of footage and sounds. These audiovisual ‘pieces’ were then assembled by me to create this work. A heartfelt thanks to Nathaniel Berman, Gerry Mandel, and my immensely creative collaborators at SCCYS for their musical creativity and curiosity.
An interactive video game that forms a portion of this piece, created with sounds from the musicians, is available to play and can be accessed by a computer running the Google Chrome browser.